Links for February 19th
Vibe shifts, Marla Gibbs, Jewish comedy and art, lost magazines, cool t-shirts, A Month In The Country by JL Carr
Hello, hope you had a smooth week and enjoy more slightly out-of-focus film photography.
Links
Since the phrase “vibe shift” became inescapable within minutes, I’m positive you’ve heard tell of or read Allison P. Davis’s look at the upcoming vibe shift. I loved this piece! And you can swap out the items specifically — this seemed to trip people up, somehow? that cool twentysomethings move from style to style, even if you yourself missed all this? — but, at the core, this is a piece (imo) about pinning down something nebulous but real, which is when trends and eras change, and when an individual lets some things go. Or as someone says herein: “Those were still real years. People’s opinions were changing, things were happening.”
Great interview here with Marla Gibbs from The Jeffersons and other shows, including that she continued working at United Airlines for two years after being cast on a network sitcom.
This is a top tier piece about Jewish identity and Jewish comedy, and the ways that jokes and people change or don’t change with the times — very thoughtful read!
Here is a funny, weird story about how someone is trying to float a guy (himself?) for Kamala Harris’s chief of staff, which also gives you an inside look a bit at how the machinery of stuff like this does and does not work.
This is a funny sequence of signs being posted in a building over a lost magazine.
Lastly, in cool t-shirts, even if you don’t have a connection to NC State (though I actually did live in Raleigh for a summer, while interning, there in the great state of North Carolina), this Homefield Apparel offering was too good to pass up.
Light book commentary
I can’t remember why A Month In The Country by J.L. Carr is in my apartment, but it’s novella length, only about 130 pages (but could be printed at 90 in a different style), and I have not recently read anything more “greater than the sum of the parts.” It’s a very English, very odd, sort of dreamy book that tells the story of a physically affected WWI vet Londoner going to a small country town in 1920 to restore a medieval painting on a church wall during the summer. Once you get past the sheer English-ness of it, though, the descriptions of the summer really pop in a visceral way, and the narration is a real masterpiece of ever-so-slight unreliability, where by subtraction from the story, and passing mention, you get the deeper story that eventually comes into focus.
A note on all this
Thanks for subscribing. Hope you enjoy. The goal here is just to offer up some links you may have missed, and maybe the occasional commentary on something in politics or a book I may have read that you, the reader, might enjoy. If you have thoughts on any of this, hit me up at katherinemillernyc@gmail.com or just tweet at me.