Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Aug. 18-31

Two comedy specials, more Elden Ring, Fran weighs in on Oasis, Angel of my Dreams, and more!

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary for paid subscribers only. The Sunday Dispatch details what I’ve been watching, reading, playing, and listening to over the past week. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my writing career, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. You can also follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

Can one of you remind me to buy dishsoap

Early into the summer, a friend asked what I imagined the vibe was going to be in the months to come. Last summer was so outrageously bad that surely this one couldn’t be worse. “Body keep score summer or summer you never had this year?” she asked. I pushed the answer off with “secret third thing” followed by “baring witness to my life in the third person” (paraphrased). Basically it wound up being neither of those things, on account of getting mono. The mono is, again, mostly gone, though this past Thursday I got hit with a powerful wave of exhaustion early in the evening, falling asleep on the couch a little before 8pm for no other reason beyond “too tired to move.”

On the subject of summers, I loved reading Elif Batuman’s piece about her new book and failed(ish) attempts at productivity this summer.

It’s cooled down in the past few weeks in New York which gets called “fake fall” because the nights get darker and being outside turns tolerable, but inevitably the second week or third week of September — basically whenever the NYFF press screenings start up — the weather will shoot back up to classic July temperatures and I’ll be sweating on my walk from Columbus Circle to Lincoln Center. But that doesn’t mean we have to say goodbye to stuff like this:

Most of what I wrote in the past few weeks will make its way into this post later on, but I wanted to shoutout this giant pop culture deep dive into “Obamacore” that I contributed some blurbs to for Vulture. The whole thing consists of stuff that I’m mostly happier not to remember, but it’s fun to scroll through and try to determine what might make you (specifically) insane (in a bad way). For me, it’s “Classroom Instruments” on Fallon. The six minute trailer for Cloud Atlas and “why is your penis on a dead girl’s phone” make me insane in a good way, though.