The Weekender: Novelty spoons, a Copa-style cover, and a plea for silence
What we’re reading, watching, and listening to this week
It feels right to open the Weekender with a painting of a big-box store on this, the most sacred of shopping weekends. When you need a break from the sales, these posts—covering a beloved grandmother’s collected treasures, a haunting breakup, and a guide to sandwiches—are ready for you.
FAMILY HISTORY
Inheritance
The everyman quality of Some Guy’s nom de plume feels especially appropriate in this ode to his grandmother. The specifics may be unique, but the broad strokes are universal: “Like all grandmothers, she owned the best, most magical things in the entire universe.”
The Norwegian Butter Knife
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inShe had a butter knife somehow better than all other butter knives. Not narrow at the end, but fat and broad. A curvature like no other butter knife I have seen since, perfect for smearing. It was a butter knife to make all other butter knives laughably inadequate. Some wise but practical butter-knife-smith of yore must have crafted it before fashion overtook practicality. Sometimes, I would imagine that butter-knife-smith in the winter’s snow, like my great-grandfather Alfred, looking down at a half-forged narrow-tipped butter knife and striking it one last time to broaden the still-molten tip in a moment of inspiration. I don’t know who got it after she passed away, but it was the one thing she owned that I truly wanted by the time I became an adult. It was like her, unique and perfect. A metafactual artifact, existing both in reality and as a metaphor of reality.
There are a hundred other memories, like her potato ricer, which appeared to my young eyes to be some kind of medieval torture device. She had a glass fruit knife covered in Norwegian patterns of… I don’t know. It was always birds and flowers. They all look the same to me. She learned to paint birds and flowers when she and my grandfather got older. She painted them on lots of things. A thimble from a world fair in the late 1800s. An amethyst geode that was surely a powerful magical artifact. Pictures of her ancestors in black and white, who looked like they were definitely ghosts trapped behind a pane of glass. That she owned them, that they were a part of her life, makes them all sacred to me.
And her spoons! Hundreds of tiny, collectible tourist spoons. She had a spoon for every state in the U.S. and dozens of spoons from each country she had visited in Europe. Spoons for monuments. Spoons for cities. Spoons for every holiday. I have some of them in my garage. I begged for them to stay together after she passed, but nobody wanted to take that many spoons. Surely, if someone truly loved the spoons, I said, they would rather give them up rather than have them be separated. My appeal to the wisdom of Solomon failed. Blasphemy of all blasphemies, one of my cousins, who is a “jeweler,” melted one and made it into a ring. More blame to me, I suppose. I didn’t have a place to bring them yet either.
PAINTING
ESSAY
Ghosted
Catherine Lacey’s 144-word—or a dozen dozen— essays are strange and delightful postcards. Our main takeaway from this week’s missive: she could make a killing as a breakup-note ghostwriter.
A Ghost Story
—
inMy spouse must have despised me for a very long time, my friend told me, and though I knew she was right, he must have loved her, too. I know it’s healthy or necessary or natural to make an ex dead to you—to deaden old love by insisting on the platonic or by revising them into a villain or by cutting off all contact.
I once wrote in a letter, I have attended your funeral and do not wish to speak to ghosts, feeling a little over the top but also precisely where I should be, yet a few months after I sent that letter I saw, for the first and only time in my life, a ghost.
In fact I did want to speak to that ghost, but the ghost said nothing. Maybe he knew better. Maybe he read that letter.
ILLUSTRATION
ROMANCE
Kinds of kisses
First kisses, goodbye kisses, hello kisses. Azeez’s journey through his romantic history rolls toward one overwhelming question.
how hard should you kiss a woman?
—
inHow hard should you kiss a woman?
My first kiss was a hard kiss, in an awkward way. We clanked together sloppily. One of the happiest days of my life. I’m sure the feeling of happy disbelief grows scarce as you get older, so it’s nice to have a memory vivid enough to produce it anew. I should have been softer.
My softest kiss was a goodbye peck. The last time I kissed an ex. She was over me by then. Her resigned annoyance with me faded after we broke up, but it was in full force that day, and I’d wilted. I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d kissed her with conviction. If I’d curled her into my arms, squeezed her tight, made a scene. Maybe she would’ve believed I loved her, if I’d acted it out properly. Show, don’t tell.
A kiss after sex depends on the sex. If you’re in love, it’s probably hard. If you slap each other during sex, it’s probably soft—like all reconciliatory things. How hard should you slap a woman?
My favourite kiss was a hello kiss. I think about it all the time. I’d walked into a girl’s living room and she’d bounced over, happy to see me. She’d kissed me on the clavicle (a soft, soft, soft, soft, quick kiss) and whispered hey into my neck. I remember wondering if the happiness was written on my face, and if her roommates could see how stupid it’d made me. It was painfully affectionate and she’d done it as an afterthought, in the way that all people who are raised with love do.
How hard should I kiss a woman, if I want her to feel that way?
GRATITUDE
POETRY
The wind and the water
This short poem reads like the Old West by way of the Great Wall, and includes a perfect description of late autumn’s weather.
A Song on the Frontier
—Wang Changling, translated from the classical Chinese by
inLetting the horse drink, I cross the water of autumn:
The water is cold, and the wind resembles knives.
The sun has not set on the sand field;
Dimly, dimly appears Lintao.
In days gone by, at the wars at the Great Wall,
Everyone, they say, was in high spirits.
The yellow sand is enough for now and past;
White skeletons are scattered among mugworts.
PAINTING
MUSIC
Sam Cooke at the Copa
Sam Cooke’s very Copacabana cover of “Blowin’ in the Wind” may take some getting used to. But as Peter C. Baker finds, after a few listens, its “happy punchiness adds up to something like an argument.”
Life Exploding in Every Direction
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inFirst thought: this is… wrong. Wrong! This is a somber song about suffering. Violence. Subjugation. Man’s inhumanity to man. About the feeling that things have to change, and the possibility that they won’t, that maybe it just goes on like this. And now here’s Sam Cooke, doing it up Copacabana style, crooning over a swinging, upbeat arrangement. Absolutely owning the delivery, and knowing it, and knowing his audience knows it. It feels like a celebration. It feels… wrong.
I hit ‘skip.’ My four-year-old son protests. He doesn’t see anything jarring or inappropriate about the juxtaposition of lyrics and performance. He wants more “Blowin’ in the Wind.” We’ve already listened countless times to the Dylan original (acoustic, spare, pure), the Peter, Paul and Mary version (angels around a campfire), and Neil Young’s take (slow, Vietnam-inflected, the electric guitar solo intertwined with piped-in gunshots and sirens). My son likes ’em all. Who knows how these things happen. He loves “Blowin’ in the Wind.” He wants to hear the rest of Sam Cooke’s version. Back we go.
It gets more Copa as it goes. Triumphantly Copa. Building to its climax, it reminds me of the music that plays in a certain type of cinematic end montage that I think is less common now than it used to be. The movie is basically over—maybe the credits are already showing up on-screen—and we’re seeing quick flashes of everyone moving on with their life, conflict resolved for now, narrative time accelerating toward its vanishing point. It’s up, it’s warm, it’s swaggering. It’s… wrong for “Blowing in the Wind”—right?
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HOT TAKE
The sound of silence
This one goes out to any curmudgeons-in-training who have found themselves shouting over Coldplay at the dinner table.
Please, Stop Playing Music Everywhere
—
inI was recently at a charming Italian restaurant with friends, and practising a secular grace I noticed how grateful I was for the circumstances. A dim candle, exposed brick, an abundance of tasteful Italian photography—all of it an enviable mise-en-scène for what was a decidedly satisfying meal. It seemed that everything, from the wine to the decor to the service was of outstanding calibre.
It was almost perfect. Almost. I thought to myself, do you know what this really needs? Do you know what would really complete this? Some Dua Lipa. Yes, all this ambient chatter is a novel relic of what dining used to be like, but we are in Britain, first and foremost, multiculturalists, and there is no better evidence of assimilation than the supplanting of our country’s crap food without the supplanting of its crap music!
As far as I am aware and can imagine, nobody has ever thought this. Why, then, are we so routinely confronted with music completely unbefitting of our circumstances? I love music. I even quite like Dua Lipa. But there is, as they say, a time and a place. Even now, as I write these words, Alec Benjamin is serenading me from the ceiling. Let Me Down Slowly, a melancholy breakup song, to be precise. A catchy tune, perhaps, but I would have named a hundred genres, let alone songs, that I would rather have dictating the mood of what is supposed to be a productive essay-writing session in an otherwise quite classy cafe.
It is sometimes said that architecture is the only form of art which imposes itself. Perhaps this was true before the invention of the loudspeaker. When confronted with the British Telecom communications tower, I am at least granted the small mercy of being able to look the other way. This other, more violent, sustained assault on our hedonic receptors, however, is one which attacks our every flank.
COCKTAIL HOUR
FOOD
Sandwich chart
Our U.S. readers are unlikely to be planning an elaborate meal again very soon. In the meantime, this chart of sandwiches—including a Thanksgiving leftovers sandwich, naturally—should come in handy.
leftovers = best sandwiches
—
inHonestly, my favorite part of Thanksgiving is the sandwich the next day. I think part of why that sandwich tastes so good is because the labor of making everything for it is in the rearview mirror.
So today, in the spirit of abundance, here are some ideas for how to turn Thanksgiving leftovers into excellent sandwiches using the same formula from the sandwich chart in What Goes with What.
Obviously you can enjoy any of the above sandwiches anytime of year, and, most importantly, you can use the formula to make any sandwich an outstanding sandwich.
GUILTY CONSCIENCE
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The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
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