“A raucous, poetic declaration championing the ordinary, the vulgar, and the absurd”
In this edition of the Weekender: Benny Blanco’s cookbook, Claes Oldenburg’s Store, and ambient music for spring
This week, we’re becoming parents, contemplating giant ice cream cones, cooking like the rich and famous, and learning to want less.
PARENTING
Becoming “dad”
Carlos Greaves writes about waiting for transcendence after becoming a parent, and the quiet, messy moment when it finally arrived.
Here’s What Surprised Me Most About Becoming a Parent
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inGrowing up, my dad would tell me the story about the day I was born—how, when my mom was pregnant, he would sing to her belly. And the moment he started singing to me the night I was born, I began looking around the room for the sound of his voice until I locked eyes with him. Hearing my dad talk about becoming a father, it felt like an instantly transformative experience. It felt as if he took one look at me and was hit with a tidal wave of love and joy.
The day my daughter was born, I waited for that same transcendent experience—for that moment when my heart would fill to the brim, and my daughter and I would forge an instant and unbreakable bond. But that gush of emotion never came. At least, not the way my dad had described it.
Even as I type this, I feel a strong urge not to admit that. “What do you mean you didn’t instantly feel connected to your child in ways you never thought possible?” I can hear people say, as a headline in the local paper reads “Deadbeat Dad Unmoved by Joys of Parenthood, Experts Say Likely Sociopath.”
I also hesitate to write this knowing that, years from now, my daughter might read this and say “What do you mean you weren’t instantly awestruck by me!? No wonder I haven’t won the Nobel Prize in Physics* yet! You were practically an absent father! This is all your fault!”
*Or [insert life goal that’s meaningful to her—I’m trying not to be one of those parents that sets specific expectations for their children]
Don’t get me wrong, the day my daughter was born was awesome. 10/10. Best day of my life. But that day and in the weeks after, I kept feeling like I should be feeling … more? I was happy, but shouldn’t I be feeling … even more happy? I loved this tiny baby, sure, but, like, I also love my cat? Does that make sense? Shouldn’t having a human child be more of a “My heart is so full it’s about to explode out of my chest” kind of love instead of just an “Aww, she caught a lizard, very impressive” kind of love?**
**To be clear, I’m talking about my cat catching a lizard, not my daughter. But if my daughter’s passion in life is catching lizards, I will fully support that. Again, not trying to impose my own expectations.
For the first few weeks of my daughter’s life, I kept wondering when that tidal wave would hit me. I wondered when I would start to feel like, this is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me, and I have finally found my life’s purpose, instead of just feeling like, yeah, this is pretty great.
That feeling made the harder aspects of caring for a newborn seem even harder. During sleepless nights, or inconsolable crying sessions, I would tell myself, yeah this is rough, but I just have to get through these first few months until we get to the good parts of parenting.
But other parents would tell me “Oh, you think it’s tough now, just wait ’til they’re mobile” or “Just wait ’til they’re teenagers” and I’d think, Well then when the hell is the “good” part??? Age 5-9? Is that it?
FILM
ART
Art for sale
Serena Dayal opens a post tracing the intersection of art and commerce with an overview of Claes Oldenburg’s The Store, which used giant plaster hamburgers to challenge both the gallery system and our relationship with everyday goods.
Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Floor Burger
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inIt’s the winter of 1961, and you’re wandering the gritty streets of New York’s East Village. The air smells faintly of grease and trash and cigarettes, and the storefronts alternate between pawn shops and bodegas. But one shop window draws you in. Inside, oversize ice cream cones slump beside sagging underwear, plaster pies balance precariously on shelves, and a man in paint-splattered clothes chats casually with a customer. This is not a store—it’s The Store. And the man—Claes Oldenburg—is inviting you into a chaotic, absurd, and strangely familiar world where art and commerce collide.
While Allan Kaprow was directing his Happenings in a loft just a few blocks away—inviting participants to squeeze orange juice and tonelessly recite random words in the name of art—his peer Oldenburg was staging a different kind of disruption. The Store wasn’t a performance in the traditional sense, but it pulsed with theatricality: a hybrid of studio, gallery, and sidewalk sale that reimagined what art could be and where it could reside.
Certain pieces stood out among the riot of plaster and chicken wire that filled The Store. Sagging ice cream sundaes with thick, impastoed surfaces seemed less like treats and more like melting monuments to indulgence. Nearby, Braselette (1961) hung awkwardly, its lumpy, distorted shape turning a delicate garment into something grotesque and unwearable. Then came the fast food: Hamburger and French Fries (1962–63), enormous, mocking, and slathered in gaudy paint. Everything was for sale (and prices started at $21.79). At the center of the display was a cash register, painted to look like a crumpled Jackson Pollock.
Like Kaprow, Oldenburg felt that the idea of what art was, needed to be entirely re-evaluated post-Pollock and abstract expressionism. He wanted to move art out from the four edges of the canvas and into physical space, he wanted it pushed beyond the gallery-museum system and onto the streets. As he wrote in his 1961 essay (one of my favorite pieces of art theory) “I am for an art…”:
“I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum … I am for the art out of a doggy’s mouth, falling five stories from the roof … I am for art you can sit on. I am for art you can pick your nose with or stub your toes on … I am for the art that grows in a pot, that comes down out of the skies at night, like lightning, that hides in the clouds and growls. I am for art that is flipped on and off with a switch.”
It was a raucous, poetic declaration championing the ordinary, the vulgar, and the absurd—embracing everything from smoke and shadows to earwax and washing machines—as legitimate material for art and was in defiant opposition to the highbrow ideals of artistic purity (hello abstract expressionists!) in favor at the time.
OIL PASTELS
COOKING
Celeb chef
Katherine Gillespie reviews pop producer and Selena Gomez fiancé Benny Blanco’s cookbook and finds it refreshingly self-aware: despite Blanco’s shaky credentials as a chef, he provides a recipe for the “banana pudding that he serves to SZA in the studio, and that for me is enough.”
“Marry Me Selena Gomez” chicken
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inSomething I like about Open Wide is that Blanco seems to have written it (and I do think that he came up with much of the headnote copy himself—there’s no other explanation for its frankness or typos) under the totally reasonable assumption that it will be received as a gag gift by most and cooked from diligently by few. And yet he makes sure that motivated readers are rewarded anyway, both with enthusiastically presented recipe ideas and glitzy glimpses into his life, which seems to have been a lot of fun so far. He documents celebrity house party culture in pleasing although not necessarily FOMO-inducing detail: Lil Dicky getting brutally rejected by Kendall Jenner, Justin Bieber singing Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls” in between whip-its, Sia napping in the driveway. Blanco also confesses to various personal eccentricities, including a fear of flying so debilitating that he once traveled from New York City to London by ship, sharing a cabin with Ed Sheeran. This “romantic” experience apparently inspired several songs on Sheeran’s 2017 album ÷.
When he doesn’t know how to do something, Blanco humbly pulls in a more knowledgeable person he so happens to know and adds a few grafs of their verbatim advice, which often seems to have been received via email or text. Billie Eilish’s mom Maggie Baird lends her (way too fiddly for me to bother with) vegan cinnamon roll recipe; Jon & Vinny spill the secrets to their spicy fusilli, complete with provocative screed about how certain other famous Italian restaurants stole their vodka sauce. Speaking of which, Carbone’s lasagne verde takes up four pages, after Blanco supposedly spent two years begging Mario to let him print it.
Open Wide loses structure about halfway through. I wish it had been edited to more closely adhere to the dinner party theme. The scrambled eggs recipe is unnecessary, as are most breakfast recipes in most cookbooks. There’s a brief section dedicated to food that will help get the reader laid, which is an amazing conceit that Blanco, for all his R&B horniness (a QR code Spotify playlist at the beginning of the book is full of get-it-on songs like Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” as well as a single Mac DeMarco track), sadly doesn’t commit to very hard. It is possible that if you are the guy who produced “Shape of You,” sex comes fairly easily, and the women reclining by your pool will eat and compliment whatever dish appears in front of them.
The best vanity project cookbooks are honest and therefore ridiculous. I do not want Gwyneth Paltrow to pretend that she eats red meat or really any substantial food at all. I do want her to name-drop Cameron Diaz. Open Wide lives up to its title in more ways than one, although Blanco obviously still only reveals what is convenient to his brand (gross-out stories starring Ed Sheeran rather than insights into his current relationship with former mentor Dr. Luke or pleas for Justin Bieber to forgive him for breaking bro code by getting with Gomez or a single strong political stance, despite numerous allusions to the importance of charity work and helping the less fortunate). To be published in hardcover is a privilege, and I wish that every celebrity thrown a random cookbook deal would embrace it with the same happy stoner’s enthusiasm. I’d mostly rather eat the rich than cook their food, but the greens and olive pasta on page 74 tastes great.
PAINTING
MUSIC
Ever New: Four Albums to Set the Atmosphere for Spring
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in
DACHSHUNDS
BOOK REVIEW
Prep school
Kaitlin Phillips proves a knowledgeable tour guide through the campus novel, offering opinions on rarities and classics before pausing to appreciate Lisa Birnbach’s seminal “Official Preppy Handbook”—a satirical bible that winkingly taught a generation how to speak, dress, and dine like old money.
Shopping The Official Preppy Handbook
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inWhen it comes to campus novels set in the United States, I’m sick of people recommending Prep. It was such a disgusting, depressing book. (Likewise, the popularity of Stoner stumps.) A Separate Peace is still, to me, the best boarding school novel. Elegant and elegiac. Tobias Wolff’s Old School has fallen completely out of fashion, probably rightly so. I can’t remember it enough to recommend it. (For some reason, Wolff’s essay in the New Yorker, in 2008, about failing to have a religious conversion—after seeing a Bergman movie in a church in Oxford—moved me very much. I read it in print when it came out…) I think Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World is deserving of more attention. It’s a campus novel in the sense that Lucky Jim and White Noise are campus novels, i.e. the protagonists are teachers. Janet Malcolm on the Gossip Girl novels is required reading. (These are campus novels, after all!) Merve Emre just wrote a long essay in the NYRB on re-reading I Am Charlotte Simmons, a book I too read when I was younger and felt startled by. For a discomforting campus novel, I’d rather recommend My Education.
Brideshead Revisited is (predictably) my favorite Oxford novel. (The TV show is worth watching!) I’ve written about the obscure books about English public school, which are more for scholarly types or intense Anglophiles: Tom Brown’s School Days: By an Old Boy, Jeremy at Crale, and Stalky & Co., “an unpleasant book about unpleasant boys at an unpleasant school.” Probably better to just read this little essay by George Orwell on his school days and call it a day. (“‘REPORT YOURSELF to the Headmaster after breakfast!’ I put REPORT YOURSELF in capitals because that was how it appeared in my mind. I do not know how many times I heard that phrase during my early years at St Cyprian’s.”)
I find the Wikipedia for the Campus Novel to be a delightful treasure trove for someone who wants to “look into this.” (Every Substack is just some sort of aborted pitch for a Real Essay that I really do plan to write on summer vacation.) There are novels I wanted to love but did not (The Groves of Academe, On Beauty, Moo). Novels I hated and knew I would hate (The Marriage Plot, Disgrace). There are novels I loved but forgot about: namely Wonder Boys (rare case of a perfect book and movie) and Crossing to Safety (which I for years mis-identified as romantic; it’s actually about a man’s dreams being slowly pulverized by his wife, but written with so much nostalgia, you really can miss it). And campus novels I didn’t know existed: Jonathan Lethem wrote a satirical campus novel? (Why are all campus novels satirical?)
POETRY
Vermeer
—Poem by Wislawa Symborska, shared by
As long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.
Wislawa Szymborska
tr. by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak; from HERE (NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010)
PHOTOGRAPHY
SPIRITUALITY
What we’re watching this week
Monday, April 28, at 9 p.m. ET
invites on to discuss non-linear healing and actionable steps to self-love.Tuesday, April 29, at 9 p.m. ET
invites , editor of , to break down the fallout from the Canadian election.Every weekday, 3 p.m. ET
Every day,
(of fame) invites comedians and actors on for wide-ranging discussions. This week, his guests include comedian Mohanad Elshieky, comedian , and the actress Daniella Pineda.
Substackers featured in this edition
Art & Photography:
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Writing:
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The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
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Thanks for the music link! Always looking for ambience as I type articles on biophysics.
I’m so honored to be featured here! This was a vulnerable essay for me to write and I’m touched that it resonated with so many people. Thank you!