♥️ The Art of Dying
Peter Schjeldahl is dying:
Twenty-some years ago, I got a Guggenheim grant to write a memoir. I ended up using most of the money to buy a garden tractor. I failed for a number of reasons.
I don’t feel interesting.
I don’t trust my memories (or anyone’s memories) as reliable records of anything—and I have a fear of lying. Nor do I have much documentary material. I’ve never kept a diary or a journal, because I get spooked by addressing no one. When I write, it’s to connect.
I am beset, too, by obsessively remembered thudding guilts and scalding shames. Small potatoes, as traumas go, but intensified by my aversion to facing them.
Susan Sontag observed that when you have a disease people identify you with it. Fine by me! I could never sustain an expedient “I” for more than a paragraph. (Do you imagine that writers speak “as themselves”? No such selves exist.) Playing the Dying Man (Enter left. Exit trapdoor) gives me a persona. It’s a handy mask.
•
I’ve lost the scraps of my aborted Guggenheim memoir, but I remember that it started something like this:
On September 9, 1956, in the very small Minnesota town of Farmington, my family of seven settled in, as we did every week, to watch “The Ed Sullivan Show.” We had the living-room lights off because we were still confusing TV with film. Elvis Presley came on. My grandmother said, “Disgusting!” My parents made discontented sounds. When Presley finished, I left the house and started walking over to my friend Richie Sievers’s house. Autumn leaves covered the sidewalks and ground. I met Richie coming the other way. One of us said, “Did you see that?” “Yeah, what do you think?” “I don’t know. What do you think?” “I don’t know.” We stood silent, kicking at leaves. Something had happened.
I thought I’d braid my life into cultural history. That went nowhere.
•
Death is like painting rather than like sculpture, because it’s seen from only one side. Monochrome—like the mausoleum-gray former Berlin Wall, which kids in West Berlin glamorized with graffiti. What I’m trying to do here.
I’m speechless. And there’s so much more.
2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣0️⃣ Was Really Looking Forward to 2020
Ok truthfully how do you follow up The Art of Dying with - well - anything? I suppose these 2020 horror glasses work. Shot, meet chaser.
🧀🍽🍘 Snack Review: Every Cheese Plate Cracker, Definitively Ranked
You know what, let’s keep this train going.
In the 227 years since the humble cracker was invented, the market for flat, edible cheese shovels has exploded. Today there are round ones, mottled with docking holes, there are thin rectangular ones, there are tiny cracker squares, and there are irregularly shaped ones marketed whimsically as “crisps.” And the importance of selecting a good one cannot be overstated. The carby barge with which you pair your cheese is nothing if not a reflection of your true existential intentions.
Accordingly, I have taken it upon myself to compile a ranking of the best specimens on the market. Below you will find my reviews of 14 popular crackers, divided into categories (show me one person who’s stuck deciding between a Ritz and a Wasa—one person), ranked in ascending order of cheese board viability (that is, worst to best) and awarded anywhere from zero to 10 points across each of the following key factors: flavor, texture, and structural integrity. (Hypothetically, the perfect cracker would get 30 points.) For the greater good of your forthcoming holiday parties, I didn’t go easy on any of them.
I probably would have ranked Triscuits higher tbh but I get the author’s point.
🎉 Which New Year’s Eve Party Hat Is the Best?
A third chaser? Sure!
It’s almost the final day of the year — of the decade! — and of course we need a hat to celebrate. As everyone knows, the four pillars of the New Year’s Eve hat are: festivity, warmth, sexiness, and a display of the words “HAPPY NEW YEAR.” But how do the available hats on Amazon measure up against these core values? Let’s take a look and see.
Lol there are nine of these. Here’s one:
IS IT FESTIVE: It’s absolutely festive. Shiny, sparkling — if you must wear a festive fedora, and I would make sure that you do, this is certainly an option.
WILL IT KEEP YOU WARM: I’m sure! It’ll keep you warmer than the tiaras, at least. Plus you can fit a bunch of hand-warmers under there.
WILL IT LOOK HOT: Well. I’m sorry, I don’t think a sparkly fedora is ever going to look hot, even on New Year’s Eve. But maybe your love of fedoras outweighs your love of looking hot, and that would be fine.
DOES IT SAY “HAPPY NEW YEAR”: Yes!
Click through to find out whether two fedoras are hotter than one.
🐱 The Improbable Insanity of “Cats”
Alright, thanks for sticking through. Here’s Jia Tolentino (who - truth to be told - just spoiled the ending of CATS for yours truly!!!! but OTOH the ending also reads like gibberish to me sooooooo yep still seeing the movie):
In 1994, when I was five years old, I appeared in a children’s production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats,” in Houston, playing a nondescript black chorus cat with the noncanonical moniker of Peaseblossom. By that point, “Cats” was a global juggernaut, on its way to becoming the longest-running Broadway show of all time. (Another Lloyd Webber musical, “Phantom of the Opera,” has since surpassed its Broadway run.) It ran for eighteen years in New York and for twenty-one years in London; a Japanese version has been running for thirty-six years straight.
“Cats” was my first experience doing musical theatre, and I can blame much of my subsequent decade of semi-committed chorus-line participation—and some of my ongoing attraction to cultural phenomena that reside on the border between hellscape and paradise—on this baptism into Webber’s feline world. The magic began with the shimmery melodrama of the musical’s overture, its melody descending like a diva on a staircase; then came the opening number, “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats,” which is lyrically unhinged but musically transporting, a series of syncopated adrenaline spikes and key changes, to which we flung our tiny cat selves around in a big, stupid whirl. The heavy-handed pop-rock pastiche of the “Cats” soundtrack turns adult sentiment into an accessible playground—I was entranced by “Macavity,” with its “Pink Panther” burlesque swing, and “The Rum Tum Tugger,” with its cartoonish version of rock and roll. Fittingly, the show’s story line, insofar as it has one, is like something that a five-year-old would invent while coming down from dental anesthesia: there are a bunch of cats, and they’re called Jellicle Cats, and they’re about to go to the Jellicle Ball, which is where an old cat named Old Deuteronomy decides which cat goes to the Heaviside Layer to die and be reborn. One cat is named Skimbleshanks, and he lives on a train; one cat is named Mr. Mistoffelees, and he’s a magician; and there’s a fancy lady cat named Grizabella, except she’s not so fancy anymore; and, in the end, Old Deuteronomy picks Grizabella and she dies and gets to ride a big tire up to heaven, and that’s the end!
Speaking of spoilers! Last week’s The Battle for Star Wars isn’t exactly that (folks, I wouldn’t - not here in a newsletter, or ever anywhere) but the Rian Johnson shade is… interesting.
“The Last Jedi,” released in 2017, was also a success. But each time it addressed one of several cliffhangers left dangling from “The Force Awakens” — what would happen when Rey returned Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber to him? who were her parents? who was the nefarious Supreme Leader Snoke? — Johnson’s movie seemed to say: the answers to these questions aren’t as important as you think.
Abrams praised “The Last Jedi” for being “full of surprises and subversion and all sorts of bold choices.”
“On the other hand,” he added, “it’s a bit of a meta approach to the story. I don’t think that people go to ‘Star Wars’ to be told, ‘This doesn’t matter.’”
Even so, Abrams said “The Last Jedi” laid the groundwork for “The Rise of Skywalker” and “a story that I think needed a pendulum swing in one direction in order to swing in the other.”
Eyes emoji.
When it was announced that Abrams was indeed returning, his actors breathed sighs of relief. “I cried,” Ridley said, explaining that the director brought a comforting sense of structure and security. Boyega said he was glad that Abrams would get to finish the tale he’d begun in Episode VII. “Even as a normal person in the audience, I wanted to see where that story was going,” Boyega said.
👀 👀 👀 👀 👀 👀
I guess this normal person in the audience will be seeing where that story was going Thursday night. Until then, MAY THE FOR—- no I’m kidding goodnight.