The Anti-Valentine Issue
If I’d known it was our last Valentine’s Day date, I would have ordered dessert.
Welcome to The Experiment, where acquitting Trump on Presidents’ Day weekend seems a little on the nose, even for 2021. This week we’re ignoring the impeachment to talk about Valentine’s Day. I wrote about how our Valentine’s Day tradition of lunch at a local French restaurant has changed over years. Robin Whetstone checks in from Georgia with a romantic horror story in “The Opposite of a Valentine.” Over in London, Rachel Megan Barker is sending letters to people, asking, “Will you not be my Valentine?” And I know I promised no Trump, but that doesn’t mean all politics is off limits as Canadian sensation Jack Hughes is plumbing Boomer fever dreams to find the AOC’s historical antecedent in “Alexandria Ocasio-Churchill.”
As always, we remember who we’ve lost and offer recommendations on what to do (searching Editor & Publisher’s archives) , read (you’re going to send Scott Galloway’s brilliant “The Algebra of Wealth” to all the young people you know), watch (“Framing Britney Spears” deserves the buzz), and listen to (Mobley’s “James Crow”). #FreeBritney
And if you’d like to support The Experiment, you’ve got options, people. You can buy your sweetheart some Experiment merch, fund the downfall of society by leaving something in tip jar, or you can attain heretofore unattainable heights of coolsville by pre-ordering Forget the Alamo. Or just read the dang thing, because that’s why we write it in the first place.
But first, do you know what I regret about our last Valentine’s Day?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That’s my wife, Sonia. She’s photographed in her happy place at a restaurant in Austin called Chez Nous, and I’m in my happy place, sitting across the table from her. Since 1982, the unassuming restaurant has been downtown just off Sixth Street. It’s about the only thing that hasn’t changed in Austin: the pale yellow brick walls, the dark brown wooden door, above which stands the sign, the oval logo set in the French tricolor flag. All very traditional for our Valentine’s Day habit of a quiet, lingering lunch together, followed by avoiding the amateur hour that evening. Chez Nous, translated, means Our Place.
I knew immediately she was more than I knew what to do with. Courting her required research, so I studied her MySpace blog, none of which assuaged my initial concerns. Jacques Cousteau had never been as out of his depth as I suddenly found myself. One entry provided a clue: “Foie gras is the way into my heart.” I suggested a romantic dinner, perhaps some place that had a good foie…
She suggested Chez Nous, a place I’d always avoided because of its proximity to the shot bars and tourist traps. When we stepped inside, the decorations — mostly framed posters for French wine and soft drinks — initially looked to me like the apartment of a graduate student who only smoked Gauloises and had a favorite François Truffaut film that was not Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The staff seemed to know her, but this was not unusual. Everyone downtown knew her. Dating her was like meeting a pretty girl in a foreign country only to discover that she was that country’s most notorious duchess. She wore her magnetism lightly, like something to be enjoyed but not taken seriously. One waiter, who spoke English with a French accent, was her favorite. He seemingly never tired of talking to her. She beamed. I seethed.
I had to up my game.
My friend invited any and all to join him on a trip to Paris to mark a milestone in his life. I brought her. If I could not give her the romance of a French accent, I could give her France, at least for a long weekend. She felt the pressure I put on the trip. I insistently kept asking if she was enjoying herself. It might have been jet lag, but it was probably me exhausting her. Still, the food, no matter which restaurant we stopped into — always on a whim, never with a plan — was perfect, simple, and delicious. As we flew home, her constantly reassuring me that she had a good time, I wanted two things: her heart, and more French food.
It did not take me long to decide to propose, but I took my time getting the ring. I picked over diamonds and ordered a specific construction that replicated, as best I could, an offhand remark in which she expressed a preference for “architectural rings.” But as long as I labored over that choice is how little time I let elapse before offering it to her.
This is exactly what happened: I bought the engagement ring in Houston and immediately drove home to Austin and brought a bottle of sparkling wine and two flutes into the bedroom where she was folding laundry and watching television.
“What are we celebrating?” she asks.
“Today’s a big day for me,” I tell her. “I’m getting engaged today.”
“No you’re not.”
“No, really,” I say. I pull out the box and show her the ring.
There are men who make more romantic invitations to prom. In retrospect, had she been wearing a nice dress and full makeup what immediately transpired would have ruined at least the latter. The tears were the least of it. At some point during the tumultuous effluence I managed a proper proposal, which then occasioned more of what was already flowing freely. She accepted my proposal and the ring despite my having chosen to propose marriage while she was wearing sweats and folding underwear. She tells this as if it’s a funny story.
Reader, I should have proposed at Chez Nous. We might have gotten free mousse.
I learned, slowly, to slow down. Lunch at Chez Nous became the way we spent our Valentine’s Days. We would sit on the simple wooden chairs at the simple wooden tables, each one topped with fresh flowers in an Anisette Berger bottle. After a few years, our French waiter could drop the basket of bread on the table without me making a joke about whether they just call French bread “bread” in France. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love eventually learns to shut up before she loses her mind.
There were steaks, and there were frites. There were bottles of vin rouge and dishes of mousse. None of these stick in my memory, but I can feel in my mouth right now the bite of a gherkin and the creamy smear of pâté on bread. I never stopped seeking the way to her heart, and if letting a dashing French waiter bring us dishes of goose and duck liver pâté would bring me a little further along, so be it.
Still, the feeling nagged that I was not enough for her. She had a talent for enjoying herself. In college, I majored in Russian, a language that doesn’t even have a word for fun. The prospect of a restaurant meal with her always carried with it the worry that I would not have enough to say. I knew myself well enough that I didn’t even want to spend an hour alone in my own company. And I’ve seen myself in a mirror. Why would she want to spend an hour looking at me while I struggled to entertain her? Hasn’t she suffered enough?
So when we had a conference in Las Vegas, I set my mind to being Up For Anything. See also: Down For Anything. Las Vegas flummoxed me. A whole city built for having fun? On purpose? I was not fluent in whatever language explained going somewhere just to enjoy oneself and be entertained. I understood doing stuff. I am a border collie of a husband. Take a walk? Sure! But go somewhere to do… nothing? With this conference, I committed to having fun on purpose. There was just one problem: I did not know how.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I got this.”
Our first stop was the restaurant at the Paris Las Vegas Casino and Hotel. She had her “Welcome to Vegas” tradition: ordering escargot at the Paris Casino. We were sharing a big table on the patio with friends who had flown in from around the country. Determined to be a good sport, I picked at the escargot, which proved to me the twin virtues of butter and garlic. It might have been the wine or the pent-up conversation, but it took me a long minute to notice something was up with her.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I don’t think I like escargot,” she said, surprised. She’d gotten this idea into her head, she guessed, that she liked eating escargot at the Paris Casino in Vegas, and this had become part of the story she told herself about how she enjoyed Vegas. But her reaction clued me in on the absence of a secret source code of fun. Sometimes fun is just sitting at a table and being curious about things like what a snail tastes like when it’s baked in garlic and butter. And sometimes it’s enough that the answer is that it tastes like a snail baked in garlic and butter.
Restaurant meals became easier. I started thinking more about what I liked — escargot, meh, but this foie gras business is good! — and what I was interested in. Whether I was enough didn’t seem important. And because she became more than an audience for my insecurities, I could help her off the pedestal I’d built for her so we could enjoy a meal together.
Valentine’s Day lunches at Chez Nous became whatever the opposite of an annual performance review is. We would start with the foie gras, every kind they had, while we lingered over the menu and each other. Our French waiter was there every year, but I didn’t mind anymore. Time would slow down. This place was closer to the real Paris than the Vegas version. And the clatter from the kitchen, the noonday transgression of wine, and the simplicity of it all provided just enough flavor to make a meal with her feel like an occasion.
Chez Nous is closed now because of the pandemic. I don’t know whether it will reopen. I do not remember what we talked about last time we were there, whether we discussed the first impeachment, the primaries, or the reports that the epidemic from China had spread to Italy. We may have talked about plans for our careers, for vacations, for dinner. If I’d known how bad things were about to get and that this would be our last Valentine’s Day in a restaurant, I would have ordered dessert.
I do remember one thing about that lunch, though. We lingered so long that the lunch shift started turning over the restaurant for dinner, and as we left, we heard our waiter shouting something into the kitchen. He spoke without any accent. All this time, he was faking it.
The Opposite of a Valentine
by Robin Whetstone
Our minds have been liberated from occupation. Now that the nightmares are happening in the streets and being litigated in Congress, our minds are processing the trauma. I’ve been having nightmares, strange ones, and I’m not the only one. Robin Whetstone checks in from Georgia where her subconscious is having a field day with her, including one nightmare that seems particularly appropriate this weekend, when Valentine’s Day comes with a body count.
Will you not be my Valentine?
by Rachel Megan Barker
What if on Valentine’s Day we sent cards made out of pink construction paper not just to the ones who got away but to those who never were? What would you write to that one guy you stood up, to the girl you ghosted? That’s how Rachel Megan Barker is marking Valentine’s Day in the pandemic.
Alexandria Ocasio-Churchill
by Jack Hughes
We haven’t seen the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before, at least in this country. Jack Hughes reaches not into pop culture for a parallel but across the pond where he sees a lot of AOC in Winston Churchill’s early political career.
Who we’ve lost
This 70-year-old woman
This member of Congress
But not this French nun!
How we’re getting through this
Printing steak
Spotting fake news
Making overnight oats
Making honey & soy-glazed chicken
Making one-pot spaghetti with cherry tomatoes and kale
Searching 100 years of history in the archive of Editor & Publisher magazine
What we’re reading
Keri Blakinger and Maurice Chammah: “He's Too Mentally Ill to Execute. Why Is He Still on Death Row After 45 Years?” - This problem seems fixable.
In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled that states can’t execute people who don’t understand why they are being put to death and should be legally defined as “incompetent.” The decision left it up to state courts to decide who fits this category. Defense lawyers note that plenty of people have been executed despite evidence they are severely mentally ill, including Lisa Montgomery, the only woman executed by the Trump administration. But even when a state court agrees to stop an execution, the prisoner is not automatically removed from death row.
Bryan Burrough: “‘Smalltime’ Review: Johnstown After Dark” - My buddy Bryan shows us how to write a book review.
In other words, this is not Mafia history that will send Geraldo Rivera scrambling to open a Shorto family safe anytime soon.
And that, oddly, is part of the book’s charm.
Chabeli Carrazana: “Two decades in the making, Rosa DeLauro’s plan to cut child poverty in half is on the brink of passing” - Rosa DeLauro is 100% the most movie-starry person I’ve ever met.
Since 2003, DeLauro has been pushing at every opportunity for the extension of the credit, an anti-poverty measure that, if expanded, could effectively cut child poverty in half. Created in 1997, the child tax credit leaves out a third of all children from accessing the maximum benefit. And for years, DeLauro was the lone voice on the topic… About a day after DeLauro called Bernstein, a historic extension to the child tax credit was included in Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, and DeLauro was within striking distance of a decades-long goal.
Elizabeth Dias: “A Century Ago, White Protestant Extremism Marched on Washington: Kelly J. Baker is a writer and scholar of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. She sees frightening similarities between that culture and the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6.” - Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose, I hope.
As a historian, sometimes you think, “I don’t know if I can take this moment in history and bring it to the present.” But you can definitely find that if you look at a Klan newspaper from the 1920s that there was similar language about God and there’s similar language about the threat to the nation, from immigrants or Catholics or Jews.
Scott Galloway: “The Algebra of Wealth” - Staggeringly good financial advice for anyone with more ahead of them than behind them.
Opportunity remains abundant, even as the headwinds of policy make it increasingly difficult for the young to capture their fair share of the spoils (note: this is not sustainable). The less novel path to success does not change, although it is overshadowed by outliers including Charli D’Amelio, President Putin, and Oprah, who illuminate narrower paths. Successful people often unwittingly head fake young people with the humblebrags of “follow your passion” and “don’t think about money.” This is (mostly) bullshit. Achieving economic security requires hard work, talent, and a tremendous amount of focus on . . . money.
Ryan Holiday: “Fight to Be Who Philosophy Wants You to Be” - Good dang advice
We have to choose ourselves a Cato. He says, “Choose someone whose way of life as well as words, and whose very face as mirroring the character that lies behind it, have won your approval. Be always pointing him out to yourself either as your guardian or as your model.”
Dan Zak: “Day 1 of Impeachment 2: Tears, fears and seasick poetry” - Last November, I wrote about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Building of the Ship”; this week, one of Trump’s defense attorneys wept while he read it in the ex-President’s defense.
Longfellow swapped in a more optimistic conclusion at the last minute, according to the poet’s grandson, and thus stirred the hearts of Lincoln, Roosevelt and now a lawyer for Donald J. Trump.
What we’re watching
I did not at all expect to like HBO’s documentary Spielberg. Critics and audiences loved it; so did I.
I loved episode two of Pretend It’s a City, Martin Scorsese’s Netflix documentary series about Fran Liebowitz — and here’s the SNL spoof (8 minute, 10 second mark).
A lot of people were talking about the Hulu and NYT Presents “Framing Brittany Spears,” an episode in its documentary series. This is as great an example of how toxic (err, sorry) the late ‘90s were. Sonia and I were shouting at the television.
What we’re listening to
Lots of great updates this week to The Experiment’s Spotify playlist:
“Crosshairs,” the latest single from Cassandra Jenkins’ upcoming album, An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, has a line that reminds me of Charlie Bonner: “All I want is to fall apart/in the arms of someone entirely strange to me.”
Canadian jazz singer Dominique Fils-Aimé dropped a new album, Three Little Words, that lands with a light touch. Start with “While We Wait.”
I got some real questions to ask you now
Do you think we might change the world
One move at a time?
I got some real blessings to share around
Having you by my side
Makes it all worthwhile
While, while, while, while
We wait for the world to change
“Strong Feelings,” by a new band called Dry Cleaning, was recorded in isolation, which is also its subject.
Dry Cleaning recorded the album during the pandemic, with each member demoing their individual parts on a four-track Tascam recorder they passed to each other through the window of a car, disinfected each time with antibacterial wipes. They went on to work with producer John Parish (PJ Harvey) at Rockfield Studios in Wales to put the record together. “Strong Feelings,” vocalist Florence Shaw said in a statement, is “about secretly being in love with someone who doesn’t know it, and Brexit’s disruptive role in romantic relationships.”
Mobley, the mad scientist of the Austin music scene, is dropping a new album, Young & Dying in the Occident Supreme, next week, and if “James Crow” is any indication, it’s gonna be another good one.
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