Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, last chunk of April

Spaghetti edition

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Good taste

Last weekend I gave myself a mild case of food poisoning on account of back-to-back-to-back fast foods, including Chipotle with poisons me once or twice a year but “I’ll keep drinking that garbage,” etc. That’s not why there was no Sunday Dispatch last week, but it was a contributing factor. I more or less recovered within a day, but for this whole past week my body had a very strange relationship with food. I was both constantly and never hungry: if I wasn’t eating I wanted food more than anything and if food was in front of me I grew immediately nauseous. All these foods I typically love — chickpea salad, onigiri, grilled salmon — could not interest me less. As the past week came to a close, however, I was consumed by the idea of eating spaghetti, a feeling I only get a few times a year. I mean, I eat pasta all the time, but I mean specifically with red sauce and parmesan (or better yet, green cheese¹). I had this intense suspicion that a big bowl of spaghetti had the power to fix me and nothing else would until I could make it. I dedicated Friday evening to spaghetti making — I do my own red sauce that’s a bastardization of about three other recipes depending on what I have on hand and how the tomatoes look at the store — and spaghetti eating. The benefits were undoubtedly psychosomatic, but the relief was instantaneous, my appetite returning in full. Did I get terrible heartburn after? Well, yes — but that’s just a side effect of being in my thirties.

I let the weather warm-up take me by surprise this spring. I don’t think I’m the only one. The newfound ability to put on shorts basically whenever came out of nowhere. It was a weird, wet, and cold spring: on either side of my trip to Texas earlier in the month, it was 30 degrees in New York, and it was 40 and rainy on my birthday. I feel a little unprepared — suddenly I have no idea what I usually wear in good weather — but having the windows open at night or hearing frantic birds all morning and seeing the trees come to life all in a matter of about twelve days has been pretty perfect. Yesterday morning, Marian and I went and got ice strawberry matcha lattes — a beverage that is functionally candy — made with homemade strawberry syrup/preserves by a new local spot. Few things have ever tasted so good in my life!!!

A brief and serious aside

There were layoffs this past week at work — Polygon was functionally dissolved and sold off, and a handful of beloved coworkers of mine were also let go. It’s frustrating and depressing, yet another sign of blogging collapse that makes me feel so defeated. Here is a link to the GoFundMe for Polygon employees should you find yourself with spare change or affection for that site (or, ideally, both!).

Sebald Second

I have no idea who or what the band (guy?²) Tennis is, but friend of the magazine Vikram put this on my feed and it’s so good:

link

Of course, one of a few issues here is that it’s W.G. Sebald, not W. B. Sebald. For whatever reason “W.B. Sebald” reminds me of Michigan J. Frog — where’s he been? Like I said, I have no opinion of Tennis but I think anyone responding to reviews of their work³ to fight with a critic, especially in an argument that ends with like, “why don’t YOU try to sing a song,” will always wind up looking bad. It is really hard to “clap back” at a critic and look cool basically ever⁴ unless you are in a real, old school intellectual debate. It is so funny to say “therein” while fighting with a Pitchfork writer.

Bandit

at what point in pet ownership do you stop having a panic attack every 36 hours thinking something is wrong with them

Pride & Prejudice, Joe Wright (2005)

Rewatched at Regal Essex. Highkey the only movie I’ve watched all the way through in weeks!!! I love this film — it is so warm and richly composed. It is undoubtedly a “better movie” than Wright’s Anna Karenina, but the worseness of Anna K makes that movie much more interesting to me at the end of the day. Rosamund Pike is really divine here — almost an underrated actress at this point. The older I get, the more attuned I am to the performances by Donald Sutherland and Brenda Blethyn who make a perfect pairing as the Bennett parents. I had not seen this movie since I saw Secrets & Lies, I don’t think, so revisiting with the awareness of Blethyn’s little panicky shtick she can turn on and off made me laugh and laugh. She’s so good. I miss Donald Sutherland so much :(

Love on the Spectrum, US (S1-3)

Bingewatched this while Phil was out of town and I needed something on while doing vague wedding-related admin. I basically never binge TV and I basically never watch reality TV, so I couldn’t tell you how I landed on this show beyond the fact that I sometimes get served TikToks from it and find them charming. By no means a perfect show, but an interesting show. I think this most recent season is probably the best they’ve done so far, where expansions of the cast feel a little more robust, though they could stand to show a degree of economic diversity on screen. I rock with Pari, the Boston bisexual.

The Stalker, Paula Bomer

Snagged this galley via Emily Gould rec — out later this month! Taut, nasty little novel. I liked it!

True Mistakes, Lena Moses-Schmidt

I got the pleasure of seeing

Lena Moses-Schmitt

read this week and discuss her debut poetry collection with Larissa Pham — another writer whose work I really love. I’m a huge fan of Lena’s Substack (linked above) and her amazing artwork, though was otherwise unfamiliar with her poetry. Something I’ve come across time and time again (and I think mentioned here, briefly) while doing wedding planning stuff is this overwhelming sentiment that no one wants anything to feel dated. Everything, instead, should be timeless. Part of what I admire so much about True Mistakes is that it is dated in that: this took place a little while ago in time. It’s a project that stems not necessarily from a universal sentiment but from specific circumstances: California, pandemic, loneliness, the body. I love how Lena renders time and movement during a period where both felt constricted and expansive. A beautiful collection, which you can find here!

Blue Prince

I think I’m very, very close to getting to what I understand to be the initial ending — getting to Room 46 — though I am hitting a bit of a wall during my playthroughs. The permanent upgrades don’t feel quite helpful enough, and I do find a tedium setting in. I did, however, blog a bit about how I keep feeling like the game is going to get really scary at some point and never does.

Pirates! The Penzance Musical

Did you know there’s currently a Pirates of Penzance revival happening on Broadway that is not called Pirates of Penzance but instead Pirates! The Penzance Musical? I assume this is because they want to copyright this slightly new version which includes some additional songs from the Gilbert & Sullivan catalog from Ioanthe and H.M.S. Pinafore. The conceit of the show is that it transposes Pirates of Penzance to New Orleans and does a few “jazz renditions” of some of the numbers. Is the show good? Not especially. It neither commits to the jazz hard enough nor stays true to the individual vision enough to emerge as a coherent new thing. The whole end of the show is a rewritten Pinafore song that’s like, “America is great because everyone is an immigrant,” and it’s like … right. But I’m no grouch, and I like hearing songs I know played loud. I laughed! There is distinct pleasure in hearing David Hyde Pierce do “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” and I always forget how good a song “With Cat-Like Tread” is.

Kevin Kline outsold. That said, that this musical got more or less left out at the Tonys is no real surprise to me. Which, speaking of…

Tony nominations

Yay for Cole Escola and Conrad Ricamora. Yay for Sam Pinkleton⁵. Yay for both leads of Death Becomes Her getting into Best Actress and basically edging out Idina Menzel in Redwood — the type of thing that might have seemed like a lock in any other year but is literally and simply quite bad. That they extended it to August and went “nvm” when the show got blanked made me laugh. Yay for Tom Francis and Nicole Scherzinger. I still want to see Boop! The Musical — the musical about Betty Boop. Broadway loves its exclamation points.

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I am loving Lonesome Dove and can’t wait to discuss more with everyone tomorrow! How are you doing? What are you reading, watching, listening to, and playing? Do you rock with spaghetti? Is it time for my annual Topsy-Turvy rewatch?

1. Many conversations on Reddit where people try to figure out what the Kraft grated cheese is devolve into people being like, “Hey! Did you know you can actually buy your own block of parmesan and grate it yourself?” Funny, because first of all, like, I think most people do know that, and also because I think the satisfaction derived from freshly and “authentically” grated parmesan and the plastic tube of imitation parmesan are completely different though equal.

2. Maybe this is like an Owl City situation… where it sounds like a band but is just a dude.

3. I basically never read comments on anything I write EXCEPT FOR HERE because the vibe is yay. When I wrote for The A.V. Club I recall some users trying to guess my nationality based on my name (???) and every now and then when I peep the Vulture comments I see that someone has called me illiterate. Not helpful in either case.

4. I have watched many try and fail to do this at the NYFCC dinner, wherein celebs and directors find themselves both thanking critics and being like “ooh… critics…. you’re so annoying sometimes.” The only person I’ve seen walk this line gracefully was Sean Baker this past January who lobbed all his jokes about critics at Richard Brody, who can take it and did laugh.

5. Didn’t realize that in addition to directing Oh Mary he also did choreography for the best show I feel like I’m never gonna get to see again: Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.