Latest
July 10, 2023
The Angelines Chan of Pokfulam Road | Fiction
Rosemarie Ho
1. Angeline wakes up on a blustery spring morning and, thereafter, discovers herself sitting by the kitchen table eating a banana. More precisely: Angeline jolts awake, rolls out of bed in one practiced movement so as to not wake the man she calls her fuck buddy, pulls on said man’s (Marco’s) shirt, goes out her distressingly unlocked bedroom door and toward the living room/kitchen, upon which she encounters herself stoically...
July 10, 2023
Dream of Antonoffication | Pop Music’s Blandest Prophet
Mitch Therieau
Nearly two centuries into the history of recorded sound, there is still no neat place for the producer in the mythology of pop music. He — as an ideal type, he is nearly always a he — is both a major and a minor character. He is at once a visionary creator and a bland executor of technical procedures, a name brand with star power and an anonymous functionary. He...
July 10, 2023
Dinner with Jack | Poetry
Megan Fernandes
A couple goes scuba diving and by accident, gets left behind in the water. The boat roars off. And there they float, in full gear and disbelief, tanks low on air, stranded in a seamless blue, deciding if they can survive until the next day, which, of course, they cannot, because the average person can only tread four hours without a life jacket. The couple bickers: Why did we...
July 12, 2023
Editors’ Note | Extremely Online
The Editors
We launched The Drift three years ago by posting a link to Twitter. At the time, people half-joked that social media was the only conduit to the outside world; certainly, it was the only way we could have presented our work to anything resembling a public. That was a singular season, a summer of protest that came on the heels of a spring indoors — a period when it still...
July 11, 2023
Dark Forces at Work
Becca Rothfeld
The iron law of cultural production is that everything is always getting worse. Pick a moment — any moment — and there is sure to be a catastrophist in tow, waving her arms and warning that a crisis is upon us. The death of the novel or the poem is declared with dependable regularity, and criticism has been crumbling since its inception. New Critic John Crowe Ransom bemoaned the state...
July 11, 2023
Uncommon Sights
Melissa Anderson
On a recent Sunday afternoon, I was one of nearly a hundred spectators at Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater taking in a program of shorts by the protean Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Less than two hours later, I was downtown at Anthology Film Archives for a sold-out screening that played as part of the third edition of Prismatic Ground, a festival devoted to (mostly) new experimental work of...
July 11, 2023
Senseless Babble
Dean Kissick
So far as I’m aware, nobody in art — and the same goes for the literary scene — is even trying to be avant-garde. Much of the art world is actively and outspokenly opposed to the idea of aesthetic progress or provocation, and has turned backwards, into an arrière-garde. Dead artists, forgotten artists, and traditional mediums and styles are favored exactly because they are implicit rejections of the present and...
July 9, 2023
Bland Bloodsuckers
Jamie Hood
I’m no maestra of the avant-garde, and consequently, my interest here is in offering neither definitions nor death knells. To mourn the loss of the avant-garde — or to seek the shock of transgressive aesthetics in increasingly arcane crannies — is an evergreen endeavor. As Roland Barthes wrote, “être d’avant-garde, c’est savoir ce qui est mort” (“to be avant-garde is to know that which has died”). And death, too, is...
July 11, 2023
History Is a Merry-Go-Round
Marta Figlerowicz
One cannot think about the avant-garde without committing oneself to a theory of history. The term “avant-garde” was first applied to art in the early nineteenth century amid the euphoria of Europe’s accelerating technological and cultural domination over the rest of the globe. It became particularly associated with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernism, when European narratives of historical progress — from both the right and the left — pointed...
July 11, 2023
True Outlaw Music
Alphonse Pierre
In hip-hop, the most powerful voices also tend to be master self-marketers, so when I hear “avant-garde” thrown around in the industry, I get ready to be sold some bullshit. I’ve come to associate the term with a brand: post-Yeezus Kanye West, when white acceptance became his priority, or the Griselda rapper Westside Gunn’s goes-to-a-museum-once music, which equates referencing the “Salvator Mundi” to high art. Even though the avant-garde label...
