As I am a gentleman of extraordinary taste and discernment (obviously), friends and colleagues are constantly soliciting my advice on nifty presents for birthdays, anniversaries, bar mitzvahs, Kwanzaa, etc. Normally I am happy to oblige, but with Valentine's Day fast approaching, I find my patience and bonhomie have all but evaporated. When you're a bitter, loveless wretch, talk of Hermes scarves and artisanal chocolates only deepens your already unfathomable depression.

This year my sinister Valentine's Day gift guide is being drawn exclusively from Sky Mall. You know what I'm talking about—that ubiquitous in-flight catalog of bizarre tchotchkes, stultifying gadgets and unimaginable decorative atrocities. I've been doing a lot of flying lately, so I've had ample time to peruse Sky Mall's distinctive wares in all their ghastly glory, and I have to wonder, Who exactly is buying this dreck?

Beyond the revolutionary nose-hair trimmers and chimerical Harry Potter memorabilia, I'm most intrigued by the beguiling sculptures from a company called Toscana. Consider the Egyptian Panther Goddess, perfect for stimulating Valentine's Day amour. The descriptive copy attributes the piece to an artist named Veronese, who may or may not be related to the illustrious 16th-century Italian painter. Either way, she's quite a looker.

For a more, um, edgy V.D. offering, try the Zombie of Montclaire Moors, "a life-size, gray-toned zombie who will claw his way out of your garden plot, office or family room, pleading for assistance with the eeriest eyes you've ever seen." Looks like me at the end of every date I've had for the last 10 years.

And speaking of my dating life, witness the Bigfoot Garden Yeti. Sky Mall assures me the statue "will have guests doing a double take as they admire your creative home or garden style!" So very true.

But enough kvetching. If I really wanted to turn my frown upside down, I'd spend less time in Sky Mall's decorative-arts department and instead focus on inspirational chazerai from the good people at Successories. A framed print of a waterfall that says "PERSEVERE" or a rainbow that says "ATTITUDE" might be just the thing to startle me out of lethargy and straight into true insanity. Bigfoot can keep me company in my padded cell.

It has been almost a week since my last post. Bad blogger, bad blogger. I've been depressed, but so has the rest of the world for the last couple of years, so I guess I can't complain.

If I were on the case, I would have noted the curious reincarnation of the historic Ferus Gallery last Friday. For those of you who didn't spring for an incredibly expensive (and occasionally useful) degree in art history, Ferus operated on La Cienega Boulevard from 1957 to 1966. Under the stewardship of Irving Blum, it mounted some of the most important exhibitions of its time, including the very first solo show devoted to Mr. Andy Warhol.

It was also the premier gallery around which the great California artists of the postwar era congregated—folks like Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, Ken Price, Ed Kienholz and Craig Kauffman. It seems that Thomas Beeton, an interior designer and art consultant, acquired the rights to the name and has opened a new gallery in the original space, which will operate as a sort of kunsthalle for rotating, independently curated exhibitions.

The inaugural show, Greatest Hits, Volume 1, curated by Tim Nye and Franklin Parrasch, delivers on its title with a delectable assortment of work by Mssrs. Ruscha, Moses, et al. A few members of the old Ferus posse even turned up at the opening party. Apparently, the Cali crew is enjoying a well-deserved moment in the sun. A fantastic show, Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960–70, just closed at David Zwirner in New York.

On February 9, the Samuel Freeman Gallery in Santa Monica is creating a replica of Ferus within its walls as part of a Billy Al Bengston retrospective. The work looks incredibly fresh and vital. I'm not surprised the art world is going back to Cali.

Okay, that's my blog. As an endnote, I'm passing along my secret weapon against depression. It gets me every time.

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match. When art looks at fashion, it sees glamour, sex appeal and lots of shiny lucre. When fashion looks at art, it sees depth, intellect and culture. The blissful union of the two has spawned the Fondazione Prada, Richard Prince handbags for Louis Vuitton, most of the social calendar of Art Basel Miami and other fruitful, fruity enterprises.

Last night, couture and kunst once again made sweet love as Calvin Klein hosted a party in collaboration with LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division, a public-art initiative) to celebrate the opening of Art Los Angeles Contemporary, an international fair at the Pacific Design Center.

The show itself was surprisingly intimate and jolly—not nearly as punishing as this type of thing tends to be. Without much heavy-duty, blue-chip artwork weighing down the proceedings, the fair instead focused on the work of younger artists, presented casually in a series of empty PDC showrooms. The fair runs through January 31, and if you're anywhere near West Hollywood, it's well worth checking out. Don't forget your rainbow flag.

As for the post-opening shindig, that was jolly, too, if not particularly intimate. In addition to booze and starlets (hot tamale Penélope Cruz, crazy insect woman Kate Bosworth, etc.), there were installations by artists Jennifer West and Jean Shin and curator Neville Wakefield—all inspired by the designs of Calvin Klein creative directors Francisco Costa and and Italo Zucchelli. 

With throbbing music and video projections in a raw, unfinished space (across the street from the PDC), the hoedown had a zippy, cinematic vibe—think Eyes of Laura Mars party scene meets Less Than Zero New Year's bash. There's one thing I can say about the fashion crowd: They know how to live it up, and they're not afraid to embrace superficiality and sybaritic delight without apology.

As for the art folks, well, they apparently want to get down and boogie L.A. style, but they just can't seem to get it right. Memo to the art fair organizers: Next year, leave the glamour to the professionals and skip the embarrassing red carpet. If the best celebrity you can come up with is Doogie Howser, it's probably wiser not to call in the paparazzi. Just a thought.

I was racking my brain for something amusing or edifying to share with the world when a friend sent me a link to unhappyhipsters.tumblr.com. It's the most toothsome delight I've enjoyed in weeks. Bon appetit!

P.S.:  My title, The Damned Don't Cry, refers to an underappreciated film noir from 1950, in which Joan Crawford makes a star turn as Ethel Whitehead, a scheming, low-rent social climber who transforms herself into mysterious society gadabout Lorna Hansen Forbes. It's my pick of the week—if you don't care for it, well, kiss my cineaste.

After nearly a solid week of rain, I celebrated the return of sunny skies by hightailing it to Palm Springs for the weekend. Normally, the desert outpost sets me on edge—so many hopped-up gays, so many ancient Hebrews—but this sojourn couldn't have been lovelier.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I myself am fast turning into a hopped-up ancient gay Hebrew, and I'm starting to accept my predestined obsolescence with uncharacteristic graciousness.

Back to Les Springs. There's something about the city—its compact size, its quiet, manicured streets, its rich, peculiar design history—that makes it the perfect place to cruise around and look at houses. Of course there are tons of iconic Neutras and Lautners and Freys to be ogled, but let's face it, all that sublime midcentury-modern splendor has grown a little stale.

With the benefit of a learned cicerone, I moved off the well-worn path and took in some of the more idiosyncratic treasures the city has to offer: Elvis Presley's shabby estate, some Fancy Feast confection for the Hearst family, a cactus garden that has been spray-painted purple and orange by its nutty owner to discourage poachers.

I was particularly taken with the Palm Springs Art Museum (above), which was designed in 1976 by local mainstay E. Stewart Williams. Unlike the modernist houses Williams designed in the late 1940s and '50s (such as Frank Sinatra's liquor-soaked hideout, Twin Palms), the museum strikes an unexpected note of high-'70s brutalism, desert style.

Brutalist architecture is frequently conscripted as a symbol of modernism's failure (think Boston City Hall), but the Palm Springs museum looked fresh and gutsy. It made me nostalgic for Paul Rudolph's Art & Architecture Building at Yale and all those hulking, concrete corduroy monoliths I encountered on my annual school field trips to Washington (when I was a wee tot full of hair and hope). Maybe brutalist architecture seems so au courant because of the brutal times in which we live.

After all that High Culture, I took a load off at the newish Ace Hotel, which I'd been meaning to check out for months. All the kids in Los Angeles are raving about this hippie-dippie, camp-themed getaway, and I must say I wasn't disappointed.

Designed by the Zeitgeist-surfing wunderkinds at Commune, the Ace has just the right look and tone for desert debauchery (and repose) circa 2010. It's not too expensive, not too overdesigned, not too desperately fashionable. I'm giving it the Tastemaker seal of approval. Fun for bears of all ages!

Dateline: Still Las Vegas. Picking up on yesterday's tour of the new CityCenter mega-development, let's head off to the shopping mall Crystals, which was designed by Daniel Libeskind, with interiors by David Rockwell. I suppose the peculiar name is a reference to the jagged quartzlike forms of Libeskind's architecture, but when I think of crystal and Vegas, two things come to mind: Cristal Connors, Gina Gershon's tough-as-nails stripper from Showgirls, and crystal meth.

Although Las Vegas is supposedly moving away from themed entertainment, Crystals does seem to have a theme: avant-garde architecture circa 1995 (think Zaha Hadid's fire station and Frank Gehry's chair museum for Vitra). Although I found the design quite pretty and compelling (at least from afar), it struck me as a bit odd that Libeskind would employ a dialect of the same architectural language he used for the Jewish Museum in Berlin and, more recently, the Jewish Contemporary Museum in San Francisco. As I wandered through the space, I didn't know whether to buy some panties at Kiki de Montparnasse or light a Yahrzeit candle for the Mourner's Kaddish.

As for the interior design, the hardworking folks at Rockwell Group deserve kudos for adding a few warm touches to Libeskind's glacial assemblage, most notably a three-story, abstracted "tree house" that might have been an early study model for the Pandora forest in Avatar.

Wandering out of Crystals and into the heart of CityCenter, one encounters a few unexpected moments of Art, including a massive canoe sculpture by Nancy Rubins, a signature typewriter eraser by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen and an early-1970s travertine sculpture by Henry Moore.

These gestures, coupled with the proliferation of Vuittons and Pradas, are clearly meant to communicate a new high-toned spirit for a town long known for cheesy kitsch. As architecture critic Alastair Gordon pointed out, "CityCenter is all about not learning from Las Vegas." Indeed.

Dateline Las Vegas. I've been working my way through the gargantuan CityCenter complex for the last couple days, and my dogs are barking. The development, which opened in December, encompasses some 18 million square feet of hotel, condo and retail space spread across six towers and one pointy, ostensibly avant-garde shopping mall. It's a lot to take in, which makes me wonder: How fat do I have to get to qualify for one of those Rascal or Hoveround scooters? Lord knows I must be close.

Much has been written about the architecture of CityCenter, particularly about the strategy of the developers, MGM Mirage, in assembling a cluster of high-profile starchitects including Rafael Viñoly, Norman Foster, César Pelli, Helmut Jahn and Daniel Libeskind. Predictably, none of the buildings represents a high-water mark for the various designers. But the conglomeration is fascinating nonetheless, if only as an object lesson in the potential boondoggle of throwing disparate egos and ideas into one playground.

Let's start at the Pelli-designed hotel and casino—Aria. So much of the success or failure of this kind of building depends on the interior treatments of its vast tracts of floor, wall and ceiling space. With so much square footage to cover, many casino developers and designers simply lack the money or vision to treat all that space creatively, often resulting in grim, anonymous transitional zones between the high-impact casino floors, retail/restaurant corridors and convention centers.

On this account, Aria acquits itself nicely. The interiors are handsome and well considered, with lots of adventures in specialty glass and commercial carpet to lift up certain areas that might otherwise feel very back-of-house. It doesn't hurt that selections from MGM Mirage's corporate collection—a little Schnabel here, some Henry Moore there—are peppered throughout the property.

One of the highlights of the Aria experience is the cascading water wall at the entry, which has a wonderfully mesmerizing effect, both visually and aurally. It was created by Wet, the firm responsible for the fountains at the Bellagio, which are glorious to behold, regardless of whether you are inebriated or sober.

The genius of the Bellagio fountains makes me wonder why the focal fountain at CityCenter (also designed by Wet) looks so puny and unspectacular. This seriously underwhelming ballet of water and light doesn't even register when you look down on it from the guest rooms. Perhaps the fountain isn't fully functional yet. Since the Bellagio fountains always send me over the moon, I have to think I missed something.

That's all for today, folks. Tomorrow I'll report on the Mandarin Oriental, the Crystals shopping odyssey and Norman Foster's bizarrely crude tower. Right now I have to have to hop on my Rascal and get to the all-you-can-eat-buffet before the shrimp supply is exhausted. Tally ho!

In keeping with my promise to feed my bloggity blog more often in 2010, here's a short post before I head off for some weekend reverie. I just came across a few new pieces created by Jaime Hayón for the venerable Spanish porcelain company Lladro, and in typical Hayón fashion, they are sprightly, whimsical and a little nutty. 

For those unfamiliar with this young virtuoso, Hayón works both sides of the art-design coin. Born in Madrid, he grew up immersed in skate-punk culture and graffiti art, both of which continue to inform his design of toys, furniture and other objects both functional and fanciful. 

I first encountered Hayón in his brilliant fantasyland exhibition Mediterranean Digital Baroque in 2003, at the London gallery of design impresario David Gill. It was one of those moments of revelation for which all true believers wait and pray. (I'm once again quoting All About Eve's Addison DeWitt, upon whom I have modeled my entire professional persona and literary career.)

Last year, Hayón designed a limited-edition collection of crystal and ceramic vessels for Baccarat that was so unbelievably gorgeous I was physically aroused when I opened the press kit—-without the aid of the good people at Pfizer! Predictably, the Baccarat pieces cost quite a pretty penny (being limited edition and all), and since I'm no longer riding the Condé Nast chuck wagon, I suppose it's back to the pharmacist for me. It's a sad commentary.  

Okay, we're into the second week of 2010. I'm still alive, and the world is still spinning. This means it's time for me to stop looking at Mayan calendars and Nostradamus specials on the History Channel and face the fact that neither civilization nor my blog is going anywhere any time soon. So, while I wait with baited breath and crossed fingers for 2012, I've resolved to post more often on this wobbly platform of mine. God help us all.

To get the party started, I've picked my brain and combed through my in-box for things on which I might happen to have an opinion. First on the list is the Tom Ford shanda A Single Man. I confess that I've always been somewhat turned off by Mr. Ford's public persona—too much pretension and hauteur, too much tanned man chest—so I was already leery going in.

It didn't help that the movie theater was smack-dab in the middle of West Hollywood, so it was naturally packed with a gaggle of shady design queens (which is to say, my people), and I was appalled by the reflection in the mirror.

But that's between me, my shrink and my beloved psychopharmacologist. As for the movie itself, well, it was the ultimate capitulation of substance to the siren call of style—mouthwatering, gorgeous, brilliant style, to be sure, but in the end, nothing more than that.

Tim Brayton, who writes a blog called Antagony & Ecstasy, summed up pretty much everything I felt about the movie: "Ford's debut film...is exactly the worst-case scenario of what pops into your head when you hear the phrase movie directed by a men's fashion designer and gay icon." Touché, Monsieur Brayton.

It's not as if Ford is the first director of a high-style, gay movie to doll up Julianne Moore in a vintage frock, stick a highball in her hand and tell her to go nuts. But if memory serves, Todd Haynes (Far from Heaven) and Tom Kalin (Savage Grace) seemed to understand that there are nuances of story that style alone cannot communicate. As for the tinkering with Christopher Isherwood's lovely novel, that's another bit of Tomfoolery I just don't get.

On to happier subjects. America's Best Dance Crew returns to MTV for its fifth season later this month, and that's enough to keep me going for the next couple of weeks. For anyone unfamiliar with this edifying program, ABDC is an urban dance competition in the tradition of You Got Served, How She Move, Step Up and the underappreciated Step Up 2: The Streets. It's one of my favorite age-inappropriate divertissements.

In addition to smokin' dance routines, ABDC features lots of novelty spelling from the performers (Fly Khicks, Boxcuttuhz, Fysh n Chicks) and the pleasant spectacle of kewpie-doll host Mario Lopez. Plus, there's always a generous helping of babbling and malapropism from judge Lil' Mama, who is truly cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. To borrow a phrase from another venerable Lil' (specifically Kim), this show is "Straight Hood."

Finally, for the design fiends among you, I have to give a shout-out to my favorite new showroom in New York, Twenty-first/Twenty-First, which specializes in limited-edition furniture by a wide range of French talents. Although I doubt there any recession-era bargains to be had, simply checking out the Website has its rewards in inspiration and delight.

Among my favorite pieces are the Adam & Eve fire dogs by Hubert Le Gall (frankly, everything he makes is genius) and the Bazooka light sculpture by Jerome Aich and Samuel Misslen. Philippe Starck designed a series of provocative gun lamps a few years ago, but truth be told, the Aich and Misslen gun collection makes Starck's creations look like a pile of poo.

So there it is, the first installment of Blogapalooza 2010. Tell a friend! Click the RSS feed! Log in early and often! I'm going to get canned if my numbers don't pick up, and I desperately need this job. At least until 2012.

Well, I've made it through another bipolar Chrismukkah, and I'm crawling on my hands and knees to the finish line of 2009. Since the recession hasn't as yet receded much—at least in my world—most of the gifts I received were of the charming/heartfelt variety, as opposed to the luxury/wallet-felt variety.

Among the myriad offerings, the most delightful curiosity was a vintage copy of Marlene Dietrich's ABC, an alphabetical compendium of the great lady's observations, beauty tips, bons mots and recipes. In 1961, the New York Times Book Review lauded the tome as "an apertif of tang and sparkle...effervescently readable."

And so it is. I happen to like this particular genre—part memoir, part how-to, written by bored, underemployed, slightly bitter starlets of yesteryear. Dietrich's ABC reminded me of Joan Crawford's My Way of Life but with less angry dementia and more Teutonic hauteur. If memory serves, Joan never mentioned Goethe ("From him came all the answers to all the questions in my Sturm und Drang years") or Schopenhauer ("The World as Will and Idea was the book of my formative years").

Of course, it wasn't all high-toned German philosophy for Dietrich. Among her more pedestrian (and peculiar) entries: "Liverwurst: The consolation of the sad"; "Morocco: Looks better in films"; "Cigarettes: Keep me healthy"; and "Jews: I will not try to explain the mystical bond, stronger than blood, that binds me to them." Who knew?!

The rush of all that Marleniana gave me a hankering for more, so after finishing "Zeppelin" and "Zwieback," I spread up a few liverwurst sandwiches and watched Blonde Venus, my all-time favorite Dietrich movie. As a Christmas present to you, dear readers, here's a look at "Hot Voodoo," the big musical number in which Dietrich comes onstage in a gorilla outfit and dons a blond Afro wig with arrows (à la Steve Martin's Wild and Crazy Guy).

So brilliant. So insane. From me to you...Happy New Year.