A good friend recommended this series and it did not disappoint. Raising a teeny ’tini to one of the most sincere and moving shows I’ve watched in a long time.
January 2025
Smithereens
Slung low, charmingly frantic, seaweed everywhere (in a good way).
Balthazar
“22 Hours in Balthazar,” New York Times:
Alvino is flying, his left hand’s fingers imperceptibly rotating the potato between upward strokes of the peeler, blindly flipping the naked spuds over his shoulder into the tub. I pull up my phone’s stopwatch to time him for a minute, treating each potato as a lap: his slowest is 10.7 seconds, his quickest 6.4. Alvino, a shy man from the Dominican Republic, has been doing this same job for 15 years. “Like anything else, it was difficult at first,” he says, but he caught his rhythm after a couple of months. Peralta has been at it for 14 years.
Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing:
My idea of a perfect night is a good play and dinner at Orso.
Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally…:
Restaurants are to people in the eighties what theater was to people in the sixties.
Ephron’s last line here (delivered through two characters) is pitch-perfect irony. You can visit a Parisian brasserie in many cities that are not Paris. Is that theater? No: a play is theater; a french fry is just a potato. But on their best days, restaurants like Balthazar deliver a tiny portion of theater’s magic.
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
A student asked Donald Barthelme how he might become a better writer. Barthelme advised him to read through the whole history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics up through the modern-day thinkers. The student wondered how he could possibly do this. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping,” Barthelme said. “Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature.” Also art, he amended. Also politics.