It's the time of the season
It's the time of the season
let's talk about this for a second
I cannot seem to get my head around the idea that it’s really and truly October.
Isn’t it still April?
Isn’t it still April of 2020?
My ghostwriting consultancy business has gotten very busy, which is exciting and wonderful, but a couple of weeks ago, I got an unwelcome and also totally understandable reach-out from someone who also has a business called Lane Editorial, and it’s similar to mine, and she’s been doing hers since 2005, so the upshot is, I am a damn idiot for not catching this and now I have to change my name, mere nanoseconds after I launched it. Obviously, I’m dreading the whole notion of this. I also can’t quite bring myself to believe that there is really, somehow, another Lane Editorial out there.
Anyway, I’ll keep y’all posted on the upcoming rebrand adventure. Lucky thing I never got around to getting any merch printed. I love silver linings!
SPEAKING OF BUSINESS DOINGS
Occasionally I get robo-emails at Quupe from random software development agencies who want to come do work for us. This one was especially inviting:
It is reminiscent of the time way back in the day that I got asked out by some neighbor whose name I had forgotten (twice) and didn’t want to ask a third time in advance of our date, so I went to the Facebooks for help, whereupon my pal Jen suggested I embark on an entire relationship with the guy and never learn his name, and someone else, imagining our future wedding invitations, wrote “Angela and [???] request the honor of your presence at TBD.”
Facebook back then was a much better place. It still had a mad evil henchman at the helm, but we didn’t realize it, and I miss our innocence, you know? Remember in 2009 when every few months there’d be a frenzied circulation of panicky rumors about how they were going to start charging us money to use Facebook, because we didn’t yet realize that we ourselves were the product? Adorable.
I learned recently that Taco Bell, that precious gemstone of American fast food cuisine that has no real following in Canada, has discontinued the Mexican Pizza (as of sometime in 2020, #follow me for more 12-months-late takes) and although it is garbage food, and they discontinued it for good reasons (waste reduction), I am legitimately sad that I will never again get to eat one. That means, though, that it’s time for copycat recipes! This pandemic time, if it is good for anything, is good for learning true resilience. As god is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again!
FOUR SASHIMIS AND A MOVIE
Our pal Neilson was over a couple weeks ago for sushi, which we have done every Friday night, almost without fail, for a year, ever since Vancouver’s second lockdown last October that we’re still kinda-sorta experiencing. Sushi Friday has become a solid and welcome tradition.
A couple weeks ago, we decided to watch a movie.
Collectively, by unspoken rule but very much of a purpose, all three of us decided to make the process of picking a movie just as complicated and byzantine as humanly possible.
IT’S CALLED GAMIFICATION, PEOPLE.
Ahem. Here is how this went:
ME
So I think we should watch a, like, classic 70s movie. Like The Graduate or Harold and Maude. Something none of us has ever seen.
**(ed. note: turns out The Graduate is not a 70s movie and Harold and Maude very nearly isn’t, either. I am not a movie expert, which is why I need movie night.)
NEILSON
I’ve seen The Graduate.
GRANT
What if you were to pick a few movies and then we get to vote on it?
ANGELA
Oooh! I like that.
NEILSON
But Angela gets two votes since it was her idea.
ANGELA
Actually what if I get three votes and each of you gets two, that way, if you band together, you have a chance to out-vote me.
GRANT
We’ll have to rank our choices, too.
ANGELA
How many movies should there be to pick from? Three? Five?
NEILSON
You should pick four good movies and one bad one, so we have to try to guess which one is the bad one.
ANGELA
Okay hold on. I need to Google.
—
The process we eventually landed on ended up being 15 sensible steps long, so I’ve decided to recreate it for posterity here, mostly so we don’t forget what we’re supposed to do next time it’s time for movie night, but also so that you can recreate all the fun (??????) yourself.
Step 1. An Artistic Creative Director is selected from amongst the attendees.
Step 2. The ACD selects a decade.
Step 3. ACD Googles “Classic [decade] movies” and scrolls through the plots, writing down the titles of whichever ones sound appealing.
Step 4. ACD Googles “Bad [decade] movies” and does the same thing.
Step 5. ACD reads out entire list of around 12-15 movies to other participants, crossing off any that others have already seen.
Step 6. From this winnowed-down list, ACD picks five movies: four from the “classic” list and one from the “bad” list.
Step 7. ACD reads aloud the movie titles, synopses, and famous cast members. Crucially, ACD does not share the Rotten Tomatoes score, since this would give away which movie is the bad one.
Step 8. Every participant ranks the movies, assigning five points to the movie they most want to see, and one point to the movie they least want to see.
Step 9. The scores are tallied. (Depending on your mood and the disposition of your participants, a quick and impassioned argument may be appropriate here about the method in which the scores are being tallied, and whether it’s being done correctly, or what.)
Step 10. The top three vote-getters move on to the final round.
Step 11. Each participant picks a movie to champion for the final round.
Step 12. (this is the most important step) Participants take turns acting out a dramatic scene from the movie they are championing (n.b.: it is crucial that this not be in any way sourced from, or informed by, the actual movie).
Step 13. Each participant rolls a 20-sided die (or 6-sided, I guess, if you are not nerds and do not have multiple 20-sided dice lying around your home waiting to be pressed into service) (#thoughtsandprayers).
Step 14. Whoever rolls the highest number has been deemed by the Movie Gods to have created the most exemplary and true dramatic reenactment, and thus, their movie is selected as the winner.
Step 15. The movie is watched, and the person whose movie it was gets to pick the next decade — either one decade up or one down. (In this case, I can either pick 60s movies or 80s movies for the new ACD to Google next week.)
MAD AS HELL
We ended up watching the movie Network. It is weird.
NOTABLE LINE
“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
NOTABLE AGED-BADLY ELEMENTS
34-year-old hottie Faye Dunaway having to make out with a 63-year-old William Holden, which made me keep yelling “GROSS” and “SICK” and “EEUGHGHHHRRHGHH” every time they appeared together on screen. Look, I’m not saying there is anything inherently gross about making out with a 63-year-old, if you yourself are 63. Or even, say, 59 or 68. But an age difference of thirty years. Come on. I know this is a well-trod Hollywood cliché, but I’m still letting myself be mad on Faye Dunaway’s behalf, 45 years later. A thirty-year age difference. That’s literally old enough for him to be her dad, and not even a particularly YOUNG dad. Boyfriend is basically Brylcreem made sentient. It is not William Holden’s fault (probably), and it’s also not like this was an isolated incident. You know, during the filming of As Good As It Gets, Helen Hunt was 34 and Jack Nicholson was 60 and we all thought that was just terrific at the time, too. The things they did (are still doing) to Hollywood women, y’all. Maybe nowadays, a young Hollywood lady would play the partner of someone completely age-appropriate, like she’d be 25 and he’d be 54. You know, something more like real life. (I realize it is absurd bordering on the fantastical to use a Woody Allen movie to make this point, even in jest, but here we are.)
NOTABLE THINGS THAT I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO FEEL ABOUT
My alma mater, the Missouri School of Journalism, gets a shout-out, as Dunaway’s character brags at one point about having gone to Mizzou. But since she is the Rupert Murdoch of the film, I don’t know how much of a feather in Mizzou’s cap this is. We never heard anything about this during J-school, I can tell you that for free.
QUAINT ELEMENTS
They kept referring to TV as “the tube.”
RATING
I’m not sure I enjoyed it, even setting aside the May 2020-December 2021 romance, because it felt like watching the birth of Fox News. But it is always interesting to dip into the cultural fears of other time periods. Also, I always appreciate seeing old-timey newsrooms with their retro-clutter aesthetics and teletype terminals. Look at them in their crowded, all-dude budget meetings with all their comically enormous sheafs of paper! Look at them in the pressroom cafeteria, back when that was a thing that existed, having martinis and Heineken in champagne glasses! Look at the rotary phones! Also, I fell asleep only about 75% of the way in, which for me is actually pretty solid engagement.
Rating: 2.5/5 telefaxes.
AND SPEAKING OF THE 1970s
I had to look at this, and now you have to look at it as well.
The 1970s were the most bonkers decade of all time, y’all. Every single thing was in ruins, but the braintrust over at EggCuber International was like, “I know what’s going to turn it all around for humanity.”
If I have ever been exposed to a more overtly threatening tagline than “makes a square egg” all in lowercase and inside scare quotes, accompanying something obviously modeled on a medieval torture device, I’ve clearly blocked it out. But maybe they were onto something, who am I to say? Maybe from here inside of our own bonkers and ruinous decade, we need another innovation like the EggCuber to get ourselves back on track.
Speaking of innovation — and this is in earnest, now — I’ve taken up a new, part-time gig as an EIR and leading the social venture studio for e@UBC. A few weeks ago, I attended a pitch event for one of Sauder’s business classes. Students had been matched up in teams and given the summer to come up with three ideas they could pitch, Shark Tank-style. There was no limit on the types of ideas they could present; anything and everything was fair game. 18 ideas were presented. And 15 out of the 18 ideas had some sort of climate-crisis or social-justice lens. That was pretty damn inspiring. The kids are all right, as they say.
None of them, unfortunately for humanity, pitched the EggCuber. Pity. Looks like we’re all doomed for at least another decade.
LINKS FOR YOUR LIFE
Check this out — the six new political parties.
Oh and this two-part episode of The Dollop on Ronald Reagan (featuring Patton Oswalt) will both delight and horrify you, if you’re anything like me.) I knew Ronald Reagan was an evil, malignant clown, but I guess I didn’t realize just how MUCH of an evil malignant clown he was, so this was a welcome eye-opener.
I recently learned the term third-culture kids, and it is quite apt for so many of the folks I know.
Y’all’ve read the Bad Art Friend story, right? Ugh-thousand, no? I know gossip is a human tendency. It’s a habit I’ve really disliked in myself in the past, and one I’ve had to work hard to wend my way out of. And it causes me shame to even admit it. There but for the grace of, etc etc. I am happier and more easeful not doing the gossips, and reading this story (truthfully, though, I could only bring myself to skim it), I felt equal parts cringe for the parts of me that relate to this incredibly human impulse and gratitude that (after a lot of work and conscious effort), I no longer feel a need to engage in this kind of thing. I am not saying I am above gossiping. But I am saying that, if there are people in the world whose behavior I would be tempted to text-thrash with friends — and someone presumed to be doing a Facebook-performative kidney donation for likes and clicks would probably fall into that category — I say nothing, because I know nothing, because I am avoiding and ignoring ‘em on purpose. I think that makes me, at best, a Neutral Art Friend or maybe just a different kind of Bad Art Friend. I’m all right with that. Social media is awful and distressing enough without engaging in rubbernecking or following people you think are trainwreck-y. Bless and block, baby, as Glennon Doyle would say.
You better read this essay of anti-writing advice from Zadie Smith (hat tip to my pal Allison, also my accountability partner for London Writers’ Salon’s 100 Days of Writing project, and a Good Art Friend if ever I knew one.)
I made Momofuku’s Bo Ssam last weekend for friends who were in from out of town; my sixth or seventh time at this rodeo. This recipe is truly groundbreaking, and I suggest you get into it, or at least go read about it for future getting-into-it purposes. I am telling you about this in order to share with you that I have officially become a person who keeps a Word document to catalogue all bo ssam attempts in order to improve on the technique. (My oven seems to prefer a longer cook time, so this time, I did 300 degrees for nine hours. Best yet.)
It being October, I’m under contractual obligation to once again share with you my favorite boo hag explainer video, featuring Randy Johnson of Bulldog Tours.)
Finally, in honor of spooky season, please don’t miss this absolute gem of an investment property in Brooklyn. The second floor used to be a dentist’s office! It’s both a real estate opportunity AND a start-up opportunity! You can’t say no! (Well, you could, but I assume the local spirits will follow you home, boo-hag style, if you try. Safety first!)
