Stuff I Enjoyed Over Fall

Twelve things that have brought joy throughout the chaos of the last few months

1. The first ever sighting of the white Iberian lynx. I wrote this a few weeks ago and in editing this wanted to clarify “from a few weeks ago” which was literally October 29. Why has this last month felt like a lifetime? Is your brain as cooked as mine in its sense of time and place?

   

2. I’ve been playing Once Upon A KATAMARI on Nintendo Switch non-stop since its recent release. It was first released in 2004 by a Japanese man who, according to his Wikipedia article, made “cheerfully bizarre” sculptures in university. I’ve played every single iteration of this game. The basic premise is the same throughout: you play a prince sent to the Earth by a flamboyant sky daddy king (although you can also swap into one of your dozens of “cousins” that you have to find and collect throughout the levels as an additional in-game goal), who instructs you to roll around a Katamari ball that collects things equivalent to your size or smaller, until you get big enough to collect bigger and bigger things. You begin by rolling up thumbtacks on a table, and become so big that you’re rolling up the Great Wall of China. The items you roll up are insane, they are stacked in crazy ways (like two pigs on top of a cake type shit), and the mechanic of moving the joysticks around to maneuver the Katamari Ball is frustrating and wacky. I have found it incredible as an outlet for emotional release, especially in today’s political climate. There is something incredibly powerful and life-affirming about being able to roll up every object around you, growing bigger and bigger until you rival the size of a country, destroying everything in your path. Special shoutout to the music, which I can only describe as hallucinatory, and of which I know every single Japanese word, with 0% understanding of what any of it actually means.

3. This short story machine that prints out a piece of light reading in Paris subways

4. The Gooner article on Harper’s - specifically this sentence that made me snort out loud about the writer trying to find a specific guy he heard a story about with a distinctive room where his walls covered in cum. “I searched for every permutation of what JustDamage remembered as the friend’s username—PornosexualGooner101—but this was like going door to door looking for a guy named Sal on Staten Island.”

5. Binge-eating gummy vitamins and supplements - I was sent some functional mushroom ones from Plant People and some very yummy chill out ones from Sakara Life. Even as an adult I can convince myself that a handful of gelatin gummies could meaningfully count towards my daily vegetable intake in lieu of actually having to eat vegetables. The Sakara Life ones remind me of all the jelly items from Neopets, somehow. I was very committed to building the breadth of my Jelly Museum when I used to play Neopets.

   

6. Paul de Vos’ Fable of the dog and the prey. I saw an artist’s copy of this painting on Instagram at some sort of design/art fair and was instantly enamored. Cody helped me figure out the original painting by Paul de Vos, which looks like it is based on Aesop’s fable The Dog & His Reflection. The Steak! The dog’s face! His sinewy body! The bridge! What an age to fall in love with a painting you first see as a copy of by someone else, in a screenshot of someone else’s Instagram story taken at a New Jersey design fair.

7. In China, if you suspect your husband is cheating, and you don’t want to confront him, you can hire someone to “organically inject” themselves into your family to subterfuge the affair on the low-low. Mistress Dispeller follows a mistress dispeller hired to get rid of a middle aged man’s 38 year old mistress who he plays tennis with and travels an hour by train to visit. The Mistress Dispeller is hired by his wife, a woman like a thick rubber band, who does exercise in her living room while she waits for her husband to come home from his affair.

   

8. Being in dark places I can’t have my phone. Specifically printing photos in the darkroom. I go to Photolab in New York, which has four color darkrooms you can rent by the hour. I’m normally there for four hours, running two enlargers at once. I really get in the zone here, and the sunsets are quite nice, plus you’re printing next to what is usually very friendly fellow photographers, so you feel still a part of the world even though half of that time I’m standing in the pitch black in a light sealed room. The other dark place I frequent is Akari, a membership Japanese-style sauna with two locations in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. It is a small, efficient neighborhood sauna and cold plunge spot, and I always bring reading material to squint at by the dim lights of the sauna, but I want to practice going without anything to do at all. Just to go and commit myself to doing nothing other than thinking and sweating might be the my pathway towards training myself against compulsively making every waking moment productive.

9. Ken Burn’s Vietnam War documentary. It’s an EIGHTEEN HOUR (!) ten-part documentary about America’s involvement in the war in Vietnam. I have known about this for years, but for some reason completely forgot about its existence until recently when I was trying to research some more books to read to educate myself on the history of Vietnam. I am finding myself watching it while doing the Stairmaster, which is territory normally dedicated to Love Island. I’m about 12 hours in and legitimately binge watch this. It is very well made, and I’m learning so much about my own people’s history. On a related note, The Stringer, a new documentary about the true authorship of the AP’s Napalm Girl photo was an interesting, albeit very long watch that I was lucky to see at the DOC NYC Fest this year. It was my first time going to this festival, and I loveeeee a documentary. I can’t wait to go back again next year. This also ties generally into #12.

   

10. The Nikon F4 that I just bought as a replacement of the Olympus OM4TI, my normal go-to 35mm camera that was stolen as part of the great 2025 Italian Robbery of my life. It’s affordable, built like an absolute brick, and takes incredible, tack-shark images. I’ve started shooting in B&W consistently for the first time in my life, and it’s been really fun. The above is a picture of Luca and Ashley, a very sweet couple I did an engagement shoot with at Prospect Park.

11. I’ve done a lot of great reading this year. I’ve particularly enjoyed: While The Women Were Sleeping by Javiar Marias, Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, Intervals by Marianne Brooker, Audition by Katie Kitamura, Clarice Lispector’s The Complete Stories, Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, Autocracy Inc by Anne Applebaum, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. I’m currently reading my first Dostoyevsky: Crime & Punishment alongside my friend Shirley Cai.

12. This candle makes my house smell like an expensive spa. The Nippon Kodo Kayuragi Green Tea incense sticks make my house smell like an expensive Japanese spa.

    

13. Pretending like I just moved to New York! I have lived in NY for more than a decade and have lost the standard-issue rose tinted glasses you wear upon first moving here. The first few years in New York felt like the next best thing to ever happen to me was constantly around the corner. All of New York like the most plentiful buffets, the best choose your own adventure. I’m tired of forgetting the pure magic that lies outside. Sometimes you have to step over literal human shit to see it, but why live here if only to bitch about it? This next season I want to eat Greek food in Astoria, Chinese food in Sunset Park, I want to find my favorite new gyro spot. I want to go to the Met (where FYI NYC ID gives you pay what you wish entry) and drink red wine at the museum cafe before tipsily looking for the photography wing (there is none), like I did recently with my friend Jill. I want to take the Metro-North and join the hordes of fair-weather hikers to Cold Spring, where we’ll stumble over each other’s feet up the same hike. I want to be high in Washington Square on a balmy Summer’s night! I want to see parts of Central and Prospect Park that I never knew existed. I want to get rush tickets and go to free comedy shows. The rent is still fucking high so I might as well try to enjoy it, my beautiful and precious New York City, a bright dew drop on the leaf of America.