🟧 Taste Notes 10.17.24
🟧 Taste Notes 10.17.24
Megalopolis, sneaker collab, Han Kang, frozen dumplings.
Taste Notes is One Thing’s signature curatorial effort, a monthly-ish collection of things we find cool and interesting. Scroll all the way down for the best frozen dumplings available online, praise for Megalopolis, Nobel Prize thoughtz, and a guide to new newsletters. KC is Kyle Chayka, NG is Nate Gallant.
A Coltrane-riffing jazz track: The saxophonist and composer Benny Golson died in September, and in one remembrance I caught his piece, “Times Past (This is for You, John),” which you can stream on Spotify. It’s an homage to John Coltrane, whose influence you can hear in the careening saxophone (Pharoah Sanders plays on it, too) and the propulsive piano. It’s not Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” but it is the next best thing. Listen for Sanders’s energetic abstraction, a step noisier than Coltrane. The whole album of Sanders performances, released in 2023, is worth listening to. — KC
Sneaker collab: Hoka launched a very normcore collab sneaker with Reformation, the beloved women’s brand (you’ve seen their dresses at every wedding). Weirdly the sneaker doesn’t have any sexy holes or slits cut into it. — KC
Lumberjack revival: Best Made, the lifestyle / outdoors gear brand that epitomized Brooklyn circa 2010, is back! It was bought back by its original founder Peter Buchanan-Smith from Duluth Trading, the company it was sold to at its peak a decade ago. Buchanan-Smith has been on a long and self-documented journey of recreating the artisanal magic, and the first products of the reboot are rolling out. The $450 “Old Gold No. 1” golden-hued ax is already sold out (sorry to the ex-Vice executive in your life who won’t get it as a Christmas gift!), but the $498 Selvedge Studio Jacket is taking pre-orders. There are also hats and belts and rulers for sale, of course. Call it a uniform for the new wave of anti-AI Luddism, smashing servers. (I remember Best Made’s waxed jackets, at least, being amazing.) — KC
Yes, that S: In 90’s nostalgia news, it’s time for the National Women’s Soccer League playoffs and the Washington Spirit have released a truly deep design cut, ripped straight from your three-ring binder during study hall: a t-shirt with that cool “S” now standing in for fandom of the sublime glory of Trinity Rodman or your favorite girlboss’s favorite girlboss, the owner of the team, Michele Kang. — NG
Etsy pick: Want an unexpected combination of earth tones for your fall closet? Look no further than this random vest I saw while browsing the other day, with geometric diamonds of green, blue, and red. The reverse-suit-structure pattern I think would be very flattering in many different ensembles! — NG
Should you see Megalopolis? Yes, immediately: I went to see Francis Ford Coppola’s epic auteur project Megalopolis at a matinee on the holiday Monday morning with a few friends who had extra tickets, which turned out to be the perfect time for something completely absurd. Honestly, it was less whacky than I expected after seeing the memes. What Coppola got for his money and creative control is a bacchanalia of image and sound and acting with visual effects and cinematographic tricks that are actually refreshing given the monotony of “realistic” CGI elsewhere. (Compare Dune 2’s washed-out hyperrealism with Megalopolis’s wild cartoonishness.) I loved when the screen split into three vertical sections and when random flowers bloomed across the frame. The dialogue and the structural editing are the worst aspects, but they’re not thattttt bad and Aubrey Plaza is amazing. We turn to art to be surprised and discomfited; sometimes it doesn’t come in a serenely elegant package. If you care about compelling culture you should see this in a theater, rarely these days is something both so big and so weird. — KC
Best new memoir: The path-breaking scholar and writer Anne Anlin Cheng’s newest book, Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority is a breath of fresh-air amid a mountain of terrible autofiction about graduate school and/or life as a professor. Rather than letting the “academic vibes” of this professional choice stand in for philosophical or artistic reflection, Cheng offers a funny, often incisively poetic journey through the dark chasms of relatable personal turmoil: difficult medical episodes, challenging childhood memories, the personal toll of parenthood. Her insights are sharpened but not replaced by her expertise in the more academic side of discussions on race, colonialism, and 20th century American life. If you’re very bored or even troubled by the way the vocabulary of cultural studies, in particular notions of what it means to write about race and gender, has spilled out into the trade nonfiction market, largely in glib ad copy for subpar memoirs or autofiction, this book will offer you something very new and very insightful at the now admittedly well-worn intersection of the personal and the political. — NG
Buy these frozen dumplings: If you know Xian Famous Foods, you know it’s a crime that the chain is NYC only. I am a single-issue voter for whichever presidential candidate mandates XFF expand to DC. But the company has been slowly mass-producing its chili oil and other products on its ecommerce site, including a variety of meal kits so you can get their dishes across state lines. It would be cool to make their hand-ripped noodles using premade dough, but I went for the frozen dumplings, which are less DIY and come 30 to a bag for $35 (on sale atm). The spinach dumplings are a sleeper hit. I’ll let you know how they turn out, but XFF has never failed me. — KC
On the Nobel Prize in Literature
Does it mean everything? Or nothing? Is this a well-deserved accolade for literary talent or merely an excuse for an aging and obsolete mechanism of canon-building to continue attempting to justify its own existence? For me, this is just the time of year I get to chuckle at the Japanese papers running the same annual headline: some iteration of “Haruki Murakami snubbed again.” In the case of this year’s winner, the Korean writer Han Kang, the story that will no doubt be repeatedly dredged up is the kerfuffle over the initial English translation of her novel The Vegetarian. Translator Deborah Smith’s effort was, by a great many accounts, neither particularly accurate nor consistent in its recreation of a coherent novella in English.
I will say I enjoyed the book when it first came out, though I haven’t revisited the work since. More importantly, the translation was greenlit by the author herself and became incredibly popular, thus asking a good few questions about what a translated novel is, should be, or could be, as shaped by some inevitable gap with the original. For those interested, the backlash, minor relative to the book’s success, was punctuated by novelist and translator in his own right, Tim Parkes, trashing Smith’s work in a now infamous NYRB piece. Personally, I enjoyed this more recent piece which interviewed the very smart and differently curmudgeonly editor at the University of Rochester, Chad Post. He has a very valuable, studied perspective on the affair, having turned down the book originally, but also having cultivated a very clear sense of how to bring new voices in translation into English, notably several of my personal favorites: Matthias Énard (Zone), Antoine Volodine (Bardo, or Not Bardo), and Carlos Labbé (Spiritual Choreographies). — NG
Fleeing the U.S. election for a European village?: Check out this bright-yellow townhouse for €135,000 in Montmeyan, France, not far from Provence. If you have more cash, try this €690,000 villa in Hyeres — you won’t regret being right on the coast, plus you could prob rent this out for $$$. A cute stone facade! — KC
Queens “cool”: In other sporting fashion news, I am still unsure what to make of Aimé Leon Dore’s dueling Mets and Yankees hats, especially now that we’re staring down the first potential subway series (a Mets-Yankees World Series matchup) since 2000. There’s a much longer conversation here about why a Mets hat feels like a choice and a Yankees hat feels like an unbothered, staple accessory, but perhaps for this reason their alt-colorway Mets hats seem more fun, except for the green one. Those are literally the colors of another team, the Oakland A’s (baseball hipsters choice of ten years ago, vis-a-vis Moneyball). Still, it feels like there’s a kind of class tourism about the Mets version, with a very upmarket fashion brand piggybacking on the increasing gentrification of Queens, and the idea of Queens, now that Brooklyn has been nearly swallowed whole by upscale urban sprawl. — NG
Hunting down the most hyped fashion items: I was enthralled by this Lauren Sherman / Fashion People / Puck podcast episode with Gab Waller, who runs an online service that takes requests to find rare and sold-out items — bags, t-shirts, jewelry — via Instagram. Her eponymous site basically says “DM or email us” — so cool. Waller employs an international staff to run to physical stores, ship across the world, or negotiate behind the scenes with luxury brand reps to get the desired object, and all for a flat service fee of $220. Such an interesting business model, and indicative of just how much specific “hero products” attract consumers, who then compete to own them. If you can’t invest the time or energy to chase down the ephemeral drops yourself, just have Gab Waller do it for you. — KC
Newsletter corner
New and new-to-us publications that we’ve added to our inboxes.
The editorial genius: Legendary magazine editor Tina Brown, who made Vanity Fair the peak of the glossy magazine era, and whose ‘80s diary we recommended, launched her own newsletter called Fresh Hell. Instant subscribe imo and you can already see her condensed copywriting skill in her first edition of newsy blurbs.
Insider restaurant biz commentary: Expedite is a food-industry newsletter from Kristen Hawley, and it supplies some of what I miss from the late Eater podcast that often discussed how restaurants ran their businesses. Check out her coverage of tech that helps restaurants text you.
London city rag: Jim Waterson, previously the media editor at The Guardian, launched his own tabloid-y newsletter of London goings-on, skewing politics and media but with enough fun stuff like “The five most expensive publicly-listed properties in London right now.” Subscribe, you anglophile.