"Sunday, in the blue silver chromium diner..." - Jonathan Larson
Hi m'dears,
Ok, big news this time. Yes, like this newsletter is actually delivering actual news to your inbox. What a concept! And that news is: I'm having an art show! Woo! I am so excited!
The show is at the Bench Gallery space inside Faye's Coffee in the Mission (which longtime San Francisco residents will remember as Faye's Video); it opens next week, on December 12th, and will be up through January 15th; and is called Mundane Food in the Movies. Faye's is at 3614 18th Street.
This body of work is a collection of drawings depicting blink-and-you'll-miss-it food moments from some of my favorite films – each one accompanied by a typewritten label contextualizing the comestible in question.
I think it's safe to say that movies, like life, are full of myriad details that most of us overlook most of the time. But if you've been reading my words for any length of time you know I believe that paying close attention is a special form of power. Power to suddenly see the wonder inherent in the mundane.
And food is a particularly great quotidian unifier because, if everything is going well, we all touch and see and smell and taste it many times a day. That means we’re all real good at experiencing it, but we’re also all real good at overlooking it. The seemingly unimportant food moments filmmakers choose to include in their work can be so small and so revelatory all at the same time. Trivial and yet glowing with meaning.
What's more, attending closely also grants us the power to understand our own unique difference. What we alone like about what we like. For me, the engine that drives the enjoyment of all three hours of Avengers: Endgame is watching Scarlett Johansson sadly make a peanut butter sandwich right towards the beginning of the film. I find this to be the magical, emotional, boring, tiny beating heart of the movie. No one agrees with me. That’s fine. It’s better than fine. It makes one of the biggest movies in movie history also singularly mine.
Of course, some of the things I’ve drawn we collectively agree are iconic – the peach in Labyrinth, the bad dates in Raiders of the Lost Arc; others will be from films you know well but might shine a light on moments from those movies you’ve never given much thought to or may have forgotten; still others could suggest films you haven’t seen, or even ever heard of, and I do harbor some small hope you might be inspired to go check them out.
All together these films span more than sixty years, from 1957 to 2019; in genres encompassing thriller and romcom and musical and Shakespeare; the meals include breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks; and foodstuffs range from beverages to sandwiches to garnishes to a hell of a lot of fruits and veggies.
As always, everything is hiding in the details.
Tidbits
Synanthropes. A couple of weeks ago I sent that mid-month missive about the wild turkeys in the East Bay and then, just a few days later, I learned – in the excellent book The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars and Kurk Kohlstedt (seriously, I cannot recomend this book enough!) – that there is a word for such animals, who live side-by-side with people in urban environments. They are called synanthropes (from the Greek syn "togehter with" and anthropos "man") and Mars and Kohhlstedt devote a whole chapter to them, with sections on squirrels, pigeons, raccoons, wildlife corridors built over freeways, and buried creeks under Manhattan that might just possibly contain fish. Great stuff.
Prowess. This video of Olympian Katie Ledecky swimming a lap while balancing a glass of chocolate milk on her head is actually from a few years ago, but it's been making the rounds on the internet again lately, so maybe you've seen it. But in the event that you haven't I include it here for you to take delight, first in this oddball demonstration of Ledecky's enormous athletic abilities, and then to additionally take delight in the fact that it's a glass of chocolate milk. Why chocolate? Well, why not?
Sayulita. As is our custom, my family went out of town for Thanksgiving. This time, we went all the way to Mexico! Sayulita is a small town on the west coast, about an hour north of Puerto Vallarta. A friend recommended a super charming hotel there and off we went. Cobblestone streets, good food, and the most delightful beach to chill upon made for a fantastically relaxing trip. Sayulita is known as a place to learn to surf and Bill and Mabel did indeed take surfing lessons and got up on their feet and everything. I will say, that the town was pretty touristy – I gather that this is maybe a pretty recent development; one of those cool little places that the secret is out about and now the crowds of holiday-makers have descended – but this diminished our enjoyment not at all.
Art
The Pacita Abad show at SFMOMA – up now through January 28th – is a stunner and I heartily recommend you getting in there if you're in town. It's the first ever career-spanning retrospective of Abad's work and includes many of her signature trapunto paintings: stuffed, quilted canvases. Their colors, intricacy, range of subject matters and techniques are astounding.
If you're unfamiliar with Abad's biography (I was), it's a fascinating story – she was born in the Philippines in 1946, came to San Francisco and Berkeley to study in the 1970s, and then went on to travel and live in over 60 countries, before she died in 2004 at the age of just 58. She used upstretched canvas as her primarily medium in part because it was so easy to transport on her travels.
Mix Tape
If I told you that I think you will really like this, would you believe me?
November: Desire Paths
xo
Bridget
Full disclosure: the bookshop.org links in this email are affiliate links.