The Weekend of Foolish Attention

Bits and bytes of the week

Revisiting a great film I only saw once: In the attempt to hold onto newer films and television with the soon enough dearth of those things due to the coupla strikes, I’ve been looking for rewatch opportunities. I saw this in theater with my mom and sister and loved it so I put on Mark Mylod’s The Menu and it is just a joy to behold. Great film.

The moment that Anya Taylor-Joy’s Margo realizes that Ralph Fiennes’s Chef has a sense of true service in the form of a perfect cheeseburger is smart and deep and says something about all of us as we slowly lose ourselves in the pursuit of status and fame. It also really made me want a cheeseburger.

I tried to watch NFL football but… My niece loves the NFL. Her mother dresses her pug up with a Chief’s jersey on game days and the niece can quote stats like a professional commentator or bookie. I’ve never been into watching sports for whatever reason but last week I booted up the cable box to sit down and try to watch a game alone to perhaps train myself to enjoy it with the intent of being able to share it with them.

After eight minutes of commercials in between plays, I almost threw a pint glass at the idiot box. Maybe the game is worthy but fuck the ads.

What is the point of saying out loud? Like Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Gavin Newsom explicitly made it a point to telegraph his decision to appoint a black woman to stand in for the late Feinstein. I applaud the decision to elevate a black woman but it seems a bit insulting to announce the race and gender as some sort of talking point.

Why not just indicate he plans on choosing the best candidate and then go with a black woman? Seems like a more empowering approach and ditches the baggage that perhaps Laphonza Butler is only there because of identitarian rationale.

Kevin McCarthy couldn’t thread the needle. Sure enough, when you’re saddled with dealing with a House GOP filled with mostly fully partisan folks, some Trump sycophants, and twenty borderline homeless, meth-addicted lunatics—the kind of people you’d avoid on the street as they rifled through garbage cans muttering to themselves about the aliens infecting their ear canals and telling them stories of cabals hellbent on destroying the fabric of a dimension that only exists in their minds—and the goal is to get them on some semblance of the same page, you’ll likely fail.

In the modern body politic, there is no successful path to compromise and moderate perspective. Either you are full-throated in your support of the identity trap that has overtaken the Left or the fascist populism that has become the default of the Right or you are pushed aside. Within nine months. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving dipshit, though.

Shit in one hand, wish in the other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Biden is old. The choice, unless Trump remarkably gets convicted and is prevented from running for president next year, is between the right hand filled with a turd and a left hand full of possibility. It’s possible that Biden will become the presidential version of Ruth Ginsburg and overstay his viability before croaking and opening the door for something nefarious. In the other hand is the worst public leader in our lifetime, a bloviating salesman/asshat, the single worst kind of human being, running for office to avoid a jail cell.

Remember mixtapes? Back in the Stone Age, I was one who took cassette tapes, recorded songs in an order with a theme and gave them to girls I wanted to notice me. Now, I make playlists on my Apple Music to be appropriate jams for both location and attitude I want to inhabit.

For a long time I had only one playlist that I would add to or subtract from as time went by and life circumstances changed. That playlist was entitled Rando Cool and included everything from Rage Against the Machine to Lenny Kravitz to The Beastie Boys. In the past year I put together an entirely separate list called Wichita and when I compared the two, the second was much more relaxed and lovelorn than the almost pathologically pissed off set list of the first.

The newest playlist? Chicago Redux. A bit more attitude and saltiness than Wichita but not so random as Rando Cool. Also with a healthy dose of 80’s punk and Leonard Cohen.

Is this my Spirit Animal?