#14: August is for hating Robert Moses
Death By Consumption
8/5/24 - 8/11/24
August used to depress me. It always felt liminal, all the awful heat but none of the promise or excitement of early summer. I'm sure residual back-to-school trauma is responsible for a lot of that feeling. But, as a man of a certain age, I've come to love it. The days are hot and long, making the month itself feel slower and longer, which means the death that eventually comes for us all is briefly delayed. But only briefly! Plus a lot of New Yorkers leave the city in August, which allows the rest of us to enjoy a blissfully emptier city, so I don't mind being left behind by the rich folks for the month (but if you want to invite me to your Fire Island house, you can simply reply to this email). August, for me, has now become a pleasurable month for long slow books, sweaty outdoor drinks, and at-home air-conditioned movie nights because all the stuff in theaters looks like it's a total flop (sorry, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, but I am not interested in the wares you peddle).
"Industry" season 1, episode 1 — on MAX
Never one to miss out on a bandwagon, I decided we needed to get caught up on HBO's "Industry" so we can watch the third season (which premiered last night, so we're already behind). I just can't resist an opportunity to Join The Cultural Conversation! We only watched the pilot so far, but I thought it was pretty good. Lena Dunham is a great director! I have zero idea what anyone is talking about or even what their actual job is, but the show moves at a great pace so you don't need to sweat the details — they're screaming about money, it's great when the numbers go up and bad when they go down, and that's all you really need to know.
"The Morning Show" season 1 — on Apple TV+
Yes, we're hopping on two prestige TV show bandwagons this month. This is my version of brat summer. "It's so good to see Jennifer Aniston again," Justin said, and I agree! Season 1 isn't as psychotic as people have made the show out to be, but I've been reassured it'll fall off the deep end soon. I can't wait!
The Legend of Hell House (1973) — on Criterion
This is just a great, completely wacky 70s horror film. Loosely inspired by Shirley Jackson’s incredible book The Haunting of Hill House, it follows four people who spend the week before Christmas in an old haunted manor, trying to investigate if there’s life after death, on behalf of a dying millionaire. One is a physicist, one is his wife, and two are mediums, one a "physical medium" and one a "mental medium." Did you have any idea there are two different kinds of mediums? I didn't! This was an educational film on many fronts.
The haunting scenes are wild and, because it’s the 70s, very horny. Pamela Franklin (who steals the movie as the "mental medium") has kinky sex with a ghost! The physicist's wife (who comes along on the trip for… fun I guess?) is possessed by a horny ghost and tries to seduce another man by screaming at him, “Touch me or I’ll find someone who will!” which is simply an incredible line that we should all work into our regular lives. All that, plus a completely absurd, pulpy science fiction-y twist ending? What's not to love!
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert Caro (1974) — paperback
I guess it's 70s week here at Death By Consumption! Although this book, at over 1,300 pages, is probably going to take me all month, so prepare for many thoughts on Robert Moses as I work my way through it. But what's August for if not long, slow reading projects? This is a dense book, but the story moves along at a fantastic pace, even with all the wild detours it takes. I'm only 300 pages in, and this is absurd to say about a 1300-page book, but I really haven't found any part of the story that feels unnecessary yet.
So far, after the first quarter of the book, my main takeaway is: the New York of a century ago is not the New York I've been picturing! What do you mean, Queens and the Bronx were almost entirely farmland 100 years ago??? We've all been associating flappers and gangsters with this era, but I guess we should be picturing farmers? The next time the Real Housewives do a god-awful 1920s-themed party, one of them should arrive on a tractor.
The book is absolutely packed with rich detail that brings the era to life. Sure, Caro could tell you that the people on Long Island were rich snobs privatizing all their land so dirty city folk couldn’t drive out to enjoy the meadows and beaches. But it’s more thrilling and hilarious to tell us how, when a North Shore landowner died, the people of the area bought his property to avoid anyone “undesirable” getting it, and built a private golf club on it, despite it being almost completely marshland. Even crazier, they refused to pay for mosquito control, because the mosquitos helped keep the riffraff out. “You’d look at the fellow you were playing with and there might be twenty on his face,” one guy remembered. But if getting rid of the mosquitoes made the golf course more welcoming to “foreigners”, one lady put it succinctly: “I’d rather have the mosquitoes.” The idea of a rich woman golfing with a swarm of mosquitoes eating her face and feeling smug because at least she doesn’t have to look at, like, an Irish person is really just a perfect glimpse into the mindset of wealthy Americans, isn’t it?
Reading this at Jacob Riis Beach on Sunday gave me one of those particularly sublime "history is really ALIVE" moments, as I finished reading the pages on how despite the costs Robert Moses insisted on constructing brick bathroom facilities at the beaches with beautiful Italianesque towers, only to look up from my book and see in front of me... the beach's old brick bathroom facilities with two Italianesque towers. Robert Moses did a lot of bad things and ultimately fucked up the city forever, but at least he gave me a beautiful place to shit at the beach.
"The Tail End" by Sloane Crosley — in the New Yorker
If you want to cry about your dead pet, this article should do the trick. And it's about a cat, not even a dog! (Did I mentally substitute "dog" for "cat" while reading this? Maybe!) Sloane is just a great, always surprising writer. Like:
“It’s ludicrous to expect anyone to miss a cat independent of the affection they feel for its owner, to recognize that this was not a cat but a person in a cat suit, to agree that the gap between what any cat would do and what your cat does is actually quite vast. If more than five people outside your household miss your cat, it wasn’t a household, it was a brothel. So I don’t want to talk about it. The problem is, I don’t want to talk about anything else.”