Week of 9/1
Books
I’m still working on Letters to Gwen John, although I left it at home while I went to the beach, taking May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude instead. I just picked it up, though, so I don’t really have any thoughts on it yet. So it was pretty much just cookbooks and comics this week! Maybe next week I’ll add a cookbook heading for Khushbu Shah’s Amrikan, since I’m making 3 recipes from it today. I already made the makhani mac and cheese, which was easy (only one kind of cheese, a hunk of gouda) and tasty, although Amy couldn’t eat the leftovers because she found a big hunk of glass in it—I think I must have smashed the jar of garam masala as I was emptying it into the pot. Oops, sorry I almost maimed you, my beloved wife!
Comics/Manga
I just finished reading Ryoko Kai’s Delicious in Dungeon World Guide: The Adventurer’s Bible after seeing pictures of it posted online on a regular basis. I really loved it—you get the sense that Ryoko Kui really enjoys world building and has really thought through stuff like character relationships and creature anatomy. I was complaining the other day that ‘90s-style anime art books don’t really seem to be a thing anymore—with tons of non-canon hand-drawn illustrations, sometimes depicting the characters interacting in ways they never did in the show, or in random fashions, or whatever. This is kind of in that spirit, giving you a new perspective on the characters, including minor or undeveloped side characters. Speaking of ‘90s anime/manga, I read the third Neighborhood Story volume by Ai Yazawa, fresh off its American Manga Awards win for best new edition of a classic manga. It really is an amazing repackage: each volume is over 300 pages, with a die cut French flap to keep your place, which is good since it’s honestly hard (even for me) to sit down and read the whole thing in one go, and I think justifies its $24.99 price point. For some reason when I was younger I hated Yazawa’s art, probably because it was so stylized and not as “cute” as the stuff I preferred, but as an adult I love it. And while I still have a certain amount of fatigue when it comes to reading about teen love, I’m so into the message of this volume, which is that if you know what you want out of life, you should realize how lucky you are.
TV/Movies
Amy and I tried to watch Worst Ex Ever on Netflix, a Blumhouse true crime limited series following up on Worst Roommate Ever, which was a demented joy. However I’m sorry to report that Worst Ex Ever is a slog through a bunch of domestic violence cases that underline just how unprotected women are when a man harasses them. So…not really fun viewing. We stopped after the second episode. Last night we watched the first episode of Kevin Can F*ck Himself, the one where the Leah Remini-esque wife sees the show as a harrowing prestige drama and the grotesque Kevin James-esque husband sees it as a King of Queens-esque sitcom. We both agreed that it’s a good show but not fun to watch. Where is it going? How much will we have to suffer while we wait to see what happens? In a similar vein, inspired by a New Yorker podcast (more on that below), we watched an episode of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and kind of hated it, so, dropped. It’s filmed like a Real Housewives series and, I think, doesn’t quite come together. I should also mention that while at the beach with my family we watched a VHS tape of the 1968 version of Heidi with Michael Redgrave, which had a lot of goats in it. I enjoyed it, and it gave me a good opportunity to knit—really the best payoff you could ask for in terms of an old VHS tape found at a beach house.
Anime
I’m still sort-of-watching True Beauty but I would be happy to drop it if something better comes along (see: fatigue surrounding teen love stories). I’ve been paused on episode 3 of Get Your Hands Off Eizouken for several months because I realized that Amy might want to watch it, so we finally sat through an episode, and the verdict is that she is open to continuing to watch it (Amy kind of hates anime). I just love the inventiveness of Asakusa, the main character, an animation obsessive who designs complicated machinery and scenarios and really thinks through every aspect of how machines would work and interact with their environments. I was like, “Amy, I think this character is you” after a long sequence in which Asakusa describes how a space ship would work in minute detail. Amy expressed anxiety because she doesn’t think that the characters’ dream of producing a 3-minute anime will come together. For me, the show makes me remember how obsessed I was with drawing and animation in high school and how excited I got about new projects (I still get that way but I had more uninterrupted time to dream about it back then!).
Music/Podcasts
While we traveled to the beach, I tried to teach Amy why Chappell Roan is good and played the highlights from her Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess album (and “Good Luck, Babe!” of course). Amy grudgingly admitted Chappell Roan has a good voice, and we talked about how she borrows from ‘80s songs in more than just a surface-level way. I’m not sure why I’m comfortable participating in the hype, since I’m usually more on the side of reflexively not liking popular music/books/movies. But I like Chappell Roan’s sense of humor and think her songs are catchy—not that complicated? We listened to an episode of the New Yorker Critics at Large podcast about trad wives, which was interesting if a little boring. We had to switch to Fleetwood Mac on shuffle after that to stay awake. (Earlier in the week, I listened to a Critics at Large episode about tarot and mysticism that was very specifically interesting to me, and perfect material for a long-ish run.) I’ve also been listening to Alex Wagner Tonight off and on, although I never feel like I get anything out of it, and mostly just listen when I’m running and can’t think of anything else/don’t want to think about anything too interesting.
