Kafka, pickles + Andy Kaufman

Also: Links and missing buttons

Happy Valentine’s Day! Nothing says “I love you” like Franz Kafka’s piercing eyes:

Warhol’s “Franz Kafka” (1980)

The other day I visited the Morgan Library to see its grand Kafka exhibit. Our current book club pick (see below) talks about the link between meditation and creativity, and this is one place I feel ultra-calm and inspired.

I mean, just look at the joint:

The Morgan Library: You can look but you can’t touch ‘em.

The exhibit is fantastic and includes Kafka’s notebooks, postcards, photos and other items, like Warhol’s portrait and Vladimir Nabokov’s drawing of a “Metamorphosis”-inspired insect. It runs through April, but even if you miss it, the Morgan always delivers (and its cafe makes the best BLT I’ve ever had in my life).

The other day I also received a text from my dad that served as its own meditative moment:

(Alas, it was not mine.)

quick book club update!

It’s crucial to have a setup, so that, at any given moment, when you get an idea, you have the place and the tools to make it happen. If you don’t have a setup, there are many times when you get the inspiration, the idea, but you have no tools, no place to put it together. And the idea just sits there and festers. Over time, it will go away. You didn’t fulfill it — and that’s just a heartache.
— David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish

There’s still time to RSVP for our book club Zoom on Sunday, March 2. We’ll talk about Catching the Big Fish, Lynchian moments that haunt/inspire us, our own creative projects and more. I’m psyched to see you all.

the apprentice + crossing delancey

This week I watched two VERY different New York movies. I’d steered clear of The Apprentice, but I’m trying to see as many Oscar noms as I can — and I loved Sebastian Stan in A Different Man — so I plugged my nose and dove right in. It’s fascinating and horrifying and compelling, and Jeremy Strong could very well beat his Succession co-star for Best Supporting Actor. (Then again, Edward Norton is a lovable Pete Seeger. Guy Pearce is fantastic, as is Anora’s Yura Borisov. Sheesh, what a golden band!)

Crossing Delancey is a 1988 romantic comedy directed by Joan Micklin Silver, whose work is being featured on the Criterion Channel in February. Silver directed the great 1977 film Between the Lines, which co-stars a young Jeff Goldblum and is partly based on her time working at the Village Voice. In Delancey, Amy Irving stars as an uptown bookstore owner who kinda loves/hates the owner of a Lower East Side pickle store and ALSO kinda loves/hates a pretentious, floofy-haired poet. I remember seeing this poster when I was 11 and thinking it looked incredibly boring, but today this jewel of a film is 100% made for me. I gotta catch more of Silver’s oeuvre before the month runs out.

heart-shaped assortment

• David Johansen of the New York Dolls (and Buster Poindexter fame) is in poor health. Donate to help pay for his care via Sweet Relief, where you can also buy this rockin’ T-shirt:

• Here’s the trailer for Thank You Very Much, a new doc about Andy Kaufman:

• Tori Amos is going on tour … to promote her first children’s book.

• Paul Rudd and Tim Robinson explore the horror of male bonding in Friendship:

• R.I.P. to the great Tom Robbins, whose books were pure delight to 20-something me. You can stream Gus Van Sant’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues on YouTube for free and decide if it was really as bad as critics said it was in 1993.

• CBS Sunday Morning talked to Stephanie Courtney (Flo from the Progressive ads), Dean Winters (Mayhem from the Allstate ads) and Deanna Colón (from the Jardiance ad — I had no idea people had such strong opinions about her!):

• The first issue of Reader’s Digest from 1922 is available online. Articles include “Love—luxury of necessity?” and “The Future of Poison Gas.”

• And I loved this 13-minute tour of Walton Goggins’s home in upstate New York. But truly, I’d love a 13-minute tour of Walton Goggins’s anything.

Try to stay warm and bushy-tailed, and I’ll see ya around the corner.

*transforms into insect*
Russell Stover
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