Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Oct. 6-12

End of NYFF, We Live in Time, the Lisa Marie Presley memoir, The Outrun, and a snippet of the Rooney convo to come...

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary usually 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 writing career, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. You can also follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

Remember “decorative gourd season”?

NYFF came and went, the longest and quickest four weeks of the year every year. On Friday, I got to set my alarm to 8am. Yesterday, my figure drawing class was cancelled on account of Yom Kippur so I slept til nearly 9am. Watching the stats tick up on my phone from six hours of sleep to a little over eight per night has been wonderful. Waking up in the dark earlier in this week had me dreading the months ahead like no other.

For the first time in a little over a month, I’m caught up on all my writing assignments, which is a wonderful feeling. I’ve never been a significant procrastinator, but balancing multiple deadlines across multiple publications with different invoice schedules creates a number of variable hoops to jump through. That’s not to say I have nothing due, but I am not staring at the clock as though time is running out on cutting the little colored wires on a bomb.

Speaking of, I wrote a book list for the Atlantic about books for people who love movies. The entrypoint here is admittedly a bit convoluted, but I’m really happy with how it turned out: rather than consider books that have been adapted into great movies, or books that ought to be movies, or books about movies, we decided instead to go with books that have the feel and sensory pleasure that film can often provide. Whenever I’m asked to recommend books, these are often my go-tos.

Desserts of note: on Wednesday, the tiramisu and the salted butter gelato from Albero dei Gelati, on Thursday, the chocolate-dipped banana Melona… I wish I liked these more but the idea is good in concept: a frozen banana in the trademark box-like Melona shape, dipped in chocolate. It’s on me that I thought the frozen banana of it all would be yogurty like the melon Melonas. It’s really just frozen banana, blended and shaped in the classic Melona fashion, and then dipped in what is — in my opinion — too thin a layer of chocolate.¹ On Friday, Clare, Liam, and I went to Morgensterns where I had two old favorites newly (?) back on the menu: olive oil chocolate orange and banana macadamia praline. All the banana flavors at Morgensterns are excellent. Charred banana is probably the “best”; the big update on banana macadamia praline is that it’s now vegan lending it a Melona ice cream bar-like texture. It is still delicious. Last night, the tiramisu at Macosa in Brooklyn — though we were almost tempted by the cheesecake.