Friday Fixations 10/25

What I'm into right now

Happy Friday, my fellow suffering beings. Each week, I share two things I’m digging right now—books, TV shows, movies, music, and the like—plus one online video of nearly zero cultural merit. 

Dan’s actual copy of the book

• Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry. I recently decided to pick up this tattered copy of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, which I must have purloined from my parents’ house several decades ago. I think I never read the thing because the title made it sound soapy. But per usual, my penchant for reading a book by its cover turned out to be wrong; it’s a riveting yarn.

  

• Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I rewatched this raunchy rom-com on a plane the other day. It holds up! The supporting cast really makes the thing work: the idiosyncratic hotel staff; Paul Rudd as a surfer; Russell Brand before he lost his damn mind. Mila Kunis is bewitching as the love interest. And even though you know she’ll get together with Jason Segel in the end, it is nonetheless satisfying when the inevitable happens.

  Speaking of Segel, I had forgotten that in both the opening and closing scenes, he stands naked and awkward in the female gaze. So really, this is a movie about in male vulnerability. Which leads me to a programming note: Judd Apatow, who produced the film (and knows a thing or two about male vulnerability), came on my pod today and let it rip.

• The Rolling Stones recording Sympathy for the Devil.

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