Trash on Hulu TV; Tennis at Amy Yee; and a veggie pizza, hold the cheese.
I’m All Lost In …
the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week
#64
First, I’ve got an anti-recommendation to make: Sean Baker’s uninspired new film, Anora. While I highly recommend his 2015 film Tangerine, a sad, lo-fi, free-form movie about a transgender sex worker, this latest effort is a trite prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold story written as a homage to (could anyone care less?) video-store-pseudo-intellectual, Quentin Tarantino. Baker scripts his main character, Anora, aka, Annie (Mikey Madison of Better Things fame) as a sassy stripper/escort, which simply means he gives her a working class Queens accent.
Certainly: A+ to the charmed, comedic performance by Mark Eidelstein as Vanya, a super privileged 21-year-old (going-on-14) Russian ga-zillionaire’s son. Vanya is a reckless sprite who floats through expensive and indolent party-drug chaos. He also seems to skid across his father’s mansion’s chic floors as he leads Annie to his Xbox-bedroom. Unfortunately, his well-crafted, off-kilter character goes missing too early in the movie, and we’re left focusing on Annie as noble stripper, whose savage wisdom consists of cursing.
Baker does give Annie an impromptu workers’ rights lecture. I guess this is supposed to flesh out her diamond-in-the-rough street genius (and also make her sympathetic to the liberal art-house crowd who are otherwise stuck with Baker’s sophomoric parade of bare asses, homophobic punch lines, cat fights, and violence).
I do have a thumbs up rec this week: Oatly brand chocolate oat milk. This is a deep chocolate potion, perfect for heating up and mixing with vanilla, nutmeg, and whiskey or brandy on your solo Xmas Eve.
Mix with whiskey or brandy
I had plenty left over to pour cold and long over ice as a morning kick for the rest of the holidays.
And lastly, a The-Jury’s-Still-Out note: I started reading the 800-page novel A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara this week; “the kids love it,” Bookstore Valium Tom told me (by which he meant Millennials and Gen Zers) after I picked it up at the suggestion of my (Millennial) friend, Glenn.
Having worked my way through the first two chapters, I am not yet interested in the overtly tortured characters.
This week’s list:
1) Tell Me Lies, Seasons 1 & 2
I wasted away in bed over the holiday break watching all 18 episodes of this trashy Hulu series, which is a throwback to the salacious heyday of CW Network teen soap operas.
Normies and sociopath’s, a sign of the times.
The show’s reliance on gendered stereotypes to explain the character’s choices (with occasional feminist monologues that fail miserably as offsets to the onslaught of tropes) seem akin, as a model of this era’s selfish behavior, to reactionary Trumpism.
Zeitgeist stuff.
It’s all frat-party-as-proscenium drama for day-after fall out featuring an intertwined set of good looking college kids double crossing one another.
And fucking each other. There are two main characters: brooding Lucy (sexy sexy Grace Van Patten), who is scripted too normie and superficial to read as the aspiring young writer this plot calls for; and her on-again-off-again, usually shirtless, cut boyfriend, a conniving sociopath named Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White), who’s reminiscent of the pernicious husband on Apple TV’s far superior series, Bad Sisters. Stephen and Lucy, a duplicitous operator herself, certainly deserve one another as they engage in dining hall machinations to navigate the social dynamics of muddled youth and mostly circle the implications of a mysterious and fatal car crash that haunts the drama from Episode 1 onward.
Much like my reaction to Trump’s sick carnival, or perhaps because of Trump’s sick carnival, I couldn’t turn away from this titillating wreckage, staying up all night two nights in a row to binge watch this garbage. The numbing of thyself for 2025 begins.
2) The Amy Yee Indoor Tennis Center
On the other hand, I formally ended 2024 by playing tennis at the Amy Yee Indoor Tennis Center on New Year’s Eve afternoon. I had a 1:15 reservation. This was an appropriate finale to my year, not only as exercise and exorcism, but more so, because the preceding 364 days were dominated by my unabated tennis fandom (Daffy Saby is already tearing through the draw in Brisbane this week, by the way) and with my own semi regular tennis matches.
If any place on the planet needs an indoor tennis center, it’s soggy Seattle. I’ve been aware of this high-profile Dept. of Parks facility for decades. It prominently marks the start of south Seattle just a few blocks south of I-90. But I’ve never checked it out. Amy Yee was a regional and national tennis player from Seattle, who taught and preached tennis to local kids.
In 2002, two years after Yee’s death, Seattle Parks and Recreation re-named the city’s popular South End Tennis Center in her honor.
For such a prominent Seattle landmark, it’s surprisingly (and wonderfully) understated inside; utilitarian in a 1970s Hot Shoppes-as-rec center way. At least at first.
There’s the makeshift locker rooms (bathrooms really, with one shower), the low-key front desk staff, and a pro-shop that probably used to be a kids’ lunch room. An then, behind a floor-to-ceiling wall of glass, there’s a set of ten bright blue, hard courts flowing in succession like a line of mirrors reflected in mirrors.
Each court is separated by hanging scrims, glorious with sky-high ceilings and spacious side areas that include changeover benches. Walking onto Court #9 (there are ten, and they were all occupied as well), it was easy to pretend I was making my entrance onto Arthur Ashe with thousands of fans cheering my every step. At $18 per person, it’s more than worth the price to cosplay U.S. Open for your allotted 75 minutes of fame.
(As opposed to going online to the the Parks Department’s website to book one of their citywide outdoor courts, you can only reserve Amy Yee’s indoor courts over the phone with a special reservation account—which I set up this week just to secure playing time for the 31st.)
There was camaraderie and optimism in the air this last afternoon of the year at the Amy Yee Indoor Tennis Center. Over on Court #10, two 40-something women dressed in classic tennis skirts were bashing flat and tricky two-handed backhand returns as they updated each other on the goss between points. And the middle aged athletic guy on Court #8 (also dressed in classic preppy tennis attire) cheered my plan for post match beers as me and my hitting partner, who, I must say, had a keen eye for the corners during our volleys, headed out spent and gleeful to ring in 2025.
3) Build-Your-Own Cheeseless Veggie Pizza at the Hop Vine
Vegan cheese, i.e., plastic, is gross.
Unless I’m baking a vegan pizza at home (cashew cheese is the ticket), I shy away from the melted plastic options available out and about.
Bored with my usual soup and salad choice at the Hop Vine (a flannel shirt, IPA, and board game-friendly hangout where I tend to meet my aforementioned young friend, Glenn, a bearded, former bike shop dude who provides cover when I venture this far off my radar), I experimented with a build-your-own pizza instead.
I’ve gone this route before at more algorithm-dependent pizza chains, and it quickly turns into a belabored affair. Not so at the alt-folk rock Hop Vine where the relaxed bartender happily turned my pizza craving into an exciting kitchen project.
We collaboratively re-mixed their house veggie pie, devising an extra marinara sauce, red onion, green pepper, mushroom, and black olive 12” pizza, while excising the artichoke hearts (too unwieldy) the tomatoes (hot tomatoes give me the gags ), and most of all, the high-blood-pressure mozzarella.
Sans the cheese, big on the veggies, and with Hop Vine’s deep baked crust, Friday night pizza went from delicious, but debilitating, to delicious, full stop.