Weekly Culture Menu 4.3.24

Emotionally free-climbing El Capitan.

Apr 03, 2024

For this week’s installment of the Weekly Culture Menu, we have a sampling of content across a variety of mediums, lengths, and sensibilities so that you can dip in and out all week. Once you subscribe, you can expect a weekly menu delivered to your inbox every Wednesday.

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Happy Wednesday! Unsurprisingly, my overeager weather proclamations were wrong, and fake New York spring has fooled me again. My dog Pete and I are in a perpetual state of drowned rat (both physically and spiritually). We’d just about hit our limit when my husband turned to me and said, “I think Pete needs a vacation.” And I couldn’t agree more. So we booked a last-minute trip to Florida, and Pete is getting his well-deserved vacation starting tomorrow. Expect me to be a whole new, sunshine-y person after some much-needed Vitamin D. Though the sunshine means I’ll have less opportunity to keep up with my Shōgun catchup binge. I’ll wait until the season is finished to share more formal thoughts, but wow, what a compelling and visually stunning watch. Plus, subtitles mean I’m not multitasking - a huge added benefit for my overall comprehension. And with that, let’s get into the menu.

🍤 Amuse Bouche [ -10 mins ]

📺 Jeremy Strong on his return to Broadway. I’m seeing An Enemy of the People tonight, and I can’t think of a better way to pregame the show than watching this Jeremy Strong interview with Seth Meyers. It makes sense dramaturgically. Per usual, he’s himself. Highlights include Strong saying that acting live on stage is like “emotionally free-climbing El Capitan eight times a week.” Asking for a friend, is that a viable excuse for not being able to make previously agreed upon engagements? “So sorry I can’t go to brunch tomorrow. Work this week felt like emotionally free-climbing El Capitan.” I’ll try it out and let you know. Also, he apparently still can’t acknowledge that “I’m the eldest boy” is funny. Kendall lives long!

🍟 Appetizer [ -30 mins ]

🗞️ I Went to Paris by Alison Roman. Despite her Substack being hacked last week (I guess that’s a thing?), Alison Roman was back and talking about recommendation culture. In particular, how we’ve become obsessed with finding the best of everything and fearful that without a recommendation for where to eat on vacation, what to wear to a wedding, or how to cook the preeminent grilled cheese, we might end up with something second-rate. As a person actively making recs each week, I, too, can struggle with rec overload, but I love her conclusion that the answer is to continue cultivating our sense of discovery. Whether through curated recs or happenstance stumblings. On The Culture Diet, I very consciously say little about the things I don’t like. Sure, I’ve got some hot takes, but I find “good” and “bad” very subjective, and I’m more interested in sharing the things that I unabashedly love. It might not all resonate with you, but even experiencing culture you don’t like gives you a better understanding of what you do. Generally, I’m just excited by people putting themselves out there and being creative - that’s not an easy feat. So, I celebrate the culture I can’t stop thinking about rather than denigrating the efforts that didn’t work for me. Find me after a drink though, and I’ll tell you all my hot takes.

🍽️ Main Course [ 1 Hour+ ]

📚 Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. I learned this morning that there’s an upcoming Broadway revival of Our Town - the show's first production since the 2002 Paul Newman version. Katie Holmes, Zoey Deutch, Ephraim Sykes, and Jim Parsons are all set to star. I vividly remember being urged to audition for Emily Webb in a community theater production of the show because even though I was twelve, I was tall and slightly older-looking. Understandably, I didn’t get the part of a woman whose story spans from ages sixteen to thirty-two - I didn’t have that kind of range! Despite the failed audition, I went and saw the production and fell in love with the play. I hadn’t thought about that memory in a long time until this past summer when I read Ann Patchett’s latest book, Tom Lake. The novel tells the story of a mother and father whose three daughters return home to their family apple orchard during the COVID-19 pandemic. The close proximity allows the daughters to learn more about their mother’s past, including her romantic relationship with a famous actor. The story of Our Town is used as a framing mechanism and a plot point as the mother continually plays Emily throughout her acting career. It’s a tender, quiet, and contemplative book, and once I finished reading, I had the immediate urge to call my mother and have her tell me everything there is to know about her life story. Because as you quickly learn in Tom Lake, much of what we think we know about our parents' lives, isn’t the reality at all.

🎬 Whiplash. I can still remember exactly where I was when I saw this movie for the first time. It was my last semester of college in Los Angeles, and my best friend and I went to the now-closed Arclight movie theater on Sunset. I loved going to movies when I lived in LA - the spectacle of it all felt like going to the theater in New York. We sat in the sold-out theater and watched the screen intently. It wasn’t until the final crescendo that I realized my shoulders were hiked up to my ears, and I’d barely remembered to breathe. We both turned to each other after the movie and said, “Wow!” Then, we continued in silence for most of the drive home. It was one of the most tense movie viewing experiences I’d ever had - and it’s a film about jazz drumming, which, as it turns out, is very intense. It’s also Damien Chazelle’s full-length directorial debut, and it immediately made me a fan for life (I love La La Land and Babylon - don’t @ me unless you want to hear me rant). The movie stars a young Miles Teller (nearly unrecognizable if you only know him from Top Gun) as an aspiring drummer at a top music conservatory in New York and J.K. Simmons as the conductor/drill sergeant/Nurse Ratched figure “mentoring” him (I’ll let you decide if you’d call it mentoring). Very loosely inspired by Chazelle’s experience as a jazz drummer in high school and college, it’s an incredibly human story about wanting something so desperately and striving for perfection at any cost. Now that I think about it, it's an excellent double feature with Black Swan if you’re trying to have an anxiety-ridden evening. If you haven’t seen it, you should rectify that immediately.

🧁 Dessert [ -1 hour ]

🎧 Men are From YouTube, Women Are From TikTok. A colleague shared this fabulously named and thoughtful conversation about the broadening political ideology gap between men and women. There have been several articles on this point over the last few months after a Gallup poll came out in January, but I found this to be a particularly lively debate on some of the potential causes of the chasm. The conversation eventually turns to the declining global birth rate, which reminded me of this recent Ezra Klein episode about the inherent conflict between work and parenting. As both podcasts share, birth rates are still declining even in countries with significant governmental nets for family rearing. Fascinating discussions.

And I’ll leave you with a Tweet from this week that had me scratching my head. I’m all here for the LiLo return to film and a Freaky Friday reboot, but does she really need to swap with her “British restauranteur fiance’s daughter Lily?” Or maybe it’s just a case of a poorly written headline. Either way, I have notes.

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