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
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.