Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Oct. 27-Nov 2

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

Endless summer

I finally got a roll of film that I started shooting on in mid-June developed. The photo above was taken on a hike in the Adirondacks right before my mono got bad, back when I was like “is something wrong with me lol?” (as opposed to “there’s something wrong with me? lol :(”). I got heart palpitations and ran out of water midway through, but the hike was incredible, the weather was perfect, and the views were stunning.

I wrote two pieces of note this week: the first of which was a scene report from the Timothée Chalamet Lookalike Competition and the second is an inventory of the most obnoxious marketing tactics of the Wicked movie’s “culture jacking.” Fran Magazine is pro-musical as a general rule but anti-Wicked in all forms — book, musical, movie adaptation of musical. I hope this doesn’t offend.

I have not been loving the act of “looking at myself” lately: hating outfits, hating body, hating face. Possibly one of the most damaging memories was sitting across from¹ a supervisor in my early 20s who used to touch his face after eating lunch to gauge whether he had “sodium face” or not. Respectfully: take this kind of thing to the bathroom, don’t do it in front of me. Some, if not most, of this feeling likely stems from something seasonal. More darkness, different wardrobe, the bizarre march of time. Of course, there is one big solution for this type of personal, self-centered malaise — as well as larger, more broad, existential, or even political malaise — and that’s getting out of your house. On Halloween and Friday, the weather was in the mid-70s. This is basically net horrible for the Earth and I don’t like it and I didn’t like having to wonder, “now where are my shorts” on the 31st of October and 1st of November, respectfully, but Sydney and I went for a long walk around Prospect Park where the leaves were bursting with color and texture. We saw every type of dog imaginable. We saw so many geese. We saw squirrels and birds. We saw a raccoon — awake early? — sprinting across the field to climb up a tree before he looked down at us with his little face like “who, me?” People were talking and fishing and laughing and playing. The sunset wasn’t as good as what we wanted, but the park still looked gold in the fading light.

There’s nothing I can say about the United States presidential election that hasn’t been said by smarter or more reasonable people. I think part of the reason why “discourse” around “politics” has gotten so unbearable is the centering of the ego and self — suddenly there are all these individual voices to listen to in lieu of, say, collective action. Once I no longer had to be “watching election coverage” for my job, I stopped. I read, I listen to things. I’ve never gone out to a bar on election night except after the results were called in 2012, but to my credit, I was relatively newly 21 and the idea of “going to a bar” was still novel.² My residency starts on Monday, and hopefully on Tuesday, I will be writing and checking in when necessary and otherwise not indulging too heavily in fatalism. It doesn’t do me — or you — much good in the long run. There’s too much work left on the table, and there’s no time for all that.