Feldman's Faves: January 27, 2025

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

This year’s Lunar New Year - being the Year of the Wood Snake – starts on Wednesday. For those of you celebrating I hope you have a very happy, healthy and prosperous year. We will be celebrating this event as a firm next Monday, February 3 @ 2:30 PM in Eddie's Social.

In Oscar news, Emilia Perez is getting a LOT of Oscar buzz and people LOVE it. I have tried to watch it several times but I just can’t get through it. What am I missing here?

What a weekend in the NFL – I had high hopes for a Bills /Commanders match up but alas we will be seeing Chiefs/Eagles 2.0.  Hard to bet against Saquon and Mahomes. But now we have no choice…. 

Finally, please join me in wishing Steve (aka “the best in the biz”) a very happy birthday (celebrating tomorrow).

No theme this week – just topics of interest.

INTERMEZZO By: Sally Rooney – You can’t walk into a book store these days and miss the massive display of Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo. People love her writing and as a first time reader of her work I can understand why. The main driver of this story is the relationship of two very different brothers in the wake of their father’s death, following the suffering of a long illness. How each brother handles grief, their relationship with each other as well as the other people in their lives is quite complex filled with contradictory  and sometimes hypocritical actions and emotions. We also get the perspective and backstory of other characters in such an effective way that the reader feels they know everyone involved (even better than the characters know each other).  Rooney’s writing style has an element of Kerouac freestyle and Joyce like references throughout – but in a way that is readable and comprehensible (as I find Joyce, at least, hard to understand in my small brain). As one reviewer notes, “Sally Rooney’s breakout book, Normal People– more than 1m copies sold in the UK alone – proved her to be a peerless creator of flesh and blood characters with a keen eye for the thrill and complication of sex and desire. Yet despite her success, she has seemed to mistrust her talent, serving up her usual treats in her last novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You – the story of a love quadrilateral – with a side order of self-consciousness, as if she wanted to be the first to do it down. Unlike BWWAY (as it became known), her new novel doesn’t worry so openly about its value in a burning world, and feels more serious as a result. And not just more serious: Intermezzo is perfect – truly wonderful – a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements. It’s centered not on a longstanding friendship but two rivalrous siblings, which gives her a heftier shared history to use for emotional punch as well as laugh-out-loud comedy.Set in Dublin in 2022, from late summer to Christmas, the book follows two brothers: Peter, 32, a lawyer, and Ivan, 22, a chess player (and sketchily employed data analyst), whose progress through the rankings has flatlined since their father, recently dead from cancer, first got ill in Ivan’s late teens. Ivan kicks off the novel’s action when his victory in a comeback event ends with him bedding the 36-year-old venue manager, Margaret, who, as Ivan doesn’t yet know, has an estranged alcoholic husband not quite off the scene.  Peter’s love life is spicier still. He still frequently shares a bed with his former university debating partner, Sylvia, a literary academic. They’re obvious soulmates, but nonetheless broke up, at her instigation, when a road accident left her in chronic untreatable pain that makes sex no-go, a situation the novel treats with unsensational seriousness. Peter’s subsequent promiscuity has come to rest with Naomi, a soon-to-be homeless student Ivan’s age; she makes ends meet with racy online snaps, drug-dealing and the odd handout from Peter – which leaves each of them tiptoeing around the question of whether or not her pliancy in bed is nothing but a survival strategy.  Of the central characters, Naomi is the only one from whose point of view Rooney doesn’t write, switching in unhurried paragraphs between third-person interior monologues from Ivan, Margaret and Peter, whose segments are a seamlessly Joycean flow of thought and speech. See this passage when, after a drunken binge, he passes out at the sight of both his lovers: “Probably dehydrated Naomi says. Like you literally never drink water. I’m surprised you don’t collapse more. She’s sitting at the table he can tell from the directionality of her voice though he can only from here see the ceiling and part of the far wall. Clink of teaspoon also he hears. I don’t know, says Sylvia. I think it might have been the shock of seeing us in the same room together.” You swiftly get into the groove of the novel’s style, even as it makes you wonder just how much Rooney might have hated being dissed for the glassy simplicity of her prose (much as the focus on two brothers possibly discourages you from parsing Intermezzo as coded autobiography, the way previous novels were). There’s even an appendix making clear which lines the book has repurposed from Wittgenstein, Hamlet, Henry James, Ulysses and so on, but that’s as far as any overt self-consciousness goes this time. Unlike BWWAY’s peculiarly stringent experiment in exteriority, which read almost as if Rooney were watching her characters on CCTV, she leans fully into her gifts here: more characters, more complication, “more life”, as Margaret thinks, tentatively embracing the potential for a relationship with Ivan.As a plotter, Rooney is a born farceur: when Peter breaks up with Naomi, she’s got nowhere to go, and neither has Ivan’s dog, now that his mother is fed up with looking after it. But their father’s house in Kildare is of course still empty... It’s a coming together waiting to happen and Rooney doesn’t stint on taking advantage. Ditto the potential for ill will in Peter’s disparaging response when Ivan confides in him about Margaret, especially when he sees how his brother is being a hypocrite about age-gap relationships, all of which uncorks a lifetime of bad blood stored up around their parents’ divorce when Ivan was five years old. A rekindling between Peter and Sylvia only makes him more of a hot mess, afloat on vodka and Xanax, yet still able to clinch a headline-making courtroom victory.  What makes Rooney so electrically compelling is the way she sticks with a scene and draws it out, often just the delicate dance of talk between two people in a room (although not just talking, given the characters tumble into bed pretty much every 50 pages). Indeed, the greatest drama here comes from conversations taking place under the pressure of life-changing events in the novel’s prehistory. Not only the obviously big ones, like Sylvia’s accident, but also things like Ivan, still in his teens, silently walking away in fearful confusion when his brother, 10 years his elder, needed a shoulder to cry on. The reader always feels different layers of grief at play – buried pain exhumed by fresh hurt – in a way that rings stingingly true to life.  There’s room in the book, too, for love of so many different kinds: Margaret and her best friend venting about their mothers over lemonades in the pub; Peter going back to his mum, watching telly from her sofa in a daze; Ivan finally taking back custody of his dog. These are tenderly emotional scenes but also very funny, full as they are of little comic touches that persuade you utterly of Rooney’s understanding of people and the world. See the moment when Ivan and Peter separately recall a girlfriend Peter once brought to dinner with her three top buttons undone – a heady memory for both, it turns out.  Is there a better novelist at work right now? It matters not a jot to Intermezzo’s success but you have to wonder why it’s not up for the Booker – not even longlisted. Was it actually submitted in the first place? Maybe its power defies easy summary – “more life”, not spying or space or slavery – but either way, Rooney, author of four books in just seven years, has at this point already created more enduringly memorable characters than most novelists ever manage. And – to mangle a line from the book – she’s, what, 33? Christ.”  I thought the premise of the book was really interesting, the writing exquisite and the deep dive into each of the characters really compelling. Here’s a good review from the NYT -  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/books/review/sally-rooney-intermezzo.html

Masters of Scale - Masters of Scale Live: Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer with Caffè Panna's Hallie Meyer – One of the highlights of 2024 in Toronto was the arrival of Shake Shack.  I remember when Shake Shack first started in NYC as basically a food truck and now it is global empire. Not surprising given that it was one of many brainchild’s of restauranteur Danny Meyer, who is also famous for The Union Square Café, Grammercy Tavern and many other amazing food ventures.  His daughter, Hallie is a NEXTGEN entrepreneur as she is building her ice cream business. What a family and how delicious must family dinners be with them.  Both of the Meyers are exceptional entrepreneurs with great brains and great hearts (Meyer was incredible to his customers and his staff during Covid).  It is always interesting to hear what Danny (and now Hallie) have to say about their unique approaches and perspectives on business in general and in the food business specifically.  Here’s an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “Danny Meyer is best known as the founder of Shake Shack and the legendary restaurants of his Union Square Hospitality Group in New York City. He joined host Jeff Berman on stage recently for the first Masters of Scale Live, presented by Capital One Business.  Later in the conversation, Danny's daughter, Hallie Meyer, joined them on stage. Hallie is busy scaling her own food venture, the gourmet NYC ice cream shop Caffè Panna. The Meyers offer invaluable insights on how to scale great experiences for customers and teams.” https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/masters-of-scale/id1227971746?i=1000678516323

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon