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The Weekender: November shadows, bike thievery, and a sculptural pavlova
What we’re reading, watching, and listening to this week
Read: An attempt to foil London’s bike thieves, the perverse joy of SNL, and a canonized urban myth. Watch: A short documentary about city birders. Listen: A deep cut from Jimmy Holiday, shared by his daughter. Make: A sculptural cinnamon and chocolate pavlova. Enjoy: All of it, we hope.
ART
Shadow time
November may be the least romanticized month of this highly romanticized season. While introducing her work “Everything is a Clock,” Tala Rae Schlossberg makes a compelling case for this month of shadows.
My first delight of the morning is the shadow of the birds against the orange building. I love the way these shadow birds fly, pressed up against the concrete, and then how they disappear into the sky. These shadows, in many ways, are reverse birds—birds (positive) being things of sky and not of brick.
Shadows, I think, have always been of interest to me. It is an enjoyable perspective, when the right day allows for it, to get to see the world as its reaction.
Today is one of those days, the kind where light and darkness have agreed, it seems, to split the afternoon. Every person walking carries a person-shaped patch of darkness attached at the ankles. I write this in the sun and my hand creates another hand, identical in almost every way (besides dimension and autonomy).
I love the fall because of the light, and when I say the light I mean the darkness and the way it lets us see the light, finally, after all these months of trying to shelter from the sun.
I’ve had this illustration lying around for months and finally added a little rain animation outside 🙃🌧️
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8
CRIME
Bicycle blues
Bike theft has become a seemingly inevitable part of urban life. As Jim Waterson knows all too well: while reporting on the crime wave in London, he becomes a victim himself. The lengths he goes to to track down his family e-bike reveal the ways bike theft has evolved in recent years, and how the private sector has stepped into a void left by overextended police forces.
James Dunn, the founder of bicycle recovery service BackPedal, wasn’t expecting a call from me on a Friday evening. We’d spent weeks discussing how best to investigate the plague of bike theft in the capital for a London Centric article. I’d tried knocking on the doors of convicted bike thieves after they got out of prison but, strangely, the criminals didn’t want to share all their tactics with a journalist. I’d asked to accompany Dunn’s recovery agents as they track down and retrieve client’s bikes, using GPS trackers they hide on the frame, but we hadn’t yet scheduled in a date.
In desperation, I’d bought a cheap bicycle with the intention of using it as “bait bike”, a tactic used occasionally by the police to smash organised gangs. Dunn’s company was going to fit my new purchase with a specialist tracker, wait for it to get stolen, then we’d see where it ended up.
Instead, I’d accidentally jumped the gun.
Earlier that day I’d left my family’s electric cargo bike outside my home while dashing in for a Teams meeting with a group of London council communications directors. The battery-powered bike can carry two children across London faster than public transport and is far cheaper than owning a car. Every story in London Centric is reported from its saddle, as I cover hundreds of miles across the capital every week in search of news. It has transformed my life. But, as the thieves who must have been watching my house knew, it is not a cheap bit of a kit. And by the time I went back outside, it was gone.
“This honestly wasn’t the plan,” I told Dunn, desperately trying to make light of the situation. The son of a policeman, Dunn reeled off tips on what to do if I wanted to see my bike again, explaining that it was probable that I was being watched and he would expect such a heavy bike to be kept in a ground floor flat. But he tried to emotionally prepare me for the worst: the likelihood was that it was gone forever, with my best chance being that the insurance company might pay out. All my hopes relied on a £28 Apple AirTag that I’d hidden in the bike’s frame. The basic tracking device would ultimately end up being the only reason I got the bike back — but it took hours of detective work, a lot of luck, and a sprint across the streets of London to confront a thief.
Piergiorgio Branzi, “Beachside bar in Senigallia, Italy,” 1957, shared by Daniel Benneworth-Gray
TELEVISION
Unpopular opinion
Saturday Night Live is celebrating its 50th season. In this post, Justin Myers argues that the oft-criticized live comedy show is good, actually—or, if not exactly good, at least worth watching.
I never miss an episode. I’m actively annoyed when it’s not on.
I know what you’re thinking, because I often think the same, while watching. Saturday Night Live, US weekend institution for the last forty-nine years, is frequently unfunny to a near indefensible degree. Its sketches are at least one and a half minutes too long and usually end badly. It is unafraid to wring a joke by the neck until it is dead, and delights in ignoring better ones. The famous cold opens—a usually topical, satirical sketch preceding the titles—are painful, overlong, and favour newsworthiness over humour. The cast is too large. There’s an overreliance on impressions. Some sketches are niche to the point of being incomprehensible. Some arrive to internet bandwagons and memes weeks too late, like your auntie screaming out “SEND IT TO ME RACHEL” on Boxing Day 2027. The accent work is agony. Every third show, the musical guest is a white man in a lumberjack shirt with face tattoos. Even in 2024, there’s an uncomfortable reliance on punching down for a lazy joke. Colin Jost’s teeth appear to feature alien technology. The repeat sketches tend to be the least amusing.
But I watch it all the same. It’s not a hate-watch, I don’t believe in those. Why waste your one wild and precious life spending an hour a week—we watch on delay and scroll through the ads—wishing your TV would explode and take you with it? I realised, some time ago, that the main draw for me is the cast. Most are very talented performers, and watching them every week means you get to know their energy, and their individual tics and strengths, which means, even if the sketch they’re in is terrible, you will root for them, or at the very least enjoy watching the material mangle them like a lion with a gazelle in its mouth.
This short documentary about a group of passionate urban bird-watchers almost makes waking up at 3 a.m. on a Saturday to “ring” birds sound enjoyable. Almost.
There’s a sign in a street in Madrid with the images of a dagger, a human head on a plate, and a bloodied, severed head of a ram. This is the Street of the Head. I look up the story.
Sometime during the reign of Philip III (17th century), a servant of a rich priest, who lived on this street, beheaded his master, took his gold and fucked off unnoticed. The murder was never solved.
Years later, he came back to the city, now in knight’s clothes. He bought a ram’s head on a market and, having no servant of his own to bring it home for him, carried it under his cloak. A cop noticed the trail of blood he was leaving behind and stopped him to ask what it was he was carrying. The man replied, “What do you think? The head of a ram I just bought,” and went on to present the head. To his surprise, the head he now held in his hands was that of his former master. Shocked, the killer confessed there and then.
When they brought him to justice—by hanging in the main square—the head was carried in front of him on a silver plate. As soon as the sentence was carried out, it turned back into the head of a ram.
In the town I am from, most streets had no names at all, and the ones that did were called things like the Apple-Tree Alley, the Birch-Tree Alley, or the School Street. There was nothing quite like the Street of the Head.
“Miniature Cherry Cream” by Florence Houston, shared by Melody Hansen
FOOD
Chocolate and cinnamon pavlova
It was hard to pick an image to feature here; every angle of Flora Manson’s pavlova looks both stunningly architectural and like something you want to curl into. In another world, it might even have been too pretty to eat. But no—with cinnamon vanilla crème légère and poached pears, beauty won’t save it for long.
I have memories of standing in the kitchen with my mum, watching as she whisked egg whites by hand, pausing to add a teaspoon of sugar at a time and then resuming. It was like magic—watching as the mixture transformed from a frothy puddle of egg whites into a glorious, shiny, billowing mound of meringue—it is one of my earliest and strongest food memories. Pavlovas were my mum’s go-to dessert, so watching her make them was a fairly regular occurrence. She would make tiny little meringue quenelles with leftover mixture which I would gobble up as soon as the baking tray came out of the oven, and I reveled in how the meringue would slowly dissolve on my tongue.
I remember the first time I made my own, and how it felt almost wrong to be doing so when it felt like mum’s territory and not mine, but at the same time it felt somewhat moving and lovely, like I was carrying on a tradition. For this reason, pavlovas will forever be a very special dessert to me. They feel both retro and forever young, and there are never-ending possibilities when it comes to customising them.
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
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