I’ve recently rediscovered “That Mitchell & Webb Sound,” an irresistible BBC Radio 4 sketch comedy show from the aughts. It stars David Mitchell and Robert Webb, perhaps best known for their hilarious buddy comedy “Peep Show,” and their frequent collaborator, the Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman. It’s keeping me company on headphones as I trudge through the still-chilly New York springtime. Below, more provocations to ease your own trudge.
On this week’s list:
1. ‘Top Gun’ hits middle age
2. Audio postcards
3. Sultry and catchy
4. Your own private screening room
5. Time as art
6. Long live the Pony Express
1.
‘Top Gun’ hits middle age
Any time I see a person wearing aviator sunglasses, I think, “That person looks popular.” This is a ridiculous idea outside a school cafeteria, but it’s encoded in me from my childhood in the 1980s, when all the coolest kids were trying to look like the fighter pilots of “Top Gun.” (Depending on your age and definition of cool, you may associate aviators with Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was already looking popular back in the 1940s.)
Even though the glasses are everywhere these days, and really anyone can and does wear them, they have lost none of their glamour for me.
Saturday is the 40th anniversary of the release of “Top Gun.” Starting today, the classic movie, as well as its 2022 sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick,” are back in theaters for a week. So here’s your chance to see Maverick ride a motorcycle through Fightertown, U.S.A., to “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins on the big screen. If you want to look cool when you go, here are all the aviator models worn in both films.
2.
Audio postcards
“I’ve been thinking about how lovely and intimate voice memos are,” my friend Tina Antolini, who works on The Times’s flagship podcast The Daily, wrote to me the other day. She had just completed the show’s Mother’s Day episode, which featured collages of voice memos from listeners sharing their moms’ mantras and mottos. Why don’t I send more voice memos? I thought, and promptly made a plan to send Tina a recorded note as soon as I had a minute.
I, too, love voice memos. They’re a little like whispering in someone’s ear, conspiratorial, a podcast for an audience of one. With texts, we struggle to convey irony, humor, gravity or really any tone without the crutches of LOLs and emojis. Is there anything better than a breathless voice memo, sent on the go, relating a funny story, or gossip, or just a heartfelt gesture of attention like “I’m thinking of you”?
When I’m in a voice-memo volley, sending recordings back and forth in real time, I sometimes wonder why we don’t just pick up the phone and talk. But the voice-memo exchange is a different varietal of conversation. It’s asynchronous, so one can partake while doing other things, transmit even when the recipient is sleeping. Each interlocutor gets to unspool their full thought without active-listener “uh-huhs” or supporting interjections. Voice memos are keepsakes, replayable when you want to hear your sister’s unmistakable affect, the way your best friend’s cadence quickens when he’s excited.
I did send Tina a voice memo, and she sent me one back. It had been a while since we’d talked and I’d forgotten her sonorous alto, the way I can tell she’s smiling by the change in her timbre. She reminded me that she’d been pregnant during the pandemic and said that she was grateful to still have voice-memo exchanges from that era that serve as a historical record of her particular concerns in that moment. We sent a couple of memos, then availed ourselves of one of the most convenient benefits of the form: no sign off, no drawn-out goodbye. I love the architecture of traditional conversation, its windup and wind-down and connective tissue, but I also love that I can still get some of the intimacy of a real chat when I’m in the middle of a busy day.
There are few good things about my dear friend Julie having moved from New York (where I live) to Texas (where I don’t), but one bonus is she has introduced me to the Austin musician Jo Alice. I can’t stop listening to “Give Me Some Good News (When I Call).” It’s sultry and catchy and easy to sing along with, and while it doesn’t make me miss Julie less, it does soothe the pangs a bit.
4.
Your own private screening room
I arrived on time last week to see Ildiko Enyedi’s lovely film “Silent Friend” at Lincoln Center, and it was so crowded I had to perch on a terrifically uncomfortable ledge in the back of the theater for the duration. This made me long for the last time I saw a movie in a mostly empty theater. I can’t remember the plot or even the title, but I do remember the vibe.
You feel this special kinship with the few others in the audience, as if you’re part of some rare and discerning clutch of cineastes who selected a 3:30 p.m. matinee on a Thursday. There’s no one around you checking their phone or blocking your view, no one kicking your seat or laughing nervously during the tense scenes. It’s a rare sort of paradise.
Now, thanks to Riley Walz, the software engineer and prankster behind such projects as a fake steakhouse and a map rating restaurants on the attractiveness of their clientele, you can find empty AMC movie theaters near you. Might I suggest a semi-private screening of “Top Gun”?
5.
Big Apple clock
Have you seen “The Clock,” Christian Marclay’s 24-hour montage of film clips of clocks, watches and other items displaying the time? It’s mesmerizing in a way that I always fear defies description, a piece of art that makes real the passage of time the way no amount of contemplation can. I sat for several hours watching the time tick by when the exhibition came to the Museum of Modern Art a couple of years ago.
I was reminded of “The Clock” when I encountered NYC Street Clock, an online clock that uses more than 14,000 images of New York City, scraped from Google Maps, to create a slow-changing, artistic representation of the actual time (in New York). It was made by the artists Yufeng Zhao and Morry Kolman and it’s a delight to behold. On Monday, 3:40 p.m. was a spray-painted number on a dumpster in Brooklyn; 3:42 was digits on the back of a city bus. How cool! How creative!
I love Street View projects — I could fill a whole Good List with them: GeoGuessr, wherein you are dropped somewhere in the world and have to figure out where you are, has filled many a happy leisure hour for me. Zhao also made “All Text in NYC,” a search engine that will show you any text where it appears in the city.
6.
Long live the Pony Express
Here I am rhapsodizing about the virtues of voice memos, while Gen Zers are starting snail-mail subscription clubs, sending out illustrations, paintings and miniature cookbooks to fans. Can one love a digital postcard and an IRL package equally? I plan to embody this contradiction. Oh, the romance of receiving something handmade in the mail!
It’s easy to collapse into a puddle of lament about what we’ve lost to technology. But if you miss handwritten letters, pen pals, zines and greeting cards, here’s a reminder that … we can still communicate via post if we want to. When was the last time you sent a letter? I think it’s a good way to reconnect with someone you haven’t spoken to in a while. It’s less aggressive than a text. It adds a certain seriousness to the enterprise that email lacks — this is not a disposable communiqué, but a bid to re-establish contact — and it gives the recipient a minute to process and decide how to respond.
The voice memo and the written letter share a similar appeal: recapturing a vanishing intimacy. Shall we all endeavor to send (at least) one voice memo and one letter this week? And report back? You could even sign up to send and receive postcards from strangers around the world. Heck, I might send a telegram!
Readers with carrier pigeons are invited to send missives to our Manhattan headquarters. If your dovecote is empty, feel free to leave a note in the comments, or send me an email. And you can check out past editions of The Good List anytime. If you want to get The Good List in your inbox, sign up here. If you want to get The Good List in your inbox, sign up here. I’ll be back next week, via email, a reliable if hardly romantic means of communication. — Melissa
The Good List is edited by Jodi Rudoren. Eli Cohen handles the photos.
