Sixty minutes in a hydraulic chair

More focus aerobics, plus an excellent playlist from a great Paris bar/restaurant, great new documentaries, and the best of the (nonpolitical) week online

“Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill” (1951), Frida Kahlo

For paying supporters, sixty minutes of observations from a doctor’s chair, followed by the supplement of this week’s cool new stuff: music, film, and a search engine for every word in New York City.

—I like my dentist so much I drive forty-five minutes to see him. He’s my age, soft-spoken, Taiwanese-American, I believe. He’s the first dentist I’ve seen who’s my age; it feels odd to call him by his name, John, but I do. He walks in, says my name, asks how I’m doing, I say, “What’s up John, how are you?”

Often this question leads to complaints about the life of a golf dad. His high-school-aged daughter is a good enough athlete to be tracked by top universities, and he and his wife spend their weekends schlepping her to tournaments around the country. John is frequently weary about it, doesn’t mind dropping f-bombs about it, then eventually he’ll say, “Well, how are your teeth?”

—Visiting a dentist is a matter of trust, of faith, perhaps more so than other doctor visits? You lie nearly supine. A person puts a bib around your neck as if you’re a baby, or attending a lobster dinner. Nothing about what happens next is explained beforehand: you hold your mouth open for an hour while a stranger goes in with tools you can’t see, doing things that make frightening sounds amplified by the fact everything’s taking place in a cave in your skull.

Tuesday morning, as the chair cranks flat, I think about how it’s more like visiting a car mechanic than a doctor, except I’m the car.