PicoBlog

When I look back on my life, I see two periods: the time before I was published and the time after I knew I could make a life as a writer. When I say, “make a life as a writer,” I mean I knew I would keep doing it. I used to pass a man on Broadway. Up and back we both walked on the Upper West Side. He had been my teacher at Barnard, and he’d had a sexy sort of bravado in those days.

I turned 30 last week. Every time I take another lap around the sun, I like to ask myself, what were your greatest lessons or takeaways? What do you now believe or know to be true? As I enter my 30s I’ve come to learn or I now believe that life is the Ceremony of remembering who we are before we return to the stars. I believe part of our purpose in being in this Ceremony called life together is to remember who we are and help others do the same.

Since tomorrow’s weekly newsletter has already been written, and since the Loki finale just dropped and is extremely fresh in my mind, let's take a crack at discussing it in this separate thread, just to protect everybody who hasn't see it quite yet from spoilers. My thoughts coming up just as soon as I learn everything you know about physics and temporal mechanics... Did not love this season. If they wanted to make a Doctor Who season starring Tom Hiddleston, just do that.

Whether you’re celebrating Passover or Easter in the next few days, chances are there’s a brisket or ham in your future. The trouble is, there are a lot of different names for a few variations on a theme. Let’s talk brisket first, since Passover starts tonight! (I’ll come back to ham on Friday.) I know, I’m a little late to the party, but for those of you last-minute types who haven’t started shopping yet, this info might help you out.

What I love about the word ‘dismantle’ is how frequently it is misused. When you say you’re going to dismantle something, the implication is that you’re going to take it apart, or undo its components into separate pieces. It’s a process we associate with a kind of careful destruction. So obviously, it’s a word that can create a deal of unease or even fear, because if you take something apart, the risk is that you won’t be able to put it back together again.

Do you ever have a newsletter and intend to make a recipe and just literally cannot bring yourself to do it? Reader, It Happened to Me/I Did It to Myself: a very ’50s style enchiladas recipe was fully avoided out of sheer panic. Here’s what I was supposed to make: We’ve been here before—with the meat loaf, with the hamburger and rice. For all my love of the midcentury, and appreciation of its moments of kitsch, I fear (some) of its food.

The blinding romance with which some people see the great Roman pasta dishes, French haute cuisine, or the precision of a Michelin-star kitchen … I feel the same way about the food in Upstate New York. Utica is like Provence to me. There are at least 3 dishes endemic to Utica, New York. This is not a very high number, but that is about 3 more than you would expect in an average city of 60,000 people.

We can all dream of reaching 99 years, a good long life, and actress Joyce Randolph did just that. She died late Saturday in New York, also the hometown of the fictional character that brought her fame, Trixie Norton. Randolph was the last surviving member of the core “Honeymooners” cast, but while she lived on Central Park West and haunted the bar at theater-district watering hole Sardis’, her Trixie character would likely have visited neither.

My one-phrase review of the 2023 film "Sound of Freedom": heart-stopping. To expand on this phrase, this is—simply put—the most gripping film I have seen in a long time. It features an incredible performance by Jim Caviezel, which I’ll dig into briefly. Caviezel is a touch eccentric in his pacing, which is effective. He's very confident with the focus on him (being both a ruggedly handsome man and an established actor), and he can hold the camera at the level of historic elites like Liam Neeson, Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson, Clint Eastwood, and Val Kilmer.