This week, we’re seeing opportunity in a sheet cake, worrying over our unused objects, analyzing trend cycles, and getting the best of both worlds in soup form.
ART
Blank canvas
Ali Liebegott finds artistic inspiration in an oft-overlooked corner of the grocery store.
I always said if I was on Death Row (is it capitalized like a city?), my last meal would be a can of Coke. Because I love soda. Especially Coke in a can. A friend said, “Ali, I bet for your last meal you could get a Coke and something else.” This blew my mind! Like absolutely exploded it. Brains on the wall! This is my problem in life. I don’t have (insert gross California language) an abundant vision of my future. I never have. My therapist says it’s a class thing. It goes back as far as I can remember.
When I was a hostess at IHOP and the manager wanted to promote me to waitress, I said, “No, thanks. I’m good. I love making five dollars an hour and wearing a Swiss Miss Dress.” He promoted me anyway … and that’s how I find myself on this TED Talk stage today.
Everyone I know is depressed right now. And we should be! I’m really pushing back on this “Let’s be productive and normal,” while everything is literally and metaphorically incinerated. Maybe it’s absolutely right to look out the window numbly. All I want right now is to take care of the people I love. And give blood. And stress eat. And try and paint, because painting makes me feel better. It’s very meditative. I didn’t go to art school. Go paint! Really. Anyone can. It’s nice.
About a year and a half ago I started painting sheetcakes. I would make a sheetcake painting as a break from other painting or writing.
I don’t love a sheetcake as a food. The majority of sheetcakes I’ve had in my life were eaten after twelve-step meetings. IYKYK. But I do love the potential for a sheetcake to say something unexpected. Like, imagine if you were in a supermarket, depressed. Imagine it! Wouldn’t that be so wild?! Wow! Being depressed in a supermarket but still trying to take care of yourself by getting a few groceries, and looking through the bakery window at the cakes when the cake was there for you.
Is it just us, or did the Oscar nominations land with more of a whimper than a bang? In this post, Matthew Gasda has a theory for why: he argues that “quality” American cinema has become tepid, thanks to an overreliance on audience data.
American films don’t feel like films. It’s a hard thing to describe—but we all know it; or those of us who remember what movies were like at least ten years ago do. The same way that cars are all the same colors, new apartment buildings all look the same, or young people’s faces share the same look (Gen Z has a look), movies all seem to take place in the same narrow, smushed range of color, performance and style. And it’s not an accident: I’ve been told more than once by Hollywood executives that they rely on viewer data. There is an international Airbnb style, and there is a national film style.
Modern American prestige movies are part of the evolutionary chain of what Dwight Macdonald once called “Midcult”: “the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity [covered] with a cultural fig leaf.” Supposedly serious contemporary cinema feels gamed, optimized; Oscar contenders all share certain “quality” markers: desaturated color palette, handheld intimacy, tasteful scoring. They are just as thoroughly mechanical as Marvel movies, but are designed to evade triggering variants of Martin Scorsese’s 2019 critique of Marvel movies (that comic book movies are “theme parks,” not films). If anything, Scorsese’s criticism of Marvel was a straw man. Scorsese’s own prestige fare for Netflix, like The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon—while they still reflect Scorsese’s genius—have an industrial quality to them. The Scorsese Cinematic Universe today stands perilously close to becoming a Midcult theme park.
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Even if a director’s or writer’s intentions are to do something beyond creating Netflix goop (and I imagine most movie people start out at least with the idea of doing something greater), there’s now a locked-in expectation and technical foundation for polished, hyper-detailed, ultra-perfect sets and shooting styles. Modern tastes are so powerful, fixed, inflexible and uninteresting that the aesthetics of Instagram—gym-sculpted physiques, muted color grading, and smooth digital overlays—have become film aesthetics in general. Moreover, actors now favor naturalism and internalism, erasing any hint of theatricality or heightened gesture. These are sometimes necessary, by the way, to break the illusion that the past—particularly in costume dramas, which are extremely popular right now—is indistinguishable from the present.
In 2011, Hugo Chavez wanted his gold back. It was stored in vaults in London—$11 billion of it; 13,000 bars of it; 160 metrics tons of it; 350,000 pounds of it; a blue whale of it—and that made things complicated: If Hugo Chavez wanted to use the gold to buy cars, or food, or fun Chavismo jackets for his loyal Chavistas, he had to call a bank and say, “please send my gold to the BMW store, or the grocery store, or to Oak Business Center in Brea, California,” and the bank could say no. The people of Venezuela owned the gold, Hugo Chavez controlled the gold, but London had the gold. For Hugo Chavez—a controversial authoritarian with a distaste for democracy and a tempting target for economic sanctions—that was no good.
But he had a problem. Hugo Chavez wanted to put his gold in Caracas, in Venezuela, and Caracas is 4,600 miles from London, with a lot of ocean in between. It is not easy to move an $11 billion mountain of precious metal 4,600 miles. You have to unload it from its vaults, and load it into trucks, and those trucks will ride low. You have to unload the trucks onto planes and boats, but planes cannot fly that far with that much cargo—Boeing’s most capable and fuel-efficient freighters can only carry about 100 tons; Airbus’ dopey beluga whale can only fly 1,700 miles—and the ocean is dangerous. You have to land the planes and dock the boats and load and unload more trucks, and you have to trust everyone who does it. You have to have guards, and you have to trust the guards too.
It is easy to forget all this. Most of our money is not a pile of rocks in a vault, but a number on a spreadsheet, with a name next to it. It does not exist in London because it does not exist at all. It is in our phones, in a computer, in the cloud. We cannot Venmo $11 billion to our friends because there isn’t $11 billion next to our name in the spreadsheet, and because Venmo’s terms of service say that we can’t. We can’t do it because software engineers didn’t build in the affordance.
They could, though. If Hugo Chavez wanted to Venmo himself $11 billion dollars—digital dollars, bank account dollars, database dollars—it could be done with a few lines of code. Make a ticket; move some bits; update the spreadsheet. The only laws are the sharp edge of physics—the speed of light, the size of atoms, the amount of palladium in the earth. It is all on the computer, and on computers, we can make whatever we want.
Fashion historian James Laver conceptualized Laver’s Law, a theory explaining the trend cycle timeline in his 1937 book Taste and Fashion. Each adjective has either a positive or negative connotation which dictates an item’s relevance at that point in time. In modern decades we’ve come to accept a 20-year trend cycle, however even that feels lengthy considering how much social media has accelerated trend lifecycles. What’s particularly interesting about Laver’s Law are the adjectives Laver chooses to describe each interval. Amusing? Shameless? Indecent? Harsh yet descriptive.
The oversized double T medallion logo adorned atop the Reva flat originally debuted in 2006 is likely perceived as outdated, middle America fashion perhaps considered dowdy or ridiculous. According to Laver’s timeline they’ll need another 130 years to be considered beautiful again, but by modern standards they are ripe for a comeback. Tory “the tear” Burch has been bulldozing through every New York City cool girl in its path outfitting them in pierced mules, floaty architectural hoop dresses, and bags designed with niche it-girl icon Lee Radziwiłł in mind. Whatever Tory’s pushing is going to be cool and ahead of the curve. The Reva relaunched in September during the SS25 show and it’s a sign.
How does Laver’s Law play into the Reva? Take the Isabel Marant sneaker wedges, for example. A shoe that was loathed, written off completely and called “cheugy” by fashion TikTokers in 2021 (along with the entire ballet flat category). After enough time passed, Isabel Marant sneaker wedges are suddenly adored again, coveted again, and the same TikTokers who claimed they hated them with all their might are scouring Depop for a pair of their own. From smart to hideous to charming to beautiful in the blink of an eye. The Reva will dance a similar path.
Wonton egg drop soup is a hybrid I was first introduced to in San Francisco. If you’ve seen it on a menu elsewhere, please let me know! In some restaurants the wontons come deep fried and you add them into the egg drop soup for a delightful textural contrast, like croutons. I was about to go that approach for this recipe, but I just couldn’t get myself to deep fry anything so early in the new year. I’ll change my tune as LNY rolls around, I’m sure.
The wontons are cooked directly in the broth, which is made with a homemade shrimp stock using aromatics and the shells and heads from the shrimp used in making the filling. It’s delicious but I provided alternative broth options that are less homemade but just as good. The light dusting of cornstarch on the wontons will start to thicken the soup, but the addition of an actual cornstarch slurry (water and cornstarch) will continue to thicken the soup until it’s the perfect silky texture for wispy trails of egg whites. My mom has always made egg drop soup by dropping in full eggs one at a time while slowly stirring the soup. This method will give you strands and clouds of egg whites and jammy yolks. I love fishing out a poached egg as a special treat just for me.
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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Sorry, this may not be the right space but I don't know where else to ask -- could you Substack tech guys please add a link/icon for BlueSky? I've left Twitter a LONG time ago and would like to be able to share my posts on BlueSky. Thank you!
Bella imagen!!!
No entiendo el inglés.
Gracias 😌
Sorry, this may not be the right space but I don't know where else to ask -- could you Substack tech guys please add a link/icon for BlueSky? I've left Twitter a LONG time ago and would like to be able to share my posts on BlueSky. Thank you!