Fandom

Wednesday

Tim Benson

I’m a forty-year-old male Swiftie. No, I’m not ashamed

Here’s the kind of guy I am: my musical taste is small-c catholic and runs about 30,000 albums. (All CD and digital, no vinyl. I’m not a hipster prone to dropping thirty-five bucks on a picture disc of Ghost in the Machine or a “junkyard swirl”-colored 2-LP edition of Out of State Plates.) If you make good music, no matter the genre, I’m probably going to like it. On any given day I might alternate listening to some Webb Pierce records with the Annie Get Your Gun original cast recording, and then follow those up with some Pantera, and then some Dandy Livingstone, and then some Bananarama, and then some Albert King, etc. etc.

swiftie

Thursday

York Underwood

Inside Joan Didion’s extravagant estate auction

On December 23, 2021, I left the Hollywood Roosevelt and walked down North Orange Drive to turn right and face Sunset Boulevard. It was dark when I passed the entrance to the Chateau Marmont. When I finally crossed the street to arrive at Book Soup, the “Bookseller To The Great & Infamous,” I turned to the cashier and asked if they had copies of Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. He huffed, “Uh, yeah, we’re sold out.” Joan Didion had died earlier that day in Manhattan due to complications of Parkinson’s Disease.

joan didion

Friday

Grace Curley

The flailing Fauci fandom

Dr Anthony Fauci has exhibited plenty of behavioral red flags over the past year. Don’t believe me? Google ‘Fauci magazine covers’. The results say it all. My favorite was an InStyle cover from last July where the ‘The Good Doctor’ was posing by a pool. The Daily Beast described the cover in slobbering detail: ‘His black rimmed square sunglasses reflect a sun ray back into the camera’s eye. His blue and white button-up is undone at the neck and his jeans fit tight. It’s as if Fauci is playing Daniel Craig playing Roger Stone in an inevitable biopic.’ Can we get a wellness check on these writers, who are drooling over an elderly bureaucrat sitting in a folding chair wearing Dwight Schrute-style sunglasses?

fauci