Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Jan. 1-13

Mad Max, The Killer, Disco Elysium, the Oscars! And maybe, even, a bit of Maestro...

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary for 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 Twitter or Letterboxd (for free!). Thank you for reading!

2024

Happy new year! Is everyone having a nice time so far? I imagine that if your life is anything like mine, it is mostly the same. I rang in the new year with a quick trip out to see my folks, and then I’ve been back to work ever since. I missed the snow in New York but I caught a bit of it back in the Midwest. I have loved living out east, but I do find myself missing the horrible weather back home, sustaining myself on Instagram stories of friends who documented this past weeks foot of snow. There was a blizzard during my first year of grad school, and we had a kind of de fact snow day though I think most of us would have made it to class okay. We got together at the poets’ house around the corner and made pasta and hung out instead. But that was 2018, and I struggle to think of a time like that since then.

Here’s a story. Yesterday afternoon we went to the Michael Mann Facts hosted screening of Blackhat (better than I remembered) and I stood out in front of the Roxy waiting for Phil for a few minutes before heading in. There was an influencer couple, by which I mean an influencer woman and her dutiful photo-taking boyfriend, doing a mini photoshoot in front of the Roxy which was making me laugh because sure! I guess so! Did you run out of other places in Tribeca that look weird? As they were doing this, an older man with his adult daughter came out of the hotel, presumably after a meal, and the older man tripped and the influencer boyfriend caught him. It was a nice moment that then dovetailed into the influencers and the father and daughter deep in conversation about influencing — the daughter used to be an influencer, but now she’s a nurse! The two influencers were kind of trying to one up each other (friendly, but strategic) though they also seemed genuinely curious in each other. They talked neighborhoods, photos. The rest of the family who’d been inside the Roxy came out. They were all introducing each other an exchanging names. It was very nice, almost painfully Midwest (though none of them were). When I move through the city I don’t see myself as existing at odds with anyone else, but I often operate under the assumption that everyone else may be at odds with each other. I think, perhaps as evidenced here, this is not the case.

! ! ! Fran Magazine heads up ! ! !

If you’re in NYC, one of my favorite films of last year — Deborah Stratman’s Last Things — is play at Anthology all week. GO SEE THIS MOVIE!!! I’m not kidding around.

All right, on with the show…