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I posted these on Twitter and immediately thought that I should have just written a Tumblr post. And so here we are, back again, posting a list of everything I watched this year. I’ve been doing this for about five years or so now and I really have come to love looking at the spreadsheet at the end of the year. I always think I’ll fill out the year, director, cast, and a lil review of each one. I never, ever get that far, which always bums me out a bit. But even just completing the list of everything I watched in a year makes my serotonin levels go whirr, so. 

I know I should probably just give in to Letterbox’d which would do three quarters of that work for me but there’s something about the spareness of the spreadsheet I can’t tear myself away from. Who knows, maybe I’ll find a balance that works for me. 

Anyway, I mostly skipped new movies this year. Of the six or so 2020 movies I watched probably my favourite was On the Rocks. Which is surprising to me and you and probably Sofia Coppola too. It felt so isolating and lonely but beautiful and hopeful and had a lot of really loving shots of driving in New York and restaurants and I watched it the week before when I would normally meet my friends in New York for our yearly Thanksgiving trips to meet up with Jeff and Andy. I watched Palm Springs right after a breakup and something about the eternal loop together vs. potentially blowing up eternity so you can move forward together of it all really struck a nerve. Let Them All Talk charmed the hell out of me and really affected me once I got over the initial shock of seeing a bunch of people I root for on a cruise ship. It made me want to call and check in on old friends. Mank made me want to go sober and do a lot of yoga and get really into incense and inner peace, more so than I sort of already am. 

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Modern Romance, 1981 (dir. Albert Brooks)

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How to Do Quarantine Yoga in 10 Easy Steps

10) Clear a space for your yoga mat and lay it out.

9) Worry about how you haven’t rrrreeeeeeeeeally ever cleaned your home yoga mat, despite the fact you diligently and intensely clean the mats you use in class,  before and after. They’re only YOUR germs, right? They can’t hurt you... right?

8) Change into home yoga clothes, whatever works for you. You don’t even need to wear clothes necessarily, but close the blinds if you choose that route.

7) Bring your laptop down to your yoga mat.

6) Check the news, your bank balance, maybe do a little shopping.

5) Read an essay about something you didn’t even know or care about before sitting on the mat.

4) Get distracted by how dirty your floors are.

3) Finally bring up your yoga video.

2) Repeat step six.

1) Blog this blog.

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I was about to have stability, health insurance, an OK savings account. This is the part that’s hardest to swallow. I completely reorganized my life six or seven years ago and went back to school and finished and struggled to get my footing in a new city and find a job. I finally had something. I had a job and friends and JUST got health insurance. I had no credit card debt and good credit. Good credit! For the first time since I was eighteen. I was about to get new glasses and start therapy and see a foot doctor about my flat feet. I’m fortunate that I am healthy and the people around me are healthy, that all I’ve lost is possibility. And that should come back if we can get back to normal. Those privileges are not lost on me. And yet it still feels like, has felt like, I’m Wile E. Coyote right when he looks down and realizes he’s run off the cliff, the ground is gone, and it’s about to get bad. 

That maybe makes it sound like I’m depressed or something but mostly I’m just as shaken as everyone else. I’ve mostly maintained my sanity? I guess that’s for my roommates to decide, really. I’m not eating my fingernails or talking to my lamps. (Yet...) I cook and clean and watch movies and do crosswords and make bread but mostly watch Bon Appetit videos and old episodes of Workaholics. I know that, odds being what they are, privileges etc., things likely won’t get bad for me like they have or will for others. The uncertainty and helplessness aren’t necessarily fun, though. They knot your stomach at a time when any sort of physical pain triggers a minor hysteria you have to talk yourself out of. 

No, I don’t have the Coronavirus because I went for a run, I assure myself, I’m just out of shape. 

Are minor panic attacks symptoms? I ask, begging my heart rate to go back down.

Is a headache a symptom of Covid-19 or am I just hungover from drinking three beers last night? I’m always just hungover from drinking three beers last night.

Which: talk to the bartenders in your life. If they’re anything like me, and a small sample of my coworkers, we’re all kind of fucked up right now. Because of everything, yes, but also because, well. We’re getting three squares a day. We’re going to bed early and waking up early. If we see the sunrise it’s not because we stumbled out of the bar after a few post-shift pints. We decided to wake up that early. We’re drinking less. We all have for the first time in a long time a healthy, regular sleep schedule and diet. I miss my homies and I miss the work and I miss the fun but I can’t say to you in all honesty that I won’t miss this, too.

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“All Val Kilmer’s stories are like that, told with that same dash of preordained kismet. He was traveling in Africa in 1994 when he decided to spend a morning exploring a bat cave; later that day, literally seriously that day, he was inspired to call his agent, who had been trying to contact Kilmer for weeks to see if he was interested in playing the role of Batman, now that Michael Keaton was hanging it up. Another story: In the days before he set eyes for the first time on his (now ex-) wife, Joanne Whalley, he dreamed that he met the woman he was destined for and woke up and immediately wrote a poem called, “We’ve Just Met but Marry Me Please.” Then right after that, he went to London, and while he was there, he saw a play, and Whalley was in it. He was so taken with her that he followed her to the pub after-party just so he could look at her. This was crazy even for him, so he made no move. But two years later, in 1987, she would be randomly coincidentally serendipitously cast opposite him in “Willow,” and they would end up married. So yes, he can talk, and it’s such a miracle that he has these abilities, because if you have enough faith, you’ll see how every part of your life is just a piece of a bigger part of your life, and nothing is an accident, and everything is good.”

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BODY HEAT

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What I’d Give for a Little Madness Right Now

It didn’t sink in until this morning that The Last Sunday, for us here in Halifax, would have normally been Selection Sunday. Today would have been Madness Eve, and tomorrow I would cancel all of my plans to park myself on a couch or a barstool somewhere and watch college basketball for something like twelve hours. Did I know anything about the teams or players beforehand? Not at all. It never mattered. And I’d do the same thing on Friday, on Saturday, and again on Sunday. It’d be glorious.

Which is maybe why Joel Anderson’s tribute to what we’re missing, and what we’ve lost, by not having the tournament this year really hit hard. It is about the basketball, the triumph and loss and surprise that comes every year. We lose the underdog upsets, the 12s over 5s, and hell, maybe even another 16 over a 1, though probably not. We miss out on Kansas dominating and inevitably showing up in the Final Four. We miss out on what would have inevitably been a bad year for Duke, and the schadenfreude that would bring, strong enough to power the earth for an extra five or six days. 

And then there’s the complicated case of Liberty University and its star, Caleb Homesley, who seemed poised to set the tournament on fire, after three seasons with season ending injuries, and then a flare of promise last year. He announced himself by pushing Liberty past Mississippi State, a massive upset, but we’ll never know what he could have done now: 

I hadn’t thought much about Homesley and Liberty again until last week, when I realized the Flames went 30-4 and earned an automatic berth into the tournament. Homesley emerged as Liberty’s best player this season, averaging team-highs in points and assists. Despite the script on the front of his jersey, it would’ve been nice to see what Homesley had in store for an encore. But now, his college story will end with the anonymity it started in, which is sad. The underdog getting his moment in the sun is what March Madness is supposed to be all about.

The biggest loss, though, the one that really hit me, is the camaraderie the tournament brings with it every year:

Even in years when we aren’t facing an unprecedented national crisis, the tournament, which was supposed to start this week, has always been a rallying and bonding exercise for both serious sports fans and their office mates who couldn’t care less but are drawn to the friendly, low-stakes competition of a bracket. What is March without getting to mock the friend who picked an Ivy League program to pull off an upset based on name recognition alone? In a time of social isolation, all of the little things we used to do—our mundane interactions, the contact we took for granted—feel weighted with meaning. Following the tournament was a fun little diversion before we needed those little diversions in the worst way.

I’d stopped filling out brackets the last few years. I hated losing, lol, but mostly I found the chaos more fun, and easier to appreciate, if I didn’t have rooting interest. All the upsets were easy to cheer for with no money or bragging rights on the line. If I switched to an upset in progress, I didn’t have to look at my phone to double check I was rooting against my own interests. I just got to ride the waves as they came. The tournament was a bit more isolated for me, not by much, just a bit. I still clowned my friends’ brackets. But now I’d give my left arm for something so low stakes, so simple, so communal. 

My dad called last night. We don’t talk much, and that’s partially my fault. When we do it’s about sports or the news or his part in whatever family gossip we’re all simultaneously not talking to each other about. It’s pretty low stakes. He’ll try to impart some fatherly wisdom, and I’ll listen, or not. Usually not. It’s nice that he tries though. But last night he was contemplative and reflective. He wants to go fishing when all this is over. We haven’t been since I was, geez, 13 years old? Maybe younger? I told him I’d like that very much. 

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Honky Tonk God

I’m sorry but this is just a million dollar graf from Alex Pappedemas’s GQ Style profile of Dwight goddamn Yoakam: 

Just explaining that whole conceptual framework, Yoakam says with a laugh, takes “an hour and a half.” But it's also an unscripted, highly conversational production, so over the course of the run the Vegas shows actually got longer—Dwight would remember something he forgot to say about Buck or Merle Haggard or Tommy Collins or the Byrds, or he'd start talking about, say, Linda Ronstadt, who covered two songs by Yoakam's old friend Warren Zevon on 1977's Simple Dreams, and then he'd have no choice but to stop and play Zevon's “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” before getting back on track. Dwight grew up in the church, abstains from everything—the author of “This Drinkin' Will Kill Me” has never touched a drop—but you've never had a conversation this digressive with someone who does not get high. You ask a question, then he's off, parkouring from subject to subject, and before you know it Dwight Yoakam is saying things like “I would even point to the Spanish-American War” or “And that begins, to my way of thinking, with Northern and Western Europe throwing off the yoke of theocracy, and the writings of John Calvin, and Martin Luther, going back centuries earlier, and that's what leads us…” in response to a question along the lines of “So how long have you had this office space?”

Whatta guy. The pictures are incredible too. In the realms of “people who don’t really age,” Dwight’s name is never really thrown around but if I can look that good at his age I’ll pray to whatever God or theology to which he thinks we should pay attention. 

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I Hope This Is All a Techno-Conspiracy Fever Dream

We wrote notes in our staff Facebook group every night at close to alert either the managers or the folks opening the next morning of anything they might need to know: stuff we’re out of, stuff that needs to be done first thing, stuff that happened that night that was weird or fun or fucked up. Did you unclog a nasty toilet? Brag about it. Did folks make out in the corner real bad? Probably!

A post right now might read something like:

86 the restaurant industry

I started using them as writing prompts. My posts were always novels compared my coworkers. They helped me stretch, keep myself limber, keep myself loose. 

Anyway, I loved Adrien Chen’s New York Times Magazine profile of Hideo Kojima, the video game designer responsible for the Metal Gear Solid series and last year’s Death Stranding. I barely knew anything about Kojima, or the Metal Gear games, really. I never owned a Playstation until the 4 and it seemed dumb to pick up the fifth game in a series. But I knew about the cult following Kojima has. I’d played games like Metal Gear, and they mostly bored me. I never got it. Chen breaks down so well what it is that makes Kojima singular within video games, though, with this paragraph standing out:

One of the defining characteristics of all of Kojima’s games is their narrative ambition. Many video-game stories are perfunctory affairs; the only purpose of the plot is to give a basic motivation for the action. The Metal Gear Solid games, by contrast, try to convey stories of operatic scope and dizzying complexity. Your adventure quickly departs from the straight­forward hero’s journey found in many video games and descends into a labyrinthine techno-military conspiracy in which you never know if you are working for the good guys — or if there are any good guys at all. In the original Metal Gear Solid, you set out to infiltrate a decommissioned nuclear base in Alaska that has been taken over by terrorists, only to stumble upon a cover-up by the United States government, which has built a top-secret, nuclear-armed robot. The sequel’s plot hinges on a series of twists that successively reveal you to be a pawn in a power struggle among three competing cabals. Along the way, you meet a huge cast of characters with complicated back stories (cloning figures prominently).

I feel like an idiot for ever like a Gears of War game already.

In the middle of the profile there’s also this cameo from Helen Mirren, of all people, at a Manhattan launch event for Death Stranding:

A few weeks after my visit with Kojima in Tokyo, I attended a launch event for Death Stranding in Manhattan. A hundred or so people assembled at a large exhibition space in Chelsea, making the whole thing seem more like the opening of a fancy conceptual-art show than the introduction of a video game. A replica of the white hall from Kojima Productions had been constructed at the entrance; snazzily dressed people sipped cocktails and wine. An entire wall was filled with photos of Kojima posing with famous people: Del Toro, J.J. Abrams, Robert De Niro, a whole array of Japanese celebrities. Dame Helen Mirren was in attendance, channeling Kojima’s cyberpunk-meets-postpunk aesthetic in a long black blazer with a Radiohead patch on the breast. I approached her and asked if she was a gamer.

“No, I’m not,” she said, shaking her head. (She was there because her husband’s son works for Sony Music and helped with the soundtrack.)

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An Isolation Blog, or Something

I think I’m going to start posting over the next week or so things I read or watch or cook and enjoy so as to keep myself sane. At the moment, no one in our house seems to have COVID-19, but from what I can tell all that probably means is we all have it and are symptomless. Or we don’t have it! There’s no middle ground, only chaos and stress. We’re isolating as much as we can, cooking, watching shows and movies, playing cribbage and board games (online!), reading books and magazines, and doing crosswords. We’re all going for at least one very socially-distanced walk a day.

I don’t know, it seems like an update of some sort is necessary, because I don’t really post here any more? I bartend now, in downtown Halifax, where I’ve lived for just over two years now. Or did, before the bar shutdown and everyone was laid off — thankfully! We’ll get EI! — and now my future is relatively unstable. 

Two weeks ago my health benefits kicked in. I had been at the job a year, my longest unbroken time anywhere since the Wire, and it felt like a wave of stability and calm had finally washed over me. The late nights can suck, sure, but it finally felt like I accomplished something and had established a life in this industry, in this city, or the first time since I quit blogging. I loved the job, how social and personable it was. I loved the movement, the conversation, the connection, the performance. I loved working with my hands. Bartending is athletic. After four-ish years working from home, it was the opposite of that. And it was great. And now here we are.

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Diner, 1982

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Diner, 1982

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Diner, 1982

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Diner, 1982

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Media Diet: Jolie Kerr

This interview was recorded in February, 2014 for a Media Diet feature on The Atlantic Wire. It was condensed and edited for clarity. Jolie is now a podcaster, a New York Times columnist, and a Patreon contributor. She was promoting her first book. 

How do people deal with the torrent of information pouring down on us all? What sources can't they live without? We regularly reach out to prominent figures in media, entertainment, politics, the arts, and the literary world to hear their answers. This is drawn from a conversation with Jolie Kerr, the Ask a Clean Person columnist, and author of My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag . . . and Other Things You Can't Ask Martha, which comes out this week. 

So I'm going to tell you there are two that I love, love, love love. I love Family Circle. Feel free to use this, because I don't hide this at all. Maybe like eight or so years ago, I was in pretty intensive therapy for severe depression. Saved my life, blah blah blah, but the best part of therapy — other than having my life saved — was they always had copies of Family Circle in the waiting room. And my therapist was a chronically late person, so I always got there early so I'd have all this extra time to read issue after issue of Family Circle. I've always been like this. I'm not normal. So Family Circle is like, whatever you think of Family Circle is right. It's a grandma magazine. (This is not the comic strip.) Its competitors would be Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook, all that. What I call Grey Hair Ladies Magazines. Or, possibly better would be like Mom Khakis Magazines. (I don't wear Mom Khakis.) Of those titles — I read all of them, I love them — Family Circle is definitely a long time favorite. Redbook, on the other hand — Kathy Griffin talks about this in one of her stand up specials, that she was asked to do an interview with Redbook and she was like, "uh, Redbook, do you know I am? I don't think you want that," but then she went and read Redbook, and she was like, "Woah! This is not my Grandmother's Redbook!" — so Redbook has pivoted a little bit, and it's still for that core audience of like, I would say, I don't know how they define it, that 35-60 or whatever, the middle-aged generation. But they're much more modern about that generation. Like, they have sex articles, you know what I mean? I know! I KNOW! Redbook! It's frickin' great. The other ones, I think, are still staid. They're trying to kind of evolve, of course they have to, but they're a little bit more staid. But yeah, Redbook. Good for Redbook.

I open email and then Twitter and then Facebook, in that order. Email because I always want to check, file and organize anything that comes in after my 9 pm curfew. So if it's Ask a Clean Person questions, I read them. I file them. I have a file for all my Clean Person questions. I read every question, I do. And then, you know, dash off emails to friends. One of my best friends lives in Australia, so a lot of time when I wake up in the morning he has sent me links and cute videos, blah blah blah. So then I open Twitter and immediately have a panic attack, and then I open Facebook because it makes me less panicky.

I hide people on Facebook all the time. I realized that if I have negative thoughts about someone, I hide them. Because that's not nice, it's not nice to have negative thoughts about people. I just kind of scan Facebook and then by the time I'm done that I'm ready to face Twitter. I'm really compulsive, like, I have to go all the way back through my timeline until I hit the very last tweet I read before my 9 pm curfew. I am constantly re-evaluating what and who I'm following. So right now I follow about 150 accounts. I keep it really low. It's a mental health thing. I get very easily overwhelmed. A lot of this cleaning stuff comes from the fact that I'm very easily overwhelmed, so keeping things clean and in order helps me to control that. You know how you can go into someone's account and turn off so you don't see when they're retweeting things? Like, contstanly doing that. That's like a daily activity for me. Just beacuse it's like, oh god, there's so much to read, what did I miss. It's the fear of missing out. Of course I rationally know. It's just feels like so much, which it never really is. 

If I didn't go through Twitter the way I do, I would have missed this New York Times story, "Do Curlers Make Good Housekeepers?" It was posted last night, at some point after 9 pm Eastern.

My commute is, I get out of bed and sit at my kitchen table so usually during my commute I'm not consuming any media. I don't have a cable connection — we have a TV with an Apple TV connection, and that's it. I don't watch any live TV or anything like that. All of my news is online. Everything is online. I think the only thing I still read in print is Vanity Fair. It's just like, an old habit of mine, to read Vanity Fair in print. I had a subscription to Texas Monthly. That was the last magazine subscription I had, which was great. I loved it in print because of all the little weird ads in the back. They were so great, and Texas, and weird, and like, blah blah blah. I still read paper books, though. I haven't switched to kindle or anything like that. That's my one weird hold out.

You know, maybe two thirds of my day is working. Either that's writing, following up on press requests, dealing with stuff with my publisher, that kind of stuff. The other part of my day is, you know, so my cleaning, cooking, going to the grocery store. On some days, generally it's Wednesdays and Fridays, are my laundry days, so those days in the afternoon I pack up the laptop, pack up the laundry. I go down to my laundromat, get the laundry started and sit at my corner bar and work from my corner bar. That's a typical day.

I have a 9 PM curfew for any interactive or social media. At 9 PM, off goes email, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr — I don't really use Tumblr any more, but I used to use Tumblr — anything that I can have any interaction with people. I'll catch up on anything that I snooped during the day that I didn't have time to read. Katie Baker's stuff on Grantland is a good example of stuff that, when I see it come up on Twitter, I say, "save that for tonight to read in bed." If I get through all that stuff really fast, or don't have any stuff to catch up on, I go to the Longform tabs page and cruise through the tags and like, "oh, tonight I'd like to read about organzied crime. Let me see what they have." They never have enough about organized crime! I'm always like, "come on!" I'm an organzied crime junkie. 

I'm obsessed with Deadspin. I love sports gossip! There's so much frickin'.... sports culture is hilarious to me. I was this way in college too. I really like men's magazines. I don't read a lot of women's titles beyond those "old lady" titles, which, a lot of that I do because of what I do for work. But in terms of general interest stuff, I read a lot of Esquire, GQ, Details, Deadspin. I'm a frat boy at heart.

I was totally sorority girl. I was the hair-bow-wearing pledge mom of Kappa Alpha Beta. I went to Barnard College, of Columbia University. Let's detour for a minute and talk about my parents sending my to New York when I was 18. Me, of all people. People are always like, "you're so clean. How do you know how to do all this stuff?" Um, pleeease, I was a party girl. I'm older now, and all that stuff. But I was a paaarty giiirl. For sure. A lot of knowing how to clean this stuff came out of like, living through making the messes. Or if I didn't make them myself I was at parties where someone had to clean the barf off the floor and guess who was doing that? Pledge mooom! Pledge mom Jolie. That's where a lot of the empathy for the column comes from. I was always the person who cleaned up someone else's barf that needs cleaning up. Like, people barf! It's OK! Barf happens. I barf! I don't like barfing. I'm a bad barfer. But, you know, yeah!

Used bike shorts comes to mind. It was an early column. Personally, as Jolie, the idea of used bike shorts is horrifying but when I sit and think about it for two seconds I feel badly that I’ve even said that because I understand that those things are expensive and I understand that someone might need to buy those second hand, you know what I mean? And then it's like, "you're being a bitch. Don't be a bitch." I wouldn't want someone to be bitchy to me! I told them how to clean them. I zipped my lip. I think I opened it with a note, like, "let's just put aside whether you should or should not buy these. They were already purchased. What are we gonna do? We're gonna clean them." [Setting aside personal hangups] is the most important part of my job.

You can get cleaning advice a ton of other places. I'm not the first person to dispense cleaning adivce. The difference is two things. One, is the Q&A format. You're reading the stories behind how the messes were made. A number of people aren't doing that! And that's the fun of it. That's why people wanna read the column, it's funny. But the other thing is that people know when they come to me that they're not gonna get judged. They're not gonna be kicked around for a choice they've made — good, bad, ugly, whatever. I'm just here to help.

The other thing is, people are always like, "oh, I'm so scared to have you in my home." And like, I don't care if you don't make your bed every day! It's not my bed. I don't live in your home. It doesn't matter to me. It doesn't matter to me if you don't do your dishes. But it you want to know how to do your dishes, I'm here to help. If you want to know why I think you should make your bed every day, I'm here to tell you. But I'm not here to jam anything down anyone’s throat, for crying out loud.

I am not a doctor. I don't want to cross the line into encouraging people to write to me thinking I can offer psychological help or anything. So I never run those type of questions but I always write back personally to those people. I offer to help, and acknowledge that they've written to me, and ask if they're seeking out professional help. I feel that there's some responsibility on my end if someone comes to me. I've had people who are cutters write to me. So what they're writing to me about, is they're asking about blood stains, and I'll say, "ok, here is a researched body of work about blood stains that I'm sending to you for help, but also you have now told me you're engaging in behaviour and I wanna make sure that you are seeking help, have help, if not, can I give you some resources? Can I encourage you to seek help?" And again, oftentimes, I'll share and say, "I don't think I should run this question." And I'll tell them that, "This is a problem I've had and you're talking to someone who understands, so please seek help if you can. Things can be better. Things can get better." Things are better for me. 

The things I read most often other than the big magazines is, like. I love a regional interest title, so like Garden and Gun, or Texas Monthly. I love Texas Monthly, it's so good. Sunset Magazine, which is like a western magazine. Yankee Magazine, which is a New England-based magazine. And Down East, which is Maine-specific, and I love Maine. Maine is such a weird state, and everyone from Maine is just a little bit off but in the best way possible. So of course there are a million stories. 

I read The Economist for the obituaries only.

I subscribe to the American Cleaning Institute newsletter. It's exactly what it sounds like.