Bits #14
I'm still copy-pasting that hashtag
Good evening! I’m sorry to arrive late with the goods: I usually write Bits in the evenings, from bed, but a small child has been occupying the literal space this week and so finishing it has dragged out. If your Substack inbox looks anything like mine, the last thing you need is another post on this week’s devastating result and so I will largely avoid. I will, however offer up my physical form as metaphor: I sprung two fresh spots on Wednesday and all my fingernails mysteriously broke off.
For light relief, my husband and I cannot stop watching a mash-up of Pierce Brosnan’s weird accents and this video on the corporate jargon that should exist. Every suggestion makes perfect sense. Just twist the nip!
I also very much enjoyed this bit from Martha Stewart’s new doc, Martha, which went viral this week:
Stewart: “Young women, listen to my advice, if you're married and your husband starts to cheat on you, he's a piece of s**t. Get out of that marriage.”
Producer: “Didn't you have an affair early on?”
Stewart: “Yeah, but I don't think Andy ever knew about that.”
The nuttiness of this defence: delightful.
I haven’t watched the doc yet, but I was interested in what Stewart has said about not liking the final cut. Her suggestions are creatively sound - Snoop Dogg is a more interesting choice than classic music to score a doc about an 83-year-old! - but I also wonder if the broader context of these comments is that we basically only watch docs now (where the person is living, at least) which have been co-produced by the talent. (Reminder that Oprah killed her doc a few months ago, by buying it back off Apple.)
In a marketplace where the talent has final say, it makes sense that Stewart would be miffed, but it’s more concerning, I think, that it has become basically impossible to make docs which are not talent-approved in the first place.
Speaking of Netflix, I didn’t even last an episode of Monsters - a camp and glossy series by Glee’s Ryan Murphy, based on the real-life story of the Menendez brothers, who killed their parents in 1989 - because the gory depiction of their mother’s murder (played by Chloë Sevigny) keyed into exactly what many have been calling for the crime genre to stop doing, which is glorifying the murder of women. (I have been hearing for a while now that TV commissioners are actively looking not to show dead women on TV - to allude to it through storytelling rather than lingering visual gore - but I guess Murphy, with all his success, is above such diktats.)
But I found Tina Brown’s piece for her new newsletter on the Menendez brothers, really interesting - in it, she nods to Dominick Dunne’s 1990 piece for Vanity Fair and wonders if Dunne (sister-in-law to Joan Didion, if you fancy a fun fact) would have written a different piece, if he were writing it now, given the brothers recent bid for clemency:
“Now, more than three decades later, when the full details of the boys’ torment by their father is being reexamined through the prism of a post-Oprah world, would Dunne have had a more charitable view of the two brothers than he did in the 90s? I asked his son, Griffin Dunne, actor and author of the best-selling memoir The Friday Afternoon Club, who told me his father had felt more conflicted at the time than his Vanity Fair pieces reflected. As the trial progressed, Griffin said, and the boys’ abuse was so vividly recounted in their testimony, it triggered memories for Dominick Dunne of his own father’s cruelty that he had never discussed with Griffin before.”
I am absolutely here for a series in which Tina Brown does a retrospective of all the Vanity Fair/ New Yorker cover stories she commissioned in the 80s and 90s. Consider this a beg, Tina!
I loved Amy Key this week on the romance of rejection and her own rejections, power-ranked. Entries include:
The clothing shop Morgan de Toi in 1997
Publications inclusive of but not limited to: Poetry Review, Poetry London, The White Review, Granta, Poetry, PN Review, the TLS, London Review of Books, The Guardian
When I’d been away for 10 days and came home to only two items of post, one from Dominos and one from my broadband provider
Such an effective way to defang a spurning! I’m quite tempted to scribble down my own and feel the shame pour out of me, like sweat.
A company called Deep Fusion Films has created an AI version of Michael Parkinson who will interview people on an unscripted podcast, Virtually Parkinson, after the broadcaster’s son approached them with the idea.
I find this both deeply weird and extremely compelling. My days as a podcast host are numbered! (Maybe. I’m sceptical of how much AI will impact this area of media.)
Speaking of pods, a couple of new likes from me:
Strangers on a Bench, suggested by a reader. Singer-songwriter Tom Rosenthal sits down with strangers on park benches for 10 minutes and asks them about their lives. Could anything revelatory come out of such a short space of time? The answer, of course, is yes. (I suspect that many more conversations took place than are included in the series - and we are listening only to the best ones.) I was rapt listening to the one with a young man, reflecting on his recent stint in prison, his relationship with his father (who was also incarcerated, while he was growing up), ambition and work. An impressive conceit, sensitively done.
Fashion Neurosis, from the polymath designer Bella Freud. Specifically the episode with Zadie Smith, who recently shared that she spent so much money on a Gucci cape, she will need to be buried in it.