PicoBlog

     The WNBA’s logo defenders, paid to protect a painted stripe at 22 feet and 1.75 inches, heard an annoying word Monday. “Prada,” Caitlin Clark said at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, explaining her white satin shirt and skirt with an embroidered rhinestone top, leather slingback pumps, a black handbag and acetate sunglasses.      Her midriff also was exposed, which thrilled her boyfriend at the scene, Connor McCaffery. “I don’t think Prada has ever fitted an NBA or WNBA player before, so kinda sleek, kinda special,” she said.

Hello, friends—thank you so much for your beautiful messages in response to Riffs & Rants #10. I believe I'll be able to keep from dissolving tomorrow and will endeavor to respond with the full measure of my gratitude, which is huge. In the meantime, this week I want to tell you a little bit about a great writer and teacher who’s just moved on to whatever comes next. Here's to Jack.

The best thing about travelling is to be reminded that there are other ways of doing things. People think differently Over There. They dress differently, live differently, respond to the present moment differently. It might be that they queue for everything. They sleep under heavy duvets. They eat funny biscuits, and butter that tastes like unsalted cheese. They sit in hot saunas and plunge into freezing cold seas for their health.

I’ll admit that I was a bit of a late comer to HBO’s Rome. I’d heard about it while I was finishing my BA (in English, History, and Classics, thank you) but, because I didn’t have HBO, I never got around to actually seeing the thing. In fact, it wasn’t until I was finished with my BA and trying to figure out what to do with my life–spoiler alert, I went on to get a PhD in film, studying representations of antiquity in the movies–that I finally sat down and started watching this much-ballyhooed but prematurely canceled depiction of the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire.

You may have seen the dinosaur man meme: Sauron (yes, his name is actually Sauron, yes for real like the lord of the rings villain) wants to turn people into dinosaurs. Spiderman thinks that he should be using technology like that for the greater good rather than to fulfil his whims. Now, I must first note that Sauron is a bad person. Good people don’t name themselves after lord of the rings villains because they’re the evillest name they can think of.

Arthur the King Dir. Simon Cellan Jones 107 min. Arthur the King deserves credit for admirable restraint, but only up to a point. An adaptation of Swedish adventure racer Mikael Lindnord’s memoir Arthur: The Dog Who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home, which tells the story of a race in Ecuador during which Lindnord and his team befriended a dog who accompanied them for much of the journey, the film waits so long before collapsing into grotesque sentimentality that it almost seems like it never will.

Challengers Dir. Luca Guadagnino 131 min. As it hops back and forth across a 13-year timeline, Challengers offers a variety of clues as to where we’ve landed chronologically even beyond the on-screen titles, from changes in facial hair and wardrobe to the songs playing in the background. But even without these clues, it would be apparent where the three lead characters are in their lives. In the story’s present—an ostensibly low-stakes 2019 Challenger Tour tournament sponsored by Phil’s Tire Town and held in New Rochelle, NY—they carry themselves with the weight of years that have yet to burden them in their youth.

The Fabelmans Dir. Steven Spielberg 151 min. The first thing you realize when watching The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film, is that he’s been making semi-autobiographical films for most of his half-century career, whether we’ve been conscious of it or not. Images that seem like references to E.T. the Extra Terrestrial or Close Encounters of the Third Kind are, in actuality, memories that had already been re-contextualized as Hollywood spectacle.

Earlier this year, I was doing research into Hot Pie, a regional variation on pizza specific to Binghamton, New York. I noticed that nearly every Binghamton restaurant that advertised in the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s always boasted of making three dishes: Hot Pie, Spiedies, and City Chicken. Spiedies I knew. Anyone who’s ever visited Binghamton even once is aware of the marinated meat sandwiches. Hot Pie I was coming to know.