Lifestyle
How to have the best Sunday in L.A., according to Richard Marx
Richard Marx keeps circling back to one word during our interview: elegance.
The descriptor works for the artist’s latest album, “After Hours,” a collection of originals and standards that sees the 62-year-old Marx channel his inner, swinging Frank Sinatra. But Marx also uses the word to detail his life with partner Daisy Fuentes, with whom he wrote the light-stepping Latin-tinged new number “Magic Hour.”
“It’s one of my favorite, if not favorite word, these days,” Marx says. “I just want to live my life more elegantly.”
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
How does that manifest? The hitmaker, who rose to fame with the now timeless ballad “Right Here Waiting,” never hopes to miss a small indulgence such as a nightly martini. Marx was born in Chicago but says he has fully acclimated to the Southern California lifestyle. It’s on the hiking trails, for instance, where he does his best songwriting, and it’s around the firepit where he and Fuentes share their deepest conversations.
Splitting time between two homes — one “in the deep Valley” and another in Malibu — Marx these days appears intent on aging gracefully. It’s partly what drew him to record an album that lovingly pays homage to the likes of Sinatra and Dean Martin.
“When I recorded this album, I dressed up,” he says. “I put on a suit like Sinatra used to do. It makes sense, since in the last dozen years since I met Daisy — she’s sort of old-school — we’ve tried to be as elegant about everything as we possibly can.”
Marx shares with us his ideas for a most elegant Sunday in L.A.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
8:30 a.m.: Sun and meditation
I start every day when I’m in California with an iced coffee of some kind, sitting in the sun for 20 minutes. No sunscreen, just 20 minutes of vitamin D. I don’t look at my phone. This is my 20-minute meditation with a little caffeine and the sun on my skin. That’s so important to me.
9:30 a.m.: Brunch at home or in Malibu
Daisy is a really great cook. She’s great across the board, but her breakfast and brunch talent is off the charts. So usually on a Sunday we’re going to stay home and she’s going to make some brunch. If we go out, one of my favorite Sundays, even when we’re here in the Valley, is to drive over the hill and go to the Malibu Country Mart or stop in the Marmalade Cafe or the Carbon Beach Club, which is in the Malibu Beach Inn. There’s a couple places we love in Malibu. There’s a place called Ollo’s that has great breakfast. It’s in a strip mall with Ralph’s.
11 a.m.: More sun on the trails
I’m addicted to hiking and so is Daisy. There are some really great hikes out here in the Valley — Las Virgenes — but my favorite hikes are in Malibu, whether it’s Solstice Canyon or the Westward Beach hike. It’s not a challenging hike physically, but it’s probably the most gorgeous hike. What’s the point of being in California if you’re not outside? Sunday is a day I need to be out hiking in the sun and sweating.
About 30% of the time I’m writing in my head, even if I don’t want to be. It happens. If Daisy is with me, I love to not take my phone because I like to be unencumbered and to not think about it. What will happen is then I’ll have to have her open her voice notes and sing a melody into it. I’ve written so many songs in the great outdoors. I saw an interview with Sting where he said that lyrics hide behind bushes and trees and under rocks. He goes outside too. I knew I liked Sting.
2:30 p.m.: Time to chill with a book
And then it’s really just a matter of relaxing, getting some time to sit with a great book in the afternoon. I always have a couple books going at the same time. I haven’t been reading hardly any fiction for a while, but I just started reading Scott Galloway’s book, “Notes on Being a Man.” He’s an investment guy and he’s got companies, but he’s become really big on social media. He’s an interesting guy, and I’m totally into that book. I’m almost finished with Charlie Sheen’s memoir. I saw the documentary, which I thought was amazing. His story is fascinating, and the quality of that filmmaking, especially in the use of the old movie footage, I thought was world-class. So I’m finishing Charlie’s book. Those are the two I’m reading right now.
4:30 p.m.: Pre-dinner martinis
As great a cook as Daisy is, we like to go out for dinner. Our favorite thing is to go someplace for martinis and a little bite of something and then another place for dinner. With more martinis. I can’t focus enough on the martinis.
If I had to pick one martini spot, it’s Lucky’s in Malibu. First of all, it’s an incredible martini, but they do a whole presentation. They bring it over to the table and shake it at the table. It’s a generous pour. You usually get a little sidecar. Being vegetarian, it’s a little challenging, but it’s a great place for us. There’s also a place called V’s. It’s a local place that’s been there a long time. They have a tiny little bar when you first walk in the door with a couple little hi-tops. That’s a really nice place to stop and get a quick drink and maybe a flatbread.
7 p.m.: Dinner and a scene
I’m going to sound so obnoxious saying this, but I really love Craig’s. I love going there. We feel at home there. They take good care of us. If I’m going to Craig’s for dinner, I’m looking forward to it all day. I always run into people I know. It’s a hot spot of activity. It’s just about feeling comfortable.
It’s a scene-y place, but I got s—-faced at Craig’s with Rod Stewart one night. We got so drunk together. It was just the two of us, like 2½ years ago. We’ve become really great friends, and we had a driver, of course, but it was such a fun night and I’ve had so many fun nights at Craig’s, with my family and friends. It’s an industry place, but it happens to be my industry so it’s really fun for me, especially when I run into someone I haven’t seen for a while or I meet somebody who I admire.
9:30 p.m.: Relax on the balcony
Daisy and I, we talk. We have endless conversations. I still have so much to tell her, and so much I want her to tell me. We’ve been together 12 years, and one of my favorite things is to come home, and we have a firepit outside our house here or in Malibu we have a beautiful balcony overlooking the beach. In either of those places we’ll just sit and talk for hours, until we’re sleepy. There’s not a lot of going to the movies or going out. Once we come back from dinner, we love our time to wind down.
Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston in Obsession.
Focus Features
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Focus Features
Two big horror films, Obsession and Backrooms, just smashed all box office expectations. So much of their success has been driven by Gen Z, which is now the biggest moviegoing demographic. But what makes a movie a Gen Z movie? Today we’re bringing you an episode of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. Host Brittany Luse talks about this trend with Sam Adams and Reanna Cruz.
If you want to hear more about these movies, check out these episodes:
In ‘Obsession,’ love hurts. It really, really, really hurts.
‘Backrooms’ brings YouTube horror to the big screen
Zendaya brings ‘The Drama,’ we bring the spoilers
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I regret to inform you I’ll need to keep this introduction brief. Not because there’s any lack of things to say about July’s crop of notable new releases; it features award-winning journalists and several different flavors of anxiety about our bleak ecological future and data-dominated present, as well as the welcome returns of several beloved novelists.
No, these books certainly deserve some love, dear readers. It’s just that I’m finding it a bit tough to type while bearhugging a box fan. And since it seems that may be my last best chance to get through this latest U.S. heat wave here on the east coast without sweating through my shirt, I feel some urgency to get back at it.
So enough with the ado. With any luck, you’ll soon be cracking open one of these great reads on the beach — or in front of a decent air-conditioning unit, at any rate.
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv (July 7)
Aviv, New Yorker staff writer and finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, has a fairly extensive purview in her role as reporter at large. Still, when reviewing her latest work, Aviv noticed a crucial throughline: “I realized that, to some degree, I’d been writing about mother-daughter pairs for the last decade,” she explained to the Paris Review. Seeing this, she decided to collect and revise half a dozen of those stories, which cover ground from a daughter’s troubling fugue states to the immigrant nannies who must leave their own children behind, to Alice Munro’s daughter, whose claims of sexual abuse went unheeded yet regularly resurfaced in her mother’s fiction.
Country People, by Daniel Mason (July 7)
In Mason’s first novel since North Woods, 2023’s critical darling and book club stalwart, readers are plopped right back in the New England woods but the time scale has shrunk considerably. Whereas North Woods spanned centuries, his new novel confines itself to a single year, during which Miles, loving family man and lackadaisical Ph.D. candidate, plans to finally buckle down on that derelict degree of his and reassert his worth to one and all! At least, that’s the idea. But plans don’t stand much of a chance when there are eccentric neighbors to befriend and mysterious local legends to investigate.
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, by Pamela Colloff (July 14)
This is the first book from Colloff, a veteran investigative journalist for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. She has won multiple National Magazine Awards for stories focused on miscarriages of justice – such as her 2019 piece about Paul Skalnik, a grifter, fabulist, sexual predator and snitch, whose fabrications can be linked to dozens of wrongful convictions in Florida, including some sending the innocent to death row. Here Colloff expands upon that investigation, which gets a lot more room to breathe in the transition from magazine article to full-length book. What emerges in this disturbing account is a portrait of one man’s callous cruelty, and the law enforcers who had no problem tolerating a deal with the devil, provided it kept juicing the conviction rate.
Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich (July 14)
Though it’s his fiction we’re discussing here, it’s important to note Rich’s reporting has earned plaudits, too, as well as a few film adaptations. No matter the medium, climate change is usually on his mind, as well as the blunt, rather bleak, prognosis he offered on Fresh Air in 2019: “There’s a huge range of outcomes … ranging from the not very good to the apocalyptic.” Which is to say I’m surprised to find myself describing his newest response to global catastrophe as a rollicking good time – and not just because I’ve never said those words, in that order, in my life. This spry, funny caper features a freelance environmental reporter who inadvertently breaks bad, careening under the influence of lust and a light wallet toward the novel’s big centerpiece: the planned heist of a massive data center.
Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, by Roopika Risam (July 14)
And now, for another book centered on data – albeit from a rather different angle. This illuminating history from Risam, a Dartmouth professor, traces the practice of collecting information – and the power conferred by possessing it – from the bones that were humans’ first archives, to the omnipresent systems that shape (or outright determine) life today. As Risam asks, “What has it meant – and what will it mean – when records that once served only to help us remember, come to rule?” A pressing question (see: those data centers), which you’re probably better served trying to answer with the help of Risam than, say, Alexa or Claude.
It Will Come Back to You: Stories, by Sigrid Nuñez (July 14)
For someone with nine novels to her name, Nuñez got a later start than you might expect, having published her first book when she was already in her mid-40s. More than three decades later, now a spry 75 years old, the National Book Award winner has gotten around to publishing her first collection of short stories. The 13 stories here have been culled from across her career, but each one resonates clearly with the warm timbre of her voice: simple, unadorned prose and mundane setups, from which she consistently manages to tease out glimpses of truth, elusive and profound.
They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy, by Lauren Collins (July 14)
The only coup d’etat to succeed on U.S. soil is, at most, a distant historical afterthought these days. To be honest, I can’t recall reading a single textbook entry that even remarked on the 1898 race massacre in Wilmington, N.C., an action led by white supremacists that left many (historian estimates say up to 300) Black Wilmingtonians dead and permanently scarred a community newly aware of its simmering animus and vulnerability to violent overthrow. So I’m grateful for Collins’ new chronicle of the infamous event, which fills in some serious gaps in the American collective memory and explains how its perpetrators cultivated the disorienting silence that persists in the historical record today.
Yellow Pine, by Claire Vaye Watkins (July 21)
I don’t think I’ve ever actually laid eyes on the Mojave Desert but after reading Watkins’ latest novel, it feels like I can picture it more vividly than some streets I’ve actually lived on. No, it’s “not a beginner’s wilderness,” as Watkins concedes in Yellow Pine, but this landscape so redolent of death is also deceptively robust with life, if only you’re patient enough to find it. Too bad, then, that it’s also on fire. And choked by drought, irradiated by military test sites and soon to be sacrificed to a massive new solar array named, inexplicably, Yellow Pine. But those aren’t the only complications confronting the book’s main character, Rose, whose aspirations of becoming a kind of climate hermit warp a bit under the pressure of a rekindled love and the pendulum swing of rage and despair at the state of the world.
Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead (July 21)
Ray Carney is back, for what regrettably appears to be the last time. The lifelong Harlemite, hard-luck furniture dealer and ambivalent crook starred previously in Harlem Shuffle and its sequel, Crook Manifesto. His perspective is our window on the changing eras of the historically Black neighborhood, from the mid-1950s on. In this, the final installment in Whitehead’s brisk, exceedingly entertaining Harlem Trilogy, readers catch up with Carney around the start of the 1980s, following him deeply into Reagan’s decade. The novel also represents the end of an era for Whitehead, whose attention has been exclusively occupied with these characters since he won Pulitzer Prizes for consecutive novels, The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys.
Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli (July 28)
The gifted young Mexican writer returns this month with her fourth novel, the second she has written in English and her first since Lost Children Archive launched to widespread plaudits more than seven years ago. Her new book, like her previous one, also concerns the travels of a small family – only this time, the road leads not through the American Southwest but Sicily. And the history sought by its mother-daughter main characters is not a record of bureaucratic cruelty but something much more intimately personal: the links shaped and tested by generations of shared heritage and experience.
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