Mentions | Summer 2026
The Endless Garment |
ART
Since 2015, Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky have been collecting bootleg T-shirts from the likes of CNAHEL and MAISON MARQIELA, reappraising these circumventions of copyright as sites of linguistic renewal. At a recent group exhibition at Pioneer Works, interspersed among the piles of textiles — through which visitors were encouraged to rummage — were pages of poems, operating in a similarly ruptured vernacular: “It’sNotWhoYou Are… / It’sWhaYouWear… / 1Mean, / WhoReahy Cares.” Such lines lack, by design, the transcendent senselessness of the surrounding clothes; they are counterfeit poems, no match for the real (fake) thing. The sharpest verse came from a MOSCHMO shirt: “after form / admim wob / is a uniq afired.”
I.C.A.
Hank’s Saloon |
FILM
If you’re under a certain age, you might not realize that the lopsided black box of a building at Atlantic and Third holds a hallowed gravesite of that endangered Brooklyn species, the actually cheap dive bar. This documentary pays respects to the titular establishment, tracing its hundred-plus-year evolution from Prohibition survivor to ironworker’s haunt to pukey country-punk pub to long-vacant real estate void. You won’t get the recipe for Patty’s Panties, but you will get to see some haunting hidden interiors, a guy playing pool with a two-by-four, and a cell phone-free dance floor. Like a neighborhood drunk, the movie rambles at times and lingers too long, but goodbyes are never easy. At a March screening, when a regular told director Leon Chase that he’s “not bitter” about the bar’s closure, the audience screamed back, “You should be!”
A.C.
Euphoria |
TV
Just as the color palette of the series has shifted (from Petra Collins blue to deep spray tan), so too have its tone and subject matter. In its third season, creator Sam Levinson abandoned high school melodrama in favor of Western noir, and when we meet the Euphoria characters all grown up, several of them are working in the sex industry. Levinson is a passable auteur and a better troll, daring his haters to cry “male gaze.” But why take any of this seriously: we’re in high camp territory now, with a giantess Sydney Sweeney trampling Los Angeles in a leopard-print bodysuit, and more buxom desert strippers than a Russ Meyer film. Pity the poor Gen-Z viewers who can’t appreciate the homage.
S.C.
Steal This Story, Please! |
FILM
Scrappy journo-activist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! spends much of this documentary about her career out of breath. It opens on her chasing a cagey Trump official up the stairs with a microphone. It closes after she reveals why she’s often coughing: the toxic dust she inhaled post-9/11, when she and her team stubbornly continued to broadcast from their Chinatown headquarters. Midway through, Goodman recalls telling The Intercept cofounder Jeremy Scahill that she would work with him only if he stopped smoking cigarettes. I thought of the breathlessness of the news cycle, the many last gasps of independent media. Then I walked out of the theater and lit up.
B.G.
Palantir’s lightweight chore coat |
FASHION
After some poor soul presumably wished to a mischievous genie to no longer see so many rich people wearing Carhartt, the couturiers at everyone’s favorite Sauron-inspired surveillance-tech giant released their own line of work shirts this spring. “Chaos is Tolerable; Pain is Tolerable / The Only Thing that Matters is to Win,” reads a tag sewn into the inside of the garment, which comes in cobalt blue and Schutzstaffel black. As of this writing, the $239 jackets are sold out in all sizes, so I am unable to assess their quality, but the Palantir store boasts that they are made from “100% American grown cotton,” for fans who are nostalgic for that kind of thing.
M.B.
