Sunday Snaps
Recap and Recs for June
WELCOME new subscribers! Thank you so much for being here. Sunday Snaps is my monthly post that recaps events, viewings, and recommendations for my month. Just things I’ve enjoyed or am enjoying, and I promise I won’t recommend anything I haven’t tried first-hand.
The Spring
So excited to celebrate 6 months/50 chapters of The Spring! The story is getting juicier by the week with plenty more to come! Thank you for coming along on the journey with me — the serial format has been such a fun way to create this little world and its characters. I’ve been asked about the process, and it does happen pretty close to publication time, but I do have a story arc and plot points that are always present. How I arrive at them sometimes happens in the writing, which often surprises me, which is thrilling. It is so true that so much gets worked out on the page…
Be sure to catch up on The Spring by accessing the full chapter index here:
If you’re enjoying The Spring, please tell anyone you can, any way you can! Also add a like or comment to a chapter - it really will help The Spring get noticed by the Substack community which will help it to grow!
Seen. Heard. Enjoyed. Still Thinking About.
June has been a mix of fun and stress together. Fun times with friends and projects, but a lot of stress from aging parents, as well as my senior dog, Tillie (a Scottish Terrier), who has been a bit under the weather all month but is bouncing back strong. That said, I know a lot of people have been having a very hard time lately: work, family, illnesses, kids out of school, the absolute anxiety over the upcoming election… We’re all dealing with a lot, so I say let’s enjoy what we can!
Started out the month with an evening with some girlfriends at Tartine Manufactory for their incredible salads and pizzas (and of course the house-made bread and butter) — it’s the best kind of carb fest and highly recommend. Speaking of pizza, my friend Tabitha and I enjoyed a leisurely Sunday stroll at Ocean Beach few weeks back and capped it off with lunch at Damn Fine in the outer Sunset. Their cherry salad with burrata (and apricots and nectarines) was so delicious I endeavored to make it at home and it was equally divine. The restaurant finishes it with a bit of basil oil, but I had a basil-mint-lemon zest gremolata I’d made to go with some lamb and that worked perfectly.
For events, I’m happy to say that the Union Street Festival was a fun, if crowded, time, but it’s good to see the street fairs starting to fill up again. Looking forward to the Fillmore St Jazz Festival next weekend too! San Francisco really does street fairs very well. Also popped by the famous Bouquets to Art at the de Young Museum - a week-long extravaganza of florals inspired by art created by local florists, event planners, and designers. Some years are better than others, and this year was exceptional. Loved so many pieces! Oh, I also got to my first Giants game of the season, and boy did that ballpark dog taste great!
The first week of June also brought about a performance from Music Education for Everyone — a choir that I joined in March. I KNOW! I don’t even like singing karaoke, but I’m beginning to think that may be a confidence thing. My friend Mary suggested this group to me and from the moment I started it’s given me a lot of joy and fun. I really missed my piano during the pandemic, and have been wanting to do something musical again, so here we are! The group is a bunch of music-loving people (maybe mid-30s to 50s?) and I’m happy to report they are smart, welcoming, kind, and can really carry a tune. Our performance was a selection of songs from West Side Story, which was challenging but great. The program picks up again in the fall and we will do a holiday concert mid-December. Rehearsals are on Mondays 6-8pm. If you’re interested, check the link above!
A LOT of streaming this month - honestly it’s kind of been what I’ve needed, especially when its armchair travel/aspirational real estate from The Parisian Agency. This is the 4th season of the show and it’s a fantastic look into some covetable homes in Paris and beyond. It’s a family business, but as the parents are starting to retire, the 4 sons are taking over and they’re lovely eye candy too. Recommend starting from the first season for the full effect. Enjoyed Buying London with Daniel Daggers and his team as well, but not as much. First, some of their properties are a little…odd? They keep going on about how fabulous a place is but the decor looks like something from season 1 of the Real Housewives of New Jersey. No lie. I kind of don’t get it. Second, none of the homes looked like places people actually lived in, just investment properties that some overseas buyer was going to snap up and use as a hotel room, and that’s for the more desirable places. It also felt like they’re trying to generate drama among the team like Selling Sunset or something, which I just don’t have a lot of patience for…
Loved Sugar on Apple TV+ - my friend Steven recommended it to me and it’s so much fun. There’s a twist which I kind of figured out mid-way through, but still solid. I loved the way they incorporated old film clips into the story and they made Los Angeles look beautiful, even if the story is pretty dark. Also dark is Bodkin on Netflix - a show about a fictional trio of podcasters who arrive in a small Irish town to investigate a cold case. Enjoyed it and the wry Irish humor throughout, but the last few episodes sort of fell flat for me. Also, since I mentioned it last month, yes I finished Bridgerton season 3, and it was fine. I really think splitting up the season was a mistake - it needed the momentum.
I did watch America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and woof. It’s kind of like pageantry meets sorority house meets So You Think You Can Dance. The glam alone is intimidating, never mind the way they talk about these dancers needing to “fuel” themselves for the dance in one moment, but then carefully check their bodies in the next. These women are fitted for their costume ONCE and no alterations will happen again. So much for bloating. Also the injuries! Holy wow, I will never look at a kick line and drop split in the same way again. Now, do I want to roll out to AC/DC’s Thunderstruck…like whenever? Yes, but I’ve loved that song since it came out in 1990.
Did give Brats a watch and I feel like it really missed the mark. It was more about Andrew McCarthy wallowing in a slight made by a snarky reporter in the 80s, instead of moving on from it, owning it, and meeting the moment. Rob Lowe and Demi Moore are clearly the most successful of the group and they are the ones who left the “brat pack” moniker in the past. It would have been fun to hear some more of their memories of the films, how they felt in the roles as young actors…something more about the work instead of the rebuke.
Finally, if you’re like me and you remember original episodes of The Reading Rainbow on PBS, I highly recommend the documentary of the show called Butterfly in the Sky. It highlights the importance of public TV, early education, and children’s media. Also…Levar Burton!
One last series that I definitely recommend especially if you’re at all into fashion or fashion history is Becoming Karl Lagerfeld on Hulu. First, highly recommend watching in the original French and German - the English dub over is ATROCIOUS. Just set it to French and read the subtitles. Daniel Bruhl plays Karl Lagerfeld and it’s fantastic casting. Actually, all the casting is pretty great. It’s almost the mirror image of the story shown in 2014’s Saint Laurent film, even down to evenings at Le Sept in Paris. I appreciate that they showed Lagerfeld’s time at Chloé and ends the series with the offer to become the creative director at Chanel. In this way it is indeed the becoming of Karl Lagerfeld as we knew him. That said, there is very little fashion design happening in this show. There is style in abundance, but very little creative process. (To a fault — Bruhl’s wig in certain scenes makes him look more like Lestat than a leader of French fashion.)
Jacques de Bascher & Karl Lagerfeld (left) - Daniel Bruhl & Théodore Pellerin as Lagerfeld & de Bascher from Becoming Karl Lagerfeld (right)
It centers on Lagerfeld’s relationship with Jacques de Bascher — a Parisian dandy, who, as Oscar Wilde said of Lord Byron, was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” The two met and began a relationship in 1971, and it continued until de Bascher died of AIDS in 1989. In 1973, Yves Saint Laurent fell in love with de Bascher while he and Karl were figuring out their relationship, and Yves ended up having a nervous breakdown over the whole thing. Which, got very complicated as Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent were always friends since the 1950s, when both were celebrated as promising young designers. So it’s an interesting dynamic of his own feelings for de Bascher plus his desire to protect Yves from the bad boy…his bad boy. The party crew is here: Antonio Lopez, Loulou de la Falaise, Anne Marie Munoz, Pierre Bergé, Anna Piaggi, on and on…and everyone really looks the part. In that way, it really captures the essence of this time in Paris, just as it captures how fragile and emotionally stunted Karl Lagerfeld was in his personal relationships. It’s likewise reminiscent of Halston from 2021, and is much more fun than The New Look from earlier this spring.
Sketches of Jacques de Bascher by Lagerfeld (left & center), & by David Hockney.
I found it odd that they didn’t make mention of the famous Battle of Versailles fashion show from 1973, even if Lagerfeld was not one of the designers — it was a turning point of fashion. At the time Lagerfeld was designing for both Fendi and Chloé, but still an important figure in the industry. Overall though, it’s a fun journey and very stylish, even the interiors are pitch-perfect.
I’m going to end here this month as this has already run long and I’m not sure I have a good array of product picks for you…but I’ll work on it!
Have a wonderful July 4th and I’ll catch you end of month for more Sunday Snaps!