Up in the Air
Hello from an airplane! A United Airlines airplane, to be precise, winging its way to New York. (I never used to be brand loyal regarding air travel and then I earned status and my god, who doesn't like that? If you fly a lot and you don’t collect miles you’re leaving money on the table.) I spend a lot of time on planes, mostly by choice. Sometimes I think I’m my most productive on airplanes. Canned air, no real distractions, a limited amount of options, some built in discomfort (to a widely varying degree) which I think always helps, spur-to-the-ribs style, and the usual various irritants and small, unserious grievances that come with lots of strangers sharing a tight space, a strict timetable, and a common goal. Each trip presents its own unique challenges. Last summer I was flying from LA to Rome and at around 90 minutes into the 12 hour journey the fellow sitting next to me, who until that point had been acting like we were on a Hinge date, accidentally dumped his entire glass of red wine on my lap. This turned out to be a blessing, actually, because after that he was mercifully far too embarrassed to keep talking at me. A fun fact: the jeans I wore on that plane ride were Citizens of Humanity’s baggy Palomas, which not only made me feel like Jane Birkin, they didn’t even stain. I don’t know how. Magic! I recommend them to everyone now. I once even did some light yoga in them when I forgot the mushroom microdose-enhanced soundbath I was attending had a “movement” portion. Find me a comfier jean! I dare you!
Anyways. I really have been flying a lot. I spent last weekend in Vail, CO, enjoying some truly spectacular snow. Vail was very much not Aspen, attitude-wise, you’ll be relieved to hear. It was a very fun trip that I am going to write about in depth elsewhere soon, but one immediate takeaway was edible! At Miller & Lux, the big daddy restaurant at the Vail Four Seasons, the chef, Tyler Florence, emerged after a deeply decadent meal with a surprise off-menu desert: an upside down pineapple cake. He has a restaurant in Hawaii, too, he explained, it’s their signature desert there. It had crumbled macadamia nuts and coconut ice cream and rich caramel and the pineapple underneath and one perfect cherry on top. Cute! I thought. And then, post-bite: why do I like this so much? I texted my sister a picture of it. Our aunt used to make that for us, she wrote back. We loved it. The aunt in question died over 20 years ago. So then I was nearly weeping in the cavernous vault-ceilinged dining room of the Four Seasons Vail like the food critic in Ratatouille. What is the point of this story? I don’t know! I guess it’s that life is endlessly beautiful and surprising, and the small sweet things we do for our children and the children in our orbit do actually matter, and are remembered, even tearfully at a fancy ski resort, so many years later. I’m inspired to make something sweet this week, maybe for a small person who needs a lift, or a big person who needs a small one (there are situations in which you can’t reasonably go around pushing desserts on the underaged). Maybe you are too. They will appreciate it, I think. Even if in some cases it takes a couple of decades to sink in.
Other things!
Two good books. Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor. If you’ve been to an airport or a bookstore recently you’ve probably seen this puppy, which comes in at a not light 500+ pages (not exactly carry-on friendly in hardcover form), but which moves at lightning-fast pace and is appealingly plotty and did for me what all truly good airplane books do, which is sweep you along in it’s current until it dumps you out somewhere new: namely, amongst the crime syndicates and caste systems and cursed love affairs of modern Delhi. There’s several different narrators, heroic acts, cruelties both everyday and extreme. I’m sure it’s already been optioned; it’s very cinematic. (I just checked, it was, FX is planning a series.) The New York Times compared it to Mario Puzo’s The Godfather—not a compliment. (That review is a master class in the not-so-subtle art of rolling your eyes while envying someone’s sales figures, though does come bearing some excellent lines, as most negative-leaning reviews do: “‘Age of Vice’ is the first novel in a planned trilogy. People say the two saddest words in the English language are ‘What party?’ But ‘planned trilogy’ cannot be far behind.” Zing!) It’s the type of thing everyones book clubs will read eventually and you’ll see everywhere poolside at your spring break destinations, so you could save it for that, but if you’re like me and you needed a good high speed collision of a story to get you through the dawn of February, it’s a very good bet.
Fierce Poise by Alexander Nemerov. I went to the Norton Simon museum in Pasadena with friends recently, to catch the Picasso x Ingres exhibition they had there, and it’s a perfectly sized place, really, even with the beautiful gardens closed by the rains. Very digestible. They have, among that excellent collection, a large painting by Helen Frankenthaler, in tones of citrus and sunset, and when I saw it I actually said “oh, Helen!” out loud, like I’d seen an old friend, which is funny, because Helen Frankenthaler isn’t even my favorite of that period (I prefer Jane Freilecher, due I think, in no small part to editing some of Julia Felsenthal’s writings about her at Vogue). But I’d also been reading Nemerov’s Frankenthaler biography, Fierce Poise, in a half-assed way before bed when I saw that work, and I do recommend it as a very nice little glimpse of the artist and her environs. I personally wanted more of the gossipy stuff (of which there is certainly some!) and less of the occasionally quixotic art writing (sorry, I’m a rube!). I loved learning about Frankenthaler’s friendship with Frank O’Hara, who is one of my many favorite poets.
Nemerov writes:
Helen knew how to take a picture right up to the edge of legibility; to leave it just on the verge of literalism and then how to draw it back, letting the emblems retreat into their groves, away from meaning, away from philosophy, away from all explanation, until we have a subtle feeling of experience, hers and—ultimately—ours as we encounter this never-ending openness. “Life as it is lived,” Rudikoff called it. [Frank] O’Hara himself, with his yellow hats, his windows full of wristwatches, his ladies and poodles and cabs, his strict availability to perception, strove for the same. Not without sorrow, he and Helen both caught the quick scintillation of days.” …
O’Hara “loved how she attended to the funkier and more inglorious feelings of a day on earth, to whatever mood was upon her when she worked… she gave us everything, ‘the whole psychic figure,’ in pictures suggesting sadness, joy, vulnerability, and outsized confidence.”
Funkier and more inglorious feelings! I wish I’d read that before I named this substack.
Anyway. I enjoyed it. You might too! And if you’re in the area you should certainly go to the Norton Simon sometime. It’s worth going in the next two weeks alone to see their exhibition ‘Ink, Paper, Stone’ of lithographs printed in California in the 1960s by the great Ruth Asawa, Gego, Eleanore Mikus, Louise Nevelson, Irene Siegel and Hedda Sterne.
Another sweet treat! I recently met a friend for lunch at Sqirl (excellent, would go every day if I lived closer) and wandered into their little market next door after. There is maybe nothing I love as much as a little food market with shelves full of beautiful bottles and tins, painted jars and spice sachets. I suppose this makes me unforgivably basic. I’m okay with that. Anyway, while weighing the charms of imported crumpets (they are many) and filling my arms with sundries I spied a bag labeled Climate Candy: FAVES on the counter and tossed that in too. I devoured the whole bag that same day. (Don’t be so dramatic, it’s a small bag.) Made in Germany from “perfectly imperfect produce” (i.e. fruits and veggies that won’t fare well on the market looks-wise but are otherwise excellent) that would otherwise go to waste, they’re little chews in which all the sugar comes from things like carrot and apple purée. They taste like fruit leather married a fruit by the foot, so not too “healthy” at all. I have already ordered MANY more packs. If you have a child in your life that you want to get off big sugar, or sometimes eat like one yourself, I highly recommend. I’ve started bringing them to friend hangs and handing them out like everyone’s favorite mom.
I watched Aftersun on the plane and am still rolling it around in my head, savoring it. It’s deep and soulful and so sad but really beautiful, like parents and children and most memories of either, really. It reminded me a lot of Moonlight, actually. Paul Mescal is terrific. So is Charlotte Wells’ direction! I recommend it really highly, for a moment when you can really sink into it.
What else? I saw some of Cat Person while it was streaming for Sundance but had to duck out to pack for my crack-of-dawn departure for Vail. The part I did see did not inspire much faith. Sorry if you love incredibly cringey sex scenes! That story never seemed particularly filmable to me anyway. (Looks like I’m not alone in feeling that way.) But who knows! Other takeaways from Sundance, which I cannot stress enough that I did not attend: Anne Hathaway’s looks were far better than the movie Anne Hathaway was in, Eileen. (It happens!) My old colleague Lisa Wong Macabasco had a twitter thread getting me excited for all sorts of new features. I am excited for Fair Play, the Phoebe Dyvenor and Alden Ehrenreich movie people are comparing to Industry and Fatal Attraction, which will be on Netflix soon enough. Speaking of the service, I saw You People and wished it was funnier, but didn’t hate it. Is that a recommendation? Meh. But look, I’ve been mostly watching Korean reality shows on Netflix. Singles Inferno fans, rise up! (Not kidding, I recommend that show all the time to anyone who needs a gentle watch/timesuck. It’s so polite.) Most recently I felt myself getting pulled into Physical 100, in which the 100 fittest people in Korea (professional athletes, fitness influencers, Olympians, etc.) compete for…I’m not sure what, actually. The entire first episode is just 100 very fit people identifying their own plaster-cast torsos in a big empty conference room. It’s an hour of that. Somehow it works! I’ll let you know if I keep watching once it gets into the actual physical competition part. It’s anyone’s guess!
Okay, more soon, probably after the next plane this weekend, so sometime next week. As always, I’m so glad you’re here. Let me know if there’s anything in particular you want to talk about. Love you.