full regalia.

volume 3.

She & Him have a new album - Volume 3 - which you can stream on NPR in advance of its release. I love M. Ward, and I have a major girl crush on Zooey Deschanel because… her face (and Nick Miller).

“98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.”

It should be known - and most likely is already - that I am weirdly in love with Larry David. I feel kindred with him, because he is curmudgeonly, has absurd dietary restrictions, and I generally think we’d have a good laugh (probably at the expense of others). But one thing I can’t excuse Larry for is his teetotaling on caffeine.

He discusses this with Jerry Seinfeld on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, and I have to say I switched allegiance to Team Jerry when Seinfeld calls him out for how weird this is. “It’s the mood” Seinfeld asserts when he argues with LD that drinking tea is the same as having coffee. 

It’s definitely the “mood”(/taste) of coffee that makes it so great (/unbearable when it comes to People Who Take Things Too Seriously). I tend to joke about hipsters who take this mood too seriously, but I definitely am one of those people from time to time. So it was great to wake up yesterday to an interview with Jerry Seinfeld on Morning Edition about coffee. (Last week was “coffee week” on NPR’s Morning Edition.)

It’s a quick little interview, but Seinfeld makes some Seinfeldianly typical observations regarding the act of drinking coffee. I definitely agree with his assessment that “98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time,” which is why going for coffee is so gratifying. Seeing as I love wasting time, I’ve become quite the coffee aficionado. The dream is to one day run into Jerry and Larry at Grumpy and/or HPS and we can all have a nosh and some cawffee tawlk. 

jonathan franzen stamp of approval.

Looks like JFranz’s coffee table books are exactly what you’d have guessed.

amy:julia::diamond:pearl.

I really hope this happens - Prince 2016: Let’s Get Funky With It!

looks pretty relaxed to me.

My grandmother is a real classy lady, a real broad, a really fancy 96 year-old. She is also a former modern dancer, teacher, and painter. Her name is Hortense. Yep. She’s 96, and her name is Hortense and she’s quite the character. She has a bathroom with a tropical fish theme that feature tiles she painted … of tropical fish. You don’t come across too many Hortenses these days, so it was a bit of a surprise when I found an email in my inbox from Of a Kind featuring Hortense Jewelry. Turns out there are other Hortys, and they all like to design fish! Exhibit A:

Although, that fish kind of looks like a pineapple. Anyway, people named Hortense are the best, and they’re usually not whores, and they’re mostly relaxed. But they really like fish. 

tiny fork.

It looks like a new oyster bar (/ let’s face it: burgeoning nightclub) soft opened on my block last night. I’ll follow up with pics later, but for now, what I know: 

- it’s called Tiny Fork (click that for the menu), and is owned by Rob Shamlian (who owns Spitzers, Fat Baby, etc…)

- it is very pretty

- it will probably attract a lot more dbags to the hood, seeing as it’s across the street from Hair of the Dog

- Todd’s Mill seems to be a smaller-scale version of this place, aesthetically and vibe-wise (not gastronomically/demographically). I actually wouldn’t mind there being more places like Todd’s Mill on the block, because it’s a comfy place to get a drink and a snack with a friend. Let’s hope it brings nothing but good food to the hood. (More coffee shops, please!)

I tweeted at Grub Street / EaterNY/ Serious Eats to see if they can dig up anything more. Let’s see if they follow up!

it may or may not be in the high 70s today.

… almost time to start riding your (citi) bike!

ending, happily (?).

If the dissolution of Amy Poehler and Will Arnett’s marriage taught me anything, it’s to give up all hope on love that all good things must come to an end (for the most part). As we look upon the twilight years of Community and Happy Endings, I am reminded of the words of Pete Seeger: “to everything – turn! turn! turn! – there is a season,” and that, to mix my references, it’s Season 4 halftime in American Sitcoms. 

I - like many of my pop-culture obsessed peers - discovered Community in season one and quickly became enamored of the show and all the characters in the world of Greendale. Now, the creative changes over at Greendale HQ have been discussed many times over (here, there, you know, everywhere). I’m not going to rehash critiques I mostly agree with, and I simply don’t have the time - or endurance - to say everything I want to say on the behemoth that is the creative evolution of Community. One thing I will note is Dan Harmon’s storytelling structure – his “embryos” – is a novel way of looking at sitcom narrative, because of its teleological emphasis. When we invest ourselves in a character’s journey, we want to know that they will emerge from it having changed. (Though, to quote Ross: “nobody likes change…”)

Tina Fey once said that when you have to churn out a script every week sometimes you get gold nuggets, and sometimes you get shit nuggets. Having watched New Girl from the start, I can place myself in that writer’s room with Tina Fey’s proclamation looming over every idea produced. I don’t think shows like New Girl come into the pilot thinking, “Yeah, so, Jess and Nick will have insane chemistry and somewhere down the line they’ll make out and we’ll maybe finally figure out what Schmidt’s first name is.” In the case of New Girl this leads to an incredible surge in quality followed by uneven output as time goes on. You can’t be the “new” girl forever, at some point the status quo has to change or your show dies a slow death in stasis. And I think this is where the problem lies in many a sitcom.

As Community tries to find footing in the brave new world that is season 4 Greendale, the characters have all become rapidly untethered from the slow and thoughtful development they’d seen over the course of three seasons (we’re going to put a pin in Pierce for the sake of not wanting to tear our hair out, ok?). They have become caricatures of themselves. One looks at a show like Happy Endings where there is character consistency, yet a modicum of growth and it doesn’t seem like it would be all that hard to find a character’s voice and stick to it. But the gang from Happy Endings is also wildly out there – it’s a huge part of why I love them so much – and I think it’s a major reason why people don’t seem to take to it as strongly as they do other sitcoms. I may laugh to myself about a Glengarry leads joke, but I’m a fairly sure that’s a joke for those of us who stalk AV and Vulture comments sections.

I fully appreciate the jokes that stay true to the voice of the show – Happy Endings’ consistency is a breath of fresh air in the sitcom/dramedy world. One could argue that familiarity breeds contempt (or, in the case of my parents: a preoccupation with interior decoration), but the real threat is laziness. I think Dr. Faye said it best when she called out Don on his abandonment of her: “you only like the beginning of things.” Is it that we’re all so invested in immediate gratification at this point that we can’t stick things out to the end?

My answer to that is an emphatic no, but I think Mad Men has become an exception to the rule of shows that start off strong and just slog through until they have to be put down (cf. HIMYM, seasons 8-10 of Friends, WHY ARE YOU STILL ON TV GLEE?). As we begin season 6 of Mad Men, I think it’s safe to say the anticipation is high, and that’s a rarity for a season 6 premiere. It speaks primarily to the talent on that show, but also to the fact that compelling writing is powerful and can sustain dramatic quality. We all know the end is nigh, but we’ll savor every minute of dialogue until it’s upon us.

At this point, with shows like Community and Happy Endings I am still a faithful viewer, but only because I want to see these things through to a somewhat logical and satisfying conclusion. Britta and Troy (really) don’t have to shack up – nor do Annie and Jeff for that matter – but maybe there’s hope yet for the Greendale 7 (a touching funeral for Pierce? Nah…). I think the clear difference between a drama like Mad Men and these sitcoms are that the plot points are meticulously determined before the season is even filmed. If you think about Louis C.K.’s show, you can see how he’s turned each show into a vignette; each episode, though able to stand alone, works into a larger seasonal ethos that stems from the creator’s perspective/worldview. At this point, my favorite sitcoms are just hodgepodges of zeitgeist callbacks with a bit of ’shipper tension thrown in there for the twitterverse.

While that is certainly a harsh – and blanket – critique of the good people who write for these shows, I think it’s fair to say that without an endgame you can get lost very quickly. I once was doing some research for an article about Bob Dylan, and the editor asked me point blank: “OK, I get it, he rambles. Is there a beginning, a middle… some conflict, and then the end? That’s all we need.” There was nothing slightly resembling such a narrative. The story didn’t run because the ramblin’ man is impossible to fit into tried-and-true narrative structure. My editor and I knew we’d have to scrap the story, and he was right to axe it.

I think this is where the problem lies when a network just wants to burn off their season order. When you have to just churn out laughs, you end up with a lot of shit nuggets, and not enough time to think about what happens at the end. Tina Fey et. al. impressively rallied 30 Rock at the end – they decided to properly finish the story, and they did it in a way that was truthful, entertaining, and happy. Let’s just hope our self-aware friends at Community and Happy Endings will have enough faith in their characters and their fans to do the same.