Hello, my friends, from another train, another plane, another automobile. Not a train, actually, though there is (allegedly) a tram, which I have never actually taken (or even in fact seen?). Where I am is Las Vegas, again, this time for a story, about which you will hear more in a few months, but suffice it to say I’m very excited, and have good reason to have unceremoniously shifted to a bi-weekly format, at least for the time being. For what it’s worth I praise the existence of any tram or similar public transit opportunity in any city, but I praise higher the rare ability to breathe fresh, non-casino air, and so when I can, I walk.
In other news, the news is still bad, we are still all reeling, and there is not much to do beyond acknowledging the anguish, to be gentle to each other, to help where we can, to reach out to each other, to be kind to one another, and to try and remain centered, and grounded in the present. That said, I continue to try and splash some water on the raging garbage fire of atrocities with other human experiences when possible, and if you, too, desire a little reprieve from time to time, well. You’ve come to the right place. You know, there’s this idea that in order to relax you need to consume something mindless. I fundamentally don’t think that’s true. I find badly (or sloppily, or thoughtlessly, or harmfully) made things very stressful, the odd delicious reality TV show excepting. Enough with celebrating “trash!” The world is already full of garbage. (I mean this literally, but you can take it any way you want.) You don’t need to clog up your mind or closet or body or life with it, too. So! Without further ado:
A perfect television show. Moonlighting has arrived on Hulu. This series has forever felt like one of those mythic cultural moments that disappeared with the erasure of physical media from our shared culture. (I could go long on this: it’s nefarious! If a streamer decides to disappear a show or film that they own for whatever reason [$$, typically] you just..can’t see it again. It’s enough to make you sneak a camcorder into the movies like Kramer in that one episode of Seinfeld, only not just “the movies,” but all of it. I guess we all have to start buying physical media again?) You couldn’t find the show anywhere, couldn’t buy it on Amazon (not even in DVD box set, if you even have a DVD player!), couldn’t stream fuzzy episdodes on YouTube. It just didn’t exist, except that there was proof that it had, like Bruce Willis’ career, and every so often someone on some social network or other would be like, “hey, remember Moonlighting? That was the greatest show ever. Wow, this would be a perfect time to watch Moonlighting. Too bad!” (This, by the way, is my least favorite kind of commentary. It is frankly just unhelpful.) And then a few weeks ago it landed, with something of a splash, but not nearly enough given the joy I’ve already gotten out of it since.
The premise: 1985 Los Angeles. Cybill Shepherd is a fabulous supermodel whose money managers have run off with all of her hard-earned gains, leaving her with a really incredibly 80s house, a power pastel big shouldered silk wardrobe, and a few failing businesses she had maintained as tax write offs. One of them? A detective agency! And guess who runs it? A brand new actor on the scene: Bruce Willis! They bicker and flirt and never get tired of it, there are silly capers, they solve crimes, Los Angeles looks great, her clothes are wonderful, she makes me want a fluffy bob, she kind of reminds me of my grandmother, I think it’s the dimensions and the color palette (and the perfect hair). It’s my favorite kind of show, wherein a beautiful and clever woman perpetually tells a guy who worships her that he’s a jerk and he’s sort of winking and winning about it and they save each other over and over again. It’s Willis’ breakout role, and he is basically playing the same character as in Die Hard, which made him into the mega star we all know and love today. Shepherd is divine. It’s Hollywood history! It’s perfect if you’re hungover, can’t sleep, have that bad cold everyone had a few weeks ago, or are incapable of absorbing any more bad news for 59 odd minutes.
A good book: Death Valley by Melissa Broder. A funny thing about doing a personal growth retreat like the Hoffman process, as I did last year, is that once you’ve finished it you’re inclined to see proof of other peoples’ also having done something similar everywhere. (Especially in their art.) Such is the case with Death Valley, which skews pretty closely to several Hoffman principles, among them love and forgiveness and acceptance, but if that sounds sappy, don’t let it stop you. It’s a surrealist meditation on the human condition. Only, you know, heavily set in a Best Western hotel (and inside a Saguaro cactus). And it’s FUNNY. And sweet? And easy to read. I like Broder’s writing a lot. I bet you will too.
A wonderful indie movie. I finally watched Past Lives (on Apple, Amazon Prime, United flights, etc.) and found it just as beautiful and melancholic and moving—and Greta Lee as totally luminous—as everyone promised. It’s not the kind of melancholic and moving that ruins your night, in case that’s a concern. It’s very gentle. Highly endorse.
A satisfyingly chewy piece of writing. A friend sent me this— ‘The Gourmet,’ by John Lancaster for Granta— and I enjoyed it immensely. It’s the kind of writing that I want to sort of roll around in, the way a dog does with a dead animal. (Do with that image what you will.) For example:
There is an erotics of dislike. It can be (I am indebted to a young friend for the helpful phrase) ‘a physical thing’. Roland Barthes observes somewhere that the meaning of any list of likes and dislikes is to be found in its assertion of the fact that each of us has a body, and that this body is different from each other’s. This is tosh. The real meaning of our dislikes is that they define us by separating us from what is outside us; they separate the self from the world in a way that mere banal liking cannot. ‘Gourmandism is an act of judgement, by which we give preference to those things which are agreeable to our taste over those which are not.’ (Brillat-Savarin) To like something is to want to ingest it, and in that sense is to submit to the world; to like something is to succumb, in a small but contentful way, to death. But dislike hardens the perimeter between the self and the world, and brings a clarity to the object isolated in its light. Any dislike is in some measure a triumph of definition, distinction and discrimination–a triumph of life.
And this bit, I mean! Come on.
Irish stew. This is forever associated in my mind (my heart, my palate) with my Cork-born, Skibbereen-raised nanny, Mary-Theresa. She was one of the few fixed points of a childhood that was for its first decade or so distinctly itinerant. My father’s business interests kept him on the move; my mother’s former profession–the stage–had given her a taste for travel and the sensation of movement; she liked to live not so much out of suitcases as out of trunks, creating a home that at the same time contained within it the knowledge that this was the illusion of home, a stage set or theatrical re-description of safety and embowering domesticity; her wall-hung carpets and portable bibelots (a lacquered Chinese screen; a lean, malignly upright Egyptian cat made of onyx) were a way of saying ‘let’s pretend’. She would, I think, have preferred to regard motherhood as merely another feat of impersonation; but it was as if an intermittently amusing cameo part had tiresomely protracted itself, and what was intended to be an experimental production (King Lear as a senile brewery magnate, Cordelia on roller skates) had turned into an inadvertent Mousetrap, with my mother stuck in a frumpy role she had taken on in the first place only as a favour to the hard-pressed director. To put it another way, she treated parenthood as analogous to parts forced on an actor past his prime, or of eccentric physique, who has been obliged to specialize in ‘characters’. She was ironic, distracted and self-pitying, with a way of implying that, now that the best things in life were over, she would take on this role. She would check one’s fingernails or take one to the circus with the air of someone bravely concealing an unfavourable medical prognosis: the children must never know! But she also had a public mode in which she played at being the mother in the way that a very very distinguished actress, caught overnight in the Australian outback (train derailed by dead wallaby or flash flood), is forced to put up at a tiny settlement where, she is half-appalled and half-charmed to discover, the feisty pioneers have been preparing for weeks to put on, this very same evening, under wind-powered electric lights, a production of Hamlet; discovering the identity of their newcomer (via a blurred photograph in a torn-out magazine clipping brandished by a stammering admirer) the locals insist that she take a, no the, starring role; she prettily demurs; they anguishedly insist; she becomingly surrenders, on the condition that she play the smallest and least likely of roles–the gravedigger, say. And gives a performance which, decades later, the descendants of the original cast still sometimes discuss as they rock on their porches to watch the only train of the day pass silhouetted against the huge ochres and impossibly elongated shadows of the desert sunset . . . That was the spirit in which my mother ‘did’ being a mother: to be her child during these public episodes was to be uplifted, irradiated, fortune’s darling. But if this, as has recently been observed to me, ‘makes her sound like a total nightmare’, then I am omitting the way in which one was encouraged to collude in her role-playing, and was also allowed great freedom of manoeuvre by it. With a part of oneself conscripted to act the other role in whatever production she was undertaking–duet or ensemble, Brecht or Pinter, Ibsen or Stoppard or Aeschylus–a considerable amount of one’s own emotional space was left vacant, thanks to her essential and liberating lack of interest.
Something that made me laugh. Michelle Williams narrating the audio book of Britney Spears’ memoir is a gift that keeps on giving. Have you read it? Should I? I don’t know. I listened to the
And some other wonderful things, all at once: My always excellently attired beautiful genius friend Marlien Rentmeester, of Le Catch, has launched a substack to allow subscribers early access to her perfect picks before the hoi polloi snaps them all up. All I can say is that holiday party season is nigh! In Vegas, I ate at Best Friend, Roy Choi’s excellent little Korean BBQ place in the Park MGM, and recommend that you do too. I could have stayed to sample many more menu items, including the boozy slushies. For Vogue’s November issue, I talked to some medical professionals and experimented with some props and potions and wrote about the rise of the blepharoplasty. One of the surgeons who participated made a cute reel, and I got to talk about Lauren Bacall and Tyra Banks in the same sentence, or nearly, which pleases me to no end. While in New York last week I had dinner with friends at a (new-ish) restaurant called Rafs, and had escargot and a big grilled fish and leeks vinaigrette (dressed with stracciatella and hazlenuts and chopped green herbs) and maybe one too many glasses of wine, and left deeply pleased with myself. It seems to be the kind of perfect little Lower Manhattan boîte that encourages such feelings, and I recommend going to see for yourself. (Not least because it’s situated next to Tom & Jerry’s, a dive bar that I used to live around the corner from and love very much.) It was also, for what it’s worth, a very good looking room, by which I mean both the restaurant and the clientele. This, as anyone who pays too much to eat out these days knows, is not nothing! Back in L.A. I had a very good lomo saltado at Chifa, in Eagle Rock, and walked away with a possibly too cool for me new pair of Timberlands designed by the owner, Humberto Leon, formerly of New York’s Opening Ceremony, now kind of taking over the world in that difficult-to-define multi-faceted way New Yorkers do when they move to L.A. and realize they can try a bunch of things at once. Last week I also talked to jean queen extraordinaire Jane Herman for her Substack, Jane on Jeans. I take a harsh line on skinny jeans and for this I am not sorry.
That’s all I have for you this week. I hope you’re well, and taking care of yourselves. I hope you’re finding time to clear your head and be in the moment. Send me a note! I always love to hear from you.