From Denver with Love: A Culture Roundup
Five things to avoid or indulge in (whether or not you're at a Colorado convention center)
I wrote this week’s post in the air –– in seat 29C on a crowded United Airlines flight to Denver. I’m currently spending four days at the Annual General Meeting for the Jane Austen Society of North America. It’s an academic conference, but it also features Austen-themed activities like a Regency ball and bonnet-making classes. I’m able to attend through funding from a Brown fellowship and am approaching the experience with an open mind. It’s already given me fodder for future posts. For now, I’ll leave you with a round-up of culture highlights from recent weeks.
Manet/Degas at the Metropolitan Museum
This joint exhibition at the Met explores the artists’ fraught yet generative relationship. I love Manet’s paintings of women dressed in blue with black ribbons at their waists and throats. It’s the same palette he uses in scenes of battleships dueling off the coast of France. Degas painted a portrait of Manet and his wife, Suzanne, seated in profile at her piano. Manet painted an almost identical solo portrait of Suzanne and inexplicably slashed off his wife’s face in the picture Degas gifted him. This sparked a mysterious feud between the men; Degas even took back a still life of nuts he had given his fellow Frenchman! The drama, the tension, the parallel careers –– there’s much to fill the lengthy exhibit. Degas paints New Orleans cotton merchants in the same airy light as his ballet studios. Manet is sometimes interested in artifice –– studio props and the model’s poor finger placement highlight the farce of this Spanish guitarist’s portrait. Degas apparently eulogized his contemporary with backhanded praise, remarking, “He was greater than we thought.”
West Village Halloween Parade
My friends and I enjoyed some delicious Lebanese food at Manousheh on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets before attending the annual Halloween parade on 6th Avenue. The intense police presence around these events makes me skittish. It didn’t help that a man in a convincing vampire costume leered in our faces as soon as we arrived. I’d seen him spook an unsuspecting couple in an outdoor dining structure an hour before. In the parade, a car with an enormous panel of speakers had a bass so loud it hurt my chest. I recovered in an alley for a bit, where girls posed for Instagram photos and a man relieved himself against a building. I loved Manousheh, and I loved my friends’ company. Maybe I’ll try the parade again next year.
Other people’s running playlists on Spotify
I’m no stranger to streaming strangers’ music. Lately, two playlists from strangers have been powering my runs. As much as I love the Spotify-generated Fast Running Mix and Hype Rap Run, the song selections don’t change frequently enough. For some variety, I’ve been listening to “No pain just vibes” from one of my favorite running influencers, Holly Brooks, and “run FAST kick ass” from a Spotify user called pstalker15. I’ll probably swap them out for something else soon, but they’re a good mix of throwback pop hits, classic hype songs, and music I forgot existed. “It’s Raining Men” is a surprisingly powerful accelerant during the most boring treadmill runs.
Shutter Island
I know I’m late to the party, but this 2010 film with Leo DiCaprio is one of the better movies I’ve seen in a while. I’m new-ish to Scorsese films (I’m coming for his version of The Age of Innocence as soon as I finish the audiobook), but I was captivated by this one. It’s visually lush, psychologically engrossing, and the cast is excellent. I always love seeing performances from Emily Mortimer, who I’ll forever remember as Nicole from the universally panned, personally beloved Steve Martin Pink Panther movies.
Red, White & Royal Blue
I’ll conclude with an unofficial look at this Prime Video rom-com, which I watched via the airplane TV of a woman seated in the row ahead of me. It has the trappings of a classic European/American culture-clash flick (think What a Girl Wants or Selena Gomez’s seminal Monte Carlo). Red, White & Royal Blue features a romance between an English prince and the son of the American president. The prince is out of his element at a tamely imagined rave, while the First Son feels awkward at a polo match. Still, romance blossoms, and there are many steamy love scenes, including one in the tent where the polo mallets are kept. The American president is a woman –– in fact, she’s Uma Thurman, whom I coincidentally saw buying coleslaw a few weeks ago. I’d be interested to watch Red, White & Royal Blue with the sound on next time. Still, there was something fun and transgressive about mooching off my fellow passenger’s screen.