June! We’re well and truly on our way to summer now. This is the preseason in the Northeast, when it’s still chilly in the shade but the extra daylight says something different. As we await the season’s proper arrival, here are some suggestions to further brighten your day.
On this week’s list:
1. The Knicks’ ‘Weird Al’
2. Music to calm you down
3. Who do you want to be?
4. Rothko weather report
5. Very particular environments
6. Questions for bats
1.
The Knicks’ ‘Weird Al’
“How could you not include the Knicks? Are you secretly from somewhere else?” a reader wrote last week. I’m not-so-secretly from Connecticut, about 55 miles from Midtown, and have lived in New York City for three decades, but I still wouldn’t claim to be from here. Of course, you don’t have to be from New York to be a New Yorker tonight, when the Knicks play the San Antonio Spurs in Game 1 of the N.B.A. finals.
This, as any fan will breathlessly tell you, is the first time New York’s team has made it to the finals since 1999. And yes, they’re playing the same team they lost to back then. When Jalen Brunson takes the court tonight, he’ll make history as part of the first father-and-son duo to play in the finals for the same franchise; his dad, Rick Brunson, who is now a Knicks assistant coach, was on the squad that played those Spurs 27 years ago.
My favorite ambassador of Knicks Fever is Doug Berns, who goes by the name DugLust on social media, where he performs delirious “Weird Al”-style recaps of Knicks games. “Jalen Brunson … 22 points in quarter 1,” he sings to the tune of the Violent Femmes’s “Blister in the Sun.” Here’s “Sharp Dressed Man” by ZZ Top. And Prince’s “1999,” which Berns recorded after the Knicks played the Spurs in December: “If we see them in the finals, rewrite 1999.” Indeed.
2.
Music to calm you down
I love this outdoor set that the band Big Thief performed while traveling between Limerick and Dublin, Ireland, this spring. If you enlarge the video to fill your screen, it’s just so much gorgeous green: the trees, the vines on the arch behind the musicians, the grass on which they’re sprawled. The first song, “Carry,” has such a soothing, rhythmic heartbeat that I can almost feel my blood pressure falling as I listen.
3.
Who do you want to be?
I read recently that the fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi may be creating a new line for Target. Whenever Mizrahi is in the news, I remember this interview he did with Lola Ogunnaike in The Times in 2005, when his talk show debuted:
As a child, Mr. Mizrahi said, he dreamed of being a raconteur: the über-dinner guest sprinkling bon mots over red wine and beef Bolognese. “My biggest goal and biggest ambition in life was to be a great conversationalist,” he said. “I care about clothes and design, but more than anything I care about being this unscripted personality.”
People often think of how they want to be: kind, say, or hard-working. Virtuous attributes, but if you shift to thinking “Who do I want to be?” (or, if you must, “whom”), the possibilities expand from adjectives to nouns, description to action. You go from thinking of yourself as a solo entity to a person in a community; one must be in relationship with other people in order to be “a great conversationalist.”
I think of Mizrahi’s desire as a corollary to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice: “Make yourself necessary to somebody.” We ask children what they want to be when they grow up and they pick a fantasy job. What if we asked them, and ourselves, whom we want to be in relationship to other people? How do we want others to see and appreciate us?
The Finnish designer Joonas Virtanen has created a website that elegantly pairs the day’s weather with a color field painting by Mark Rothko. There’s a sort of meteorology inherent in Rothko’s work, the way the atmosphere seems to change while you’re looking at the canvas. The art is so much more expressive than the little icons of clouds and sun you get in most forecast apps. The last time I checked, the weather at my location was “Orange, Red, Orange” from 1961. See what painting it is where you are.
5.
Very particular environments
There are two parallel curbs in the parking lot of a Los Angeles Costco that are famous among skateboarders the world over. I learned this from a lovely story by my colleague Conor Dougherty, who skates there regularly.
“What I love about Costco is that it is the perfect expression of how skateboarders can turn even the blandest form of American architecture — the big-box parking lot — into a thriving community space,” he writes. What I love about a secret environment masquerading as everyday space, a spot sacred to those in a niche community, is its sanctity is completely invisible to everyone else.
6.
Questions for bats
I had a harrowing encounter with that city dweller’s scourge — the water bug — the other night. Recounting this to a friend from the country, she proffered her own terrifying run-in with bats in her house. I argued that a water bug the size of a sedan is scarier than a bat, but she was unconvinced.
Luckily, there exists Bat Cloud, a strangely touching art project that greets you with the query, “If you could, what would you ask a bat?”
Obviously, I asked, “Are you scarier than a water bug?”
The website is a digital incarnation of a piece by the French artist Antoine Bertin at SFER IK Museum in Tulum, Mexico. After a bit of philosophy (“Our fears speak as much about us as about the world. They shape what we expect long before anything arrives.”), the oracle told me NO.
I felt validated. And emboldened! “Are you here to hurt us?” I asked the bat. Also NO. OK, but what about the water bug?
