This is the time of year I like to call the Spring Holding Pattern. It might get a little warm, maybe the sun will be out, and you may leave the house wearing a jacket but you’ll be able to shed it by noon. But also…maybe not? That’s April, baby! It’s the cruelest month, or so I’ve been told.
There are a few holding pattern times throughout the year. Generally, I’d say the worst ones tend to be at the end of a hot or cold season when you’re just dragging out the last days of summer or winter, begging for the misery to end and the new weather to truly kick in. The Spring Holding Pattern is tolerable, but this year it does feel like it has a little more edge to it than I like. Mind you, there’s less edge than in the last few years. I can actually leave my house and go see people. But all the distractions coupled with my mind going “Just let it get warm and sunny and stay that way already” can make it difficult to concentrate.
The good news is that it’s almost over. And the better news is there’s always stuff to read. And this week I started with Lauren Oyler taking the Goop cruise for Harper’s. I think the first thing that obviously comes into your mind when you read a sentence like that (at least it was for me) is that’s the same magazine that sent David Foster Wallace on a cruise and he wrote one of his most famous pieces of non-fiction. And yeah, Oyler knows that. It’s part of the fun. “I am getting paid about 50 percent more than DFW was, even adjusting for inflation, which is a win for us girls,” she writes. The whole thing strikes the perfect tone, especially since she’s reporting on not just Gwyneth Paltrow, not just her luxury wellness brand, and not just a cruise, but all three things that have been reported on to death. It’s very good and very funny. Everything is absurd. Love that for us.
Read: “I Really Didn’t Want” to Go by Lauren Oyler at Harper’s
You have those movies that you just happened to catch on premium cable when you were young and impressionable and it changed a lot for you? There are two that come to mind for me: 1979’s Over the Edge was on HBO waaaaay too much when I was 13 and it made teen Jason go “Rebellion and Cheap Trick are cool.” The other was this 1993 crime drama called Blood in Blood Out that was on HBO or Showtime or one of those channels and I was obsessed with it. It had this look and feel, grittiness and tenderness that I was just taken in by even before I used words like “grittiness” and “tenderness” to describe films. I’d seen The Godfather already and already started thinking a little deeper about fiction that dealt with gangsters and mobsters and what they say about America and all that, but this film really changed so much for me. I’ve been talking about it for years, and thank goodness for Carlos Aguilar for giving one of the great American crime and family epics the respect it deserves.
Read: “Disney neglected it. Critics panned it. ‘Blood In Blood Out’ became an L.A. classic anyway” by Carlos Aguilar at the L.A. Times
There was one part in the New York mag “It Girl” package that really stood out to me. It’s in the Rachel Handler piece on Chloë Sevigny, where Sevigny lays out her intentions from back when she was younger: “I wanted to be a working actress, a character actress. I wanted to be Gena Rowlands.”
I read that and I thought how interesting that is because Sevigny is one of the people I can count on one hand from the last 30 or so years that I could see hanging and working with Gena and Cassavetes. But I also think she’s done a pretty great job putting together a body of work that stands on its own as something totally unique and always interesting.
Read: “Chloë Sevigny, ‘It’ Girl to End All ‘It’ Girls” as told to Rachel Handler at The Cut
Syreeta McFadden is a writer I always read. I’d say that you’re likely to catch her the most at The Atlantic every month or so or maybe when the spirit moves her to want to write something. She’s a busy person teaching the youth of America, I get it. But the truth is that she’s one of the best I can think of in taking an experience like walking through the Toni Morrison exhibit at Princeton University and truly distilling it into something engaging and beautiful. That’s tough! How many times do you find yourself going “Gee, I want to read about this person walking through a museum” anyway? In this case, I clicked ASAP because of who was doing the walking, but I came away with a lot of perspectives that I didn’t have beforehand.
Read: “The Exhibit That Reveals Toni Morrison’s Obsessions” by Syreeta McFadden at The Atlantic.
A few years back, I was one of the many that walked through the spiraling halls of the Guggenheim to take in the Hilma af Klint so I could walk away feeling like I’d possibly just had a very deep, spiritual experience in an art museum surrounded by tourists taking selfies in front of every single painting. And the truth is that I was incredibly moved by the exhibit and found myself totally mystified by the works I looked at that day and then again a few days later when I decided to go at a less-crowded time. And now there’s even more to think about thanks to a new book, Anna Cassel: The Saga of the Rose, edited by Kurt Almqvist and Daniel Birnbaum, which was reviewed recently in Artforum. I won’t spoil it for you, but the link below should give you a clue that there’s so much more to this story than I could have imagined.
Read: “Spirited Away: Who painted Hilma af Klint’s otherworldly visions?” by Susan L. Aberth at Artforum