#29: December Round-Up
Plus, favorite things I bought this year (because I love to read about shopping/tis the season).
If you’re reading this, please consider sending some funds to Hassan and his family of 13, as they struggle to survive a harsh winter in Gaza amidst a genocide (or you can give more broadly to provide food & water to families in North Gaza).
My Best Friends Are Married! + Housekeeping
I’m back in New York after a whirlwind 5 days in Hyderabad, India where two of my best friends got married!!! The American friends & family contingent mostly stayed in 2 apartment buildings and were escorted around via bus, which lent the whole wedding a very fun summer camp feeling. I had so much fun eating my daily morning idlis, riding $2 tuk-tuks around town, clambering around beautiful forts and temples, taking in all the color and the music and the honking, buying myself painted wooden parrots and bananas, but most of all I had fun hanging out with my friends. <3
As for newsletter stuff, I’ll have a best of 2024 mega-edition out sometime next week (I hope. It’s my birthday so cut me some slack).
Film Festatouille Commences!
I am reminding everyone again that I have a podcast called Film Fest with my good friend
, edited by Adam (titular Boyfriend, roommate), and our new season “Film Festatouille”—films about food—began to drop earlier this month. So far we’ve released: Simply Irresistible (perfectly insane season starter 1999 rom-com about a magical crab that makes Sarah Michelle Gellar good at cooking/everyone around her impossibly horny) with Abi Balingit (buy Mayumu!!), Pig (about the prettiest pig and a Naked Brother as “Amir”) with , and Burnt (bad boy chef Bradley Cooper who HATES sous vide) with (kaufer). Give ‘em a listen!Movies
New Releases
Okay, I’m actually planning on spending the last night of the year seeing Nosferatu at the Regal Union Square with “buttkicker recliners” but that aside, the only new movie I saw in theaters this month was Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths because I was out of town for the big “A Complete Babyratu Inside” drop.
Anyway, Marianne Jean-Baptiste is so great in Hard Truths (ferocious, funny, really sad) as Pansy, a tornado of depressive fury, and so is Michele Austin as her patient and well adjusted sister, but I wish I liked the movie they were in a little more.
Then I watched a bunch of 2024 movies at home:
Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker, which reimagines the Joker as a trans comedian in a surprisingly sweet coming-of-age story, is so clever and funny and inventive and there were a lot of times I wish this story wasn’t operating within the trappings of Batman, which I don’t care that much about, but I do agree with Drew that the Schumacher Batmans are Awesome.
I’m fully in the bag for Pawo Choyning Dorji, the Bhutanese director who scored his country their first Oscar nomination with 2022’s Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (good movie, title doesn’t lie about yak presence). His new movie, The Monk and the Gun builds to a very funny punchline about why the monk wants the gun that is also very movingly Buddhist. You know, I’m a Western lady so I’m always watching (and feeling moved by) movies about Jesus so it’s nice to get one about MY guy you know?
I wish playing Animal Crossing felt like The Promised Land, the handsome and gruesome Mads Mikkelsen movie about making a farm in the barren part of Denmark in 1755. I love anything about the process of building up a farm/business/girlboss monastery (in the case of Lauren Groff’s Matrix). The Danish title is “Bastarden” which is much cooler.
The best new movie of the month for me was Conner O’Malley’s 56 minute, free-on-Youtube mockumentary Rap World, about a night in the life of four dumbass friends in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania as they attempt to record a rap album. I laughed so much! This will probably show up on my end of year list so… stay tuned..
In Theaters
In preparation for Hard Truths, Adam and I went to see Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies at Lincoln Center and that’s a PERFECT movie to me! Endlessly funny, looks so good, brimming with the truest empathy because Leigh writes unbearably annoying characters who we still find love for. Two things to convince you to watch this: 1) Timothy Spall plays a portrait photographer and there is this incredible montage of his different photo subjects (people! so lovely) & 2) there’s a character in this who’s introduced via a smiling portrait of them as a kid and her aunt and uncle say “She hasn’t smiled since she took this” and it cuts to a young woman doing the most spectacular frown on the couch. I laughed so hard. Being British seems miserable. RIP Dick Pope. <3
The IFC Center plays It’s a Wonderful Life every year for Christmas and Adam and I did this two Christmases ago just the two of us and this time we got a little group of friends together to go and it was so lovely and is officially a Tradition.
After a third or fourth release of tickets, I finally snagged Interstellar IMAX tickets (like, real IMAX) and I can’t believe I was prepared to miss this!!! I adore this movie!!! It was so loud!!!!
New To Me
Adam and I saw a snippet of The Lovers on the Bridge (where Juliette Binoche and her little bald boyfriend dance along the bridge amidst fireworks) in the Criterion Channel ad for the Juliette Binoche series but the movie wasn’t on the channel anymore so we went ahead and rented it—that fireworks scene and the sheer directorial force is so overwhelming it mostly makes up for the fact that the fucked up romance at its core never rings quite true.
It was one of my New Year’s Resolutions to watch Bound (I wanted something achievable) and here I am, getting it in under the wire! It’s great! In many ways, this is what the movies are all about: fun, sexy, great looking heists. Jennifer Tilly in this movie makes me want to put on a full face of makeup every day.
Rewatches
Have you seen A Bug’s Life? That’s a masterpiece.
I wrapped all my holiday presents while watching The Holiday with Meghan and eating adobo chocolate chip cookies (again, buy Mayumu!). I hate to say I was a little less charmed than I usually am (in some ways, it is just worse Bridget Jones—cad boss boyfriend, but less charming; frazzled Englishwoman but so much SADDER) but I will never be immune to Jude Law’s runaway hairline/that voice and the super winning Eli Wallach plot.
On the Planes
I spent about 60 hours on airplanes/in transit this month and this is what I got up to:
For the first time ever, I understood that Mars Attacks! is kind of badly paced but I don’t give a shit. I love these horrible giggling little suckers. Off-putting midcentury yodeling will save us all!
Superman (1974) - absolutely coasting on that score and those faces!!!
Elf holds up every time and made me cry. The Rockefeller Center tree is up until mid-January, I am gonna walk by it soon and say hello.
I thought Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s Kill was going to be a kind of Hindi romance Train to Busan where the hero murks train car after train car of bandits to save his beautiful fiancee and that’s certainly how it starts but holy god this movie is vastl more gruesome and tragic than that. SO MANY people die. Children! Women! The bandits mourn each of their losses in a way that you’re meant to feel for! I almost couldn’t stomach it, but I do respect it.
I’ve been meaning to rewatch Edge of Tomorrow for ages—now that’s a movie!!! Incredible how it never gets boring. Hope Liman gets his groove back soon.
Adam convinced me to watch The Mule after he watched The Mule and he was so right for that. Gotta love Clint, an ancient Republican who made a movie about how much Phones Suck but also about white privilege and his regrets around family. Then followed that up this year with a movie about the moral pitfalls of prioritizing family??? I hope he lives forever, sorry.
Scarface is total bozo shit, but definitely fun! I want to go to Miami and wear a loud button-up shirt over a bikini and drink a pina colada so bad.
Last Book of the Year
This was a roundly bad and embarrassing reading year for me, numbers-wise, but at least basically everything I read was Good. My last book of the year was no exception—the Hungarian writer Magda Szabo’s stunning, surprising, intensely focused The Door, about the close but volatile relationship between a writer and her singular, eccentric housekeeper Emerence. The writer, also named Magda, obsesses over Emerence’s quick and long held grudges, her hard-won devotion to Magda, her stubbornly ill-defined politics and anti-intellectualism, her fierce attachment to (and command of) animals, the little house she won’t let anybody into, and her mysterious past. The Door was one of those novels I noticed everybody was talking about (online), which obnoxiously is a turn-off for me for New Books but when it’s an Old Book (The Door was published in 1987, its translation republished by NYRB in 2015) my interest tends to be piqued. This is kind of my favorite type of reading experience—I’m often disinclined to seek out work that isn’t obviously to my taste and the synopsis here sounded frankly boring, but by page 10 I was totally enraptured.
Theater
I saw Audra McDonald in Gypsy (thankfully before all the cancellations—I hope the girls are okay!) and I feel like that’s all I need to say: I saw Audra McDonald, six-time Tony Award winning voice of an angel and living legend, as Mama Rose in Gypsy and it was the honor of a lifetime!!!!
I do think this was a good production—I loved the way the vaudeville tap numbers and “All I Need is the Girl” were staged to show off the dancing, I loved Audra and Danny Burstein’s warm, easy, sexy chemistry, the way director George C. Wolfe allows race to infuse the book with new meaning about what it would mean for a black Mama Rose to dream like that without ever condescending to the audience and spelling it out, I loved Jordan Tyson’s squeaky voiced Baby June and Joy Woods’ transformation from tentative burlesque dancer to Josephine Baker inflected superstar. I’d also forgotten how absolutely perfect Gypsy is, both score and book. It’s hard to fuck up on foundations that strong, not that this Gypsy ever comes close.
10 Best Things I Bought This Year
A shameful thing about me is I love reading gift guides and shopping websites and various “we tested every SPF lip gloss/window AC/wide legged jeans/comfortable boots” articles ( you might be thinking “just say The Strategist” and yeah..). In a recent edition of Hung Up, Hunter Harris attributed her own obsession with gift guides to being Nosy, which is also true of me. So in the spirit of writing the kind of stuff I’d like to read, here are the best and most useful things I bought this year:
Vintage gold hoops with a little dangling heart that I bought on Etsy for $341 that I wear constantly because they’re the perfect size and very light (bonus: these beaded red hearts I also bought on Etsy for $42 that I get compliments on whenever I wear them!).
I basically refuse to wear shoes that aren’t geriatric and comfortable and that I can walk around New York in for hours and hours, which makes it relatively hard for me to buy shoes but this year I found some great ones:
the black Sam Edelman Michaela Mary Jane flats ($130) which look nice for work but are buttery soft and don’t hurt (with socks on, I can walk in these for ages; without I can last an hour or two before it chafes a bit).
i’m shocked by how good these chunky ASICS Gel-1130 ($95) look with all of my outfits but they do? They’re SO bouncy and comfortable and I wear them all the time.
i got a pair of Onitsuka Tigers in Tokyo because I wanted a pair of sneakers that looked elegant/work appropriate.
wedding season has kicked in big time for me, so I bought these Aerosoles Cosmos heels ($80) for all the parties on a Strategist rec and they are shockingly comfy. I did the Naatu Naatu dance in them this past week in India and I wasn’t in pain (but I did take them off just so I could execute all of the jumps in the dances a bit better).
A Land’s End red barn coat I bought from a street vendor in Soho for $40 after looking for one exactly like this online for the past year. I like it because it reminds me of this pic (above) of Juliette Binoche where she looks like a French teddy bear.
Lots of colorful short crew socks! This is the ideal height and it’s stupid how easy it is to wear a boring outfit but colorful socks. I bought most of mine in Japan but you get the idea.
I got bangs ($120) and I was so scared it would be a disaster but it’s not, I look awesome and maybe French (sorry I always want to look French, it’s the movies) but also kind of like the girls on all the Korean perm accounts I saved images from to show my hairdresser.
For some reason, the Church of Sweden sold me these pretty black leather gloves with embroidered horses and flowers on it for $25 instead of the $50? $70? Swedish bucks it was obviously marked as. God bless them!
I’ve been looking for a good and cozy pullover sweatshirt that isn’t too long on me with shockingly little success and finally found one when I was back in Berkeley for a wedding in the form of this fleece Champion ($65) at the Cal student store. It’s pilling real bad, but I don’t care I’m gonna buy one of those fabric shavers.
Pant shopping is a huge pain in the ass, but after years of adjusting to my post-covid weight gain, I’ve finally reassembled a decent pant collection in part thanks to these Everlane utility barrel pants ($69 on sale, I have two pairs!).
I can’t stop buying insanely basic black midi dresses at Muji ($20? $30? in Tokyo?) and Uniqlo (not precisely what I have, but the right idea) because it’s really easy to call it a day in a black dress/ASICs/hoop earrings/colorful socks.
A 1ml sample of Monsoon Tea by d’Annam from Scent Split ($4.99). Every once in a while, I treat myself to a couple of perfume samples and my favorite from the last round was this clean/pretty/subtle tea scent. It doesn’t last terribly long but I want a bigger one anyway. I also really like d’Annam’s In the Garden (romantic floral without any powderiness, which I hate), White Rice (soft and sweet; what I hope babies smell like when they’re not shitting) and Vietnamese Coffee (strong, cozy, holiday-ish).
Also here’s what I bought in Hyderabad at the Shilparamam Craft Village:
No link because they aren’t sold on Etsy anymore but they were: Oscar De La Renta Antiqued Gold Tone Textured Hoops with Removable Dangling Heart Charms Earrings
rip to a real one https://youtu.be/n_w4v6dwwVw?si=rTKW6pNcEALHqgBv