A nice, slow, back-on-the-wagon week. On Tuesday, we carved some time out of an afternoon to walk through the cherry blossoms, then met with one of the only friends in town for a reason other than “see the cherry blossoms.” We met at a beer bar that used to be my favorite, no-hassle after-work meeting place, where the friend had taken over a table for six with a mysterious and long puddle on the floor. I hadn’t drank beer in months, and it was wet out, so I had one of the sweetest stouts I’d ever seen on a menu, then a half-pint of a “smoked beer” that tasted like summer sausage, the one you slice and eat with cheese.
Otherwise, we kept to ourselves. There are weeks when I need to travel and weeks when every story is on the other side of a phone. Early Wednesday evening, a colleague asked me if I was planning to speak at the global politics hub party in New York, so I quickly bought tickets to and from New York for the next day.
When you don’t give yourself many chances to drink, you don’t miss it. I had more time to tend to plants, which were clinging harder to life than the last batch, and to walk instead of riding the bus. Too busy on there, some days. The bus on my Wednesday commute was packed, so I did the polite thing; I stood in the “no standees” area and jumped off at every stop to let people off. It was downright friendly in the “no standees” zone, and jarring when a middle-aged man, on his way, loudly muttered to himself: “I know you’re white but you gotta get out of the way.” No one was offended. We just snapped out of the commute daze, got annoyed, then got dazed again.
The same day, I took a roundabout way around the coffee place, to give myself a walk. I ended up behind a man moving wildly and shadow-boxing every few steps. After one flurry, he jumped jaggedly and a box flew out of his pocket. He ran ahead; I walked up to the box. He’d dropped a weed vape cartridge, and he was across the street now. Was it worth picking this up and running it over to a man already lost in a reverie? Would he misread the situation and box at me? I considered a couple options before another man, walking perpendicular to me, stopped at the box and had the same internal debate.
“He’s probably better off without it,” he said. “Right?”
Sounded right. I went back to the office and don’t know what happened to to the THC resin. Episode 1, a podcast in which each edition is the pilot for a new podcast, had cast me as a solipsistic 1960s rock critic for a very special episode; you can listen to that year.
The Best Thing I Read. My wife made some light fun of me for caring about Atlas Obscura’s recommendations; totally harmless, just a statement on how much I needed my pastimes to be vetted. This reminded me that “Gastro Obscura” was sitting in the open storage of our coffee table, and that I’d never sat and read the thing. Honesty is important: Leafing through it was the most fun I had all week. Cheese aged in bogs, bread cooked by the heat of natural springs, “mad honey” that can induce hallucination, rare wild apple trees whose fruit tastes like the last thing the bees pollinated. Humans wrote the capsule histories, and humans took the photos. It’s good, easy food writing, grouped by continent, and good for any part of the coffee table. Best fiction: Jason Pargin’s upcoming novel, which I read a galley of for a blurb, if the publisher likes it.
I listened to Tiny Fey’s “Bossypants,” a monster hit that I’d never read, but seen on the bookshelves of at least two dozen millennial women. Paging through it once, I assumed it was a memoir with a strong focus on leadership techniques. There’s a little of that, once Fey gets to her SNL and “30 Rock” career, first with a male-heavy writing room and second with one she built. “Don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions,” he writes. “Go over, under, through, and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss.” This really does sound like advice, but she undercuts it: “Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing, and don’t care if they like it.”
The whole book is like that, with Fey staying sardonic, revealing lessons or details from her comedy career then instantly joking so that the reader will still like her. One very detailed chapter exposes the habit male SNL writers had of pissing in bottles to save the time of a bathroom walk on deadline. This has no relevance to me but I’m glad she covered it.
My amble through sci-fi took me to Bob Shaw’s “Orbitsville,” a derivative but fast-moving story about mankind’s discovery of a Dyson sphere, with lots of land to settle on. Not bad, but made me want to pick up the copy of “Star Maker” in the guest room, because the entire concept of the Dyson sphere came from Olaf Stapledon’s novel; Dyson just read it and formalized the theory. Otherwise, I read short stories, adding a Clark Ashton Smit collection when I saw it on deep Kindle discount. Most of the way through Penguin’s Richard Matheson collection, consisting of good stories that inspired adaptations (“Duel,” “The Box,” “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”) and good stories that didn’t (“Born of Man and Woman,” a first-person horror about a mutant kept in a family’s basement).
Books read
Bob Shaw, “Orbitsville”
Tina Fey, “Bossypants”
Jason Pargin, “I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom”
Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras, “Gastro Obscura”
Frank Kelly Rich, “The Modern Drunkard”
Books purchased
John Barton, “A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths”
Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years”
Clark Ashton Smit, “The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies”
The Best Thing I Watched: Nothing in theaters was grabbing us, so we watched some movies on our own. Whose work do I enjoy with friends but would never subject my wife to? That’s right, Abel Ferrera. I marathoned a few of his that were about to disappear from streaming: Death Wish-with-a-car snooze “The Gladiator,” ripped-from-the-headlines “Welcome to New York,” and sex-brained cyber-noir “New Rose Hotel.” But the b-movie gristle I craved came from “Fear City,” a cops-and-strip-club-promoter neon noir. There’s a flashback that builds Tom Berenger’s backstory, showing him kill a man in the boxing ring, then scream — in slow motion — that the fight should’ve been stopped. Melanie Griffith looks lost and Billy Dee Williams looked contemptuous of the material. I adored it.
Best short thing I watched was Sarah Sherman’s movie memories for MUBI, part of a series that site does, in which artists are invited to a New York poster gallery to talk about movies. Sherman has lived her entire life thinking that the V-sign was a peace symbol inserted onto the American boxes of “Bad Taste” to make the movie look nicer.
The Best Thing I Heard: You guessed it, the Mandarian cover of “Boom Clap” that plays on new Panda Express ads. I don’t even eat this stuff.
But I was still enjoying the Lamont Dozier playlist I made, and finding good melodies from songs that didn’t get overplayed. “I Got A Feeling” dropped in 1966, after British rock had displayed Motown.
I built the playlist with several versions of the songs I didn’t know, and this one’s even better.
Back on course. Thanks for the patience during the burnout period and see you next week.