The Bear and The Bagels

The Week in Diamond

Hello! So in later July, I’m going. to be moving this weekly post of things I read. to Saturdays. I’m going to start aiming for three posts a week with one of them being paid subscriber-only. I really appreciate everybody who has signed up for that and I think if I can get another 25 I will do a limited run of some Melt merch to say thanks. More on that soon. If you can spare it, please buy a subscription. It helps! If you can’t afford it but want to be Premium Content, just message me. We can work something out.

I don’t binge shows very often. And, to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have ripped through all of season 2 of The Bear if I wasn’t probably going to write about it somewhere. But I did, and the truth is that I’m actually thankful the network decided to throw the entire thing up on Hulu because I think it’s one of the few shows that you need to pump right into your bloodstream to get the desired effect. I think most shows could use a little breathing time between episodes, and I wish the networks exercised a little curatorial sense when it came to things instead of just dumping an entire series on us. Like could you imagine if an entire season of Mad Men was just up there and available when it first came out? If it was on today, I think we’d have the entire season on Netflix or Prime in a single day, and it would really change the way we watch and discuss the show. The time between episodes adds to a show’s intrigue, it gives us something to talk about for a few days and adds to the overall experience. But a show like The Bear, especially this second season which has so many moving parts since Christopher Storer wanted to highlight the lives of people who work at the restaurant besides just Carmy, that it made sense to be able to just keep going. Obviously, the big win was the “Fishes” episode. Everybody is talking about it for good reason, but I gave it a second watch so I could see it without the “Oh man, I’m shocked to see Sarah Paulson, John Mulaney, Bob Odenkirk, and Jamie Lee Curtis just absolutely ripping it!” feel, and it was one of the few times I can think of a single episode of television felt like it belonged on a stage as a play. The other example that came to mind was the “One Man's Trash” episode of Girls. I think that came out a decade ago (yeesh) which makes me think that I’m forgetting a few other episodes of shows that blew me away in a similar way, or there just aren’t that many and “Fishes” is a rare thing.

The Melt Stuff of the Week!

My pals at Human Boy Worldwide are constantly putting out the best movie-related stuff, and they’ve really upped their game this week with a Last Days of Disco hat and a shirt for the 1968 adaptation of The Swimmer.

It seems there are a few shirts left from the AWMS x Wes Robinson “Riveria” collab. It’s an oversized beauty, perfect for hanging out by the water, then deciding you want to walk down the beach and maybe grab a drink at the little shack where you always see the local fishermen hanging out.

Light in the Attic gets a lot of my money, especially when they say they have a new Japanese record for sale. Usually, it’s City Pop or jazz, but they recently posted about a pre-sale for the Time Capsule: Tokyo Riddim 1976-1985 vinyl, which is a collection of Japanese reggae that I listened to on Bandcamp and, friends, it slaps.

Stuff I Read!

From the Department of We Don’t Care About Cultural Institutions, the new Three Amigos, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson, seemed to have saved TCM, so that’s a win. On the other hand, National Geographic, which has been a magazine for 135 years and is pretty much totally owned by Disney, laid off all of its staff writers. How many more vital resources do we have left to gut at this point I’m not really sure, but it’s pretty bleak out there right now, and it doesn’t seem to be letting up.

Read: “National Geographic lays off its last remaining staff writers” by Paul Farhi at The Washington Post

Bon Appétit put out a whole big bagel…thing this week. I feel personally attacked by it for many reasons (get your sweet bagels out of here, you child), but it’s the list of the best bagels in the country that reminded me of how dire the bagel situation in my hometown of Chicago is. How hard is it to open a good bagel place there? I don’t get this. I feel like there were some decent bagel places there once. And now you basically have one option and that’s to drive to Skokie and pick some up. Seriously, if this writing thing doesn’t work out, I might move there and open up Diamonds Bagels and Bialys.

Read: “The Very Best Bagels in the US (Yes, Outside New York)” at Bon Appétit

In local news. Seriously? You’re going to fine a small business in New York City for graciously giving me extra packets of soy sauce or extra plastic forks that I’ll no doubt have a use for? That just seems silly, but then again, so does everything our local politicians tend to do. I mean, I get it. Waste is bad. But it feels like there are much bigger things we could go after if we wanted to cut down on that. Now I’ve got to worry my local Chinese spot won’t send me a half-gallon of duck sauce that I don’t need now, but I’ll definitely find a use for down the line.

Read: “NYC Sets Fines for Extra Forks, Ketchup and Soy Sauce Packets in Takeout Orders” by Laura Nahmias at Bloomberg

Companies are always trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to online experiences, and I often think back to Google Reader being taken away as the moment when things really started to turn online. It felt like we had all we really needed, but nope. “Google’s bad reputation for killing and abandoning products started with Reader and has only gotten worse over time,” David Pierce writes over at The Verge, and I agree. But I also can’t help but think it was the start of something bigger and more ominous that we’ve been seeing come to fruition over the last few years.

Read: “Who Killed Google Reader?” by David Pierce at The Verge