RELAUNCH!
In which I turn this substack that might've actually been about something into a catchall for all sorts of bullshit!
Hello! I haven’t posted in a million years! I stopped mostly because I found it very difficult to write about a sport that takes place mostly at night (WNBA basketball) while maintaining a job that takes place mostly at night (bartending). This does not mean that I have abandoned my beloved Seattle Storm. I watched them throughout the rest of last season, even in person, as they fell out of the playoffs to the eventual champion and actually maybe not cool at all Las Vegas Aces. I still plan on watching the Storm this season, but pals, recapping them was too much for me to handle. So instead I’m going to treat this here newsletter as a chance for me to both unleash my dumb thoughts onto you and also an attempt to maintain a more consistent “writing practice”. Since one of my only subscribers is my wife I apologize to her in advance because I’ve almost certainly subjected her to these thoughts in person and it feels kind of unfair to do so again on the internet. ANYWAY LET’S SEE WHAT HAPPENS!
ROSES AND THORNS
When I got to college I heard about kids who would sit down to dinner with their parents and name three good things and three bad things that they saw or experienced that day, they’d call them Roses and Thorns. This sounded like a nice way of communicating as opposed to my childhood of spending dinner hoping that we’d sit late enough to miss the boring syndicated episode of MASH and be dining just as the awesome syndicated episode of Night Court was coming on. So now I’m stealing this idea for what may or may not be a running feature!
ROSES:
These Helen Frankenthaler paintings nearly made me cry when I saw them in person! Holy moly! Because my knowledge of art is almost completely free of any formal education I hadn’t really known anything about Frankenthaler besides her name. THIS WAS OBVIOUSLY A MISTAKE. These paintings are pretty big, and the color and control are breathtaking. For being so abstract they are excellently balanced, go see them!
The approach of baseball season! Now there are many smarter people who can write about baseball’s heralding of the warmer months and renewal and blah blah blah. I mostly like it because it gives me something I can follow on the ipad at work while it’s slow/to distract me from the inequities of the capitalist system that has put me in my job (please don’t tell my bosses that I’m using the ipad to watch baseball).
The Blade movies being the movies that are on TV a bunch. We have a non-cable streaming service that allows us to watch cable TV and there are groups of movies that are just on all the time. Invariably those movies will be of the Marvel/Ocean’s series and I will invariably watch some and feel pretty gross about it later. I mean there are books all over the place in our house! Our decades-long New Yorker subscription pile is right there for crying out loud! This feeling does not occur when those movies are the Blade movies (the Blade movies predate the MCU). The first Blade movie is legit good, the second slightly worse but still alright, and the third is so comically bad that I cannot believe they show it on tv so regularly. This is peak afternoon movie TV. Honorable mention to Demolition Man, a non-Blade film that still features a top-of-his-game Wesley Snipes.
THORNS:
“Dear friends”, oftentimes people will be talking about a new project and refer to their “dear friends” who’ve helped them out with money, this straight up sucks! I don’t need to be reminded that you, a person whose project is being written about in some publication I’m reading, have rich friends! Let alone that these friends are “dear”, an adjective that makes your friendship sound more intimate and special than it probably is! It doesn’t help that this phrase is usually reserved for talking about a new overly expensive coffee shop/fashion brand/candle store for/by white people! We’ve all had enough of those I think!
This subway time sign at the Lorimer stop on the L:
Given this sign’s placement and orientation, toward the entrances/exits for the G and away from the entrances/exits to the L, you’d think it would be communicating the arrival times for the L train. THIS IS NOT WHAT THIS SIGN DOES! This sign, which you can only read when EXITING the G train, shows you how long it is till the next G train arrival and it drives me bonkers! It serves as both a cruel prank and a perfect metaphor for every attempt by our woebegone public transit system to improve. JUST TURN IT AROUND!
The person who honked at me and my old dog when we were crossing the street. My dog is old and moves slowly and you can suck my fucking dick!
SOUND OF THE WEEK
This could be a song or just like a sound I heard or something. MY SUBSTACK MY RULES!
Look, I listen to all sorts of overly complicated new age music a lot and it’s great and I love it but sometimes I just want some jaunty ass organ from a man with one of the most perfect names in history. I mean listen to this shit! It rules!
CELEBRITY SIGHTING OF THE WEEK
In case you didn’t know, I LIVE IN NEW YORK and there are a lot of celebrities here. I often see them and now I’m going to tell you about them.
Here’s the thing about seeing celebrities in New York, it’s a pretty common occurrence so you get conditioned to either ignore it or think that every third person you see is a celebrity. Recently I was in the latter mode when I thought that I was seeing the guy from the Planet Money TikTok around my neighborhood. First at the supermarket where I almost cried during the pandemic because they were playing Landslide and second at the bar I go to. Then after some not-so-careful googling, it came to light that the guy from the Planet Money TikTok lives in LA and the person I was seeing was just another tall shaggy-haired white dude in ill-fitting clothes.
THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK!