Image: Dave Parker via Flickr

10/5 8:25 ET New England -5.5 At Tampa Bay

Patriots slumping!
Did they forget to park the
Gronk in the endzone?

PICK: BUCCANEERS

10/8 1:00 ET At NY Giants -3.5 LA Chargers

The Giants will win!
The Chargers will be jetlagged
And sad they’re fanless

PICK: GIANTS

10/8 1:00 ET At Cincinnati -3 Buffalo

Buffalo’s defense
Is pretty good. The Bengals
Are kinda awful.

PICK: BILLS

Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature today. That’s a great excuse to read or reread his novels, or, if you’re lazy and internet-addicted like me, an even better excuse to read the best blog of the millennium—Jim Windolf’s imagining of Mike Francesa appraising Ishiguro’s career in 2015. If you have even a passing familiarity with Francesa or Ishiguro, or even sports talk radio and books in general, you will not regret clicking on that link.

The connection between Francesa and Ishiguro goes beyond Windolf’s comic genius. The narrator and main character of Ishiguro’s 1989 The Remains of the Day—played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1993 movie adaptation—thinks exactly like the baboons who populate the semipermeable membrane between sports radio and television and conservative punditry.

Nude beach, Cottbus, East Germany, 1985. Photo: German National Archive

Well, you guys, this has been another pretty shitty week in the US, but in the spirit of counterprogramming and, I don’t know, worldliness maybe(?), let’s all talk about something important: naked Germans. So, I have some shocking news: The venerated tradition of FKK (or “free body culture”), a.k.a. Germans chilling on the beach with their parts out and such, is out of style. A clothed Heidi Klum (vielen Dank) has just curtly cheek-kissed FKK and shooed it off the runway.

But how is this possible? I mean, when you think of Germans on a beach, you think of naked Germans on a beach! That’s the whole point of being German! Using any convergence of dirt and water to hang out in the buff for hours at a time, and not give a good goddamn whether your body is sexually arousing to someone else! Without FKK, all that’s left is punctuality and telling people they’re wrong. Oje.

Summer Haven

At the summer party you are toasted
for not destroying your own home.

Power tans itself, roasts another rack of bream.

There are no real people left here, says an engineer.

The oyster shucker is the truest philanthropist.

I want in, in.

“Imagine meeting you at the beach!” she says. But we all went to the same college, after all.

That woman won a prize for her conventionally bitter memoir. Drinking ginger and lemongrass blend. A colostrum-like caramel gelato.

This is perfectly pleasant and doesn’t go any longer than it needs to. What else in your day will you be able to say that about? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Enjoy.

★★★★★ Clouds stacked up in the morning light in fancy and attractive arrangements. Bright wobbly images from down the street moved on the surface of high apartment windows. By afternoon the sky was empty and deep shadows stretched uptown. A flag swung awkwardly against the half-length straightening rod at its bottom. The late light was ample but out of reach. Faint linear ripples of white kept the west from being featureless. They held their shape as they went from their original delicate white to pink, until there was no more light to find them.

In Gook, a pair of Korean brothers in their late twenties living in Los Angeles in 1992 befriend an eleven-year old black girl from around the way. The girl’s name is Kamilla. The brothers, Eli and David, are running their dead father’s shoe store. Business is slow, and they’re in a rough part of town, so they’re on the verge of shutting down—but between selling stilettos and Jordans, they mostly fuck around in the shop. Kamilla cuts class to work with them. The film is set on the first day of the Watts Riots, an event that shook LA’s divisions to their foundations, but for Kamilla, Eli and David, there’s nothing remarkable about their companionship. It’s only after the world intrudes, and they’re touched by the city’s fractures, that the reality they’ve built for themselves dissolves through their fingers.

Gook is Justin Chon’s first directorial effort. He wrote, produced, and starred in it himself. And while Chon has acted in a number high-profile films, Gook is a total departure from the rest of his oeuvre (excepting, maybe, the ebullient Seoul Searching). Chon’s work in the Twilight movies, “Dr. Ken”, and 21 and Over demonstrated his range, but those moments felt like stepping stones towards bolder, heavier opportunities. Describing the writing process for Gook, in a conversation with Ava DuVernay, he noted that, “people were confused that the film was about two Korean-American brothers and one black girl, but that’s my reality.”

The riots bloom over the course of an hour and a half—beginning with grainy footage of Rodney King’s assault, before descending into the rumors of “free stuff” across town. But those developments don’t announce themselves. They happen gradually, a lot like in life. Tension permeates from block to block, and Chon shows us LA’s racial factions, formal and otherwise—from the city’s Latino street gangs, to the cliques of black women window-shopping down the block (there are no white people to speak of in Gook)—but, by the film’s end, our trio’s own muted internal racial strife is magnified by the world around them.

Plenty of Montclairians responded to Bieber’s arrival with avowed disinterest — “I’ve used behavioral techniques with our children so that whenever someone says the words Justin Bieber they hear instead Sviatoslav Richter,” Lee Siegel, a writer who lives in town, said — and even longtime Bieber fans weren’t quite sure what to do with the fact that their icon had disrupted their suburban existence. Montclair’s most ardent Belieber, according to some locals, is 18-year-old Sami Cytron, who has been to 15 Bieber concerts and wears purple every year on his birthday. She spent much of the summer learning to operate a stick shift by driving up and down the block where she heard Bieber was living, which she admitted was a bad idea. “If he comes out, I’m just gonna drive my dad’s Porsche into a tree,” she said. After days spent driving around looking for Bieber, Cytron’s boyfriend tried sending him a message on Instagram asking him to just come outside for a moment, so he could have his girlfriend back. (It didn’t work.) Then a funny thing happened. Cytron finally saw Bieber, walking out of a spa in town, but she was too embarrassed to approach him. “Ever since the sixth grade, I’ve been desperate for the day he’d be living in my town,” Cytron said. “The day has finally come, and I’m too old to be crazy about it. Everybody grows up. And Justin is growing up, too.”

I know “we” were all “talking” about this story “yesterday” but if you haven’t done so yet, please take a moment to read Reeves Wiedeman on Justin Bieber in Montclair, New Jersey. It’s a goddamn delight.

It would be vaguely interesting if I could use this column to convince you to see classical music live just once this year. Would you consider it, honestly? Even for a few minutes before you decide to buy a new sweater or a decorative candle or something like that? Which is not to say that seeing classical music live is more important than those other things; it’s just a different experience altogether.

I am feeling very sentimental about seeing live music if especially because I, personally, me, yes, did just see the first concert in my subscription this year, and yes, in fact, I did tear up during Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony aka Romantic (the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this time! A 1997 recording) which is both embarrassing and a brag. It’s not that I get Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony more than you would. I didn’t anticipate crying. It is just such a full piece of music, and there are few experiences on par with listening to a piece of classical music when you have nothing else you’re supposed to be doing. I encourage people to work or write or read or run to classical music—that’s fine! It’s nice! But when you are working to listen, your mind will wander on its own, conjure images and associations, as mine did for the first time in a long time listening to this particular symphony.