the january lists
What happened
Fire
We bought a tinfoil roasting pan for our friend’s cat to use as a makeshift litter box while we were hiding from the aforementioned fire. Ultimately both the pan and the evacuation were more superstitious ritual than anything else.
David Lynch died.
Fire
Megan assembled a shelving unit for the entryway of our apartment.
I washed dishes and took bad iPhone pictures of the sky as it changed.
How I felt
Scared
High on gummies
Very much in love
Like screaming
Remorseful and excited
Sore and happy from lifting weights
Products I enjoyed owning or imagined I would like to own
Dior Homme Parfum, per Robert Pattinson, who I trust implicitly due to his being a huge freak, in GQ (Did not buy) (Yet)
Necessaire scalp serum. Part of a birthday gift from Megan. I cannot swear that it’s doing anything, exactly, but as ever I like the medicine dropper style applicator and the cooling sensation as it spreads through my wet hair.
After quite literally years of deliberation, I got a pair of Blundstone boots and I’ve been wearing them basically daily and with any outfit and they feel great and they look all the time neither too casual nor too formal and it’s spiritually good for me not to be in sneakers all the time like I’m 6 and they’re excellent.
These pens that my sister gave me for Christmas. I do not know the brand but she said they’re big on TikTok. None of my business. But they write very nicely in the planner that I have been using this month to record brief and troubling screeds.
Things I watched, read, listened to
Nickel Boys is the best film of 2024, a remarkable—and very much singular—artistic achievement that is moving and invigorating and a must see.
Better Man is the best film I’ve ever seen where the human subject is played by a (really beautiful and affecting) CGI monkey. It’s simply incredible to watch a biopic about a person who is not even a little bit famous to you. Thank you, England, for affording me this immense privilege by being weird.
Sing Sing is sweet, funny, very good, when all the “as himself” credits rolled at the end I was choking on my snot a little. Clarence Maclin should have been nominated in best supporting actor and all these fucking Succession twerps are on notice.
One of Them Days is, I mean, fine, fun, take your brain out and sit it in the popcorn tub kinda stuff. But Keke Palmer is a Movie Star and people should be lining up for miles and miles to hire her.
Traitors has been a pretty good time so far. Gabby is my angel darling and now I send Megan eight videos a day of her just saying something, anything. It’s astounding how good Boston Rob is at talking to people. I am very interested in Boston Rob as a person and as a cultural object and one of the greatest moments of my life to date was when I was high on our couch talking about Boston Rob on Christmas Day 2023 and Tyler asked me, “How did he meet his wife?” I am a Boston Rob scholar and I find him very enjoyable, but it goes without saying that he’s an asshole. Assholes can be bad people but they aren’t necessarily. There are lots of ways for assholes to get by in the world and even thrive without improving but Rob’s is one of my favorite and I think overall the most harmless. He smirks and he never stops talking and a lot of things fall his way. Even when you’re sure it can’t work this time it just does. This red-faced and beer-bellied father of four remains, in essence, exactly the horrid little minx that Rosie O’Donnell called out as a notable cutie-patootie at the Survivor: Marquesas reunion in 2002 even though his main contributions to that season were 1. failing to make the merge 2. repeatedly referring to the one gay castaway as “a major queer” and drinking seven hundred Coors Lights. Though his reality TV rap sheet is significant, and while he seems to support his family chiefly through “celebrity” poker tournaments, Rob still has Normal Charming Guy energy, not TV Person energy. He is almost fifty and he goes about his days like the kid in your high school class who was in trouble everyday but never actually got sent out of class because the teacher in spite of herself was completely enamored. His quips are always meant first and foremost to delight himself and I can think of several men I knew growing up and have known who are often great fun to be around and can’t be trusted at all because they’ll talk to you in circles like that and are always working an angle. Where many new age reality television aspirants and minor stars perform cockiness that covers a desperation for approval and fame and followers, a great chasm behind the ribs full of millennial despair, Rob Mariano is just a regular old genuinely arrogant married guy that lives in Florida, genuinely just the product of a Massachusetts childhood as a good-looking, mischievous, coddled white boy and son of a mother. The shit-eating-grin confidence and lack of personal artifice is what makes it so slippery as he proceeds to, of course, lie incessantly and with huge panache. I think it’s been especially disarming to these younger people who came up in a different era of reality television and have learned to perform themselves with more discretion. It won’t work forever, probably not even for another episode, but it has been fascinating to watch.
Deal or No Deal Island is so euphorically dumb and actually better than Traitors lol
Tyler gave me a copy of E.M Forster’s Howards End and it is so spectacular and funny and beautiful and moving and smart and fizzy and true and we are entering our Bloomsbury Group era and I’m worried for the public.
The Lady Eve is an amazing movie about the power of being hot and insane.
Real Housewives of Salt Lake City had several all-timer, 10/10, delirium inducing, pain alleviating, absolute grand slam just truly, thrillingly, wonderfully deranged and genuinely funny episodes over the holidays and into this hell month and for that I thank those wretched beasts.
“Honeycrash” by Sasami
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty is excellent and distressing. I listened to the audiobook read by author Patrick Radden Keefe as my gym and bus companion for a couple weeks and I cannot recommend this experience enough. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that upon completion I was jonesing for more so intensely that, after a quick skim of the popular nonfiction titles, I tried putting on Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill to scratch the itch. This was an immediate disaster and assault on my person/psyche. Radden Keefe has a great voice, and you don’t even begrudge him for being an adult male blond. Suffice to say, neither is true of Farrow.
NBC’s SMASH. What can I even say? There is so much. There is sensation without end. There is pleasure and rage. I cannot possibly capture here in simple, ugly, English phrases what a psychedelic experience it is to watch this mostly bad television show. I kind of want to write about it at length because it’s been a long time since I’ve watched something that set off such alarm bells and explosions and symphonies in my mind and I’ve missed that, and I thank the miserable and psychologically addled individuals who made that possible. Megan is an original Smashochist and I began the journey for her benefit, but my purpose was swiftly redirected, transformed. I’m obsessed with all of the weird and disturbed characters on this show. Why are they like that? Debra Messing’s character is so rude to everyone. She is disgusted by her husband because he’s a lowly science teacher. She cannot stand her son. I found I was increasingly on her side because that was the funniest place to be. Her work husband Tom is my favorite character and he’s a huge loser. Amazing and childlike gay man played by straight theater actor Christan Borle who is mostly convincingly gay except occasionally when he tries to queen out TOO hard with Megan Hilty but then, the man is only human. Everyone is super horny and enduring near constant sexual pratfalls. The only person who is not horny at all is Katharine McPhee’s cornfed bitch Karen Cartwright, canonically one of the dumbest people in America and with all the sexual sophistication of an eighth-grade cheerleader. This is wonderful because the show nonetheless insists upon her innate sexiness and multiple men in the Smashiverse exist on the brink of killing themselves over her. SMASH’s sexual politics, as it were, are obscene. I sincerely question whether I have ever seen even half so many unique humiliations meted out in a single television show, and I’ve watched all of One Tree Hill. Many of the songs are bad but some are really good. At one point, a character played by famous actress Uma Thurman, so woefully miscast that it really works, knowingly accepts and consumes a smoothie that’s been laced with peanuts, to which she is deathly allergic, because life as the star of Bombshell, the Marilyn Monroe musical at the center of this television fever dream, has deteriorated to such a degree that anaphylaxis and perhaps death is preferable. Poignant! In what was intended as an improvement over the much-maligned prior season’s work—which, to me, was already working in the sublime, charting new course, redefining what TV can be, misunderstood by those unwilling to abandon such petty constructs as taste or logic….but anyway—season two introduces these two really awful young men and then kills one of them off and tries to convince me that I care about that. Fantastic. Ivy Lynn is my angel, a princess, god’s most perfect girl, a rare and precious flower; this show exists almost solely to brutalize her. It’s criminal and I love it.
Also the video Timothee Chalamet posted of himself lip-syncing to Edith Piaf in a Raiders jacket. To dress like if, perhaps, the rat muppet was in a sketch where we are supposed to be able to tell by his styling that he’s an unemployable ruffian who will take your rent money to fund his DJ career while you are ostensibly campaigning to win an Academy Award is really beautiful to me.
Favorite concepts
baby hairs
Celebrity Jeopardy actually having elevated emotional stakes because the questions are so easy that it’s almost distressing by proxy when, for example, Jo from Grey’s Anatomy, knows almost none of the answers.
valet parking
Notable tastes
The astounding fried cod sandwich at Daybird in “Silver Lake” (actually a liminal space close to Silver Lake.)
Ellenos fancy ass greek yogurt. This stuff is so fucking good it makes me feel emotionally unstable but in a way I enjoy. Typically, I’m a lemon curd girl but I had the vanilla bean flavor last week and it's dessert. It is a dessert. Not in a depressing, anorexic, Serena and Blair’s “diet plate” of lemon yogurt and romaine lettuce with hot tea way, really, at all. It is just as good or better than most desserts.
Wendy’s fountain Diet Coke after I drove myself to the gynecologist in Beverly Hills which despite being a very normal thing to be able to do and to have done did cause me to cry (sob, hyperventilate, I am not joking) twice. (Not about the doctor, obviously. They can put whatever they want in there more or less. But my horror of cars persists and in fact is getting more ludicrous.)
Megan’s salmon with crispy skin. Baked sweet potatoes with miso butter and fried shallots. Carrots always. Tofu bowls with peanut sauce and quickles. Perfect rice from her new fancy rice cooker. Life-saving breakfast burritos with tots. A lot of other things. Thanks for keeping me alive—I love you!!!
Triumphs
Five baskets in a row on our little tabletop basketball game. (No one saw.)
Our apartment building did not burn down.
People are largely good and want to help each other.
We made it to the gym all three scheduled times this week.
Rilo Kiley reunion tour????????
Pains
The disorienting Polar Seltzer packaging redesign.
Emailing.
Whole neighborhoods gobbled up by flames and gone.
Ugly old president replaced by the ugly old president from before that.
Rilo Kiley reunion tour???????????????????????????????
What I thought about
Painting. I took pictures of things this month that I wanted to paint. I imagined myself painting them. I imagined the feeling when the work was over and I could look at it and I liked that so much I felt ashamed. I’m just talking about watercolor and pencils and the intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights where there’s a billboard for the Netflix show The Diplomat which I have never seen.
Usefulness and how to achieve it.
My own selfishness. Everything ending all the time but only sort of. Birthdays. Where we’ll go when we can’t be here anymore. I mean when we die but also more urgently (I mean, we’ll see) when Los Angeles is uninhabitable.
Producing a zine I’ve threatened to make for over a decade now about queerness and The Real Housewives.
Smash and Howards End………………. More than a hundred years apart and across the sea. We take stock. On art and fucking and intellectual, spiritual decay. Ivy is to Karen as the Schlegels are to the Wilcoxes……………reject modernity…embrace tradition. Derek is Mr. Wilcox—interloper, brute, bad hair, seeking to plunder and defile the glorious Ivy but conquer of a great light (like, for one, Margaret Schlegel) is not possible for a tiny man like that. Both Julia and Tom are Tibby if Tibby was a devil. He’s kind of a devil. Aunt Juley is Eileen. Perhaps I am Leonard Bast. More soon…………………………………….
