this dress, that color

ryan roche casting from aurora james’s paris fashion week diary

patience

been thinking about amazon and online shops and how all order fulfillment has slowed down. it feels kind of important, that shift away from instant gratification. i felt like that demand — the expectation of immediate service, constantly — led to all kinds of bad behavior. (if you’ve ever looked at yelp, travelocity, etc., you know what i’m talking about. the comments are straight up fireballs.)

i wonder if we can hold onto that after all this.

(“after all this”)

unrelated, saw this poppy growing in the street yesterday (NOT a symbolic photo).

no. this isn’t it.

from the small bow:

I got a physical soon after I quit [smoking] by a quirky doctor from Santa Monica with a stud earring in his left ear who, he himself, was a former smoker. “I miss it,” he’d tell me. “But remember, it will kill you and you can never ever smoke again.” He scanned my lungs and they weren’t as bad as I thought–no emphysema, no cancer–but I did have the lung capacity of a man of 65 (or thereabouts). He assured me that my lungs would improve with time–as long as I didn’t ever smoke again. I negotiated with him for one cigarette each day (like Obama!), but he wouldn’t budge.

“You can never smoke again.”

I see him twice a year and he patiently lets me run through this same routine each time. On a recent visit he struck a bargain with me. “I’ll tell you what, if there’s a news report that a meteor is about to hit the earth and there’s no chance of survival, I’ll set up two lawn chairs in front of my house and you and I will smoke a whole pack together.”

I admit the prospect excited me and some days I’m hopeful an all-caps report about the meteor of imminent doom will pop up on my news feed.

A couple weeks ago I went to see him for a checkup on my cough and I inquired about a coronavirus test. He wouldn’t give me one, but I followed up with the more pressing question.

“If this gets real bad does it count as the meteor? Can we smoke then?”

He stared at me for an extra long beat, clearly processing the question.

“No. This isn’t it.”

terminated

one of andrew keh’s Epiphanies and Small Victories (from the ny times’s google docs of recommendations, which exactly hit my sweet spot):

-Jay-Z being presented with various beats for the Black Album for the first time and rapping over them in these clips taken from the concert movie “Fade to Black”
– With Kanye West (“This record ain’t a record. It’s a movie.”) 
– With Timbaland (“Every rapper that’s out that’s supposed to be so-called hot will be terminated.”)
– With Pharrell (“Your career right now, this is the end of ‘Carlito’s Way.’”)
– With Rick Rubin (“You some type of lawyer or something?”)

“Little Richard, King of the Blues … and the Queen, too!”

more about little richard here, gif via ann friedman.

the round up

• i won a raffle!!!!!!! from east fork pottery. could NOT not not not believe it. the email announcing it felt like seeing a quadruple rainbow. or like a rainbow ending right at your house, in your house. have i ever won anything before? a: NO.
• thinking a lot about this feeling — it’s scary to finally get to the / a place you’ve longed for. raises all kinds of failure and fear feelings (for me).
• “Past Prime is a dead fucking serious diversion for Matty Wishnow & Steve Collins.”
• isn’t the name of poet jean valentine so great?
• and isn’t this poem of hers so great and sad
• this poem is also great or mostly i just love the line “like a postcard from someone / who calls himself your uncle”

never forget

ken leung was legit awesome on LOST

(can’t remember where i found this photo)

devotion and discipline

from phillip picardi’s “the empathy crisis of white america” (discovered via haley nahman’s newsletter)

Overt and violent racist events like the death of Ahmaud Arbery’s make it easy for white people to point the finger at the perpetrators and thus, exonerate ourselves. Instead, each time something like this happens, we’d be better to point our fingers in our own directions. To take a look at ourselves and ask: How do I participate in racism, knowingly or unknowingly, in my life?

watched BlacKkKlansman last night (john david washington is denzel’s son?!?!?!?!) and it felt all too current, like — nothing has changed, not really.

odyssey

from the huntington library blog (R.I.P.):

Illustrations from a 1933 French edition of Homer’s “Odyssey” from our library collections. The artist, François-Louis Schmied, first painted the compositions before they were reproduced into woodcuts and colored.

all the things i made during my layoff

WOULD MAKE AGAIN:

• pat’s salsa — still so great
• BA’s best banana bread, as mentioned
• snickerdoodles — always +++
• banana everything cookies — vegan and quite good! like a breakfast cookie
• eleven madison park granola — this is my go-to granola, though i cut the salt, and don’t add cranberries, and ross thinks it’s too sweet, but i still think it’s [chef’s kiss]
• simple ribollita — it was AWESOME!
• via carota salad dressing, i was rushing and it turned out pretty meh. but i blame meself and i’ll always love via carota everything.

WOULD NOT PROB MAKE AGAIN:

• BA’s best chocolate chip cookies, but i don’t think i browned the butter right, so they were kind of not anything to repeat
• bucatini with butter-roasted tomato sauce — first: i don’t like bucatini too much, and second: marcella hazan’s tomato sauce totally tops this by a million
• vegan thai curry — very underwhelming, though we cut some corners with the curry paste AND i diced the sweet potato too tiny. so it turned out a bit of a flavorless mush. but who can i blame? THE RECIPE
• kentucky butter cake — not bad, i may have overcooked, but it didn’t WOW me, so: deleted

i was supposed to make a lot of other things (namely, this soup called “roberto”), but i didn’t and now it’s back to eating ice cream for dinner (i hope).