Plucking Around

for the week of March 7

This is the weekly roundup of reading, movies, music, and whatever I’ve been up to. Expect one each Friday, to give you something to read over the weekend.

Another Oscar contender down: I watched West Side Story, and it was very good. Rita Moreno is always a treasure, and Spielberg made the musical into a movie, with some fantastic camerawork to show off the choreography, and to tie it in to the demolition of neighborhoods to build Lincoln Center. My pick for Best Picture is still CODA. I haven’t seen The Tragedy of MacBeth or Drive My Car yet, but I will soon. I kind of want to watch The French Dispatch and Turning Red, the new Pixar about a girl who turns into a red panda, first…

I finally got around to seeing Room 237, the documentary about Kubrick obsessives explaining their theories about The Shining, and if it is one of the most engrossing docs I’ve seen in a long time. I love Kubrick’s adaptation; more than the book. (The book isn’t bad, but it the big reveal for why the hotel is haunted was a letdown, in my opinion). So this doc was a real treat, hearing the wild theories that often boil down to a single frame. I don’t agree with any of them, but they are fascinating, and the soundtrack is gripping, electronic, sort of like Wendy Carlos scoring Stranger Things.

Bookwise, I finished two recently; Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge, which is about the wayward daughter of the first Black woman doctor in the United States, and what is freedom, in the time of enslavement? She lives in both the U.S. and Haiti, after their revolution, and after the Civil War, and as a woman, “freedom” means different things. It was a good read and made me think.

The other book is Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, which was fantastic. I wish I’d read it earlier. My friend, fellow writer Josh Stallings, author of Tricky—a great read as well—recommended it to me. It’s a hard sell these days, being about an apocalypse spurred on by a pandemic, but it somehow manages to evoke hope. It’s in the tone, and the characters; we follow a traveling theater troupe who reenact Shakespeare, but are also handy with throwing knives and crossbows. In that way, as I mentioned before, it is like The Seventh Seal meets Salute to the Jugger (also known as The Blood of Heroes, a post-apoc ‘80s flick with Rutger Hauer and Joan Chen as traveling warriors who battle for people’s entertainment. But Station Eleven is quite emotional; there was a scene near the end that brought tears to my eyes, and it was a scene of hope, no tragedy. I’m not sure I’ll watch the series, but I highly recommend reading the book.

As for television, one of the few shows I watch regularly is having its final season: Better Things. Pamela Adlon’s Hollywood family comedy-drama is kind of like watching a Carrie Fischer reality show where she raises three children, and it is very satisfying. Brutally funny, emotionally honest, and short! Maybe forty minutes, a handful or so episodes per season. That’s about all I can invest these days, so it’s perfect. And she somehow manages to make a working actor’s life feel like one of the most relatable families on television, because she’s always working, cooking, running errands and meeting people. I dig it. I’m sad it’s ending. But I’d watch it all again.

Some links:

Hannah of WanderFinder, one of my favorite weekly reads, shared this intriguing article on the life and death of a Brooklyn maraschino baron. If you ate a sundae or drank a Manhattan in Manhattan, you likely popped one of his cherries in your mouth. And this story goes places I couldn’t imagine.

From last year, but the 1959 mystery of nine Russian skiers who were found naked and mangled on Dyatlov pass, has been officially declared “not caused by yeti.”

My writer pal Lauren Hough wrote about her grandpa meeting Bonnie and Clyde. It’s a great read.

Charles Entenmann, baker of those fabulous chocolate coated donuts, and many other supermarket pastries, has died. Put the donuts in the fridge, and they become crunchy and lose that vinyl texture. Not that I would know.

This review of The Sentence by Louise Erdrich, a book I greatly enjoyed, made me think a lot about how it merged the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd into its somewhat whimsical plot. I still recommend the book, but it gives us plenty to talk about.

On Sunday, I’ll share my adventures looking for the Ruins of Fries Mill, which culminated in an attack by screwdriver. If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, you can get a 7-day free trial and not miss a thing:

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The Substack app is currently available for iOS. If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.