History on the march
The past and the present all point to the future
Okay, I had some time after my work meeting before catching my flight home. I’m still too discombobulated to address any topic in a salient manner, so how about this: Last weekend, we attended two interesting and not unrelated events: the NYC Climate March and the new exhibit at the Met: Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s. These were not unrelated experiences! So, without commentary or attribution, I am going to irresponsibly intermingle photos from both experiences for you to consider and mull. And then my weekly diary stuff.
I will say, we had an interesting view of the March. Dash was with us, and jamming a 12-year-old with sensory issues into the fray didn’t feel like the wisest idea. Instead, we walked the entire length of the march, from back to front, along the sidewalks. It was surprisingly easy to trot into the street ahead of the vanguard and take photos along with the journalists and others (as you can see at the top of this post). This video gives a taste of the spirit, which was defiant, determined, and ultimately joyful.
For those who are interested, later in the week I did my part to burn business-as-usual fossil fuels by flying from Brooklyn to Oakland on Tuesday to attend my employer’s first in-person all-employee meeting since 2019 (two years before I joined). The company is entirely virtual, meaning that I and many of my colleagues were meeting each other in person for the first time. It was, inevitably, an adrenaline high that I’m crashing from as we speak. These are all incredibly good folks, and it was a delight to spend time with them.
I tried to keep East Coast hours, but last night I got dragged out to a karaoke outing, and, against my better judgment, I enjoyed myself immensely. I got to pull out my rendition of “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” for the first time in at least half a decade, and my throat is raw - I guess I went a little heavy metal at the end? And I wasn’t even drunk. This is 47!
As I write this (on Thursday morning), I’m looking at a long flight home - Oakland to Salt Lake City, and then a transfer to JFK. I don’t even land until midnight, and then I have to get home from the airport. Friday is full of meetings, and I’m gonna be wrecked. Thank god I don’t have any big plans this weekend. I’m prescheduling this newsletter to go out when I’ll presumably still be asleep on Friday morning, so it’ll be awfully eerie if the plane crashes!
Here’s this week’s media report:
BOOKS FINISHED
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, by Kurt Vonnegut: I’ve been re-reading all of Vonnegut’s novels chronologically since last year, and this is the fifth. Almost certainly the weakest I’ve read so far - it has a wealth of fascinating ideas and character sketches, and it helps to crystallize his tone of trenchant, world-weary comedy, but the pieces just don’t hold together. It feels more like the setup of a novel than a full-fledged book. That said, it chills me how well (as in the much better Mother Night) he described the deep moral/political divide of America back in the early ‘60s, showing a big crack within our nation that has only expanded in the decades since. He saw it all coming, and I think he’d agree it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Giant, by Mikaël: A gorgeously rendered French-Canadian graphic novel about the construction workers who built Rockefeller Center, with a focus on Irish immigrants, their families, and communities. The story, which describes a hulking laborer’s misguided attempts to comfort a fallen comrade’s widow, is a bit simplistic, as these things tend to be, but the glamorously gritty atmosphere of Depression-era nostalgia feels well-researched and hard-won.
Some pictures books:
Pokko and the Drum, by Matthew Forsythe: A delightfully watercolored romp about a little frog who annoys her parents and galvanizes the neighborhood through her budding musicianship.
Need a House? Call Ms. Mouse!, by George Mendoza and Doris Susan Smith: This is almost entirely a selection of cutaway images of modernist homes built for various animals, and for that it is to be joyously celebrated.
The Queen in the Cave, by Júlia Sardà:
BOOKS STARTED
The Likeness, by Tana French
MOVIES
Surviving Desire (1992, dir. Sam Raimi) and Army of Darkness (1992, dir. Hal Hartley): We didn’t set out to watch two movies from the same year on the same weekend, but that’s what we did. They kind of represent the opposite poles of my artistic sensibility: overintellectual indie affectation vs. joyously lowbrow genre slapstick. I was obsessed with Hartley for a while in college - the deadpan stylization of his characters, who said exactly what they thought if not what they felt, was galvanizing to me, and in some ways I think paved the way for Wes Anderson. I hadn’t remembered seeing Surviving Desire at the time, but on watching it I remembered certain things - it’s an hourlong production for American Playhouse that serves as a kind of distilled primer of his style - not as excitingly weird as some of his others, but enjoyable. Likewise, I had seen Raimi’s first two Evil Dead pictures a few years back, but only now caught up with the third in the trilogy, which is all about a hypermasculine American badass destroying hundreds of skeletons in the most ridiculous way possible - another broad primer of a director’s bag of tricks. I liked them both, though if they had to arm wrestle Army of Darkness would win.
So long for now!