PicoBlog

One of the things I love about writing this newsletter is that I can pull on a thread of something that interests me and get all tangled up in it — in the best possible way — as it unspools. I don’t make bread often, but I wanted to bake a loaf of the French sandwich bread pain de mie (“bread of crumb”) that is tender, a lovely color and slightly sweet.

[This profile contains discussion of rape culture and sexual assault.] Of the main characters I’ll be profiling, Jenny Humphrey has the briefest arc on Gossip Girl: seasons one through three, followed by a few season four appearances and the series finale. Even in that shorter span of time, Jenny is the character whose style evolves the most, whose wardrobe is most influenced by her actor, Taylor Momsen (followed, perhaps, by Serena van der Woodsen/Blake Lively; we’ll get into her in a future issue).

The first utterances we hear from Paul Giamatti in Sideways and The Holdovers, the two comedies he’s made with director Alexander Payne, are not words but exasperated sighs, as if Hades has presented him with another goddamn boulder to roll up the hill. These small cries of existential despair are his defining trait, usually prefacing a sarcastic response to a world that constantly disappoints him—which, of course, is a cover for the disappointment he carries about himself.

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women every two weeks. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent. Queen Eadgifu, third wife of Edward the Elder, had a career spanning five decades. She outlived her husband and saw at least six different kings of England during her lifetime, and her fortunes rose and fell numerous times within these years as various kings took the throne.

The first time I heard of the Rainbo Club was when Mary Kate texted me from there several years ago. She was in Chicago catching up with friends. It was one of her favorite bars, she told me, a hangout of her salad days in Chicago, the best bar. I had never heard of it. A year later, I was in Chicago on business. Mary Kate said I had to go the Rainbo Club while I was there.

While this pairing of The Rat Race and Bells Are Ringing started out as a convenient way to highlight two final films from the year 1960 by grouping them together by their premier dates (both in the summer of 1960), I found these films have more in common than they might at first appear to have. Bells Are Ringing is one of my absolute favorites and a film I have seen many many times.

The Raw Society Stories, an extension of The Raw Society Magazine, will feature photographic stories, interviews, and essays, all of which touch on themes as varied as social issues, politics, culture, travel and history. Launched a year ago No thanksncG1vNJzZmismJq%2FosPSqJqinaSuwLW70aKcrGajqq%2B0wMCcomebn6J8

The atrocities commited by the Razakars are so many, that it would actually take a book to fill that up. Here I am just looking at some of the more well known ones. For context, you can check out my post on Qasim Razvi here. Bathukamma is one of the main festivals in Telangana that occurs during Devi Navratri, where women sing and dance in a circle around the floral representation of Devi.

Sticking here with comics still for this column for now. I just happened to re-read a number of appearances of these DC Comics characters over the past week, so they were on my mind a bit. I think in some ways they’re a great example of how the long-running serial nature of comics allows individual writers and artists to do great work in service to a failed concept. To some extent, comic publishers just lack the focus and staying power required to build the potential of secondary characters that an individual creator introduces on their behalf.