The Weekender: Synesthesia, the art of breakfast, and Megalopolis
What we’re reading, watching, and listening to this week
Happy Saturday. This week, we’re reading about high-brow listicles, remembering an iconic radio host, and fondly contemplating the horror of turning into our parents. Enjoy.
SENSATION
Seeing scents
Synesthesia, the experience of sensory information through multiple unrelated senses, has a few (relatively) common guises: associating numbers with colors or letters, or being able to “see” music. In Gonzo Fumes, David Seth Moltz explains how his synesthesia—he experiences scents as colors—informs his work as a perfumer.
Synesthesia
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inI’m not the first person to suggest that aromatic materials are a lot like the paints on a painter’s palette. In fact, people in the perfume industry often refer to the materials used in a perfume as a palette. When you have synesthesia (or perhaps even keen observation skills), the perfumer’s organ really looks colorful. Let me try to explain.
Of course, aromatic materials that come from natural sources are informed by our other senses. Orange oil (from orange-colored oranges) unsurprisingly conjures visions of orange skin. You can certainly use it to paint orange strokes in your perfume. But like orange paint, orange oil has the ability to be stretched in ways to make it paler, brighter, or richer in a myriad of ways. Orange oil can have tinges of yellows, greens, and perhaps even red. This ability to “stretch” an aroma (or color) is extremely useful not only when you want people to smell “orange” in your perfume, but for when you want to highlight the orange aspect of something that is not an orange.
If I were to try to construct the aroma of a saffron-colored monk’s robe in India, I might use some orange to announce “orange” to the sniffer in the top note section of the perfume. But personally, I would not use so much that it smelled like the real fruit—I might bury it in some spices and other citrus. I would pull at the orange with saffron and marigold. Both have some “orange” color in their throw. Saffron has more red and yellow tones. Marigold has a dusty brown earthiness that squirrels and I find repellent. In fact, that dustiness reads to the nose almost like a texture—you can smell its felted thickness just as orange oil smells “bright.” This usage is, of course, all very meta; we are using Indian oils that smell of colors common in India as we try to suggest the presence of an Indian monk’s robe. The oils suggest color and even tactile feelings. Hopefully, the sniffer is left with the impression of a monk’s robe, which is often helped by the name, description, or image on the bottle or box of the perfume. But you can see how these many references to a place help accurately bring the sniffer into the Indian world of the robe.
FAMILY
The ghost of parents past
Death, taxes, turning into our parents: all inevitable. In this post, Laura Kennedy describes realizing she’s adopted a habit of her mother’s as she’s aged, evoking a combination of horror and fond remembrances.
Gasping at straws
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inMy mother gasped. She was a gasper. If someone dropped something, or nearly did, or if she tripped, spilled something, or simply took fright for any reason, she would audibly, richly gasp with the fulsomeness of a town gossip or a deep sea diver. She would emit a dramatic, objectively silly gasp. The sort of gasp you would associate with a Victorian woman being medicated with laudanum and cool, dark rooms for “hysteria.” The sort of woman who says things like “I’ll have to go and lie down” as if anyone has the time or the budget to be prone in the middle of the day in this economy.
My mother’s gasp made no sense. She did not “lie down.” Possibly even at night. It would not be a surprise to wake in the night to fetch yourself a glass of water only to find her reading, or engaged in some other manner of productive but in no way night-time-appropriate work. “I’m just polishing the coffee table. The dullness was bothering me.” I’d just blink at her dryly, considering that if I were wearing a watch it must surely read between one and three am. “I couldn’t sleep so I thought I’d make soda bread. Get a run at the day. You know.” A run at the day, as if Limerick city in the 2010s were Thermopylae. Somewhere you had to launch yourself at an enemy emitting a death-shriek and wielding your weapon of choice. A sword! Or some soda bread! My mother was a true product of second-wave feminism, believing that women should do everything but also that they should feel they’re not doing everything well enough.
So the gasp seemed out of character, but it spoke to the reality beneath. The anxiety. The fact that my mother was a string pulled taut and any extra little tug or snag might snap it. As though she was waiting for the bad thing to happen at any moment, every moment. The milk spilling. The bills hitting the doormat. The bad news phone call. Always on the precipice of disaster. The sound was profoundly annoying. My brother and I would taunt her endlessly about it. The size—the mass—of the gasp. The luxuriant way it filled a room. Its disproportionate sense of drama in a person so otherwise undramatic. You sound, we would tell her, like someone on meth sanding a wardrobe; like a dog’s squashed chew toy reinflating; like an overzealous under 7s basketball coach with a broken whistle; like a forklift elevating a palette full of toilet seats; like a woman who’s about to demand to speak to the manager. You sound like a crazy person.
So anyway I’ve inherited the gasp. I hate it so much, and every time it happens I think of my mother and I laugh and I hate it and I wish a little that she were here to say that I sound like a cat barely tolerating a rectal thermometer. The gasp arises from the diaphragm and it is reactionary, so I cannot seem to train it away. To think it away. It comes forth of its own volition when something is spilled, jostled, walked into. When we find ourselves on the cusp of a tiny, routine disaster or an error that will definitely not cause grievous injury to anybody. I consider it, trying to remember if I did the gasp when my mother was alive (I don’t think so), and if not, when it began. When precisely my mother jumped forth from my past to fill my lungs noisily, hysterically, pointlessly, with air at precisely the least appropriate moment.
PAINTING
CULTURE
The listicle strikes back
Listicles may feel like a relic of the past, but in One Thing, Kyle Chayka and Nate Gallant convincingly argue that they still rule the internet. The main difference: These days, lists are made by prestige media in attempts to create “some semblance of a cultural map by which to navigate.”
List culture
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and inBack in the mid-2010s, during the heyday of BuzzFeed, the site published tons of “listicles.” The genre was synonymous with BuzzFeed, which was synonymous with cheaply produced, easily distributed content that could float out over social networks. Hence articles like “33 Things Every Conference Attendee Knows To Be True” and “23 Songs To Play You To Sleep.” They also functioned as a container for aggregating social media: “29 Hilarious Tweets That Are A Perfect Representation Of Adulting.” (These are all real but I will not do you the disservice of linking them.) A 2010s blogger forced to produce multiple posts a day would every so often turn to the listicle as a crutch. Who can forget The Awl’s Listicles Without Commentary? (JK, I’m too old and the site’s archive is now nigh-inaccessible, but IYKYK.) As the era wore on, entire full-time jobs were devoted to listicle production. Of course, the ecosystem eventually collapsed and the listicle became another artifact of the bygone era, like being famous on Tumblr or knowing which Instagram filter was most popular.
Today, we have prestige lists, the upscale version of the listicle. They are the same format, the same appeal of easily digestible content, yet with a veneer of curation. They are meant to build a kind of canon — something permanently authoritative — but they seem closer to a revived, upmarket listicle. The hottest restaurants in your town according to The Infatuation or Eater heatmaps. The best shows to stream on Netflix right now. The NYT recently recapped its own archive of recipes: “Our 50 Greatest Hits, According to You.” Some recipes are “Icons,” some are “Chart Toppers,” some are “Influencers.” In other words, NYT Cooking has produced so much content that it needs to offer a thematic guide. Not to be outdone, Bon Appetit collected its best 56 recipes since its launch in 1956. Others recap culture as a whole. The Atlantic might have kicked off the list mania in March of 2024 with its list of “The Great American Novels.” This summer, NYT did “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” (The nice thing about publishing giant lists of stuff you can shop for is you can make money on referral links.)
The function of the list is to guide our attention. We need a tight selection of information on the boundless internet, perhaps more than ever before.
FILM
In dialogue: Megalopolis
John Paul Brammer: I recently saw Megalopolis, the beleaguered passion project from legendary director Francis Ford Coppola, whose repertoire includes such classics as The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This film is unlike those, in that it is not “good.”
Underexposed: Everyone knows the numbers: Coppola, who is 85 years old, spent 120 million of his own money, and only made 4 million back on opening weekend, finishing sixth behind the Indian Telugu-language action film Devara: Part 1. The Tomato tells us “MegaFLOPolis” is only 49 percent good. The standing ovation at Cannes was a measly seven minutes long. By the numbers, Megalopolis is a zero on the binary. No value.
radicaledward: [P]eople have the audacity to speak about its box office numbers. Children, if Coppola was looking to make a movie to make money, he would not have spent his own literal fortune to make it.
Benjamin Kerstein: I am totally unable here to give a comprehensive summary of its plot. It would take pages to do so. Suffice it to say, the premise is that a genius city planner is driven by his own genius to construct a utopian city in the midst of the capital of a modern Roman Empire.
John McDonald: The plot is a mash-up of Roman history filtered through the lens of a Hollywood B-movie, with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) hovering somewhere in the background.
Kate Wagner: The film is saturated with erotic fantasy, anxiety, and objectifying ideation.
John Devore: [It] is sloppy and sluggish, a conceptual smoothie blending surrealism, sci-fi, ancient Rome, and Art Deco New York. The CGI is half-raw, the dialogue flat but flowery.
Jeff Maurer: The film is more masturbatory than your typical OnlyFans live stream, and it made me embarrassed not only for the actors, but also for the crew, America, and Thomas Edison for having invented the movie camera in the first place.
Benjamin Kerstein: [T]he film is, in a sense, quite pretentious. It is enormously ambitious and clearly seeks to convey what Coppola believes to be a profound message about the nature and fate of humanity.
John Paul Brammer: Corruption! Decadence! The fall of civilizations! The snakey nature of women! And, most importantly, there’s the idea of the artistic genius who simply wants to bring something pure and beautiful into existence, but is held back by the wickedness of a naughty world — small, fearful minds that refuse to let Cesar Catilina build Megalopolis because it “sounds weird” and “will flop at the box office.” One of the big ideas of Megalopolis is Megalopolis.
Jeff Maurer: If Coppola intended to make a point about the dangers of dictatorship in the most roundabout, meta, vineyard-liquidating way imaginable…well, then, maybe he’s a genius after all.
John Devore: Megalopolis is everything Hollywood is not right now: daring, silly, passionate, eager to please, and utterly uninterested in what you think.
John Paul Brammer: I may not have loved Megalopolis, but it did make me wish I lived in a world in which there were more films like it, more risks taken, more ridiculous films that exist strictly for the sake of film itself. Whatever criticisms I have, I appreciate that it’s art! In my perfect world, my utopia, my Megalopolis, if you will, there would be more weird, difficult, unwieldy films with massive budgets behind them. On this, Megalopolis and I agree.
CREATIVITY
AUDIO
Longtime listener
If you were an insomniac or night-shift worker in America in the ’90s and early aughts, you might well have spent a few of the long, dark hours of the night with Art Bell by your side. The host of Coast to Coast AM, Art Bell provided a space to discuss topics too offbeat for daytime radio: stories about ghosts, aliens, secret societies, and conspiracy theories abounded. In this podcast episode, Katherine Dee shares Art Bell’s impact on modern media, and how his show fostered a sense of community for lonely misfits across the country.
First Time Caller: An Art Bell Tribute
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and in
ILLUSTRATION
POETRY
PASTELS
FICTION
A good meal
The Humanities Library compiled a survey of breakfasts in literature and film, with excerpts from literary giants including Iris Murdoch and James Joyce, and stills from movies including Howl’s Moving Castle and Groundhog Day. Here’s an excerpt from the short story “Breakfast” by John Steinbeck, an “imagined world of red light, cold air, and hot coffee.”
Perspectives | On Breakfast
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inWe filled our plates, poured bacon gravy over our biscuits and sugared our coffee. The older man filled his mouth full and he chewed and chewed and swallowed. Then he said, “God Almighty, it’s good;” and he filled his mouth again.
The young man said, “We been eating good for twelve days.”
We all ate quickly, frantically, and refilled our plates and ate quickly again until we were full and warm. The hot bitter coffee scalded our throats. We threw the last little bit with the grounds in it on the earth and refilled our cups.
There was color in the light now, a reddish gleam that made the air seem colder. The two men faced the east and their faces were lighted by the dawn, and I looked up for a moment and saw the image of the mountain and the light coming over it reflected in the older man’s eyes.
Then the two men threw the grounds from their cups in the earth and they stood up together. “Got to get going,” the older man said.
SKETCH
FOOD
Tarte tatin
There’s been more coffee than usual in this week’s Weekender. While you contemplate brewing your next pot, consider how good a tarte tatin would taste with it. It may be too late for today’s coffee, but there’s always tomorrow.
Kitchen Project #150: Ultimate Tarte Tatin
—A recipe by Clodagh Manning, shared in
’sI enjoy any dessert that highlights the flavours of fruit. Above any cake or ice cream dessert, a plate of fruit reigns supreme in the hierarchy of last-bite pleasure. Its most noble form is a tart: with a crisp or flaky texture at the bottom and supple fruit or custard fillings, it brings out the best of every element within it. It's no reach then to say, with certainty, that tarte tatin is one of my all time favourite, desert island desserts.
The tarte tatin is named after sisters Stephanie and Caroline Tatin, who owned a hotel in a village near Paris in the 1880s. According to one legend, Stephanie (Fanny) Tatin, while preparing apples for a tart one Sunday, left the fruit cooking a bit too long. Alerted by the wafts of smoke, she quickly covered the apples with pastry and baked it, creating the iconic tarte tatin. Another legend suggests the tart was born from an accidental fall, prompting one of the sisters to cover the smashed tart with caramel and call it a day.
Since the 1880s, the best possible tarte tatin has featured apples that are glassy and thoroughly infused with caramel. The apples are sweet but soaked with a rich caramel that adds bitterness. The texture is equally important; the apples should have a chewy exterior and a tender, supple interior, and pastry is always crisp—famously, no one likes a soggy bottom.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Substackers featured in this edition
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Megalopolis is a work of genius, it doesn’t need the box office or the critics, it needs people who can sit and see their world reflected: A Rome that is always about to fall or flourish. A battle between the dire needs of the present and the seemingly superfluous dreams of the future. We need both the pragmatist and the dreamer if we want to create something better, but anger and upset threaten to overturn the whole thing if it’s not better in time. It was a brilliant portrayal of our times in my opinion (and many of the times that have become before this one too!)
Big thank you for reposting my painting! 🧡