Block Universe Theory
On the arrow of time, the new Lucy Dacus record, and chronicling feminism
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BLOCK UNIVERSE THEORY*
During and early July Tuesday morning, in a school yard soaked in a dirty yellow New York sunlight, I was talking to a recent high school graduate about spacetime and Kendrick Lamar. As staff members in an ambitiously wide-ranging academic summer program, we had been asked to come up with a playlist as an icebreaker activity. Quickly, however, we digressed into discussing what had been on our minds during our music-infused morning commutes. I was getting ready to teach a class on physics and art and they were a teaching assistant for a literature-meets-ethnography class on Lamar’s 2015 record To Pimp a Butterfly.
There is a strong sense of place and geography on this album, my new colleague explained, but time and space seem disconnected in its narrative. You could maybe draw a rough map of Lamar’s neighborhood, but the timeline of the record’s story is harder to lay out. In physics, I offered, space and time are thought of as parts of a single four-dimensional fabric that everything we know of is embedded in. They can sometimes be treated as separate – space and time instead of spacetime – but any investigation of the universe that requires looking at more than a few disconnected points will force a physicist to interweave the two. As people, I conceded, we are imperfect detectors of both.
We talked some more, differentiating between psychological time and physical time and walking along the edge of the argument that music can be a form of time manipulation or even time travel. After all, music has a tempo, a sense of fast and slow, that colors our perception of the passage of time. Music also has a distinct direction: the fact that most songs can’t be run backwards means that music forces us to follow notes from into the future while the past may still be ringing in our ears.
Last summer, I reported a story about music and the arrow of time – the singular directionality of time – for Scientific American. It was about a team of physicists and mathematicians that turned 500 years of music into mathematical data then treated those data as if they had been collected in some system that you’d usually study in a statistical mechanics class like a large collection of atoms or a box of marbles that has been vigorously shaken. They ran a very physics-y calculation on those data to try and identify the arrow of time in works of different composers. When I interviewed the research team, one scientist shared their personal motivation for engaging in this intriguingly interdisciplinary work. If we understood how a sense of time is mathematically encoded in music, they said, maybe we could get a better understanding for what it is that a composer actually does, in their brain or with their brain, when they compose a compelling piece.
The sense of direction in time, the direction in which the time arrow flies, is associated with disorder in physics, so the whole thing gets very complicated very quickly. How do we know that time has direction? A broken teacup or a pierced egg yolk never spontaneously re-assemble themselves, they only ever get more disordered and messy. Time flies towards more disorder.
At the same time, a composer’s job is to pluck random notes and sounds from their mind and assemble them in a structure that can then convey the passage of time for us listeners. In fact, the study I reported on showed that different composers managed to encode different amounts of order, or differing strictness of time’s one-way flow, into their pieces.
Remarkably, as a consequence of certain spectral analyses music had historically been codified as a type of noise, so-called pink noise to be precise, which implied that time may not be a very important ingredient for its creation because noise sort of sounds the same played forwards and backwards. My editor for the article was quick to point out that anyone who has every listened to Mozart or Beethoven could intuitively guess that this noise description could not be exactly right. Though I have enjoyed a fair amount of music that does sound like noise over the years, I could not exactly disagree. What drew me to the story to being with, however, was the sheer amount of mathematical analysis and sophistication that researchers I interviewed had to explain to me to prove that point rigorously. To quantify something that they could have guessed, the team had to reach for techniques from very different physical systems and even innovate on some small bits of common mathematical methods.
I was really taken by the idea that the human brain, a composer’s brain really, could create an arrow of time in a composition without knowing any of that math at all. The lede of my first draft for this story, before it got vetoed and cut in the editing back-and-forth, attempted to capture this by saying
“You can teach an artificial intelligence to compose music that sounds just like Bach by having it study hundreds of his pieces, but you will not necessarily be able to determine the magic Bach ingredient in its composition process. The composition process, typically carried out by people, is an act of creativity that is hard to analyze. In a study published in Physical Review Research in July, a team of physicists has now used methods from physics to gain mathematical insight into it. “
Ultimately, the story ran with a better, clearer, and snappier opening, thanks to my editor. I do still, however, sometimes think about composers as anti-disorder machines, as time-arrow-makers, as tools of our overwhelming need to control time by recording it in a narrative and giving it the pacing of a compelling story.
Later in that same sweaty day I explained to my own teaching assistant, another recent graduate turned colleague, that after we teach a lesson on the physics of time, I’d like us to teach some lessons on photography as means of stopping time or dividing it up, quantizing it even, into frames. Then, I continued, we should talk about comic book panels that do something similar while also allowing you to see past present and future all laid out on the same page at once. Then, I kept going, maybe we can circle back to whether collecting data in fixed time increments is a bit like drawing a panel after panel in a regular grid. I probably said it all just like this, too many ideas in rapid success with many implied commas trying to break through my paisley-print facemask from Target, paired with just a little too much hand waving. Graciously, my assistant nodded their head, played along, and offered to give a lecture on movies that play around with time because they had been in cinema studies classes all this past year. A week earlier I gave a similarly rambled, run-on, pitch to a guest a friend’s birthday party. They made the mistake of asking about what I’m teaching this summer, sometime between my grilling an ungodly amount of zucchini and cutting the strawberry chocolate layer cake I had made for the friend we were celebrating. There were more nods on their part and more hand-waving on mine and then they told me they were a writer and a poet and a person that had thought about controlling time through storytelling many times before. The main difference between reading a story and hearing it told, they said, is that in the first case the storyteller controls time, while in the second you do as you can always flip the page and go back to something that had already happened in the story’s narrative. Turns out, they had once written a whole dissertation on this. Since I wasn’t wearing a mask for this outdoor gathering, I pretty much had to pick up my jaw from the floor.
I guess what I’m saying is that, anecdotally, all art is about time and all that people really want to talk about is time as well.
***
And I fought time
It won in a landslide
I'm just as good as anybody
I'm just as bad as anybody
***
The new Lucy Dacus record, titled Home Video, is an exercise in traveling to a very vividly painted past. Though this may not be fully surprising given that the artist’s previous release was called Historian, the new album is certainly a more personal and more emotionally cutting trip to Dacus’ history than the job of a historian would suggest. Though her music is not as grating or as technically intense as much of what I usually reach for, something about its intimacy tends to really get to me. I bought Historian on vinyl and listened to it often during alone-but-not-lonely weekends in the final stages of my graduate school work. The sound of this record is pretty consistent, but the lyrical themes jump from more personal to more abstract. Some songs on Historian are about relationships, but some are also about what it means to be an artist and a creator. It’s a meta record that at times feels slightly meta, but Dacus’ smooth voice and pop guitar, just on the edge of harder indie rock, make it pleasant and accessible.
Home Video is as anything but abstract. Here, each song is a precise memory, a story from the past that just happens to be music when it spills out of Dacus’ mind. On this record, she uses the second person “you” over and over to tell stories of both childhood friends and her child self. Every one of those you’s sounds like it is aimed at herself as much as at those friends or her listeners. There is a strong sense of times, and unidirectional time at that, that operates within this record. The songs are about the past and in most instance that past does not manage to reach into the future in any clear or definite way. Though “Going Going Gone” does offers three different snapshots of a past flame’s path in time and “Christine” and “Please Stay” are heavy with implications of very dark possible futures, most of the songs, and the best songs, of the eleven are pretty firmly stuck in the past, caught in Dacus’ backwards view like it is amber.
When Pitchfork interviewed Dacus about each of Home Video’s tracks, she said she wanted the album to “feel really inviting and blushing.” This may be the exact sensation of showing a home video to someone new or beloved alike – the fleeting hubris and self-conceit of thinking that someone needs to see the past you and the very tangible sense of how vulnerable sharing the past may make you.
My partner’s family loves to retell the events captured in home videos from when he was young more than they like watching them. Over the course of the last the last six years I have heard the story of his hand being bitten by a guinea pig while his mom was filming so many times that I could tell it as if I had been there too. I think I only saw it once, at some crowded and loud family party where there was enough food and drink that I may have actually just confused it with another vivid retelling. There are other stories about home videos that have been told but not shown to me, some about my partner’s siblings, some just about how shaky his mom’s hands would be when she first started filming them. Two years ago, she bought a new camera, hoping to revive the home video practice. It never caught on and her hands were still shaky.
The home videos themselves are moments in the past captured through changing the physics of the camera’s insides. They are time stopped; instances of order briefly being imposed before the situation fully dissolved into the future. Stories about the videos are another ordering, another capturing, and another course-setting. They are also another layer of protection against the emotionality of what things may have been like at the time of the video’s creation. Ironically, the only family video I can remember watching with any devotion is my parents’ wedding tape, probably because their divorce had been such a polar opposite of the moments that I had seen so on the small screen so many times. I’m sure there are videos of me as a child somewhere on some dusty VHS or some questionably compatible computer file, but, vulnerable to being haunted by my past selves as I am, I don’t think I could find much pleasure in watching them.
Lucy Dacus is about four years younger than me, so when she sings about a friend who wasn’t convinced that they were born for a reason or a friend that had to play Slayer at full volume to block out intrusive thoughts or about her own hedging bets by turning to religion or about having a male friend that tried to pass himself off as deep by citing classic movies she had never seen or about falling in love with a girlfriend before she knew what queer means, I can’t avoid feeling like, as we now say on the Internet, the Main Character. I am jealous of her ability to tell these anecdotes so invitingly, so vulnerably and with such seeming ease that an accessible, radio-friendly sound can carry. She doesn’t hide her past hurt or her past anger, but there is no acidity to her voice, no saltiness in how she serves up her coming-of-age as something the rest of us can consume. Home Video is not a mourning record or a revenge record or an overcoming record – it’s just a record of the past.
In a few years it will serve as a record for how she thought about the further past in the more recent past. This is sort of what happens when we try to stop time’s natural path and slow it down by creating a loopty-loop, a knot maybe, in our personal arrow of time, forcing it to retrace a previous path before straightening out again. With this album, we can nestle into and comfortably dwell in the curves of this loop for a bit. Or at least I can. After I gave it a few spins, the intensely resonant emotionality wore off some, but I kept putting it on again and again, as if I really needed some time travel while I walked to the farmer’s market on Saturday morning or waited for the L train on Thursday night.
It’s funny because Lucy has a connotation of light, and in physics, we do sometimes have a chance to look into the past exactly because of what light is like. Namely, light always travels at the same speed and though it is the fastest moving entity in the known universe it cannot move infinitely fast. In other words, it takes time for light to bring us information. It takes time for light to leave an object, enter our eyes, help a picture of that object form in our minds. Sun, our closest star, is so far away from the Earth that light needs more than 8 minutes to reach us if it starts there. When we look at the Sun, we are seeing what it looked like 8 minutes ago. In some sense, our light-sensitive eyes are taking in the past most of the time.
Do I need to tell you that old-school home videos also only happen because light interacts with cameras, changes something inside of them like the motion of the electrons or the chemistry of film?
In a way, all artists are Lucy’s, all artists are light personified, producing artifacts that provide some limited means of time travel, helping us imprint and re-imprint the past inside the imperfect recording device of our minds.
***
The future isn't worth its weight in gold
The future is a benevolent black hole
***
In Feminisms in Motion: Voices for Justice, Liberation, and Transformation editors Jessica Hoffmann and Daria Yudacufski collect writings form make/shift magazine, a publication centered on intersectional feminism and amplification of feminist voices that engage with issues such as immigration, the carceral state and climate change. When reading the essays in this collection, there wasn’t much that struck me as shockingly new. There are essays on over-medicalization of trans bodies and dangers of centering the transition narrative too much, there are essays about ICE raids and family separation and how the mainstream feminist movement does not always see the plight of the brown laborer woman as worthy of its front pages, there are essays on climate change, environmental destruction and its adverse effect on reproductive health in some communities, there are essays about unpaid gendered domestic labor as an unacknowledged backbone of capitalism, there are essays about reproductive justice that extends past access to abortion, there are essays about abusive families and generational trauma carried in women’s bodies, there is even an essay about the adjunctification of academia and labor unions. Most of these things read as if not ripped-from-the-headlines then directly plucked from what passes of as discourse on Twitter these days. The twist, though, is that some of these essays are 10 or 12 years old.
make/shift stopped publishing in 2017, almost four years ago, but even the essays from its early days in 2007 or 2008 come off very similar to something that may have been written just a few weeks ago. Sure, there are linguistic details that would maybe be different today, an occasional asterisk or a piece of jargon that some community used ten years ago, but does not love to roll out right now, but even such insider minutiae quickly get drowned in the familiarity of the anxieties and calls to action that Feminisms in Motion overflows with. Making my way through this collection during a few work-free evenings I stole for myself before that one big July holiday, I was nearly overwhelmed by how much it seemed that nothing at all had changed in American law and culture since make/shift no. 1 was published.
In physics, there are theories of expanding universes, of collapsing universes and of universes that cycle between Big Bangs and Big Crunches, but for decades cosmologists have agreed that the universe is not static. Big, universe-wide things must change; whether we see those changes immediately or not, they do happen. Take the whole universe as an example: it is constantly expanding, taking us and our star further and further away from all other stars and planets. Of course, we only notice this when we look for signs of expansion, and most of us are not spending our days trying to figure out how fast a star was moving when its light started its journey towards the Earth. But an astrophysicist will look at that data and quantify the change with little ambiguity. They will be able to say that a change is underway and that eventually its effects will be quite dramatic (specifically: everything will freeze because all the warm stars will be too far away). As I neared the end of Feminisms in Motion, I found myself wishing that I knew what the equivalent of this starlight measurement would be when it comes to progress with regards to issues that intersectional feminism has dealt with over the past decade.
Time usually doesn’t quite work for me in the mornings. On many days, I wake up disoriented, barely having closed my eyes for five or six hours, unsure of what time it is beyond it being time for me to get up. For most of the past year it was still dark while I made two lazy banana-oat-hemp seed-frozen cherry-tahini smoothies over the sound of early morning news. While the blender would be struggling with all the frozen chunks that I didn’t have the energy to chew, I would check my watch over and over to make sure that I did wake up on time and I will not be late to work if I just partition the next hour between eating, coffee and make up correctly, that it was not all just an early morning, shallow dream mirage. The small digital screen that’s always suffocating my wrist would reliably tell me that I can count on the present to be accurate, and on the near future to work out. But the snippets of news competing with the blender’s low roar blender were rarely that reassuring. In fact, it seems like whenever I heard about the Supreme Court or Congress or some state legislature, chances that the future will really work out seemed low for women trying to run for office or get abortions or cross borders or vote while Black or foster kids while gay or play on sports teams while trans.
“Clearly,” I would sometimes say to my partner while he would be rummaging through the fridge for cold water that held the the promise of actually waking him up, “we are just moving in the wrong direction.”
We are moving towards the worst parts of history, flipping the equity and justice variety of the arrow of time. Hateful policy is like some perverted form of time travel now. Those essays from 2008 or 2009 are threatening to never become obsolete or unrelatable.
In their introduction to Feminisms in Motion, Hoffman and Yudacufski paint a less fatalistic and dark picture:
“Intersectional feminism didn’t appear a few years ago. It has roots that go back forever, and it has been voiced and otherwise nurtured by women of color for generations. It is like a river moving through time, communities, and other contexts, full of differences and always changing. We have always envisioned make/shift as dipping into, reflection on, and contributing to this river, putting into print a few of its moments and voices from a particular time. From 2007 to 2017, we published work by about 350 people who have added to the burbling of that river. It started flowing way before us and will continue long after us, and it is always bigger and more full of possibility than any one of us.”
Their tone, centering continuity and expansiveness rather than one group of people and one moment in time, is not so much as reassuring as it is more grounded in an impersonal reality. To an extent, the fact that I can sit here in 2021 and bemoan the fact that nothing seemingly changed since many issues of make/shift had been published speaks favorably of the expansion and might of their metaphorical river.
Though policy changes may have not caught up, so many more of us are conversant in what intersectionality means than we may have been a decade ago. In 2011 I was in college and celebrities were being asked whether they are feminists as if it were a bad word. The culture writ large was obsessed with rape jokes and whether consent can ever be sexy. A graduate student whose calculus class I had been a teaching assistant for had added me to a group of Facebook acquaintances he liked having “critical and rational” debates with and I spent way too much time reading bad faith arguments about cultural Marxism, libertarianism, and some really terrible takes about the killing of Trayvon Martin. I didn’t know what intersectionality meant, I had barely met people who actively rejected the gender binary, and I was certainly unkind to a Black roommate who in my view just took politics way too personally. The point that Hoffman and Yudacufski make is, of course, that movements are bigger than one person and that none of us get to be the main character if we are to take the revolutionary struggle seriously. But even indulging the extremely narrow perspective of one – of me – it is counterproductive to claim that nothing has improved at all.
The thing about the passage of time and the way we use it to frame and contextualize events in our personal and collective lives is that, well, we sort of made it all up. If you were to ask a physicist what makes a metal a metal or what electricity is made of or why water flows better than honey, there is always a way to break the question down into smaller parts, like atoms or electrons, whose interactions explain the bigger behavior. We don’t really know how to do that with time. What is time made of and where did it come from? Physicists and philosophers will disagree on this among themselves to the point of being able to hold multi-day conferences about those disagreements. But our brains seem to need time, so we use it to index data in experiments and to order experiences in our lives. I’m not saying that we invented time out of nothing as clearly some sense of stages or cycles is hard-coded into our bodies that have to sleep and can’t avoid aging, but I am saying that when we are confronted with a large number, a number like 10 or 15 years, we can’t always quite grasp its breadth.
Intentionally, Hoffman and Yudacufski stress that successful movements transcend single moments in time and stretch through the years even when those years seem to be unreasonably long to some of us. The timescale on which change happens is always humbling and the way we experience “fast” or “slow” when we look backwards rarely matches the way those adverbs feel closer to the present moment. And that present moment is always where change can start; it’s the star moving away from other stars ever so slightly and leaving clues for those that will eventually study its motion. People are not immune to the arrow of time, we can always rely on it pushing us into the future.
In an essay from make/shift no. 13 published in 2013, Leah Lakshimi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes
“Some days, things seem rough. I want to feel on fire, on the verge of an earthshift, but I’m just going to the grocery store.”
We can’t really speed up time, be it physical or psychological, we can just stick to our beliefs, keep up our practices, and seize moments when the time arrow’s push can be a bit of a slingshot into doing better and being better.
In the meantime, I am also just going to the grocery store, or maybe the farmer’s market. Find me in line for maitake mushrooms, listening to Lucy Dacus.
Best,
Karmela
* The block universe theory in physics is a rough equivalent of eternalism in philosophy: both state that spacetime is essentially unchanging and the passage of time is a mental construct or some other sort of illusion specific to our modes of perception as human observers. In the block universe it is not the laws of physics that say that time has to flow in one direction, but rather, that flow is solely a feature of our experience.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING
For Wired, I wrote about a device that can image the electrical activity inside live heart cells by using carbon atoms, a prism coated with metal oxides, a charge-coupled camera and a laser. This is a story about biosensing as much as it is about quantum physics and I really enjoyed both how interdisciplinary the team behind this experiment was and how much I had to stretch my knowledge. This is my third story for Wired since February and I’m really grateful to keep having the chance to work with some of their really great editors. Though I always wish I wrote more, I do feel like I have grown some as a science writer over the past few months, in part through tackling stories that are slightly outside of my wheelhouse like this one. It’s been really fun and inspiring to do so.
LEARNING
I’m at about a third of the way into teaching a special summer class on physics and art to incoming 9th graders and the whole thing has really been a new experience so far. Even after a whole year in both the physical and the virtual classroom, adjusting to new faces, to having a teaching assistant and to teaching 90-minute classes all day three days a week has been non-trivial. Certainly, I like having the freedom to explore teaching physics from a very different angle than usual and I appreciate the more dynamic classroom atmosphere that comes from foregrounding a bit more discussion and a little less problem-solving.
This course, and the whole summer program, are supposed to help students become good learners in the competitive environment of their new school so I am trying to be very conscious about teaching them skills, and transferrable skills at that. They’re researching jargon-filled articles, making arguments grounded in evidence, trying to come to conflict during discussions from a charitable place and also just really trying to get their homework done on time. I’m a big believe in telling students why they have to do something when they have to do something, and I really hope they trust me at least a little when I say that learning how to find information on a physics experiment done by someone whose name you can’t pronounce will pay off when they have to read so-called big books in their humanities courses in a few months. As such, my role in the classroom feels almost more consequential than during regular instruction and I am trying to keep some of my past experience as a peer mentor at the top of my mind. I have co-taught courses on art and physics before, but never before with the intent of developing analytical skill and writing and reading as much as designing projects, so it feels like I am pushing myself to be brave in the classroom as much as I am nudging my students towards doing the same At the same time, I’d lie if I didn’t admit that I have also enjoyed the chance to tell them about modern physics ideas we usually never touch on in the 9th grade or to nudge them a bit into trying to convince each other that graffiti or dance are or are not art. If you’re curious about how I have tried to break down and describe this course to my students, I shared a version of the syllabus here.
READING
This opinion piece for Physics World by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein where she rightfully argues that we should not be teaching students how to manage their impostor syndrome if, as underrepresented minorities, they are truly being treated as outsiders or impostors. As sharp as always, Prescod writes:
“I have noticed in the last 10 years that it has become increasingly popular in the US to lecture to students and other junior researchers from under-represented groups – particularly white women and people of colour – about their imposter syndrome and what to do about it.
Imposter syndrome has entered the popular imagination as one of the reasons “we” have an equity, diversity and inclusion problem in science. Marginalized students are now coached by their instructors and universities to believe that how they feel is an individual psychological problem tied to a low sense of self-confidence. This is a troubling, though not surprising, turn toward individualizing what is a structural problem. If the students have developed a sense that they don’t belong, it might be because they have excellent observational skills: they have noticed that the world of physics was not built for them.”
This point is something I have been dwelling on a lot recently as I am teaching many minority students this summer and want to support them as best as I can.
Arabelle Sicardi’s newsletter on celebrity beauty products, the insincerity of “clean beauty“, celebrity lines, and quickly approaching horrors of climate change. Making an argument that could be applied to most industries that keep trying to convince us that we can save the plant by buying more things, Sicardi is blunt:
“No one needs anymore products that make them seem effortlessly beautiful. It is a delusion that is burning up with everything else in the world, along with labor rights and data privacy. It would be nice if clean beauty and celebrity beauty brands could own up to the fact they are empty promises. There is no “clean beauty” legally or otherwise in a world where the vast majority of their packaging will go to a landfill after being shuffled around by underpaid and overheated workers after having crossed the ocean five times in various forms. Very few people are “effortless” about anything, especially their beauty, and especially celebrities. It would be nice to just… stop pretending. We are all killing something to stay alive. If not ourselves, then certainly each other. Why pretend otherwise? Wouldn’t it be better to own up to it and adjust course?”
This poem by Nicole Sealy, titled Object Permanence, that may be one of the best poems about love and togetherness I have come across so far.
LISTENING
My brother-in-law’s band Cold Dice played their first live show in two years a few days ago and though they played a pretty small venue it felt good to be back in a loud space, near folks in leather and denim bobbing their heads. I’m tentatively looking forward to seeing more live music this summer and hopefully a lot of it will be exactly this kind of old-school hybrid of thrash and heavy metal, un-fancy but really authentic and energizing. I grew up with this kind of music so having married into a family where someone’s band sounds like the lovechild of Iron Maiden’s second record and your average Tygers of Pan Tang song also feels a bit like the universe is telling me that I have chosen well.
WNYC’s Radiolab has been running a mini-series called The Vanishing of Harry Pace that tells the story of a Black visionary and entrepreneur whose person and story seem to have been forgotten and hidden despite his influence on the music industry and much more. I get tired of prestige podcasts easily, but Radiolab manages to tell complex stories without being too dramatic or too pretentious about it. This series is no exception and I have been liking it a lot so far. It is full of heavy history and touches on a fair number of complex politics and sociology, but it does not come off as didactic and keeps a surprisingly light tone that makes it easier to follow the beats of the story as it unravels.
On a similarly appropriate note on how history shapes the present and the future, NPR’s Throughline recently put together a series on capitalism that connects everything from Friedrich Hayek to prosperity gospel and I found those episodes really informative and worthwhile.
Lucy Dacus’ bandmate from boygenius and a pretty successful musician on her own Julien Baker was on Slate’s Outward podcast to talk about being a queer artists and though I am not super familiar with her music nor do I usually like people saying things like “quantum queerness”, I was really charmed by her and a lot of her thinking resonated with me.
WATCHING
We finished the third season of the Sopranos and have been steadily chipping away at the fourth. I am still really amazed by the microcosm this show manages to create and by how easy it has been to get really invested in its characters. At the same time, the amount of violence, misogyny and racism seems to be ramping up pretty relentlessly as the show goes on and I am starting to be a little exhausted by the notion that no one in this show is truly good or likeable. For sure, we’ll finish the series because I am constantly dying to know what happens next, but the watching experience is getting darker.
We are also still watching older crime and crime-adjacent movies, so we committed some time to Three Days of the Condor and Night Moves, both of which were mentioned on this episode of the Ringer’s Big Picture that explored, in that content-churning gamified way the Ringer somehow makes work most of the time, the movie year 1975. Both were enjoyable, but lacked clarity and Night Moves definitely went pretty seriously off the rails in its last half hour. I guess I have come to appreciate this about movies made before my time – the dialogue is less bloated with explanations of every single plot point and sometimes directors seem genuinely disinterested in holding your hand throughout all the intricacies of some plot. I am not saying that I like being confused (even though I do have a new aesthetic appreciation for the young Robert Redford), but there is some satisfaction to feeling like the movie just wants you to roll with it without making sure you appreciate every minutia of its central puzzle.
EATING
Though the weather here in New York City has been relentlessly warm and humid, I have been pretty committed to taking any excuse I can get to make a cake. For one friend’s birthday I put together a turmeric spice cake filled with lemon cardamom jelly and a coconut lemon elderberry buttercream, for another friend’s party I went with a chocolate cake, tahini raspberry coconut cream filling and a freeze-dried strawberry buttercream, and for July holidays I went with a frozen cashew and coffee-soaked cake dessert inspired by tiramisu. My go-to chocolate recipe is written out here in my it’s-January-go-vegan master document and this recipe from the Curious Chickpea is the vanilla cake I often use as starting point too.
Otherwise, I have been trying to stay away from the oven and lean on big salads or, if I really have to, pan-fried fare. We’re converging on the best time of the year as far as farmer’s markets are concerned and the temptation to just eat big platters of tomatoes with olive oil and a good sprinkle of salt for every meal is fairly non-trivial for me right now. I hope you have a chance to indulge in some fresh produce too.