First off! There’s a substack reader app that is actually quite pleasant in my opinion (the skies have yet to weigh in). Believe me, if I had any idea how to link you to the app store to download it, I would. However that’s not the world we’re living in, so if you can figure out how to find the substack app yourself then godspeed!
Week of March 15th to March 21st, 2022.
You find this time of year a bit challenging, Virgo. Early winter is a bit easier for you—expectation wise. When you anticipate each day will be a cosmic joke, you cannot feel disappointed by each of its depressing elements. But when a tiny bird visits your window sill one day, yet disappears the next? This is the stuff of nightmares. The low of a godless winter day is far lower when you know the unspeakable high of how cute birds can be when they’re up close.
You have spent most of your March watching a show about gangsters from the 1920’s. When the characters are about to die they solemnly say, “In the bleak midwinter.” You like to think that right before you die you’ll say something poetic, but unfortunately I’m actually aware of how you die, and I can assure you that there’s nothing cool about it (if you want specifics: you die in a terribly unfashionable “house dress” that a friend buys for you as a joke. The house dress is covered in toucans and gingham, but its constant presence eventually dulls you to its garishness and you start to wear it unironically. The house dress slowly becomes such a part of who you are that you not only die in it, but your closest friends and family agree it’s what you should be buried in. That’s right, they’ll forget you want to be cremated—because the vulgar print of the dress eclipsed all of their other thoughts of who you were and what you liked).
The show with characters who are poetic even in their last moments of life has an amazing cast. These talented people seem to have endless capacity to give devastating, complex performances. The skies are in awe of their craft. Unfortunately, the show also includes Adrien Brody. Who, for one season-long grimace, delivers a performance that could be best replicated by asking any Improv 101 student to do an impression of Marlon Brando as the Godfather.
In a show that includes many scenes of torture and unbridled agony, the only scene in which you absolutely must avert your eyes, is any scene Adrien Brody happens to be in. The Skies aren’t big Brody heads, but it’s got to be the worst on-screen choices he’s made in his career, which is saying a lot, since Adrien Brody once went rogue while hosting SNL and delivered his monologue with a Jamaican accent from beneath a wig of dreadlocks. He has since been banned from hosting the show. (This is true. Sometimes it feels like Virgo and the skies are the only sentient beings that know this fact but it is a true fact about Adrien Brody.)
In playing an Italian gangster, Adrien Brody bravely makes the choice to not make a single original choice of his own. It feels as though Adrien Brody had been replaced by an AI that had only watched scenes of Americans playing Italian characters written by Americans who talk incessantly about “la famiglia” and have no other notable personality traits (besides being violent when someone does something to their famiglia).
The skies can’t help but notice that Americans are particularly fascinated with Italy. Learning that a food is from Italy is often the only piece of information an American needs to become instantly and ardently convinced of its quality. And y’all will call anything Tuscan.
The skies are begging you to learn from Adrien Brody’s numerous, glaring mistakes. Do not traverse this world with lazy, appalling, arrogance. If, say, you have the opportunity to host SNL, and you come up with an offensive idea that the writers and producers and the creator of the show forbid you from doing—the skies beg you to do what Adrien Brody could never do: please see reason, and make a good decision.