Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Sept. 15-21

Fran learned to gamble

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!

Frans casino

Good morning from the city of Philadelphia, where by the time you’ve read this, I’ve already left.¹ Phil and I got in last night to see Jeff Lynne’s Electric Light Orchestra on their purported farewell tour, which looked like this.

Earlier in the year — maybe in June, when I was on residency — my mom, who listens to the radio every day in Chicago, won a call-in contest that scored her two tickets to see this particular ELO tour in September, and in fact, next week. I didn’t think much of it at the time, beyond “wow, cool!” because it’s a novelty to win something on the radio and ELO is one of the bands she and I both like.² Time passed. I got mononucleosis. Then one of my editors went to go see ELO on this tour play Madison Square Garden and I reached out to him to say, “jealous!” and he said, “you should go if you can!” and then I almost bought tickets to see them at MSG but Phil had already bought us Stereophonic tickets for that night.³ I thought about it for a day and a half. I googled “Jeff Lynne age” (76). I thought some more. I said to Phil approximately three seconds after he woke up one day: “We need to see ELO.” That was that. We came down to Philly, stayed in a hotel casino, we saw ELO, we slept, we went home. Jeff and ELO were awesome. I will write more about them in the future in an issue that’s not the one everyone skips. Is there a better song than this?

I did have a brief thought during the concert where I considered: If Harry Styles is so content to rip off ‘70s rock, he should be making more songs (or specifically ballads) that sound like ELO instead of everything sounding like slow Tame Impala. We can revisit that idea around the time of HS4.

Perhaps just as crucially an update: I gambled at a casino for the first time. I obviously know the major card games⁴ and am familiar with slots and online gambling, but I’d never walked through a casino in real life before. Wow! I can see why and how this would be ruinous to, idk, 70% of the people who do it. Too much fun. I very quickly learned the cheap heartbreak of real life slots, but the most fun was at the roulette table where I won and then lost and then won and then lost and then finally broke exactly even and walked away. This morning, upon waking, I thought: they should make, like, a whole vacation type that’s about gambling, before remembering we have multiple cities where that is mostly “the deal.”

ANYWAY, I wrote a ton this week but not all of lives online yet. This Sunday, you can read my thoughts on The Substance, a movie I walked out of at the end thinking, “I’d probably be normal about this whole thing…” and about La Chimera’s (<3) summertime session at IFC theater. Okay, on with the show.