Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, May 5-11

Oops, all (mostly) good movies

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 career in culture writing full-time, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. You can also follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

Just about every photo on my phone is of a storefront

I had a story come out in Curbed on Friday about the influx of places with “atelier” in their name in New York City, and I took my own photos for the piece. When I look back over my camera roll for the past three weeks, my phone has just about as many ateliers inside it as the city does in Noho — bizarre. This is sort of my ideal type of writing project: a deepish dive into a public oddity that allows me to talk to people without making them feel like I’m making fun of them or having to get too in the weeds on business and numbers. At one of these ateliers, I tried to explain the conceit of my article as clearly as possible, and when I was leaving, the sales associate said, “Good luck with your project.” I’d come right from school and I was wearing my backpack and I thought, maybe, she thought I was younger than I am because as we all know, I can pass for 24, and if not 24, then 17, probably.

It was a massively busy kind of week — the last week of the school year! I was grading and taking office hours constantly, reassuring my sweet MFA students that they were fine, or that they were going to be fine, because by the time you hit mid-May in grad school, you basically are fine, like you didn’t drop out and your project didn’t blow up and no one is mad at you. Working with students who are graduating is bittersweet in part because you can’t say you’ll see them next year; you can offer a perpetual option to meet for coffee in the future and wonder who will take you up on it (usually just one of them). That, in tandem with my mounting frustrations with New School administration — who once again called the police on their own students — has made this past week feel very strange. I think we’ll all be happy to be away from that place for a while.

Two fun things I read this week: this article in Hell Gate on the bathrooms at Lincoln Center, and Nicholas Russell on Fincher’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for Bright Wall/Dark Room. I think I am not alone in a vested interest of “where you can pee for free in New York City, specifically Manhattan” and the ways in which the city has failed people in this regard (see: the great John Wilson episode as well as this recentish story). And then, of course, Russell is just one of my must-read writers these days, and readers of Fran Magazine/Blank Check listeners will know I spent a ton of time in the greater “Dragon Tattoo” universe last year. Fincher feels like one of those directors where I’m always sure we’re going to run out of ways to talk about his movies… and then we don’t! Which I can’t complain about.