The Silver Lining: Volume 30
Musings on living the good life: food, culture, art, and products designed to inspire. Top picks from me to you on Thursdays.
TSL turns 30 today — holy shit! Thanks for being a part of it, we’ll keep writing as long as you keep on coming back.
Top Tracks
Artist: India.Arie
Why I picked it: India Arie Simpson, more commonly known as India.Arie, hails from Denver, CO. Her career kicked off with the 2001 debut album Acoustic Soul, from which “Strength Courage & Wisdom” is pulled from. There’s something deeply enriching about the track — her melodic vocals don’t hurt the cause here either — and in the times we’re living in lately we could all use a little more strength, courage, and wisdom to persevere.
Artist: Alabama 3
Why I picked it: Lee and I finally completed our marathon run of The Sopranos — what a beautiful few months of content consumption its been. I had to pay homage to the show in some small way, and this felt like an appropriate place to do so. The Alabama 3, coincidentally who hail from the UK, never got a fair shake for their outsized contribution to the cultural zeitgeist:
We agreed to let HBO use it for about $500. HBO was just a tiny thing then. Nobody knew the show was going to be this huge thing for 25 years. Over the years we had lawyers look at it, telling us to go for more copyright, But it's been nice to watch the song take on its own life. It belongs to the show now.
Royalties be damned — it was the song that set the tone for each episode, and to the 3 lads from across the pond, I say to thee: thank you very much.
Artist: Paradis
Why I picked it: If you’ve been following TSL for a while now, you know I’m a bit of a francophile when it comes to music. Paradis, the French electronic music duo consisting of Simon Mény and Pierre Rousseau, very much fits the mold of the french DJ sound I’ve come to love. This pick, “Quand Tu Souris”, is a bit more downtempo than Paradis’ most well-known song Toi et Moi off the same album. It’s the perfect song to carry us from that transitional period between summer and fall. It’s 5 minutes of a richly complex vibe that I hope you’ll enjoy as much as I did.
Speaking of Summer coming to a close — I wanted to gift you all with my ‘Summer Playlist’, 99 tracks collated over these last few months with several Top Tracks featured throughout.
Artist Date
Props to Nicolle for this gem of a find: Window Swap, a tool that just may help you get out of your literal quarantine bubble funk for a few fleeting moments through the lens of other humans’ windows.
Window Swap, a website that recently launched as a project among friends, is a site that lets you check out other people’s views. Users record videos from their windows, providing a sneak-peek into their world.
I found myself overwhelmed with this feeling of connection and togetherness that that Pandemic has largely stripped from us. As beautiful and unique as the vistas were (see below for some screenshots), equally powerful and impactful for me were the sounds of each unique place. Don’t blame me when you invest an hour or two on an Artist Date around the world from the comfort of your laptop. Blame Nicolle. :)
Seaside views from Sardinia, Italy
Flora and Fuana together in Tennessee.
Barefoot Contessa Bootcamp
This a boozy version of Bootcamp because we need (several) drink(s) after these past few weeks. Below is the delicious-looking Tequila Soleil, a cross between a Negroni and a spritz from NYT Beverage writer Rebekah Peppler.
The star ingredient here is not some fancy Italian Apertif, but its in fact the fizz of a brewed beer:
Beer as a cocktail ingredient isn’t a revolutionary idea. It’s long played a part in drinkmaking. The original flips, concocted in the late 1600s, were made with beer, rum, sugar and whole egg, and served hot.
According to Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery and the editor of “The Oxford Companion to Beer,” early punches often contained beer, although it wasn’t in there to make the drink sparkling. Rather, he said, “it added undertones of malt flavor and fleshed and smoothed out the overall feeling of the drink.”
Equal parts tequila, Campari, and vermouth and 4 to 6 ounces of beer of your choosing. She recommends a session I.P.A. but I can’t stand I.P.A.s and went with a clean Peroni lager and it was delicious.
Cheers!
SKU of the Week
Two SKUs this week:
1) Light Phone II — a phone for Humans reimagining out addiction to smartphones:
From their marketing materials online:
The Light Phone II will never have feeds, social media, advertisements, news or email. All of the tools are custom designed for our Light OS. There is no infinity, just intention
I’m very intrigued, and curious if this resonates with any of you?
2) And one final homage to Tony, Carmela, and company: the TQE Sopranos Style Guide
Table for 2
Tortillas have a soft spot at TSL — recall that deep dive into Sonorotown’s Sonora Flour Tortillas featured in Volume 004 — so we’re excited to see KCRW having their annual Tortilla Tournament — stacking LA’s best tortillaerias against one another for a winner-takes-all finish in the coming weeks.
KCRW’s Gustavo and Evan Kleiman pick 64 tortillas (32 corn, 32 flour) from all across Southern California, split them into four brackets, seed them so underdogs match up against favorites, and do an elimination-style contest until there are only four left. We may have lost March Madness to COVID this year, but this bracket is packing a serious punch.
RSVP for the big finale on October 18th.
Social Starlettes
RIP to the Notorious RBG:
HT to Will with the find on this cuteness overload (click to play):
A beautiful photo from 1965:
I never quite figured out how a speed bag works, but this man surely gets it:
A little diddy to help get out the vote from Hamilton’s Phillipa Soo and her equally talented husband Steven Pasquale (click to play):
And we close things out with Diane Keaton dropping the mic:
That’s it for Volume 30. I’m off next week, I’ll see you back here October 7th.
Comments, questions, tips?
Send a letter to the editor –– Scott Silver:
scott@thesilverlining.la / @thesilverlining.la