Read Me #5: All you can do
1. This is Read Me
Coming up:
— a songwriter grapples with Beyond Good and Evil
— the world’s biggest cheese board stays put
— what a football poet in Denmark did yesterday
— how to use a stopwatch to process bought yet unopened books
And much more. If you’re not a paying subscriber, please consider whether you’re in the mood and position to become one. You’ll receive more issues of Read Me and also the separate, weekly newsletter First Pages, lately featuring passages on sleeping in the Louvre, shadowing the police, bluffing it as a waiter and the camouflage of flamingoes.
2. Leave a message
There’s a global voicemail, by which I mean one that the whole world can leave messages on and listen to. It is callable on +1 (442) 667 2337.
All messages end up here.
3. Villagers (intro)
Last week I spoke with Conor O’Brien, best known in the context of Villagers: a band, or musical project, of which he is the sole longterm member. Something I especially like about Villagers is how the songs and albums come with reading lists. The liner notes of coming album That Golden Time begin with a quote [note: paywalled link] from Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by Friedrich Nietzsche. I should add, I also love Villagers’ music, especially, I’ve noticed, when listening alone on public transport after 10:30pm, when the anthemic yet melancholy quality of songs like ‘Everything I Am Is Yours’ poignantly reframes the scene just so. Conor and I spoke last week about Nietzschean morality, Joan Didion's famous article on self respect, the plays of Lorraine Hansberry, the TV show Get Back and quite a few other things. A couple of fragments of our conversation are below. I’ll share more of it in issues to come as well.
4. Villagers (interview)
READ ME: What made you choose this Nietzsche quote to appear so prominently?
CONOR: I’ve always been kind of flirting with reading Nietzsche. I’m a very slow reader so when I decide to go into something I’m like, “alright, this is it.” And I really commit, you know. I go into the world of it. I did English and Sociology in college and I remember a friend of mine was just quoting Nietzsche all the time. He was obsessed with him, but it made me kind of feel like there was a big wall surrounding him that I just would never be able to get over. I finally approached his stuff in the last few years. Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals feel so prescient to me. He’s complicated, obviously. There’s lots going on, but with that particular quote on the album, I think he uses that lovely word, not to “cleave” which I think we’re being forced to do every day at the moment. I think a lot of the current narrative is that you should connect yourself to movements, or ideologies, or else you’re kind of nothing really. Nietzsche is almost a forewarning against what we’re living through right now. Which I think is kind of interesting, just that idea of the value of independent thought, and the focus on complicated nuance, the cloudy grey area of everything, how power games are being played out in the strangest places.
R: The passage really hammers its point home in Nietzsche’s typical cantankerous, didactic way, but it’s almost paradoxical because he says, “don’t let yourself get caught up in this, or this, or this, because that’s not really being independent.” But then it culminates with, “don’t let yourself be caught up too much in being independent either.” You end up wondering, “what’s left? I don’t know what you want from me, Nietzsche.”
C: I love that actually. I find that really interesting, the idea of, “don’t connect yourself to a sense of being different from the crowd, either.” I think what he’s saying does make sense. It’s about not allowing yourself to identify with any of these things. Like there’s something deeper you can tap into, that you can connect yourself to a feeling of being disinterested in these things.
Conor’s new album with Villagers is out on 10 May. He’s also going on tour in May and June to see his European contingent of fans, culminating with shows at the Royal Festival Hall in London and Trinity College in Dublin.
5. Buffet tactics
A previous conversation with Conor occurred in this issue of my former newsletter Happy Readings. A more recent issue, from late last year, was themed around Between Meals, A.J. Liebling’s love letter to French cuisine. That one included a recommendation for Les Grand Buffets, which is both the last great bastion of old, old French cooking and the world’s most vainglorious all-you-can-eat buffet. It’s located in Narbonne, a coastal town a little east of Toulouse, and is the recent subject of a blockbuster New Yorker article by Lauren Collins:
All-you-can-eat buffets are usually associated with a catholic array of foods: California rolls and king-crab legs, baby back ribs alongside pasta bakes and hot-fudge sundaes. However, Les Grands Buffets serves only what it considers to be traditional French food. You will find chorizo at the charcuterie station, but there is no pizza, paella, or couscous, no nems or thiéboudiène, even though more than a tenth of people living in France were born elsewhere. Les Grands Buffets takes a panoramic view of the French classics, ranging from the palace-hotel repertoire (lièvre à la royale, peach Melba) to bourgeois cooking (veal blanquette, bœuf bourguignonne), regional specialties (quenelles de brochet, pissaladière), and rustic dishes (snails, frogs’ legs). “More than a gargantuan orgy,” Le Journal du Dimanche reports, the restaurant represents “a sort of conservatory of the nation’s gastronomy.”
When I went a couple of summers ago, I remember it being one of the best meals I have ever eaten, but also that the eating occurred against a backdrop of constant worry thanks to the unforgiving mechanics of human stomach vs endless buffet. They say the basic economic problem is ‘infinite wants and finite resources’, but at Les Grand Buffets that dictum is turned on its head. All appetites are finite yet here is, effectively, infinite food.
The notes on my phone start off quite eloquently (“the psychology of the all you can eat buffet is different to other meals”) then quickly descend into the Notes App equivalent of contented grunts (“Mussels with some sort of potato cake <line break> Then the meats <line break> Then the duck <line break> Then the cheese”). I do remember how the clientele reminded me of that found at other buffets such as those located in service stations, or the eateries next to ski slopes. Demographically, I mean. Such is the fame of Les Grands Buffets in France (and, post-New Yorker, perhaps globally) that the customer base has transcended the mere elitism of the “good restaurant” and arrived at the sort of universalism otherwise reserved for tourist attractions and legacy rock bands.
At that time, there was talk about Les Grands Buffets’ intention to leave Narbonne, to go somewhere more fitting than a 1980s leisure complex, shared with neighbours including a swimming pool and go-karting track. Earlier this month, the restaurant’s founder Louis Privat announced Les Grands Buffets will in fact be staying put, thanks in part to the city’s pledge to invest €15m in improving that complex.
This probably means that it will, at some point, close for a while. Book now, book urgently, is my advice. Tables are available from January 2025, which is definitely better than never at all.
6. Drunk man sneezes fire
I don’t know how well I understand this clickable animated space station inhabited with characters and memes from popular culture but I like it.
7. Better, wiser
My profile of Julia Louis-Dreyfus — the cover story of the current issue of The Gentlewoman — is now available to read online. As alluded to repeatedly if tangentially in this newsletter I interviewed Julia in Montecito, a Californian neighbourhood known for being home to many celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, Gwyneth Paltrow and Harry and Meghan, the latter of whom just made headlines yesterday for launching the first drop from her American Riviera Orchard brand, a limited-run strawberry jam of which there are apparently only fifty jars available (Read Me’s request for a review copy has gone unheeded).
There was a somewhat epic quality to the assignment, from travelling to Montecito in the first place, to spotting a SpaceX rocket launch completely by chance, to then encountering the most Emmy-ed actor in history in the rich-yet-rustic foothills of the San Ysidro Ranch. Most daunting was the fact that she is a better interviewer than me, better indeed than just about anyone, as evidenced by her podcast Wiser than Me with its intimate in-depth conversations with septuagenarian, octogenarian and nonagenarian luminaries like Jane Fonda, Isabel Allende and Beverly Johnson. The second season launched recently. I recommend them all, for the genuinely moving nature of the conversations but also the reassurance of hearing how glad most of her guests are to be properly, unambiguously old.
8. Weirdo
“This is an absolute banger, wow. He was the Thom York of his time.”
(YouTube comment on Nietzsche’s piano music)
9. An attempt to speak with someone from every city in the world, in alphabetical order (chapter 2 of ???)
Alphabetically speaking, the second city in the world is Aalborg, sometimes known as “double A”, in the Jutland region of Denmark. Aalborg resident Claus Nivaa is a teacher, cafe owner, poet and father of three, so Read Me is grateful when he finds time to answer that simple but ever-illuminating question: what did you do yesterday?
I got up at about 6:15am then the day really started with me opening my book cafe, which is called Ordgeist. It’s a Danish word and a German word combined. Ord means “word” and Geist means “spirit”. I started there then I went to my other job, which is a high school teaching job, where I teach the arts. I went to our local art museum, Kunsten, with my students and we saw three exhibitions. One was with a Swedish contemporary painter called Maria Nordin, who makes beautiful — what do you call that in English when you paint with water? Watercolours. Yeah, I don’t really know how she’s able to control the brushes that way. It’s mainly human bodies. At first you think they’re having an intimate moment that is calm and maybe even loving but when you look further, you get this unwelcome, unholy, eerie feeling. Another was just the standard collection with different modern artists, and the final one was a new one, about Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, three Germans who all were born in the 1930s and 1940s. It was about those three trying to use their art to open up a conversation about what had happened with the Nazis, Hitler, the Holocaust… They used new materials in their paintings like straw, even blood. What time did you arrive at the museum? It was about 12:30pm. What time did you leave? About 4pm, and then I went back to Ordgeist. There were a lot of customers so I came back at just the right time.
We closed at 6pm, then I went home, to my girlfriend Mia and our kids and had dinner. I live in a suburb called Vejgård, about 2.7km from the centre of Aalborg. What time did you have dinner? It was 7pm. What did you have? Oh, we ate, I think you might know the term, it’s called smørrebrød. I think it’s quite popular in New York actually. It’s rye bread with butter and all sorts of meats and sausages and cheese and onions. I worked on some funding projects I’m developing with the Nordic Council of Ministers. I’m doing one with Swedish, Danish and Norwegian rappers, a record inspired by old poems from the 19th century. We’ll base educational materials on it, making youngsters aware how close we are to each other in terms of literature, language and history. Who are some of the rappers? One of the main guys is my friend Per Uldal. His stage name is Per Vers. And we’re trying to get a Swedish rapper called Silvana Imam. She’s actually half Syrian and half Lithuanian, but she grew up in Sweden and speaks, like, seven languages. Wow. Yeah, she’s brilliant. After that I saw the second half of a Champions league football match, Barcelona vs Paris Saint Germain. I went to bed at 10:30pm.
Yesterday in this instance was Wednesday 10 April 2024. Claus’s book of football poetry ‘Måltid - Fodbolddigte’ is illustrated by Martin Bowyer who contributes to English football magazine FourFourTwo. Claus is on Instagram here. Coming next: Aba, Nigeria.
10. Radio for florists
Having originally been due to expire in March, the Five Radio Stations are now available until further notice. To remind you, they are five artworks that are also radio stations, by artists such as Emeka Ogboh and Keren Cytter. The stations can be heard online. Key advice: don’t sit there treating them like a TV show, put them on in the background for a while, like actual radio. They are also expanding into a series of real-world contexts which are all, as it happens, in Italy.
In Parma, for example, various high street shops including a florist, Le Jardin de Delphine, and a fashion boutique, Store333, are treating them as normal, burbling-in-the-background radio for retail environments. Or what about Lucca? The Giungla Festival will install ambient listening posts for all the stations at various locations during its stint at the city’s Mercato del Carmine, from 3 – 5 May.
11. PMESII-PT
There is something fascinating and unnerving about this piece from the newsletter Why is This Interesting? in the sense it feels like a briefing-before-a-raid scene in an action movie. A commercial intelligence officer shares guidance on using techniques known as PMESII-PT or “atmospherics” in the service of going on holiday.
For the adventurous traveler, fluency in atmospherics is better than anything you might find on the internet or in a tour guide. By attuning our senses to the unwritten rules and rhythms of a place, any far-flung destination becomes ripe for authentic exploration and cultural connections, the very essence of world travel.
12. Essay on watercress
The new issue of Fantastic Man, published yesterday, contains my article about the artist Alvaro Barrington, whose work will take over the Duveen Galleries in Tate Britain from 29 May. Also present is my short essay on watercress, a plant whose shade of green, Pantone 17-0220, is an important hue this fashion season. Fantastic Man has a beautiful new website, offering the chance to read a few greatest hits, among them a recommendation I remain greatly committed to and still practice to this day, my “ruthless speed reading technique for tackling mountains of unopened books.” It could well be seen as a predecessor of Read Me’s bonus newsletter First Pages.
Elsewhere: I contributed an article about Twitch, nostalgia and Final Fantasy VII to the new issue of Rotterdam-based Extra Extra magazine (print only), a piece about Paris to Roadbook, and a pair of bookshop recommendations to Farrah Storr’s newsletter Things Worth Knowing.
13. Conor’s dead cactus
READ ME: I wanted to loop back to the first conversation we had, when you talked about your reading chair. You described it quite carefully to me. You said “it’s a nice, Danish, leather armchair. It’s surrounded by two alive plants and one fully dead plant.” I assume you got rid of that dead plant at some point?
CONOR O’BRIEN: Well at the moment there are indeed two live plants and one dead, gigantic cactus.
R: But the same dead plant you had in 2021?
C: No, a different one.
R: Ah. So is the cactus one of the plants that was alive in the previous interview?
C: Yes. I think it was. I think my subconscious is trying to surround my reading chair with death.
14. Ends
Thanks for spending time with Read Me. Bye for now.