Something New (This Week)
Puttering music, weird old movies, bad new movies, and new (old) books.
It’s Monday morning (while writing), I’m drinking some old Cafe Bustello from a North Portland house that houses Chester, a 13-year old dog I am caring for. I’ll be here all week, reading and writing and watching and listening and working and walking (Chester). Here’s some stuff I did the last week or two, that I think you should mimic.
Shuffle a New (To You) Artist’s Catalog
On Saturday, my first day house/dog-sitting, I found myself with a lot of puttering-around time as I settled in and familiarized myself with my new best-friend and my new house. I started by creating a Google Maps guide for myself so I could explore everything in walking distance of my new locale, and while browsing the offerings of Turn! Turn! Turn!, a nearby music venue and bar, I saw an artist was performing that night that I hadn’t heard of: Nat Vazer. This is one of the best ways to discover new music and new artists, and instead of taking my typical route of discovery — playing an artist’s catalog chronologically, like a psychopath — I simply hit shuffle on their Spotify page. And, reader? This was a banger of a choice. Vazer, a singer-songwriter from Melbourne, creates dream-pop-adjacent indie rock that is perfect puttering-around-in-summer music, with instrumentation loose enough to allow drifting around the house, and storytelling specific enough to rack your focus into out-of-the-blue.
After a couple of hours of Vazer wafting through my house, I replicated the experience by shuffling through another young indie-rock creator — one who has a great new single out — MJ Lenderman. A guitarist for the band Wednesday and last seen recording and touring with Waxahatchee, Lenderman has been writing their own music for years, filled with odd sports references and textured guitar solos, and this new single sounds so much bigger and locked-in than their independently produced work in the past. His catalog also creates a wonderful dishwashing and laundry-folding environment — my highest compliment! — and I am currently vibrating with excitement for the September 6th release of his next record.
Watch a Movie from the 1970’s
I watched The Last Detail, a 1973 dramedy about two sailors, disenfranchised with their stale states, who are assigned a new detail: escort a young sailor to prison. The prisoner is too young, the crime too insignificant, and the escorts too empathetic to perform this task without a couple of detours. It has been on my homework list for a couple of years, for its placement in the careers of several important Hollywood-ers, namely the writer Robert Towne, the director Hal Ashby, and the actor Jack Nicholson. I just re-listened to The Big Goodbye, a book about the making of Chinatown, and of the careers of the main players involved, including Towne and Nicholson. It is a great book, and helps contextualize the strange final product that is The Last Detail, a movie I enjoyed, but am unsure how to recommend. Mostly, I just love the aesthetics of the production, the dressing of the characters and of the east coast cities they roam through; aesthetics that have bled back into modern stylings in bits in pieces, though we’ll never have it all back again. It lives on, however, immortalized in little stories we make up and act out on cameras. The stories we tell are wonderful, but so are the methods and times and locations that we bind together with them. For me, there’s nothing like that 1970’s American visual palette.
Don’t Watch Anymore Superhero Movies
Another piece of homework I completed last week was the dreadful The Flash, a movie made for no reason that cost an unreasonable amount of money. Hollywood chased the success of one studio’s single idea (what if we made comic books into movies) way too fiercely, and it has crashed and burned in its pursuit, with a global pandemic and a writer’s strike as two cherries on top. Watching the movie, which took me several days to churn through, I endlessly wondered how anyone could keep trying to make movies like this again, and while it does seem like the never-ending comic book movie circus is finally slowing to a place of intermittent sustainability, I can’t forget that Warner Brothers is currently “rebooting” their entire DC Comics movie empire, and that we still have one more hoorah, hopefully our last. I recommend that you don’t watch any comic book movies this week.
Go to the Farmer’s Market
Because my priorities are out of whack, I just went to my first farmer’s market of the year, in preparation for my week-long dog-sitting gig in someone else’s house. I skirted around 50-person lines for the year’s peak berry stands, and bought some fresh eggs, locally sourced bacon, shishito peppers, a giant head of lettuce, fresh tomatoes, snap peas, a huge zucchini, a huge cucumber, and newly available rainier cherries. My week is set for snacking, salads, and after grabbing a brick of sharp cheddar and a stack of tortillas, set for wraps and quesadillas of many veggie variations. Eating can be so simple sometimes, and I think I’m at my best and favorite place when it is. All of the market items were priced the same, or cheaper, than grocery store prices, and are way more satisfying. Someday, I won’t forget that fact every week.
Buy Old Books
I am fortunate enough to be working with a small team at my job, and they are big book readers. One of them let me in on a great bookstore find in Eugene, OR, where I was heading for the weekend: Tsunami Books, a wonderful new and used bookstore in a building with a quirky layout — the best kind of bookstore. Inside I found so many cool and fun and bizarre things, and I also found my personal haven: a giant wall of “good and cheap reads”, filled with pocket-sized(1) trade paperback fiction novels. I snagged two great 1970’s prints of “important American novels” that I have not yet read, and I also found a two-book paperback collection of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and China Men, two books I have been looking for nice used copies of for almost two years now. It was one of my peak bookstore moments (so far).
Thank you, as always, for reading. I hope this week, and last, brought something new to you. If it didn’t, you might have to go looking for it; the universe won’t always do it for you. This next week, I’m writing about Boys Who Ride Bikes, watching a LOT of content while house-sitting, and will be having a wonderfully slow and unplanned Fourth of July weekend. I am blessed. I hope you are too.
TTFN,
b
(1) If you wear men’s Patagonia Baggies, almost every book becomes “pocket-sized”.