An appreciation of graffiti, an extremely silly musical comedy, and a novel about time.

1. Sasha Frere-Jones’ review of Monumental Graffiti (4Columns)

Maybe it’s my oppositional-defiant streak, but the longer I live in Seattle, the more I appreciate cities where graffiti—as distinct from state-sanctioned murals extolling the virtues of the local sports team as DIY punk is from the hold music on the city’s customer service line—is allowed to flourish. Our mayor, Bruce Harrell, has said repeatedly that he “hates” graffiti, and has appointed a team of “Graffiti Rangers” to ensure its eradication and replacement by “inspiring” murals suitable for display on the Downtown Seattle Association’s website.

In Four Columns this week, Sasha Frere-Jones writes a review of the new book Monumental Graffiti: Tracing Public Art and Resistance in the City that articulates how modern cities’ relentless focus on graffiti as a signifier of vice and decay provides a distraction from the slow decomposition of our public spaces. Like other efforts to eliminate “disorder,” graffiti-eradication projects communicate what kind of public space (and which members of the public) is tolerable, acting in parallel with subtle cues—like the elimination of benches at bus stops and the removal of awnings—to subtly corporatize and homogenize the city.

I keep thinking about this paragraph from Frere-Jones’ piece which reads like a manifesto:

Aside from parks with high tourist pass-through (like Central Park), interstitial urban spaces that were once more hospitable to workers now have fewer trees and more anti-homeless benches. Government and corporations provide public space in name only when it is, materially, just a space for taxpayers to pass through on their way to point of consumption. The graffiti writer and public artist inverts this, registering to the state as “destruction,” while having absolutely no agenda other than the iteration of the artist’s individual spirit. The state, legion in its erasing agents, wants you to believe that graffiti is the tip of some spear coming to cleave your life, while the state goes ahead and upends your life with all of the latent malice it has isolated, split off, and projected onto the graffiti artist.

Seattle is full of public parks prowled by conspicuous security guards, “publicly-owned private spaces” that are functionally inaccessible (like elevated plazas that require boarding elevators inside bank buildings), and homeless-removal squads that, mid-sweep, can make parks feel like contested spaces. Hostile architecture abounds. Graffiti, including everything from tags to unsanctioned public art, can be seen as a response to these efforts to control cities—and a benign one at that. As Frere-Jones argues, “No graf artists have ever made it harder for you to find a place to eat your lunch.”

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2. Girls 5Eva (Netflix)

Girls5Eva—a three-season show about a ‘90s girl group that has a second chance at fame—is a joke-dense delight that showcases one of my favorite multi-hyphenate talents, Busy Phillips, along with singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, “Hamilton” star Renée Elise Goldsberry, and comedy writer/actor Paula Pell.

The foursome are the surviving members of a Spice Girls-esque group (a fifth member, played in flashbacks by Beef and Joy Ride’s Ashley Park, died when she swam off the edge of an infinity pool) who decide to stage a comeback on their own terms. The show, I must emphasize, is not a musical, but it does feature a ton of sharply satirical songs, and the overall vibe is 30 Rock meets Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, except that the characters (kind of) grow. Tina Fey is a producer and, perhaps more notably, plays Dolly Parton, in a hallucination sequence that inspires this song:

If that’s your jam (it is EXTREMELY mine), you’ll dig this show, which features jokes about learning to cook salads, a decades-long beef with Enrique Iglesias (“Daddy’s boy.” “Fake mole”) and a parade of songs parodying early-2000s faux girl-power pop. OK, just one more:

3. How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe, by Charles Yu

This 2011 book, about a time-machine repairman named Charles Yu who spends his free time searching of his lost father, takes place in a future world where time-travel is commonplace and people can choose to live in virtual universes designed to their own specifications.

Yu, the character, lives in a “minor universe” roughly the size of a coffin. His mother spends most of her time locked in a one-hour loop that allows her to experience the perfect family dinner she never enjoyed in the non-virtual world. And his father is stranded somewhere in space-time, still bitter about his failure to bring the first working time machine to market. Some unusual time-travel mechanics aside, How to Live is less a time-travel story than a meditation on what we do with the time we have.

A reassessment of Amy Winehouse, a book of photos from an artist unknown in her lifetime, and what to do with all those cherry tomatoes.

1. This beautiful piece by Leslie Jamison on how we as a culture processed Amy Winehouse’s addiction and death.

Reading this essay, by the author of The Recovering and many other books, is a reminder not just of how people talked about Amy Winehouse while she was clearly dying from addiction, but—as someone who has experienced addictionn—the appeal of saying “fuck it” because getting sober is the hardest thing you’ve ever tried to do.

I remember, during all the times I tried to quit drinking, how I felt like everyone around me was waiting for me to fail, or anticipating that I would try my hardest but fail, or hoping I would succeed and feeling disappointed in me personally when I failed. Now magnify that times tens of millions of people who believed they had the right to judge or pity or just gawk at Amy Winehouse. How tempting it would be to just say “fuck it”—not because you thought things would be different this time, not because you thought drinking and smoking crack and shrinking to a shadow of your former self would be liberating or fun, but because sometimes the sheer work of the alternative seems like too much to bear.

I remember reading gossip blogs in the late 2000s that speculated recklessly and with abandon about Winehouse and her condition, often expressing faux concern while zeroing in on her bloody ballet flats, her skinny legs, her disheveled beehive. Even the late, lamented DListed, a site I loved, couldn’t resist punching down, mocking Winehouse for her devotion to her boyfriend Blake Fielder-Civil and buying into the narrative that he was holding her down. As if that’s how addiction works—get rid of one “bad influence,” and the fog magically lifts.

This hit me hard:

But maybe “unrepentant” wasn’t an alternative to the fantasy of conversion so much as another flavor of fantasy. Maybe fuck it was a fantasy. Maybe our collective vision of her alchemy — ache altered into chorus — depended on a myth that wasn’t quite true. As the poet John Berryman put it, even he had to fight the “delusion that my art depended on my drinking.” That delusion was what he had to break, he felt, if he ever wanted to get sober.

Berryman never found recovery (his book, “Recovery,” is an unfinished account of his time in a residential treatment center); he jumped off a bridge in Minnesota in 1972. Winehouse, similarly, never got fully sober, although she did go to rehab at least four times. If you’ve ever been fascinated with Amy Winehouse, the cliché of the self-destructive but brilliant artist, or the internal mechanisms that keep people addicted, this 2017 piece (republished this week for Longreads) is for you.

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2. If you happen to live in New York or will be visiting in the next week, I highly recommend catching the exhibit at Fotografiska New York on “unseen artist” Vivian Meier, a street photographer who worked mostly in Chicago and New York City. (Showing in Fotografiska’s sexy space until September 29).

If you aren’t able to catch the show, this book offers a close look at this working-class artist who was little known until an archive of negatives was discovered in a Chicago storage locker. Most of Maier’s work captures ordinary people doing ordinary things in public, like retouching lipstick or falling asleep on a park bench, but the resulting images feel collaborative, even conspiratorial, not exploitative or judgmental. Meier’s self-portraits, many of them unconventionally staged, feel unselfconscious but not guileless or naive. More images of, and books about, her work are available on this website.

3. I got an unusual amount of (positive!) feedback after I wrote recently about how I dealt with a bumper crop of paste tomatoes in my P-Patch. (Update: They kept coming, even though the plant itself looked deader than dead.) This week I have a suggestion for how to deal with too many cherry tomatoes, which I suspect is a common problem in the Pacific Northwest, where many people grow cherries because they’re more likely to ripen fully before the cold sets in.

This recipe for fresh tomato sauce has slightly more ingredients but is almost as easy as the Marcella Hazan recipe I recommended last week, requiring minimal chopping and only a few hands-on steps. It’s also easy to adjust the quantity in case you’re like me and like to freeze fresh tomato sauce for the doldrums of winter.

1. The Olympics

“So are you watching the Olympics this year?”

I can’t remember the last time the Olympics were a huge topic of conversation in my world—not in Tokyo 2021, certainly, except for a few discussions about the oiled-up Tongan flagbearers, COVID protocols, and those “anti-sex” cardboard beds.

One thing I love about the Olympics is that—at a time when nationalist leaders around the world are trying to swap out modernity for paternalistic, patriarchal politics—they celebrate internationalism, immigration, and real family values.

Two examples stand out, both from Team USA: Breanna Stewart, the women’s basketball star (and former Seattle Storm player), was featured in one of the interstitial mini-documentaries with her wife, Marta Casedemont, and their two kids—the picture of domestic bliss, and a well-deserved slap in the face to US viewers who embrace the warped JD Vance version of “traditional American values.”

Second, I fell in love with the bronze medal winner in men’s breaking, Victor Montalvo, whose dad and uncle, Victor and Hector Bermudez, were pioneers of the breakdancing scene in Puebla Mexico. The brothers immigrated to the US in the 1980s, joining family in the Orlando area, and Victor started breaking at around 6 years old; by the time he was in his 20s, he had earned enough through competitions to buy a house for his parents. MAGA America may have convinced themselves that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the nation, but the triumph of athletes like Montalvo (who won bronze) is a rebuke to their poisonous worldview. Will seeing America’s diversity on display change the minds of any red-pilled Republicans? Almost certainly not, but I’ll settle for making them uncomfortable.

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2. The Olympics, specifically: Surfing, breaking, and trampoline

Another great thing about the Olympics is that it makes millions of people become briefly obsessed with sports they may have never considered or even heard of before—think artistic swimming or kayak cross (the one where they drop into the water from 15 feet). My obsessions this year were surfing and breaking, and my discovery was trampoline, a variation on gymnastics where the men can fly dozens of feet in the air. (Their graceful, inventive routines made me wonder, not for the first time, why floor routines are considered too “feminine” for male gymnasts.) I love watching basketball and gymnastics as much as anyone, but I was just enthralled by this year’s surf competition (won, on the women’s side, by Team USA’s Caroline Marks) and by breaking, which was new at the Olympics this year; watching the men’s trampoline competition, meanwhile, gave me sympathetic stomach drops every time the competitors approached the net—and, yes, sometimes they fell off the side.

3. Tested

To keep with this week’s highly unusual sports theme, I highly recommend this CBC podcast about the history (and present) of “sex testing” in women’s sports—a sordid tradition that goes back much further, and is far less “scientific,” than you might imagine. The point of sex testing, from its origins in the early 20th century, has been to exclude women with characteristics deemed insufficiently feminine, such as large muscles, a “manlike” appearance, or internal testes. Originally, this was done by forcing women to strip and display their external anatomy. Today, women who are suspected of being insufficiently “female” are instead subjected to intrusive blood tests; the results can require them to abandon their careers or take unnecessary hormones, even in the absence of evidence that testosterone alone confers any special advantage on female athletes.

Whether women’s sports are already an area of interest or if you’re just curious about how elite athletic institutions decide “who is a woman,” this podcast is a timely reminder that even in the supposedly merit-based world of athletics, women are always subject to special scrutiny.

A big, smash-y movie, a (non-Olympics) world record, and a defense of “trashy” books.

1. The Fall Guy (streaming on Amazon Prime)

It isn’t a caveat, exactly, to say that I like big, dumb movies with big, dumb action sequences—I really enjoyed the latest Deadpool movie (don’t even try to convince me that it was a Deadpool/Wolverine movie) despite my loathing for “fan service” (ugh) and I was one of the first in line to see Top Gun: Maverick despite my loathing for, you know, cults.

It’s just that dumb action movies aren’t for everyone, and if the idea of a film that’s primarily about the spectacle, and humor, of stunts and the men who perform them sends your teacup pinky flying skyward, The Fall Guy isn’t for you. But if you’re a sucker for elaborately choreographed fight sequences, comically stupid villains, and big, smashy practical effects, you’re going to love this movie.

The plot centers on Colt Seavers, a stuntman (Ryan Gosling) who doubled for a bleach-tipped dummy named Tom Ryder (British actor—and maybe the next James Bond???—Aaron Taylor Johnson) until he fell down an elevator lobby while executing a stunt, an accident he blames on himself. Seavers is convinced to get back in the game by Ryder’s longtime producer, Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham), who entices him to join the crew for a sci-fi romance called Metalstorm by telling him that the director—his old flame Jody Banks (Emily Blunt)—has asked for him specifically. But (dun dun DUNH) nothing is as it seems, and pretty soon Seavers is being framed for murder. Now he has to clear his name, get the bad guys, and convince Banks, whom he ditched after his big fall, to give him another chance. Plot, schmot: The movie is an homage to stunts, and there are more than enough good ones to justify its more than two-hour runtime and a deliberately paint-by-numbers plot.

Despite what I said above, my favorite sequence is, arguably, a form of fan service : A replication of the Universal Studios’ stunt show based on Miami Vice, featuring a flaming speedboat, a daring underwater getaway, and multiple boat jumps—a perfect distillation of this funny, sweet, pyrotechnic-fueled love letter to the little-appreciated professionals who make action movies, and their stars, look cool.

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2. Once you’ve watched Fall Guy (or in lieu, if you’re highbrow), check out Terry Gross’ Fresh Air interview with the movie’s director, former stuntman David Leitch. Among many other fascinating things you will learn about stunts and the guys who do them is the amount of preparation that goes into executing a cannon roll—a trick that involves a pneumatic tube that forces a speeding vehicle to roll end over end—and the many ways the trick can go wrong. Stunt man Logan Holladay took the world record by executing an eight-and-a-half-flip cannon roll during the filming of Fall Guy, a feat that’s featured—and celebrated—in the movie.

3. Books aimed at teen and preteen girls are among the most maligned American literary genres, and it’s easy to see why: Like adventure and mystery stories aimed at boys, “girl” books tend to be frothy and fun, but unlike those books, they’re for and about girls—a group whose musical tastes, fandoms, hobbies, and interests have been historically ridiculed as unserious and inferior.

The Sweet Valley High books—which, along with the ouvre of the great Judy Blume, taught me much of what I knew as a tween about sex and desire—are a prime example of this tendency to look down on mass-market literature about and for girls. Their creator, Justine Pascal, died recently at the age of 92, and her passing has been the occasion for a number of wonderful pieces revisiting her legacy and the impact her books (written mostly by a team of writers) had on a generation of young women.

Sally Franson’s, in the New York Times, is the best of the bunch. I’ll just leave you with an excerpt that I recently read aloud at home, cackling like Kamala all the while:

“He responded by turning his face to hers and kissing her hard, his arms crushing her against him, his mouth demanding what his body wanted to take.”

The line precedes a sultry encounter that, like Proust’s madeleine, has had such staying power in my consciousness that for years I’ve joked it makes up the bulk of my sexual identity. […]

“His body was urgent against her, and she didn’t have the heart anymore to fight … a strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way.”

If you squint — you don’t even have to squint hard — D.H. Lawrence’s imagery is indistinguishable from Ms. Pascal’s. Like her, Lawrence was ridiculed for writing about female sexuality. Unlike her, Lawrence was a man, and his efforts to put words to desire were, eventually, touted as genius.

A physical-media discovery, the best running shoes, and the best fan for the PNW summer.

By Erica C. Barnett

It’s Actually Hot here in Seattle—a rare and treasured delight for heat-seekers like myself—so I’m making this one quick so I can head back to my Adirondack chair and crack open an icy-cold Mineragua. Hope you’re enjoying, or at least finding ways to beat, the weather wherever you are.

1. The translators’ notes to The Three-Body Problem

Like a surprising number of people I know, I listened to the audiobooks of Cixin Liu’s profound Remembrance of Earth’s Past series instead of buying or borrowing physical copies of the hefty trilogy. After the Netflix series “3 Body” let me down (sorry Netflix, but “street-smart, tempestuous Latina” is not a victory for representation), I decided to revisit the the books themselves, this time in physical form.

What a pleasant surprise to discover that translator Ken Liu provided footnotes (not included in the audio version) to explain many of the references that are obscure to Western readers (like me) not deeply versed in Chinese culture and history. Some of the notes are straightforward descriptions of historical figures (“King Zhou of Shang reigned from 1075 BC to 1046 BC. The last king of the Shang dynasty, he was a notorious tyrant in Chinese history”), while others describe linguistic wordplay that doesn’t translate in the English version (“The Chinese term for ‘sunspot’ literally means ‘solar black spots.’ Black, of course, was the color of counter-revolutionaries.”) And although the section on solar mirrors will forever elude me, Liu does explain a few of the more arcane scientific concepts, including the three-body problem itself, even offering references for further reading.

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2. Brooks running shoes

I’m a fair-weather outdoor runner, which means that for the majority of the year I do my running at the gym, on a cushy treadmill that’s about 100 times less bone-shuddering than the concrete sidewalks and asphalt pathways that make up my regular running routes. I know big, foam-padded Hokas are popular (I own a pair of these indescribably ugly shoes myself, for walking, and they make my feet look two sizes bigger) but my daily runners are from the local Seattle brand Brooks, and they’ve never let me down. Buying a new pair is an annual ritual, and that first run always feels like I have wings on my feet. I’m a real believer in finding the thing that works and just buying it over and over again, and for me, that’s the Ghost line, but the good news is that if you live in Seattle, you can just go to the flagship store in Fremont and figure out which one works best for you.

3. My Vornado fan

If my trusty Vornado fan ever dies, I will buy another, and if that one dies… well, actually, I don’t foresee that happening. I’ve had this specific fan for about 10 years now, and it is a small but mighty lifesaver during our Pacific Northwest summers, which rarely get super hot but are increasingly daunting without A/C. Don’t listen to those fancy product testers Wirecutter; listen to me, a person with no financial incentive at stake, to tell you that this is just a great, compact fan that produces a surprising blast of air for its size, and does so reliably year after year.

A film about two 20th century publishing giants, an album of Tom Petty covers, and a fascinating piece on film photography.

1. Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (Streaming, Criterion Collection)

One reason I put off watching this documentary about the legendary author Robert Caro and his equally legendary editor, Robert Gottlieb, is that there’s a finite amount of Caro material in the world and I feel the need to make it last. (This is silly. One can always reread the Power Broker.) Caro himself inspires this feeling: In more than 50 years, the man has written five monumental books, plus one about writing that, for similar reasons, I haven’t gotten around to reading. If this documentary was going to offer new insights into the minds behind some of the greatest nonfiction books of the 20th century, I was happy to wait a while before absorbing them.

But this film was lighter, funnier, and more impressionistic than I expected (although with that subtitle, I should have had a clue). Director Lizzie Gottlieb—Bob Gottlieb’s daughter—has a light touch, interviewing both men separately in a number of settings before finally, at the end, bringing them together for a visit to their publisher’s office, where they wander around for several minutes, two men out of time, asking everyone they encounter if they have a yellow #2 pencil.

You won’t learn too much about Robert Caro’s “process,” or even the proper way to use a semicolon, from this film. What you will learn is that, according to Gottlieb, “everything is of equal importance” to Caro, from semicolons to the direction the sun was slanting into the windows of LBJ’s childhood home as he interviewed the President’s brother, Sam Houston Johnson. You’ll also learn about a type of relationship that has been driven to extinction by a publishing industry that no longer has patience for slow, meticulous authors like Caro—a lifelong relationship between editor and writer. Caro and Gottlieb aren’t friends, although they are friendly; they don’t socialize, and most of their interactions take place insider the editing room. Both men separately told director Gottlieb that editing is too private a process to let anyone observe, and when she finally talks them into letting her film them in the editing room, the scenes are overlaid with music, leaving the viewer to speculate about what they might be saying.

As someone who started my own career calling in stories over pay phones and debating pages covered in a sea of blue grease pencil marks, I was struck by how much of the world Caro and Gottlieb inhabited is probably no longer legible to contemporary authors and journalists, from organizing chapters by pinning pages on the wall to writing first drafts in longhand on legal paper, something I used to do myself while working a quiet job at a theater box office near the Texas Observer. “Turn every page,” of course, refers to the editorial imperative to read every document—and while I often fear this idea has been lost in an era when so many outlets have decided editors don’t matter, the existence of Turn Every Page made me feel a little hopeful that those values haven’t been lost just yet.

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2. Petty Country (Out June 21), featuring Steve Earle, “Yer So Bad”

You don’t have to turn the twang dial up too far Petty solidly in country territory, but it’s always delightful to hear his songs in a different voice—even when, as with Dolly Parton’s cover of “Southern Accents,” the cover makes me fonder of the original. Steve Earle’s cover of “Yer So Bad,” a deeply silly song from Petty’s 1990 album Full Moon Fever, is an exception: Earle’s world-weary voice, backed by peppy banjos, updates and softens Petty’s more sneering original. Name anyone, besides Petty himself, who could deliver the line, “My sister got lucky, married a yuppie” better.

3. “The Lost Art of the Negative,” New York Times

Returning for a moment to the world of analog media, this NYT story about photo negatives made me think about something I haven’t considered: When a film photographer picks up their prints or, more likely, receives scans of their images, they often leave the negatives behind. (Film, believe it or not, is going through a resurgence.) That’s a problem, because it’s the negative images that carry the copyright, not the prints—the same way an author’s words, not each physical book, constitute a written work.

“Put simply,” per this brief but fascinating piece: “Whoever has the negatives has the mechanism to reproduce the work but not the copyright to do so; the artist sans negatives has the right but not the means.” Even if you don’t remember the anticipation of dropping a roll of film off at the drug store, this story shines a light on issues that remain relevant at a time when we all have the ability to store thousands of images on a device in our pockets.