Vicsek Model
On reciprocity, the woods, and a card game
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VICSEK MODEL*
Trešeta is a game you play with a partner, as does your opponent. In a game between ideal players, the kind that my father seemed to always be preparing my brother and me for, each pair of partners would only exchange two words: piko and strišo. For the most hardcore of players, the two can be further reduced to wordless motions: a quick but loud rap on the table with a player’s knuckles or a dragging of a card along the table in an elongated U-shape. Mastering this barebones communication with your partner, alongside counting how many cards of each suit have fallen before you play another, is key for winning the game.
Piko, pronounced pee-kho with sharp and explosive p’s and k’s, signals to your partner that you have some strong cards in some suit, and in trešeta you always follow suit, but not enough to dominate the game by yourself. When you say piko you are saying to your partner “I am strong in this suit, but I need your help.” You signal piko over a weak card that is in the same suit where you also have some strong cards. Ideally, your partner responds to your signal by throwing a card that wins the round. This earns them the right to start the next round and they put down another card from the suit you were signaling about, setting everything up for you to throw one of your strong cards and win the round for your team again
Strišo, a word that has more of a swish and swoosh to it just like the associated hand motion, a strhee-shoh, communicates that you understands what your partner can and wants to do, but you need them to have patience and make space for you to run the game for a bit before they can execute their hand. Strišo says “I see your strengths and plans and I will return to supporting you as soon as I do as much as I can with the cards that I have been dealt.” You are allowed to follow a piko with a strišo, for instance, throwing down some of your own strong cards before setting up your partner with the card they need a few rounds later, at a slight delay to what they may have expected. When this signal comes through, and especially when both are employed in sequence, a team can win five or six rounds of the ten round game with very little other strategizing.
***
The game of trešeta has been in my family for a few generations. In my childhood memories, it was most played when we visited the cabin in the woods that belongs to my grandmother - my nonna. It’s played with so-called Italian cards which sport more colorful and more cryptic suits than the more common hearts, spades or diamonds. Though it is commonly heralded as one of Italy’s most popular games and dates back to the 18th century when it may have also spilled to the coast of Croatia, Slovenia and Montenegro, I have yet to meet someone who knows how to play in the United States. And I certainly grew up with Croatian classmates that only learned how to play it on the beach, from friends, instead of at the family table. You could tell by how they said “re” instead of “kralj”, Italian and Croatian words for the card that bears the image of the king of a suit, respectively. I was a terrible beach player, largely because I was always trying to play with my bullies, but after all the many nights in the cabin, I knew exactly what a proper game should look like.
When I was very young I was watching my grandparents and their siblings play under the fluttering light of petrol lanterns, enveloped in the smell of the stuff and cigarette smoke. Later my father and uncle jumped in, each partnering with a parent, and we bought a generator for the cabin to extend playtime and minimize hazards. For a long time I wasn’t a sufficiently mature player to sit at the adults table and only played when someone older wanted us kids to practice. Once, my uncle yelled at one of my younger cousins so meanly during a practice game that I swore it all off forever. Of course, I came back to it as a part of my heritage and a ground to prove myself as an adult; the mix of nostalgia and the childish need to show my family that I am not a child anymore (and I have a math degree!) were always going to get the best of me.
***
I married an American man with some Italian blood and lots of family lore about it, but none about Italian cards as I know them. His family plays pinochle, a game beloved by Italian Americans on the East Coast, but actually of a German origin. It’s played with a visibly different deck of cards and the machinations of it are different as well, like players calling bids at the very beginning and the trump suit being chosen by a player before the rounds actually start.
Watching pinochle being played is like watching a movie in a language I don’t really understand, but that occasionally has the same cadence of a language I am fluent in. I’ve tried to play a few times while we lived with my in-laws during lockdown, but forgot the rules almost immediately after. For my partner, the situation is more dramatic because he does get invited to the trešeta table whenever we visit my parents, and he receives that invitation in a language that is literally foreign for him.
We took the excuse of all the holidays packed at the end of December, as well as the occasion of my birthday, to spend a few weeks with my family in Croatia and when the celebratory chaos died down, my dad and my grandma hosted us in the cabin in the woods. Unseasonably warm January days were sticky with tiny rain droplets that were suspended in the air more than they were falling down, and obscured with a thin fog that, in the absence of a bright midday sun, stuck around from morning to night. Together with my brother and my father’s fuzzy, goofy old dog Kika we retraced some trails and hikes of my childhood in the mornings, read books in the afternoons and played trešeta all evening, a few times way past the edge of the next day, raucously pushing up my nearly octogenarian nonna’s bedtime.
My spouse and I alternated playing with my father as a sort of periodically switching partnership. Rolling his r’s in the proper Croatian way, my American boy would say “jako dobro”, very good, at a successful play then turn to me to ask, in his Brooklyn-tinged English, whether we should play the suit of špade or baštoni next. We won more often than I expected.
Most of my memories of visiting the cabin in the woods include my late grandfather. He was both a gentle and an angry man, something like an economist in his professional life, or so I imagine because he never talked about it enough to make me think knowing the details of his profession mattered for understanding him, and a singer, a hunter and a nature lover in the part of his life that I got to participate in the most. He had mostly stopped hunting by the time I was old enough to form memories, but he would still sometimes buy hunting magazines and his old hunting club would send him calendars featuring gorgeous animals that one could potentially hunt. He loved to cut out the animals and paste them into little notebooks for me to draw around and write their names in shaky cursive.
When we visited him and my nonna in their apartment in the big city, he’d often be watching nature documentaries on Italian TV. A deer would be prancing around piles of snow and barren trees under the careful direction of an Italian dub of Richard Attenborough; my grandfather spoke the language just enough to enjoy it so he’d be deeply invested. He loved the part of the city where he lived out his last decade or so, but he always wanted to spend sunny days in the woods, saying that it was a place where everyone can do whatever it is that they enjoy. On bright spring days, we’d drive up there and find him sitting on a bench, one that either he or my father made, in front of the cabin, looking unbothered.
With him in mind, I packed Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass to read during our early January trip to the cabin, thinking that he would have wanted me to read a book about honoring nature while feeling the embrace of a piece of nature that has virtually always been with me. In one chapter, Kimmerer writes of cooking leeks harvested in a forest near her home for her daughters and wanting to do so so that the two of them would “always carry the substance of home in the mineral of their bones.” All of my grandparents have always grown something, my mother’s parents especially as they inherited olive trees, a very diverse garden and a small vineyard, and I feel like the experience of the woods is an integral ingredient of who I am as much as the nutrients from all those vegetables.
Kimmerer is a PhD trained botanist and a professor whose work has been published in peer reviewed journals like those that my own job hinges on. She is also an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a poet. In other words, her language is richer than the language of science. Going beyond using western science’s mechanistic and objectifying, deconstruction-prone language without forgetting the lessons it packages, she speaks from a place of traditional knowledge as well as love and beauty. Braiding Sweetgrass is a book about plants and ecology, but it is also a book about motherhood, heritage and gratitude. It reminded me that despite all of my anxiety about the environment and my quasi-academic contemplation of being a more responsible consumer, I still live in a big city, keep my hands free of dirt except when I cut farmers market cabbage or mushrooms, and that I rarely stop to think about how my being alive has so much to do with nature extending something like love towards me. In the end, even though I read Kimerrer’s gorgeous book nominally in the woods, I still read it inside, under battery-powered or generator-powered lights, with my phone just grazing my fingertips at all times, and the earth’s stickiness and dust locked away behind lace-adorned windows.
***
The best case scenario for a game of trešeta is when there is something like reciprocity between the partnered players. For piko and strišo to work, both have to be able to give and take, to meet the other where they are while still bringing something of their own to the game. If one partner has all the strong cards and the other’s hand is weak the coded communication almost immediately breaks down - calls for reinforcements or patience both become useless.
Strišo, the wait-for-me-I’ll-come-to-you-soon signal is always the more difficult one to master for a new player in part because the instinct when you are learning a trick-taking game is never to wait and always to take. But the game in which this signal is never employed is often a weaker game than the one where it is because, again, a single player by themselves cannot simply do everything. It’s a bit odd to claim that a game that takes only ten quick rounds at a time is one where you have to “think of the long game”, but this is often true. If you get a good enough sense of what your partner can do, you can sometimes make seemingly silly sacrifices, let go of cards that carry lots of points or have a high offensive value and still emerge victorious. I was a fairly clumsy trešeta player when I was young because I wanted to rack up points quickly and didn’t have the patience to put some more nuanced thoughts into how much partnership and reciprocity influence the gameplay.
Through her exploration of picking sweetgrass, making maple syrup from trees in her backyard, making baskets from black ash, clearing a pond on her property and much more, Kimmerer repeatedly returns to ideas of gratitude and reciprocity that are core to indigenous teachings. She argues not for restoring the natural world by letting it be, but rather by considering ourselves to be part of it with no more special privileges than buffalo or maples. Based on years of elder wisdom, communal memory and traditional practice that are so many that a few centuries of peer review could never compare, she offers gentle teachings about only taking from the world what is given and what is needed, and tending to those that you want to take from repeatedly. Harvesting plants is like receiving gifts from them, unique gifts that reflect their unique brand of performing the kind of magic that turns inanimate elements from the environment into food, Kimmerer explains. In her tradition, a gift comes with a responsibility to give back through using it well and offering something in return to the gift giver. The gifts she receives from nature are not static, they comprise a moving equilibrium, an ever-shifting sense of balance between the giver and the taker.
In one chapter she describes never picking more than half of a sweetgrass patch. Later, one of her graduate students shows, using the format of empirical science, that an unpicked patch never does as well as one picked from according to these tenets. Throughout many more, Kimmerer describes asking plants for permission to be harvested, like with the leeks that she chooses not to pick when their bulbs look too slender. When the leeks say to wait for them, she does. When they seem strong enough to play along with her gameplan, she still asks for their participation first.
But the stakes of not entering a reciprocal relationship with nature, a partnership with all that is living and more, are clearly much higher than that of a card game.
***
While I was walking around the woods during the day, before reading or playing, I was consistently saddened by finding the spots that seemed to hold so much magic when I was young desolate, rotting or otherwise transformed in ways that take them closer to death than abundance.
A forest that seemed so deep and dark when me and my brother were young was now split in two thanks to a muddy path carved by big wheels of big trucks. All around it, trees were cut down mercilessly, their smaller branches left in loose piles because their commercial value is too low to justify dragging them out. I’ve helped the men of my family cut down trees for firewood over the years, even grew up with a wooden stove in our apartment in a small coastal city where no one's even heard of central air, but we never left the woods looking like a boneyard. We’d collect the smallest of the branches and use them for kindling. It suffocates the growth of the forest’s young to leave it covered in an inordinate number of its rotting dead, someone explained to me once as we worked.
“Maybe this was done by someone who is stealing,” my brother offered while we trudged over the muddy truck tire marks, “you wouldn’t do this to your own land.”
A trail up a small hill we always hiked as kids lay so unkempt that we weren’t sure we’d find it. In a few places, traditional painted marks on trees seemed to be replaced by plastic ties on nearby branches, but we couldn’t agree on whether those were actually trash. Descending down the other side of the hill we hit another unnaturally clear part of the forest, covered in gravel and marked with red and yellow plastic pillars. This one was made while we were young, to accompany some sort of a gas line, and the woods just never managed to take it back. Our dog refused to drink from a nearby pond that hunters built for the deer and boar they will later set out to kill.
***
And then there was the weather.
Had I ever asked to watch a movie or a show on a trip to the woods as a teenager, I would have gotten chewed out for being disconnected from nature, but now my father pulls out a tablet at 7 pm and puts on the daily news show on Croatia’s oldest TV channel. One of those broadcasts devotes a segment to a ski race being canceled in the country’s capital because the weather was too warm even for artificial snow. A technician explained that their state of the art fluffy white stuff could not handle two days of racing. My dad and my nonna shook their heads at the small screen, muttering about how we’ll never have real winters again. They both live on the Adriatic coast, my dad still in the apartment where I grew up, so their experience of winter has mostly been mild. Except in the woods.
I have exactly one memory of trying to visit the cabin during the winter and it involved snow so deep that we joked about losing my then very young brother in the trenches we barely dug to make it from the highway to my nonna’s property. When we entered the cabin itself, my mom spilled juice over the dining room table and it immediately froze into a thin layer of shimmering ice. The memory is bright in my mind because I never knew more snow than that until I moved to upstate New York at age sixteen. Now, my family members seem to agree, snow will become even more of a thing that pops up in my American life only. During one of the days that we were spending in the woods I got an Instagram message that casually referenced the weather back in New York City being spring-like to a crazy extent. When we went for a walk later, everything was sort of wet, but I got away with just wearing a t-shirt and the top of my tracksuit.
While there is broad acknowledgement that the climate has changed and changed for the worse, my family members avoid conversations about any possible reasons why. They eat meat for every meal. Even my mom who proclaims herself obsessed with recycling choses a five minute drive in her car over a fifteen minute walk to the grocery store. My grandma suggests I ask the magazine I work for to transfer me to the London newsroom so that I can fly home more often. It’s another year where there is a lot of hand wringing over me being vegan and no one knows whether I will eat bread or chocolate, but no one asks me why I’ve chosen to live this way. The indifference to why what is happening to the Earth is happening rings in my ears why we all collectively say nothing when we meet at the dinner table.
I have seen this before, the lack of care that allows an existence where you just roll with the punches and rarely do more than shake your head in what is more of an annoyance than grief. I’ve heard it in the voices of coworkers that will consider veganism “only when the fake cheese gets good”, friends defending endless deliveries as opposed to walking to wherever a truck would have to go, and organizations' decrees that they’ll fly you out across many miles even for just a day or two.
We stay inside the cabin more than we used to. We read and play with our phones more than we used to. We reserve our thinking about what it means to work together only for the card table.
***
The third chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass is nominally about wild strawberries. As a child Kimmerer picked them often and used them to make a strawberry shortcake that would then be gifted to her father. I recognized her description of looking for the tiny fruits before they are quite ripe, hiding underneath leaves you quickly learn to recognize by their scalloped edges. My family never called them “divlje jagode” or wild strawberries, we only ever called them “jagodice” or “tiny strawberries” and their season was a big deal while my brother, my cousins and I were also small. We’d come to the woods intent to look for them and would be heartbroken if there were only a few or if they were still at an unripe pale green, not yet ready to give away their full sweetness. What you wanted was to find a big patch, preferably in a meadow rather than by the side of a trail, fill up a small pail or a large glass jar, then bring them home and eat them. In my family, the tiny strawberries never made it into cakes because our tiny fingers were too quick to jam them into our tiny mouths.
I started coming to the woods mostly with my father and he was always putting up fences, fixing something around the house or building new portions of some porch, shed or fireplace so he couldn’t really participate in picking anything. But he encouraged it; he wanted us kids to be the kind of kids that know how to find and identify wild fruits and who were not afraid to get dirty while doing so. My earliest memories of the place include him and my grandparents, my nonno sitting in front of the house, my nonna feeding me tiny carrots she grew through the window of the shed that we call the “summer kitchen” and cook in when it gets too warm for burning firewood inside the cabin. My grandma remembers the tiny carrots, and she still grows some, alongside kale and chard and tomatoes that are more and more starved for water by the unprecedentedly warm summers. But I haven’t picked a tiny strawberry in a very long time. As I grew older, the patches disappeared because the woods became more and more strewn with logging debris and previously well maintained meadows got consumed by weeds.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, the wild strawberries are a gift that nature gives to Kimmerer and one that she passes on to her father. She recounts picking strawberries to earn some change at a business in town and understanding that those are a different kind of strawberry all together.
“I knew the difference: In the fields behind my house, the berries belonged to themselves. At this lady’s roadside stand, she sold them for sixty cents a quart,” Kimmerer writes.
Her chapter about wild strawberries is really a chapter about gifts - the strawberries gift themselves to her so she can gift them to her father and maintain something like an ecosystem of shared wealth. She writes: “If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become”
Looking back on my childhood, I understand that though my family never had much material wealth, we were rich in how spending time in nature was part of our routines and heritage. My mother’s parents still grow as many vegetables as they can and now that I live in a place where I am constantly telling friends and acquaintances that I am “lucky and privileged to shop at a farmer’s market all year round” I understand the meals they offer me when I visit as a real richness too. While gratitude is important, I also can’t escape the fact that my being grateful is inevitably tied with the market system I operate within where a trip, a piece of land, and a bundle of greens all cost money. Even my being vegan, something that is deeply tied to the care for the Earth for me is a decision about consumption, about buying and not buying. No matter how much I talk about wanting that consumption to be seasonal and local, the realities of living in a city make Trader Joe’s and CTown irresistible more often than not.
Though Kimmerer does write about the importance of being the same kind of consumer that one may want to be as a harvester or gatherer, noting that “..we consumers have a potent tool of reciprocity right in our pockets. We can use our dollars as the indirect currency of reciprocity,” and warning that “it can be too easy to shift the burden of responsibility to the coal company or the land developers'' while forgetting our own complicity, she is still wary of buying wild things instead of meeting them where they are and engaging them in conversation. She writes that it is hard to recognize produce, or a wild plant, as a gift when it is presented under harsh light and wrapped in plastic.
And so, sitting in our cabin reading Kimmerer’s book and half-listening to news spilling out of a plastic square most likely manufactured through exploitative land use and labor practices I started to worry. I started to worry that I have, and maybe we have all, forgotten about the sense of richness that she describes, the one that has nothing to do with owning things, the one that goes beyond indirect reciprocity.
When we climbed on top of Velo Lukovišće, the hill that seemed so mountain-like when I was young that my father deemed the hike to be something I’d have to turn a whole six years old to attempt, and the hill on whose top I lost my first tooth, stuck in a sandwich featuring my nonna’s famous homemade bread, I tried to take a second to be grateful and consider the hill’s gifts. My dad’s dog had made it to the rocky top with us and I caught a glimpse of my brother trying to feed her water out of his palm. When I asked to take a picture of him, he tossed his arm over the dog and smiled widely. She extended her pink tongue towards her nose then looked at me too, with warm black eyes peeking underneath unruly white fur. She looked happy to be there, standing on rocks and pale grass, a sea of trees and the actual sea in the background, another warm body there to give care.
Looking at the picture later, I was touched by the tenderness between the two, and grateful for the myriad of nature’s miracles that made everything my phone captures, and so much more that it cannot capture, possible. I will not be there to see the now barren trees on top of this hill turn green, but when I see their counterparts in the city thousands of miles away, I will remind myself that they are a gift and that, as such, I owe them more attention than just hurriedly walking by.
Best,
Karmela
*The Vicsek model is a mathematical model that describes the behavior of simple particles that can propel themselves at a constant speed. Under different conditions, like there being random fluctuations in the system, the particles can align with each other and move as a collective.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING
In addition to a few news items, this year so far I published two preview articles concerning exciting physics coming up in 2023: this one about an incredibly powerful x-ray laser in California and this one about an incredibly cold detector for gravitational waves in France.
Whenever I write about this sort of “big machine science” I think of a history of science professor I had in college and who was always loudly suspicious about whether the scientific community actually needs this expensive mode of research. Some of their objections were probably worthwhile, but speaking to scientists that work with these big machines over the last few years has made it harder for me to think that they were fully correct. These two particular machines I wrote about while looking at the year ahead both stand a chance to make a real difference in how we see some of the smallest and fastest processes in nature, like electrons moving around in materials sensitive to light, and largest and most cosmic ones, like gravitational waves spreading from some distant, dramatic black hole movement or collision.
READING
This essay by Anne Helen Petersen about going through random items she saved as a teenager and re-remembering her teenage self through the process. She writes
All archives are, to some extent, narratives: edited stories of the self or others. What I kept then was a story of myself that felt precious and still, at that point, untold. I wasn’t saving in the hopes of someone else discovering who I was. I think it was much more a case of ensuring my future self’s attention. The artifacts were the grammar that made the story readable.
Our tweets, our text messages, our Slacks, our Discord, our Instagram Stories, our Facebook posts, our Livejournal entries — they are us, and they are not ours. They might be part of a data archive of “us” that advertisers buy and sell, but apart from the most scrupulous downloaders and PDF-makers and organizers, they will not be part of our story.
And, later, as poignantly
We are so much more than what we keep. But what we keep anchors us when and where memory inevitably fails. You don’t need a mom’s basement to put aside the things that make you feel like you — to begin or continue to preserve the language that future you will one day read.
I am very susceptible to the idea that I can catalog all of my past selves in my social media feeds yet very critical of my equally strong tendency to never throw anything out so Peterson’s reflections gave me lots to think about.
This somewhat harrowing Rumpus essay by Monica Prince on gendered violence, poverty and healing told through the frame of managing a bad gin hangover. I was drawn into it as I am also a gin drinker, although a very cautious one and with a somewhat more expensive taste, but the bigger themes of Prince’s story are also familiar. It is a story of being in pain and trying to get away from it, a compelling if hard to read narrative of something close to healing. Prince writes
“I want to believe that, seven years after I learned to drink gin, the only reason I punish myself by still drinking New Amsterdam, a decent gin in a glass bottle at a competitive price point, is because I haven’t learned forgiveness for every version of me that chose violence in alcohol over grace in sobriety. I haven’t learned that the residue left from old selves isn’t a tattoo but a UV stamp from a dance club that disappears after enough scrubbings.”
This essay from Huw Lemmey’s utopian drivel, on finding comfort and direction in the past and embracing a view of the world that makes kindness as visible as those overly memorable moments of hurt that can be so hard to let go of. Lemmey writes
Yet for every cruelty we experience in the street, we have witnessed 100 kindnesses. For every person who lets a door shut in our face, many more have held it open. For every time our pocket was picked, someone else has handed us something we dropped, and so on. The world operates through a marvelous degree of cooperation.
I think it’s the same with the past. The urge of the majority of those who came before us has been to pass down something they have learned about the world. I’m not just referring to the idea of a familial inheritance here, or in fact, not referring to that at all. I’m referring to the musicians, to poetry, sciences and so on; each one an attempt to beat a path for the future, so say I went here, I felt this, to say “don’t hunt these animals in their breeding months - you’ll thank for me for this later”.
And then later, with the talent for mixing the profane and the profound that makes this one of my favorite newsletters:
The unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a medieval pedagogical text for a young contemplative, said that speech is a bodily activity performed by the “blabryng fleschely tongue” and thus cannot communicate the meaning derived from contemplative activity. Doubly, our public sphere is still defined by pugnacious intellectual conflict masquerading as debate, and flim-flam like belief is chum for a hungry school. To talk is to take a risk. The contemplative, hell, the silent, requires work and empathy.
Contemplation is a bodily activity, though; yoga, prayer, fucking, and walking are all practices that reveal things to us. I love the blabryng and I love the fleschely.
These poems that were generated by an AI based on a chapbook by Aerik Francis, a really talented poet I went to college with. I love his idea of collaborating with technology instead of using it to perform ethically dubious labor that uses and misuses someone else’s work. Aerik’s handles online are always some variation of phaentom and I kept thinking about it as I was clicking in order to get more poems to be served up to me by the machine that I am using and the machine that the poet used - they do all feel somewhat haunted, almost in the vein of that William Gibson-esque magical realism where dangerous technology is substituted in for magic. Here is an example:
the Revolution will not be televised
we are to bear witness
our Revolution is being televised
same old dirty
pervert tactics being employed
the Revolution will be airbrushed, bled & ex-blamed
blame the Revolution
we are to bear witness
we as bare witnesses
restless / breathless / we cry foul
Another Substack favorite of mine, John Paul Brammer of ¡Hola Papi!, recently shared some advice on writing. In addition to some very practical notes and some very clear-eyed commentary on the publishing industry, he offered the following, which I took some comfort in
Did Shakespeare not write cringe? Have literary empires not been built on cringe? Is cringe not a basic element of human existence?
And, as another piece of advice regarding finding your “voice”
What’s really helped me is to think, “the ‘weird’ is your friend.” The blank page is not the place to be shy, and there are times while writing that a strange impulse will arise, or an interesting alleyway will call out to me between sentences, and I have to be brave enough to follow it. If it ends up being goofy or not working, I can always edit it out, but I do think voice can often be found in those unconventional moments in your process.
LISTENING
A lot of Radio Rijeka, my father’s favorite station that soundtracked so much of my childhood. Their promos still live in my head for free, as does the frequency at which they broadcast.
The latest record by the Icelandic black metal outfit Misþyrming that an old friend recommended on social media. They were right to underline it as a favorite, it’s heavy and loud without losing a sense of melody and avoids the screechiness of some of the more extreme black metal without losing the genre’s essential energy. On a similar note I quite liked Battlespells by Warmoon Lord which is certainly doing a fairly specific bit, but goes hard nonetheless.
Natural Brown Prom Queen by Sudan Archives, an upbeat, somewhat dirty record dense with samples and references. Listening to it goes by surprisingly quickly until you find yourself looping it for seamless hours of the same kind of satisfyingly overstimulating blur that you can at times get from scrolling through TikTok.
WATCHING
We accidentally rewatched the first Mad Max movie on Croatian TV on a random Thursday night and I was both amazed by the film’s unbeatable post apocalyptic punk aesthetic with just a dash of fetish gear and queer-coding and yet again terrified by how much cruelty it constantly throws at the viewer.
Lots of Midsomer Murders and Agatha Christie TV movies because both of my parents’ preferred comfort watching is British crime fiction. I am not immune to this and will certainly watch the upcoming season of Slow Horses with little hesitation, but the somewhat more formulaic, less prestige-y content of these two shows reminded me that whodunnits are fun by virtue of being puzzles even if nuance and finesse are sometimes missing form their conception or execution. I have a pretty terrible track record with guessing who the killer is in any given episode of any given show. The lack of class and race consciousness, or the over exaggeration of it, and the inevitable endorsement of the police as unambiguously good also now bother me more than they used to. Still, I stayed up late at least once during our time in Croatia just to see how a baroque murder would get disentangled.
The Woman in the Window, an Amy Adams vehicle which seems to be made with ingredients for a solid thriller, but falls short because it cannot decide how over the top it really wants to be. Adams plays a therapist that is experiencing agoraphobia and, while staying in her house for weeks at a time, thinks she has seen a murder in a neighbor's home across the street. The Hitchcock reference here is obvious, but it is sloppy at first and completely consumed by the many red herrings and erratic twists later. The tone of the film is really what shifted too much for me to actually care about its characters, and though my partner and I did engage in some “but did this actually actually happen” speculation which maybe says something about the interestingness of the script, ultimately I felt like everything about it was a little too forced and emotionally underdeveloped.
EATING
My grandma’s strudel and my mom’s donuts.
A cake heavily inspired by this recipe but with hazelnuts and walnuts in place of pecans and a heavy layer of chocolate frosting all over everything.
Lots of cheeseless pizza and pasta with mushrooms during a trip to Tuscany.
I want to cook everything from Hannah Che’s gorgeous cookbook that my partner gifted me for Christmas, but have only made the scallion oil noodles and the smashed cucumbers so far. Luckily, both were fantastic.
This breaded cauliflower in spicy sauce by Jeeca Uy where the sauce is always beloved. I never actually fry anything here - I pour a good layer of oil into a cookie sheet with a raised edge and put it in the oven while it is coming to temperature then add the breaded cauliflower and watch it sort-of-fry-sort-of-bake until properly crispy.