Portugal Postscript

Atop an Oldster Magazine Friday Link Roundup.

Portuguese Bowline [Knots], Sarah Morris, 2009. via WikiArt.

I tend to read, watch, and listen to a lot of Oldster-adjacent content. Every other Friday I’ll pass some of it along to you in a Link Roundup like this one. If you like what you’re reading here, please hit the ❤️ button to give Oldster a boost in the algorithm.

While I have you…The advertiser- and venture-capital-funded approaches to media have failed and contributed to the demise of most legacy publications and outlets. They got all of us accustomed to never paying for content we consume, while deep-pocketed corporations and investors bought the power to determine what was presented to us. It turned out that wasn’t sustainable. Fortunately, the reader-supported approach is working. Support with your dollars the publications you’d like to see survive.

Now through my 60th birthday on October 2nd, save 10% off Oldster’s already low subscription rates of $55/year and $6/month. After that, prices go up to (the still pretty reasonable rate of) $60/year and $7/month. Thanks to all who already support my work here! 🙏 I’m grateful. - Sari Botton

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Hey, Gang. Just a quick note to say that I’m back from my week in Portugal, and back to my normal posting schedule.

I traveled there for a wedding in Brian’s family. It was in the rural Montouro/Ihavo area, which was just lovely. The wedding was 13 hours long! From 2pm until 3am, including four meals—apparently just how they do it. In between festivities, we had some fun with the extended family on the beach.

Left, at the wedding; Right, at the beach.

After the wedding, we spent an afternoon in bustling Aveiro, then three days in even more bustling Porto, a city I loved and could see retiring to someday, assuming, you know, that Social Security is still a thing ten years from now.🤞🏼

The Ribeira in Porto.

While I was gone I really enjoyed everyone’s reports on their summer vacations. Thanks to all of you who chimed on last Friday’s Open Thread. I also really enjoyed your responses to question #2 of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, about your internal age.

I love how vocal and responsive the Oldster community is, and how many of you enjoy conversing with one another in the comments. I feel very fortunate to have such a thoughtful cohort of all ages reading and interacting with this magazine. Thanks for being here, and for all your support. 🙏 - Sari Botton

*By the way, you’ll get more out of this post if you read it online, rather than in your email. Click here.

And now for some links…

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• “My only regret in life was spending too many hours working and not enough time with friends and family.” - RIP Italian designer Giorgio Armani, who died this week at 91. Shortly before he died he spoke with Alexander Fury at The Financial Times.

  

  Julien De Rosa/Getty Images

• Bruce Springsteen Unvaults Yet Another Mythic Album, Electric Nebraska… - at Pitchfork, Jazz Monroe (what a great name for a music writer) has the scoop on another box set coming from the prolific artist, due on 10/17, a week before Deliver Me from Nowhere,—the biopic about his life and the recording of Nebraska, starring Jeremy Allen White—hits movie theaters.

  estreetnation

  

  A post shared by @estreetnation

• Gonna try to get to People’s Light theater in Malvern, PA sometime between September 17th and October 19th, when friend of Oldster Kathryn Grody performs her one-woman show, The Unexpected 3rd, “a radical, rollicking rumination on the optimism of staying alive.”

  mandypatinkin

  

  A post shared by @mandypatinkin

• Inside Ava DuVernay’s Creative Journey - the groundbreaking filmmaker,

  whom I had the great pleasure of interviewing last month, talks about her legacy, her creative process, her persistence, and resistance with actor/screenwriter/producer Lena Waithe for an episode of Waithe’s series, Legacy Talk. DuVernay wrote about the conversation for her newsletter, Onward with Ava DuVernay.

  lenawaithe

  

  A post shared by @lenawaithe

• “Before she was my grandmother, she too was a young girl, with a life very different from my own.” - congrats to my friend, illustrator and author Giselle Potter on her new children’s book, Before She Was My Grandmother. Seems like a great intergenerational gift for a grandchild.

  

  Order the book…

• Sarah Paulson Lives for the Drama - in NYMag/The Cut’s fall fashion issue, Jazmine Hughes profiles the actress, who this fall will appear in All’s Fair, Ryan Murphy’s star-studded Hulu drama about a team of women divorce lawyers.

• In the meantime, I’ve got no new shows to watch, so I’m re-binging Pamela Adlon’s delightful and funny Better Things, also on Hulu.

• Joyce Wadler on Barbie’s updated anatomy. - Characteristic hilarity from an esteemed Oldster Questionnaire-taker.

• PHOTO ESSAY: Unlearning the quiet performance of “graceful” aging -

  Monica Danielle in bone gospel.

• I just got ahold of The God of Small Things author Arundhati Roy’s new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, and can’t wait to start it.

  

  Order the book…

• “On hospice and decluttering: Mom was dying. So I sorted her skincare products.” - early Oldster Questionnaire-taker Rashunda Tramble.

• Speaking of caring for elderly parents, I’m always moved by Oldster contributor Jodi Sh. Doff’s The Long Goodbye : Dementia Caregiving & Other Stories.

• No “Oldster Top 10” this week, but there’s this from David Byrne (thanks for the intel, Will Hermes):

• Four Best Friends Made an Album as Kids. 25 Years Later, It’s a Cult Classic - at Rolling Stone, brittany spanos talks with Y2K-era band X-Cetra about the belated popularity of it’s album, Summer 2000.

  rollingstone

  

  A post shared by @rollingstone

• More from The Department of It’s Never Too Late…my husband Brian Macaluso’s 1990s band Purple Moon Giants has just released Escape Velocity, the album it recorded more than 30 years ago.

  

  Purple Moon Giants in the early 90s. That’s my husband, Brian Macaluso, the lead singer, second from left, in his early 30s.

• Who will we be if we give up the guns? - From singer-songwriter and author Rosanne CASH’s new newsletter, launched last week. I couldn’t sign up fast enough.

• The Forever-35 Face - In The Cut/NYMag, Bridget Read reports on the current facelift craze and the latest “deep plane” surgical advances.

• Neurologists are exploring medications that would help the brain recover after a stroke or traumatic injury. - in The New York Times, Rachel E. Gross writes “A Pill to Heal the Brain Could Revolutionize Neuroscience”

• How Did the Latchkey Kids of Gen X Become the Helicopter Parents of Gen Z? - David French in The New York Times/Opinion.

• What Labor Day Sales Say About the American Dream - Alissa Quart in Time.

• More details to come, but here’s Chronogram’s Brian Mahoney on the debut Oldster in-person event (there will be more!) in Kingston, Weds., 10/1:

  

How about you? Got any recs? Books? Shows? Movies? Music? Plays? Podcasts? Art shows? Places to travel to? Restaurants? What’s good?

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Okay, that should be enough links to keep us all occupied through the weekend. If you like what you’re reading here, please hit the ❤️ button to give Oldster a boost in the algorithm.

Thanks as always for reading, for commenting thoughtfully, and for all your support! I absolutely couldn’t keep doing this without you. 🙏 💝

-Sari