The unbearable boredom of the Bear; the Biden bummer; and a bad bro movie (Challengers).

I’m All Lost In…

the three things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#39

For posterity, I must report that I’m still obsessing over my fanciful Blondie exercise, the one I revealed last week: Combining and shuffling the songs on the new wave band’s back-to-back 1978 and 1979 LPs, Parallel Lines and Eat to the Beat to conjure an imaginary classic double album which I’ve taken to calling Parallel Beat.

There are 24 songs on the two albums altogether, so, conveniently, I divvy up the randomly generated set lists into four sides of six songs in a search for a perfectly curated album.

Hey Blondie fans, just look at this blockbuster Side One I got from one of my random play prompts:

Side 1 Hanging on the Telephone Accidents Never Happen The Hardest Part Fade Away and Radiate Will Anything Happen 11:59

This particular run through also generated the perfect finale, closing the album with “Picture This.”

Get a pocket computer/Try to do what you used to do, yeah.

Picture this, indeed:

Side 4 I’m Gonna Love You Too Heart of Glass Atomic Pretty Baby Shayla Picture This

Amplifying my Blondie obsession, a Blondie piano sheet music book I ordered last week arrived in the mail on Monday. I immediately started learning to play Eat to the Beat’s big beat single “Dreaming,” which turned out to be the opening track in another iteration of my junior high reverie.

A couple of other obsessions from last week persisted this week as well—such as wishing Biden would bow out,

I also got caught up in a past delight: Practicing Lorde’s ballad “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” which, in addition to possessing my brain this week, was on Week #2 of this regular round-up back in October . Not only was I digging the mournful melody, but this turned out to be a piano playing breakthrough for me. Rather than just concentrating on getting the jam right, which is how my (stuck-at-beginners-level) piano playing typically dictates things, I was able to lean into the emotion of this sad song (“We'd go dancin' all over the landmines under our town”), feel out some dynamics, and arrange my own finale—around an inverted D chord.

Okay. Here’s this week’s official obsessions:

1) I binged on seasons 1 and 2 of restaurant melodrama The Bear (with my X Diana X) when the series aired back in 2022 and 2023, and I liked it: Sharp dialogue, mini-art-film camera work, and patient, prestige-era TV story telling with the requisite character development; there’s a deep roster of rich characters to develop too, including Richie, Tina, Marcus, and Jamie Lee Curtis as the Mom.

If you were a fan of that compelling run (irritating, indie-rock-song girlfriend Claire, Molly Gordon, aside) let me warn you off Season 3.

Not only is the new season a bit of a mess— the repetitive use of heavy-handed supercut montages are more like A.I. diarrhea than actual storytelling—but basically Season Three is a bore.

Here’s some typical dialogue that we hear again and again from one of the (too-many) scenes featuring close ups of Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) fretting about problems that have obvious solutions, like his pretentious restaurant’s fantastical budget, his aforementioned, now ex-girlfriend Claire, and his reticent, despotic approach to running a restaurant:

Sydney, Carmy’s No. 2: You good?

Carmy: Yeah. … You?

Sydney: I’m good … I guess.

The most engaging conundrum is not Carmy’s overwrought stasis, but Sydney’s (Ayo Edebiri), dilemma: She’s quietly been offered a dream gig to head up her own local restaurant. Hard to say if she’ll jump ship and leave Carmy’s restaurant next season—she has a panic attack on the stairs outside of her new apartment in the final episode—but I, for one, am definitely leaving.

X Diana X sent me this week’s Culture Gabfest where host Stephen Metcalf trashes Season 3 for all these reasons and more.

2) Call me an “Elite,” but I’m one of the millions of people who believe that after President Biden unambiguously (and predictably) crumpled in the presidential debate, he’s incapable of beating Trump.

Unfortunately, after Democratic dissatisfaction with Biden’s candidacy was gaining some momentum, the anemic president seemed, by mid-week, to have stanched the party’s push to change nominees.

This is dispiriting. First of all, Biden’s going to continue to be a dud, and worse, a liability on the campaign trail; he will inevitably have another disastrous senior moment that will convince voters he can’t serve as president. By then—during the second debate, perhaps—it will be too late.

There’s a gotcha rejoinder coming from bitter Democrats who are asking why there aren’t calls for Trump, a convicted felon, to withdraw from the race as well. My sense is that the question voices a grander, general frustration about Trump’s ability to get away with bullying and lying and ultimately turning the Republican party into his very own cult. But the question seems more rhetorical than practical. What would calls for Trump to drop out of the race (and calls from whom, exactly) really accomplish?

If the point is to bring attention to the fact that Democrats have an earnest moral value system that reflects an interest in good governance, while Trumpist Republicans don’t—sure. But the same voices who have been making that exact point—presumably the only ones who would also call on Trump to drop out—would only add to Trump’s momentum by doing so.

People who are complaining about the apparent double standard and the supposed self-destructive impulse of liberals, Democrats, and the New York Times, are being too willfully oblivious to what the calls for Biden to step aside are actually about: Biden’s (unforgivable) pathetic debate performance has given Democrats a legitimate opportunity to address their mounting anxiety about Biden (who has been an unpopular president since early in his term) by calling for a new standard bearer.

If calls to replace Biden are successful, it won’t only address the party’s Biden problem, but it will create an opportunity to capitalize on Trump’s bad reputation with a candidate who can prosecute his record, while also energizing Democrats in their own right by having a solid candidate at the top of the ticket.

If the calls fail, well, we’re back where we’ve been for 3-and-a-half years, stuck with a leader who doesn’t seem capable of defeating Trump.

3) I’m not sure where I got the idea that Luca Guadagnino’s new movie Challengers was a smart, cutting edge drama, but for some reason, I thought it was going to be a tennis version of Succession.

I stayed up one night this week to watch it, and nope.

Zendaya at the center of a retrograde love triangle.

The movie certainly has a fun premise. Tracking three characters from late high school idealism to their defeated early 30s through flashbacks and clever jump cuts, Challengers is a tennis court love triangle featuring an apathetic, fading star, Art (Mike Faist), his Type A wife/coach Tashi (Zendaya) (who was en route to being a tennis superstar herself before suffering a devastating knee injury in college), and a braggadocio, meddling goblin, Peter (Josh O’Connor), a scamp and a cad who fell off the pro-rankings into the B-League qualifying circuit. His malevolent presence casts an existential threat to Art and Tashi individually, and to their marriage in general.

Nice set up, but despite the (still) tabboo-breaking (I guess) scenes that put male nudity front and center, plus some heavy homoerotic relationship vibes, Challengers is downright retrograde. Tashi, who’s bitterly living through Art’s (now disintegrating) tennis career, is a controlling, conniving wife whose relevance, the film decides, comes from between her legs. The script plays to this trope in a banal, male-constructed “she was asking for it” fantasy scene that leads the movie to its silly pro-bro finale.

… Speaking of tennis…

Even though my tennis hero, WTA World No. 3 Aryna Sabalenka, dropped out with an injury on the first day, I was still mesmerized by Wimbledon this week.

Go Jasmine Paolini; however, New Zealand’s Lulu Sun, No. 123, was the story of the tournament this week. Handing out upset after upset, she made it to the quarterfinals where No. 37, Croatia’s Donna Vekic, ultimately stopped her surprising run. Paolini then beat Vekic in the semifinal. No. 1, 2, and 4—Iga Swiatek, Coco Gauff, and Elena Rybakina, were all knocked out thankfully, so Sabalenka won’t fall as far behind in points for missing the tournament.

World No. 7, Italy’s Jasmine Paolini, made the Roland Garros final last month and now she’s in the Wimbledon final after beating No. 37 Donna Vekic in an epic nearly-three hour match.