What to Read and Watch and Listen To this Weekend

A link roundup...

Albers Brothers Milling Company promotional postcard, ca. May 1910

I tend to read, watch, and listen to an awful lot of Oldster-adjacent content. Now and then I’ll pass some of it along to you in a link roundup like this one.

PS If you’re a free subscriber and enjoying Oldster Magazine, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription so that I can keep paying contributors. More paywalled content is coming soon…

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• “It doesn't count as ‘celebrating an aging woman’ if you're celebrating her for still looking young and fuckable.” -

  The Unpublishable
  ’s
  Jessica DeFino
  on 81-year-old Martha Stewart’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover. (I’ve read a variety of opinions on this, and have mixed feelings. So at the very least, this cover was a conversation-starter. Maybe I’ll host one of those conversations on the Oldster Podcast…)

  

• “Café Luxembourg turns forty years old this year, but it still looks and feels just as it did back then.” - in The New Yorker,

  Jason Diamond
  pays homage to Lynn Wagenknecht’s iconic Upper West Side Parisian-style bistro and its unusual staying power—shared (bested by three years, actually) by her iconic downtown bistro, Odeon.
  Cafe Luxembourg

  

  Cafe Luxembourg on Instagram: “Don’t let “Rainy Days & Mondays” get you down”#thecarpenters #1971”

  April 15, 2021

• “This is the way the real-life story was supposed to go: Our parents would die (which they did, because they were old) and then the three of us—brother, sister and I—would grow old. We would get to watch each other, with curiosity and sometimes pathos and alarm but mostly just with fondness, become old people. All those things that happen to people’s faces and bodies would happen to ours. In our lighter moments, we would laugh together about the indignities.” - in Literary Hub, Janet Steen’s hauntingly beautiful meditation on grief, brought on by her brother’s unexpected death.

• “In life, we experience many ends before the ultimate one–the end of a friendship, the end of the line, the end of our parents, lovers and pets. In this issue, our writers tackle them all.” There’s another great new issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, an online magazine I enjoy, this one with essays on the theme of endings.

  

  Dorothy Parker circa 1935: American author Dorothy Parker (1893 - 1967) poses with her arms crossed. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

• “In the world of ‘La Dolce Musto,’ as his column was titled, club kids, drag queens, and tabloid fixtures were every bit as noteworthy as pop stars and models.” - In W Magazine (one of my alma maters), Kyle Munzenrieder has a retrospective on nightlife fixture (and Oldster Magazine Questionnaire taker) Michael Musto, illustrated with the most incredible photos.

  

  NEW YORK - DECEMBER 1991- Gossip columnist and author Michael Musto hosts his birthday party at the Limelight nightclub in December of 1991 in New York City, New York. L-R: Julia Sweeney, Michael Musto and Brooke Shields. (Photo by Catherine McGann/Getty Images)

• RIP Paper Magazine, another of my alma maters in the 90s. By day, I wrote about the home furnishings and menswear industries at a trade publisher; by night, the editors of Paper let me live out my then dream of being an arts journalist

  

• “Do we really need more social media?”

  TueNight
  ’s
  Margit Detweiler
  on the many new Twitter alternatives that have cropped up, and “the toxic combo of social media overload paired with midlife brain fog.”

• My mom highly recommends A Small Light, the Hulu miniseries about Miep Gies, who helped hide Anne Frank and her family in Amsterdam, in World War II, before she and her family were captured by the Nazis.

• “Old age is a slippery slope, but if you enjoyed sledding as a kid and improvising ever since, it shouldn’t be degrading.” - in The American Scholar, 90-year-old Edward Hoagland takes stock of “a life well lived.”

• “If I was going to realize I liked women, I thought, surely it would have happened by now.” At Gloria, Justine Harrington writes about “The Messiness of Coming Out Later in Life.”

• “This would be the first time Trina undressed in front of another man in twenty-six years. The looming move to his bedroom rattled and aroused her. It was not the same delicious vulnerability she’d felt as a young woman.” - at JMWW Blog, Natalie Serber’s short story, “Add to Cart.”

  

  Photo courtesy of Natalie Serber.

• “‘Seven Psalms’ sounds like a last testament from the 81-year-old Paul Simon. It’s an album akin to David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’ and Leonard Cohen’s ‘You Want It Darker,’ which those songwriters made as mortality loomed; they each died days after the albums were released.” - in The New York Times, Jon Pareles reviews Paul Simon’s new record, Seven Psalms.

  

That’s all, folks. Have a great weekend!

-Sari