Mentions | Fall 2024
“Bells and Whistles” |
Single
From the desolate Omaha bathtubs of Letting off the Happiness, to the post-9/11 New York of I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, to the witchy Florida of Cassadaga, Bright Eyes albums have always conveyed a strong sense of place. In this single from their new record, the band’s focus has returned to New York. SoHo girls, Bay Ridge boys, and loners wandering Bleecker Street are all dutifully name-checked — as are the New York Mets and a guy named Zach, presumably the drummer of Brooklyn punk band The So So Glos. Frontman and songwriter Conor Oberst moved to Los Angeles a while back, but the only nod to his life there is a geographically confusing reference to the Silver Lake bar Edendale. If this song is any indication, we’ll have to wait for the next album to find out his order at Erewhon.
G.B.
Small Rain |
NOVEL
Garth Greenwell’s latest follows an unnamed gay poet who is plunged into a health crisis, prompting a reappraisal of his relationships and recent history. Greenwell posits the sick body as a submissive losing control both of its physical autonomy and the capacity to separate art from life. The book is at its best when it is brutal and erotic: in one scene, the narrator sucks on his partner’s tongue and gets dizzy; in another, the pair rekindle their romance amid the chaos of an ICU, after a detailed examination of stool. But for all the excrement involved, the narrative itself proves relatively tidy. Maybe the reigning king of gay autofiction needs love to win.
L.F.
Sloomoo Institute |
EXPERIENCE
This slime-themed play space, founded in 2019, is Willy Wonka’s factory for children raised in the epoch of micro trends: picture colorful vats of “hand-crafted, artisanal slime,” a slime lake, and pipes that shower aquarium-blue slime from the ceiling onto participants for an added fee. “Parents are looking at how to get their children off screens,” says Nicole Shanahan, who helped Sloomoo raise $5.8 million in Series A funding before joining RFK Jr.’s ill-fated presidential ticket. (The Drift’s fact-checkers could neither confirm nor refute that Sloomoo’s proprietary formula includes “whale juice.”) Come for an afternoon of fun, stay for the chance to be named in a class action lawsuit for chemical poisoning.
R.V.
“The Rabbit Hole Detectives” |
PODCAST
An ex-Vicar, an archaeologist, and an aristocrat walk into a podcast studio. Each episode, the cheerful trio dives into esoteric trivia (think: the bones of Saint Peter, an exploding whale, ancient dental plaque, memories of Eton, the Finnish practice of giving PhD graduates ceremonial swords). The former Vicar is Richard Coles, who before taking up the cloth played in the ’80s pop group The Communards. The archaeologist, Cat Jarman, specializes in the radiocarbon dating of Viking-era human remains. The aristocrat? Earl Charles Spencer, brother of Princess Diana.
D.S.
Sanctuary |
COMMERCE
Cher was on the cutting edge of celebrity entrepreneurship in the mid-nineties with this short-lived mail-order catalog. The self-financed “coffee-table book you can order from,” as she described it, ultimately folded due to “mismanagement and order-fulfillment problems.” While it lasted, the collection boasted a global Ren Faire aesthetic, lots of wrought iron and fleurs-de-lys, and the kinds of furnishings with which Anne Rice might appoint her boudoir. Put on 1974’s “Dark Lady,” flip through the glossy pages, and contemplate the Sanctuary Chainmail Helmet Candlestand ($179.95), the Sheriff of Nottingham Tax Box ($49.95), and maybe even the Wrought Iron Candelabrum ($239). You can practically smell the Sanctuary tuberose incense — a Cher favorite, according to the product blurb. The rare physical copy can be found on Etsy, but if you dial the 1-800 number to order a Scroll Heart necklace ($24.95) from the Fall/Holiday 1995 issue, you’ll be offered a medical alert device with a monitoring service instead.
M.D.
Health and Safety |
MEMOIR
A book about doing psychedelics, going to raves, Berghain, a bad heterosexual relationship, and moving to Bushwick: a murderers’ row of potentially annoying subjects. But Witt transforms them through virtuosic observation in heroically restrained prose — like Joan Didion posting on Erowid. The narrator is a hypnotic avatar of female abjection in the vein of Jean Rhys and Anna Kavan. In a just world, this memoir would serve as a death knell for the dominant humble-bragging style of millennial life writing. Many readers I know inhaled the compulsively shareable PDF galley overnight, or in a day — though I do wonder if others also skimmed the sections on protests and U.S. politics, which suggest that even a writer as gifted as Witt can’t make Donald Trump’s America that interesting. But I’d read her on just about anything else.
K.V.
The Collective |
ON TOUR
Initially, I imagined the energetic breadth of Kim Gordon’s latest concert series — some three dozen cities in six months — might have been a rejoinder to her ex-Sonic Youth and ex-matrimonial partner Thurston Moore’s cliched decampment for an associate two decades his junior. But the project is about more than scoring points. At Basilica Hudson, her throaty monotone was backed by percussion so thunderous it felt like standing underneath a Sikorsky helicopter continuously taking off for an hour. “BYE BYE,” a distorted trap-rock recitation of her packing list, sounds like her escape, or a send-off. In a way it was: it both opened and closed the show.
M.H.P.
TWA Hotel at JFK |
TRAVEL
If you’re going out of town and your friends are unwilling to babysit your car on short notice, and the same car is saddled with a string of delinquent parking tickets, you could do worse than to use the long-term parking service at TWA Hotel, “the only on-airport hotel at New York’s JFK International Airport.” Designed by Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen and constructed in 1962, when JFK was still called Idlewild, the curvaceous “head house” of the defunct Trans World Airlines is nowadays a try-hard nostalgia trap posing as a vacation destination. Across the penny-tiled foyer, enjoy the famous Sunken Lounge, done up in red and filled with white-backed tulip chairs in which you may swivel at your leisure so as to better peer through the grandiose faux-cockpit window at what is now Terminal 5 (JetBlue). But the real draw, I’m told, is the rooftop deck, where visitors can take in the timeless scent of jet exhaust while floating in an infinity pool beneath the permanent crosshatch of contrails overhead. All this, plus — I have it on good authority — the on-site garage is infrequently visited by tow trucks.
J.W.
Orlando, My Political Biography |
DOCUMENTARY
Philosopher and director Paul B. Preciado seems to think the best thing about Virginia Woolf’s novel is that she wrote it about him. For a sluggish 98 minutes, his solipsistic film offers a checklist of smug cliches and rote “experiments”: a repurposed text here, a dance party there. Cue bisexual lighting. Woolf’s complexity is flattened into easy platitudes, and her expansive love of life is replaced by a stale, grant-funded presentation. The original Orlando ends in a mystical burst of joy and terror, as the protagonist grieves the beautiful comforts of antiquity even while embracing the freedom of modernity. Preciado’s protagonists get gender-affirming passports. Although released in 2023, this failed Orlando does manage to capture the spirit of its true age: the 2010s.
J.K.
The Substance |
FILM
An aging fitness instructor (Demi Moore) in health-obsessed L.A. takes a drug that spawns a younger, better version of herself (Margaret Qualley), and the two begin to battle for supremacy. From the awkward title cards and jump cuts to the montages of slick bodies and chickens, the film isn’t scary so much as grotesque. It’s been touted as a feminist parable, but Moore’s insistence on destroying her younger, better self makes it seem more like an excuse to watch two hot women fight. After 130 minutes, I found myself hoping a better, shorter version might take over the movie too.
G.B.
