One Big Thing, Two Takes on the F-Word

And other numerical exercises

One big thing

I mean, biggish. For me anyway. We’re gonna do this podcast thing. If you’re around D.C. this month, join me and my crew on Thursday, January 22 between noon and 4 pm at the Barrel House Cafe and Bar, on 14th Street and Rhode Island Ave., NW. (Entrances from both thoroughfares, though the 14th Street door will be closed once we roll tape.)

We’ll record three separate pilot episodes with three world-class creatives I know you’ll be interested in hearing from — plus a handful of surprise guests to help keep things interesting.

No charge for the show, regular Barrel House menu available. So come hang out, getcherself some lunch or coffee, and watch me try not to fall on my face in front of people I respect!

Drop me a line if you’d like me to save you a table — otherwise seating is first come, first served:

If you can’t make it, watch this space. The first pilot will drop here (and on most of the usual platforms, if the creek don’t rise) within a week or so of the taping.

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Two takes on an F-word

All my gheys were talking the other week about a thing where that punchy little F-word — no, the other F-word, the one that also means “a cigarette” (to Brits anyway) and “a bundle of sticks for the fire” (to crusty old lexicographers anyway) — has been turning up in more titles lately, specifically at the theater.

The six-letter F-word in question also has a culinary usage (meatballs made with the nastier bits of one critter or another), and of course it shares linguistic space with “fasces,” an authority figure’s bundle of rods, which is where we get “fascism” from.

(Maybe keep that in mind as you decide how much you’re comfortable using it.)

Aaaaanyway the results played out here in the NYT and here in The WashPo. If you’re the sort who looks at datelines and keeps score, it appears that Erik Piepenburg got there first (on Dec. 1 online, though his reported essay didn’t hit print until later). But Shane O’Neill at The Post, who hit send on his Seriously? base-rounder on Dec. 4, gets bonus points for including a helpful little decision-making rhyme:

“If you’re gay, slur away. If you’re straight, it can wait. When in doubt, leave it out.”

To which I can say only, “Attagurl.”

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Three things you might appreciate

• Gotta love it when a perfectly respectable performer drops their “I’m totally a professional” veneer in an interview and admits quite frankly to being a healthy, horny thirtysomething (final page).

• This essay by The Post’s Tim Carman, a former City Paper colleague from way back, has such a melancholy beauty about it that I’ve had it open in a tab since Christmas Week. I wanted to share it with y’all in case you missed it.

• What does it say about me that my reaction, when I saw the press-performance invite for the upcoming run of ‘Happy Days’ at Washington Stage Guild, was something like “Oooooh comfort food!”? It is possible that I am not entirely well.

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This week I’ve been …

Watching:

Heated Rivalry. For reasons! Work-related reasons! I did at least wait to cue up HBO Max’s sweatily smutty hockey romance until I’d read the first trio of Rachel Reid’s Game Changers books, because I’m classy like that, and because my librarian friend Lee threatened me with severe judgment if I didn’t. Now that I’ve binged the TV show, my extremely professional opinion is that main couple Shane and Ilya are indeed quite pretty, as discussed ad nauseam in the popular press, and that the impossibly stacked real-life rugger-bugger Robbie G.K. would be exquisitely cast as Michael “Mouse” Tolliver in any future excursions into the Tales of the City universe. (The link just above takes you to a longer and much more thoughtful Heated Rivalry conversation at NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour.) Also my professional opinion: I’ll be greatly pleased if the already-greenlit Season Two brings Ryan, the towering beardy-ginger enforcer from Tough Guy, firmly into the frame. Oh, and BTW if you like the essential sweetness of the Game Changers series, you’ll love Cat Sebastian’s We Could Be So Good and You Should Be So Lucky, a pair of linked midcentury romances set in overlapping sporty-newspapery New York City milieus.

Reading:

Life on the Mississippi, wise and funny and alive to the world and its wonders in a way that’s heartening in this bitter season — while remaining splendidly jaundiced about everything from the colonial urge to the religious impulse. Mark Twain, man. A legend for a reason.

Listening to:

Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes by Erik Satie, key influence on French modernists and minimalists, quizzically zany musical humorist, and onetime house pianist at Montmartre’s legendary Chat Noir. Also a raging alcoholic who died at 59, which is about a year older than I’ll be in a few weeks, and essentially the guy who invented elevator music — though he called it musique d’ameublement, or “furniture music.” And yes, his stuff can be wonderfully unobtrusive and undemanding, but even the simplest of it is inventive and sophisticated. (Maybe avoid “Cinéma” if you’re a newbie, though. An actual film soundtrack that Satie composed for a Dadaist short, “Cinéma” can be just straight-up insane-making, in much the way that that endless monotone piano note in Johnny Greenwood’s One Battle After Another score is.) Plus, Satie’s masterpiece is a setting of the Socratic Dialogues — classical-era debates among exclusively male philosophers — as a kind of secular oratorio for four sopranos, so there’s that. Anyway, here’s Satie’s marvelously queer compatriot Jean-Yves Thibaudet with some of the greatest hits:

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And finally

Another old friend from the City Paper sounded a bit despairing this week in a social-media post that read, in its entirety: “The fashion for being a total heel is hard to take.”

I hear that, y’all. I do. We’ve gone from “God don’t like ugly” to “I wonder just how crass and cruel I can be about another human being the day after her extrajudicial murder without losing my talking-head gig.”

And maybe it’s easier for me, at least today, because my kittens are still kittens, or because my nephews remain pretty cool twentysomethings, or because my sister’s cancer hasn’t returned. Or because amid all of this I’m still somehow not drinking.

But the world and its wonders, as I was reminded by dipping into the Twain and into the Satie and yes, even into the warm-hearted smut of those hockey romances, actually are still real, still present, still available when we need to reach out and clutch them tighter. (Not the bunnies. Do not clutch the bunnies; they can be skittish about that sort of thing.)

Walk. Breathe. Turn your face to the sun. Yes, even now, even in January.

Life is so, so precious. And I’m awfully glad you’re here.

Next time,

— trey