Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Feb. 11-24

Revisiting Dune, Vera Drake, I finished two whole books (okay, kind of), plus Fran Magazine goes to the theater

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary for paid subscribers only. The Sunday Dispatch details what I’m watching, reading, playing, and listening to. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my career in culture writing full-time, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. Feel free to follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

Gummy bear on the sidewalk

gummy bear on the sidewalk

Thanks everyone for your patience last week as I got my workload finagled into something manageable. It’s so good to clear a bunch of stuff off your metaphorical plate and then immediately get a cold! But the sun was out yesterday, and it’ll be out again today, so I can’t really complain, just stay home and drink miso broth.

It occurred to me that it might be in my best interest to front-load pieces I wrote for other publications at the top of Sunday Dispatches, ahead of the paywall. Classic thing to realize one year into working on something. For Dwell, I went to a Brooklyn #vanlife meetup and reported on the post-2020 state of the union, so to speak, for East Coast #vanlifers. I don’t typically consider myself a reporter, probably to the greater detriment to my career, but I love doing a scene report because I am just extroverted enough not to feel completely insane. You are probably not going to see me in a converted van any time soon, but everyone I met was so fun and so gracious. Here is a bonus picture of a dog named Nugget giving me a side-eye.

For Vulture’s Weep Week, I wrote about crying to film scores in isolation. Do you do this? Tell me you do this. What scores do you do it to?

Beyond that, it has been a relatively good week. I didn’t realize I had President’s Day off til late last Friday. I’d set aside the day for some unpleasant dentistry stuff to attend to (“Why do I not believe that?” one of my coworkers asked me on Tuesday after I told him I was doing good, to which I said, “Dentist appointment yesterday,” and he said, “Say no more.”), but then we spent the rest of the sunny day in New Jersey: the morning going out to the suburbs to the Jewish cemetery where my great-grandparents are buried, and then to 99 Ranch, an Asian grocery store that was one of the top five most fun places to go in Jersey City.