Mentions | Issue 13
Like other exiled directors before him, Woody Allen has yet again gone to France. His latest movie is entirely in French, a language that Allen does not speak and presumably does not direct in. Though he wrote it in English first, no native ease (or humor) translates to the performances or the subtitles. As with other Allen joints, the director’s artistic presence mostly emerges in the tight plot’s churn. Fanny, a beautiful auction house employee with a wealthy, possessive husband, reconnects with a childhood classmate, a hot guy writing a novel in a bohemian apartment. They begin an affair, Fanny yearning for a life outside her artless cloister. But there is very little life here to begin with; even the food is alienated, much of it fast-casual to-go lunches eaten secretly in the park. It is both sensible and depressing to watch Allen’s banishment yield increasingly automated, unfeeling work. That said, one joke remains, at least if you saw it at Manhattan’s Quad Cinema: there, the film was preceded by not one but two trailers for movies about Jews converting to Catholicism.
E.S.B.
In his biography of Mike Nichols, Mark Harris recounts the legendary director’s experience directing a production of Waiting for Godot that starred Steve Martin and Robin Williams. Casting movie stars on Broadway is a tough proposition: due to their busy schedules, the runs are usually brief, and the knives are out when it comes to reviews. Nichols knew this, but still, he went ahead with it. Critics were lacerating. This pattern persists, yet people still keep coming back for more of the devil’s candy. This season’s offering of Uncle Vanya at Lincoln Center stars Steve Carell in the title role. For some reason, the text has been tampered with, seemingly for the sole purpose of trying to make me feel like a snob. Rewritten by the author of What the Constitution Means to Me, it now features Marvel-style quips, adorkable jokes, and anachronistic comments about things like “postmodernism” at every possible juncture. Even amid all the “oh really?”s and the talk of “really awesome” deathbed visions, some of the power of Chekhov’s original shines through. When Carell delivered Vanya’s climactic monologue, I couldn’t help but tear up. But when he shouted, “I could have been a Schopenhauer or a Dostoevsky!” I wanted to shout back: “And you could have been Uncle Vanya!”
G.J.A.
Shot in stark black and white, this series is literally and figuratively leached of the color and dynamism of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 thriller and its 1999 film adaptation — a loss of personality made all the more explicit by dropping of the titular “Talented Mr.” Andrew Scott’s deadpan atonality cannot be explained by Ripley’s reader-diagnosed psychopathy, because it is shared by, apparently, everyone else in Italy. Highsmith’s Ripley is keenly observant, a doer of silly impressions and skits, deeply repressed, and, yes, murderous. “Tom cursed himself for having been so heavy-handed and so humorless today,” Highsmith writes of an early meeting between Tom and Dickie. “Nothing he took desperately seriously ever worked out.” Too bad that lesson was lost on writer and director Steven Zaillian.
L.W.F.
Minneapolis is no longer the flour capital of the world, but its riverfront is still littered with tubular grain silos and washed-up relics of the mills that once dominated the city. One of these, the Washburn “A” Mill, is now a museum. It burned down in 1991, but the mill’s walls and foundations are displayed like the remains of excavated Roman ruins. Museum visitors follow the journey of a wheat kernel in great detail while sampling freshly made biscuits from a “Baking Lab” operated by a modern-day Betty Crocker look-alike. Slick wood-and-glass paneling sits alongside ominous warnings about mauled limbs and flour-dust explosions: industrial chic distilled to its essence. It’s not a big place, but there’s plenty to sift through.
P.N.
Customers signing up for United Airlines MileagePlus rewards program are presented with a suite of security questions, one of which asks, “Who is your favorite artist?” The preset list of 65 possible answers — though seemingly devised with some effort toward geographic, temporal, and disciplinary balance — is so arbitrary as to render its parameters and intentions impossible to deduce. Yet as users waffle between Shirin Neshat and Jeff Koons, Donatello and Shepard Fairey, perhaps they will determine that United Airlines attempt at canonization is no more ludicrous than any other.
J.G.
This Miller Theatre series has become, per The New Yorker’s Alex Ross, an “indispensable” forum for contemporary classical music. The upcoming season — which includes 2024 Grammy winner Jessie Montgomery and “wearable computing” pioneer Miya Masaoka — further illustrates executive director Melissa Smey’s sense for the zeitgeist. Not that these artists are the biggest stars Smey works with on a regular basis: that would be her beloved West Highland white terrier, Berkeley, who starred in the series’s gag promo video “Miller Announces New Series: Canine Composers.” His other credits include After the Dog and a holiday-season Juicy Couture campaign. Perhaps he’ll one day reach the heights of Smey’s last terrier, Sophie, who scored a cameo in Trainwreck. Unfortunately, word has it he chews the scenery.
L.M.
In her six hour 1974 work “Rhythm 0,” the Serbian performance artist placed an assortment of objects on a table and told the audience to do whatever they wanted to her. Two of those 72 items — bread and wine — became “key ingredients” in the artist’s new beauty products. Out later this year, the line initially included a $250 lotion, developed together with the longevity guru Nonna Brenner in a wellness center “nestled in the tranquil embrace of the Austrian Alps.” But the cream quietly disappeared from the website, which now lists only a trio of “drops” titled “Energy,” “Immune,” and “Anti-allergy.” (The recommended dose is fifty to sixty squirts with breakfast, lunch, and dinner). Some puzzled fans have speculated that the whole enterprise might be another piece of performance art; why would a woman who once let an audience puncture her with rose thorns now strive for a poreless complexion? They have a point, but Abramović has never been much of a comedian. She’s always been better at getting under people’s skin.
C.A.G.
Here is a song that is, on the one hand, terrible — an unconvincing heel turn into pseudo-edgy power pop that was written fifteen years ago and feels like it. On the other hand, it’s sort of a banger. Over the years, as former Dance Moms child star JoJo Siwa has plastered her signature bows and rainbow tutus on branded cereal boxes and asbestos-tainted makeup kits, we’ve come to know her as a kind of oversized toddler, a stunted corporate avatar. “Karma,” with its Triangle of Sadness-esque music video and its lyrics about how she “did some bad things,” and should’ve “never effed around,” is an attempt to reposition this big baby in the world of grown-ups. That her rebrand has so far failed to convince anyone hardly seems to matter given how much JoJo seems to be enjoying herself. We are dealing with a pro, someone who can sell virtually anything. I, for one, am buying.
W.G.
If you’ve happened upon this Naran Ratan album, perhaps in a Spotify playlist titled something like “Ambient non-music early Tuesday morning” or “Music for Plants,” you may have also encountered “tasty morsels,” the album’s tiny, all lowercase, “anti-label” label. The U.K.-based record maker — behind titles like life on wheels: music to play tony hawk to, playing piano for dad, and dick arkive: issue 1 (there are seven issues of dick arkive) — often traffics in stomach-turning nostalgia, but nowhere so explicitly as trees etc. The first eight tracks plop along an aqueous gamerwave journey to nowhere that’s both fantastical and dreadful, familiar and strange, before the ninth plays the others in reverse, Laura-Palmer-in-the-Black-Lodge-style. Give it a listen if you want to feel insane.
C.H.
This 1956 movie musical stars Danny Kaye as the bumbling underling of a Robin Hood character whose troupe seeks to oust a pretender to the throne and reinstate the slain king’s infant son. After Kaye infiltrates the castle, a witch’s spell transforms him into a dashing lover fit for the local princess (Angela Lansbury), prompting a sequence of increasingly absurd mix-ups, duels, and acrobatic stunts. Though much funnier than The Princess Bride, it remains less famous. Perhaps for the best. The film’s obscurity has spared it other indignities, like Princess’s “fan-made” remake, filmed on iPhones by celebrities during the 2020 Covid lockdown, and launched, in installments, on the short-lived app Quibi.
M.W.-G.
“It may from the outside look like a spectacle in the making, but it isn’t. I’m a quiet man,” Michael Heizer told The Guardian of his latest southern Nevada land art mega-sculpture, which, through its mile-and-a-half-long complex of architectonic masses and atavistic allusions, conjures merely the quiet and unspectacular image of civilization itself. Former President Barack Obama once proclaimed the Great Basin site on which Heizer built “City” a “landscape in motion.” It is precisely this dynamism that thwarts Heizer’s inert, “quiet” vision: for all the millions poured into his maze, the desert is more interesting to look at.
A.C.
The Met tapped a British director, Carrie Cracknell, for its new production of Bizet’s enduring tale of love gone wrong, giving us an English twist on a French caricature of the Spanish peninsula, set in the American Southwest. Cracknell’s rendering of the U.S.-Mexico border is a Fox News fever dream for New York’s adult diaper-wearing set: a head-on collision of machismo sports cars that traverse the stage at comically slow speeds with semitrucks that double as dance venues, all driven by “smugglers” who traffic in nothing in particular. Guns, drugs, people, whatever — one gets the sense that it’s all the same as far as Cracknell is concerned.
T.H.
Mitski’s latest album toys with her archetypal themes and characters: lost women, self-love, being a workaholic, dogs. During her recent tour, comprising short residencies in historic theaters, she performed at a pop-star level so choreographed she seemed straight out of a Bob Fosse production. She reached for a twinkling mobile during a rendition of “Star.” She threw multiple chairs. Frequently, she stopped to take long sips of water. The crowd’s fanatical devotion went largely ignored. She had no idea what they were screaming, she said. She knew only that it was loud.
G.B.
Duluth is in the midst of a real-estate boom, fueled by the belief that it is destined to become a refuge on an overheated planet. Some locals bemoan the influx of out-of-town investors, but the city no doubt prefers the rebrand to its earlier infamy: in 1920, three black traveling-circus workers, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, were pulled from their jail cells and lynched by a Duluth crowd numbering in the thousands, in an atrocity that is referenced in the opening lines of what is perhaps Bob Dylan’s most haunting song. “They’re selling postcards of the hanging,” croons Dylan, a Duluth native whose father was eight years old at the time of the event and lived a few blocks from where it took place. June 15 was the anniversary of the murders, though you are unlikely to hear much about them. It took 104 years for Duluth to go from “Desolation Row” to global warming oasis.
B.J.
An all-you-can-spend healthcare buffet for salaried Americans who partake in the year-end ritual of frantically attempting to use up the money that has accrued in their tax-free “flexible spending accounts.” According to this website, which is run by the for-profit company Health-E Commerce, FSAs were created to “put power back in the hands of consumers” so that we can “make more efficient use” of our money on “everyday healthcare products.” Best sellers include an $800 foot-and-leg massager, a $400 light therapy device, and a $180 ingrown toenail remover. I have no qualms. Spending $1,600 in a single night and waking up to discover I now own an ultrasonic denture cleaner is the most fun I’ve ever had in the American healthcare system.
C.F.
“My weak points are that I’m self-conscious and often insecure,” Patti Smith once said. “My strong point is that I don’t feel any shame about it.” Her newsletters range from eulogies for her many MoMA-worthy friends to virtually indecipherable anecdotes about the airport composed on a phone keyboard. Smith’s commitment to formal experimentation overrides any concern for trivial details — like functioning hyperlinks or punctuation. Writes the National Book Award winner: “Its hard for me to reconcile buying a cup pf coffee with a card Cash is not acceptable I am sure ww are being groomed to ne cashless which seems discriminatory.”
E.O.
In one segment of the Y2K-era Japanese reality series Susunu! Denpa Shōnen, the contestant Nasubi attempted to live alone in a windowless studio apartment, sustaining himself only with winnings from magazine sweepstakes. Millions watched as Nasubi went through cycles of mania and depression, ate dog food, danced naked, cried, and wrote deeply personal journal entries (which were immediately published to best-selling success). This film by Clair Titley revisits Nasubi’s story, painting the showrunner Toshio Tsuchiya as a sadistic villain. But Titley’s condemnation of the show’s cruel voyeurism is undercut by the blunt fact that her film profits from the same thing. Tsuchiya, who likens himself to the devil, expresses some guilt for exploiting Nasubi. Titley does not.
C.G.T.
Say this for today’s masculinity crisis: its unregenerate pitchmen and swindlers can make for riveting entertainment (see @LiverKing, who peddles organ meat as a corrective for low T). Such fare typically subordinates what really ails the modern male to the nostrums that will cure him. In that sense, this men’s fitness company, run by trainer and physical therapist Jeff Cavaliere, is a rare exception. Sorting its library of YouTube clips by popularity yields the expected appeals to vanity by way of bodily obliteration (blast your pecs, shred your abs, etc.). But unexpectedly, many of the most-watched videos address occupational hazards — back pain, neck aches, pelvic tilt. Rather than “going virile,” these videos suggest that men might find more effective relief by demanding better labor conditions.
C.M.
Nineties independent cinema shouldn’t just bring to mind Baumbach and Stillman and their talky bourgeois realism. In this 1991 Hal Hartley film, one character’s whole deal is that he hates television. Although the rejection of any semblance of relatability paired with the grim reality of the human behavior depicted can be alienating at first, if you stick with it, you can begin to feel fond of the types of guys that nobody talks about online — after all, Twitter is just a place for wannabe Chris Eigemans.
L.O.
In this 1991 documentary TV episode, the elite British institution’s affinity for hierarchy — teachers were beating students well into the sixties — remains explicit. Only in the past thirty or so years have academics become a priority at Eton, as the headmaster admits via voiceover. Before then, the lessons were more straightforward. As one alum said in an 1895 biography, Eton taught him that “to be weak is to be wretched, that the state of nature is a state of war.”
E.F.
In the eyes of his boss, Shoji Morimoto is a good-for-nothing; he thus decides to make it a career, “renting” himself out for free to his followers on X as a warm body who will be present for whatever activity they might request but “do nothing.” Morimoto, who doesn’t want this vocation to become a “job,” charges clients only for incidentals, like the hamburgers he shares with someone who hires him after being fired for the tenth time. He seeks no connection, as the expectations of any possible bond strike him as too burdensome. Morimoto’s commitment to noncommitment suffuses his memoir, too: it’s lightweight, flirting with but ultimately avoiding any commentary on loneliness in contemporary Japan. Approach the book the way Morimoto wants clients to approach his rental service: expecting minimal effort from him.
W.C.
Sometime after the first twentyish minutes of what is essentially a play-length medley, accompanied by an energetic sequence of interpretive dance, there was, from the audience, a collective slump of resignation. We would not be getting anything so much as a story. In its absence of narrative and its brightly hued pleasantness, Justin Peck’s stage adaptation of Sufjan Stevens’s beloved 2005 concept album transports us back to a time when indie rock was king, and life stretched out before its listeners. But the protagonist of his musical isn’t quite so lucky. Minutes after one of the show’s more cogent sequences, in which he drives to New York in a van with his friend, the plot resets, back to the moment it began — doomed to spin around with a timid smile and a notebook forever, or at least until the run closes. Not all things, it turns out, grow.
G.R.
Michael L. Power and Jay Schulkin use evolutionary reasoning to lay out an accessible account of how milk became milk, tracing its origin back to our ancient ancestors, the sail-backed reptiles, who may have produced a pearly liquid to keep their eggs wet. Today, the dairy lobby contends that plant-based milks aren’t really milks. But Milk reorients the discourse around a far less frivolous question: was 270-million-year-old lizard-egg lube milk?
L.W.C.
This 2001 black-and-white indie features the most famous members of a and everything they deemed cool, including rampant misogyny and detailed descriptions of preferred masturbation methods. (Their general M.O., as The Guardian put it, was to “chase girls, pick fights, and not tip the waitress.”) The pals — Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, and Kevin Connolly — are joined by colorful side characters such as Jenny Lewis, mumblecore-ing through a night at the titular diner. Legend has it that once Leo and Tobey watched the final cut, they made sure it never saw the light of day in North America. That’s not for the producer’s lack of trying; he runs a blog called freedonsplum.com.
A.P.
First spotted at an alien-themed roller-skating rink in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and more recently in Ridgewood: the large-scale puppet theater of Puerto Rican twin brothers Pablo and Efrain Del Hierro. Perhaps aided by twin telekinesis, the brothers improvise their act, blending mystifying, free associated, site-specific puppetry with a soundtrack of experimental noise; Pablo asked the band for something like “nine mountains of sound.” The technicolor marionettes cried out for an unidentified Mama, vomited foam from their many mouths, and contained literal multitudes — other, smaller puppets within them. Not recommended: bringing children, as this description intentionally leaves some details to the imagination (butt stuff).
M.R.M.
It was only a matter of time before Americana queen Lana Del Rey released her own piano-backed rendition of this 1971 folk classic. With her affecting performance of mid-Appalachian yearning, she joins the list of over a hundred singers who have covered John Denver’s smash hit. This ostensible ode to the great state of West Virginia (later revealed to have been inspired by a road in Maryland) has become a de facto national anthem, one also inexplicably adopted around the world, by everyone from ska bands (“Almost heaven, West Jamaica”) to Oktoberfest crowds. In 2023, the song was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress, which occasioned an interview with songwriter Bill Danoff (the mind behind another American classic, “Afternoon Delight”). Of the unexpected endurance of “Take Me Home,” he remarked: “People all over seem to like those ‘country roads’ that promise to go to the place you belong.”
A.C.
In this Survivor-style South Korean dating show, now headed for a fourth season, twelve contestants live on an island (“Inferno”) where they participate in challenges and blind votes to win dates at a five star hotel with unlimited room service (“Paradise”). Like the Japanese show Terrace House, lauded by The New Yorker for its “tranquility,” Single’s Inferno purportedly offers viewers a reprieve from the manipulative, overwrought drama of Western reality television. There is no kissing or groping, and only the vaguest suggestion of sex; in a typical display of gallantry, one contestant insists on sleeping in the hotel suite’s living room, even though the bedroom includes two separate queen-size beds. The judges’ cartoonish cries of concern as players get injured in chicken fights and wrestling matches raise the possibility of an eighth terrace to Dante’s original purgatory.
N.P.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein hardly needed feminist reinvention, but now that we have several, skip the glossy Emma Stone movie for Laura Moss’s cheaper, dirtier, grosser, eminently more fucked-up film. In it, a nurse and a morgue technician form an unlikely duo to reanimate the former’s young daughter, Lila, after her sudden death. Much like Bella in Poor Things, Lila reemerges nonverbal, slowly grunting her way toward a new mode of being in the world. But where Bella gets a triumphant sexual awakening, Lila is stuck with the brutishness of a medicalized life cycle where even death is a matter of degrees. Perhaps this is where the monster was always supposed to lead us: not to the Cannes-like glamour of fashion and champagne and liberation, but to the streaming-on-Shudder grunginess of the hospital bed, the tubes, the incessant beeping. In Moss’s imagining, reproduction, by the living or of the dead, is always full of blood.
J.S.-G.
The final paragraphs of this Ben Lerner novel, addressed to the “schoolchildren of America,” self-nominate its leaves for our nation’s syllabus — advice The Atlantic evidently failed to follow in its recent and much hyped accounting of “The Great American Novels.” But readers may find 10:04 to be an even richer read in the summer of its tenth anniversary than they did in that unseasonably warm autumn of 2014. Lerner’s Obama-era optimism for the USA’s “second person plural” may have aged two presidents on, but many will recognize his neuroses, sperm count concerns, and depictions of natural-disaster-struck New York as all too timely (perhaps undercutting the narrator’s insistence that “our society could not, in its present form, go on”). If not exactly “Time Regained retold as The Odyssey in a best of all possible worlds,” as poet Ariana Reines claimed at the time, 10:04’s “affect of profundity” affects us still — not least in its inflationary observation, as when the narrator thinks in its final pages, while buying a ten-dollar Luna bar from a late-capitalizing bodega, that “prices rise in the dark.”
S.R.
Every generation gets the drawing room play it deserves. In his latest production, Matthew Gasda — the playwright-provocateur who tried to ride the hype surrounding the faux neighborhood Dimes Square in his play of the same name — has hatched a banal durational experience that feels less like a performance than an installation. Set in an airless, white-bricked, loft-like space that grows more claustrophobic by the minute, Zoomers dines out on shared ennui and Super Smash Bros (the official shorthand of slackerdom). In an interview, Gasda compared his writing process to “setting up a pop-up shop” and waiting for “people [to] come to you with data.” The data here isn’t exhaustive, but it is exhausting.
R.F.
St. Louis, Missouri boasts its fair share of culinary specialties: gooey butter cake, bread-sliced bagels, and “Provel” cheese pizza, so named for a cheddar, Swiss, and provolone hybrid that technically does not meet the FDA’s minimum moisture requirement to be classified as “cheese.” But the 314’s most famous delicacy is toasted ravioli, or “t-ravs,” a deep-fried pasta dish hailing from the city’s Italian American neighborhood, The Hill. Legend has it a chef in the 1940s accidentally dropped a raviolo into the fryer, and thereby altered local carbohydrate history. Take a bite of a t-rav and you’ll know two things for certain: mistakes are meant to be and pasta is better deep-fried. Ask a St. Louisan — it’s The Hill they’ll die on.
A.C.B.
“This fragrance becomes you,” reads the ad copy for Victoria’s Secret scent “Bare,” one of the latest in a series of perfumes promising to make you smell like yourself. (Victoria’s Secret being among the nation’s top fragrance brands, “Bare” becomes plenty of other people, too.) Some scents are more explicit about selling a sense of self: take Yves Saint Laurent’s “MYSLF” or Millie Bobby Brown’s “Wildly Me,” which the brand claimed amassed a 13,000-person waitlist within a week of its announcement. Glossier says that a bottle of “You” sells every forty seconds. Those looking for a perfume truly up-front about its artificiality might instead consider a recent offering from Joseph Duclos: “Eau de Manufacture.”
J.D.
The male toads are randy and will mate with anything: a dead, run-over female; a foot; 22 goldfish. They conquered northern Australia by sheer reproductive drive after being introduced in 1935 on the theory that they would fight off sugarcane grubs. (The toads, alas, did little to control the pests, and ate virtually everything else.) This documentary, shot in part from a toad’s point of view, is high camp: a man serenades the toads in the shower (“they hop and they dance / to every romance”), a town debates building a giant toad statue (will it draw tourists?), and a farmer compares the species to the Wehrmacht. But for all the amusement over this icon, mascot, and scourge, a larger point about environmental hubris emerges. “At the moment,” the final interviewee explains, “we have absolutely no way of controlling the cane toad.”
M.Z.
Bloomberg Businessweek investigative reporter Zeke Faux’s perfectly timed and executed chronicle of cryptocurrency’s booms and busts gives his subjects enough rope to hang themselves. Although the book is reported nonfiction, Number Go Up reads at times like a William Gibson thriller, minus any sympathetic characters. In contrast to the ridiculous, delusional fabulists who populate the world of crypto, Faux uses mostly plain language to great effect, often pausing his narrative to point out that a quoted statement is gibberish. But Faux’s straight-man narrator occasionally adds a dry observation — one source rolls “a blunt as fat as a dry erase marker.”
S.S.
This daily trivia game that debuted last year may, at first glance, appear to be a kind of Wordle for sports nuts. Really, it’s more of a memory exercise. Faced with a three-by-three grid of match-up categories, you search your brain for someone who, say, played for both the Baltimore Orioles and New York Mets, or hit thirty-plus home runs in a season for the Twins. Armando Benitez, Torii Hunter, Jon Papelbon, Fred McGriff — each ballplayer’s name lingers in a distant neuron, much like half-remembered high school classmates. Crack open a lemon-lime Gatorade and summon a newsflash from ESPN circa 1998: Benitez traded to the Mets.
D.G.
Like the other films in Aki Kaurismäki’s proletariat trilogy-turned-tetralogy, a vivid color palette contrasts the bleak working class conditions of the Finnish protagonists. But here, the Russian invasion of Ukraine features as a geopolitical backdrop; war reports play over Ansa’s old-fashioned radio as she unwinds from her night shift at the supermarket and again when she tries to lighten the mood on a date with her love interest Holappa. As Kaurismäki said at Cannes, “This bloody world needs some love stories now.”
R.B.
Anne de Marcken’s meditation on purgatory follows yet another lesbian twenty-something adrift in a world between life and death. Birds and bodies pile up. Zombies eat their dead spouses in dissociative rapture. After pages and pages of uneasy, hallucinatory tension, the novel ends in a threadbare anticlimax. The Road drenched in Sapphic longing.
G.B.
Twentysomething Sam Fragoso has probably interviewed every celebrity I’ve ever heard of on his eight-year-old talk show. Before he could easily rent a car, he’d recorded episodes with Don Cheadle, Willem Dafoe, Philip Baker Hall, Norman Lear, Rob Reiner, Kate Berlant, Kelly Reichardt, and many others. Fragoso’s prodigious success begins to make sense once you hear him talk. He’s a remarkable listener, a kind of gentler Nardwuar. Invariably, at some point in the show, he’ll read a celebrity their own quote from a decades-old interview and they’ll respond with something like, “I really love the way you put that.” Most surprising: the show is produced by Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast company.
M.S.
Those interested in understanding the roots of our so-called crisis of masculinity can consult any number of writers and theorists from Barbara Ehrenreich to Susan Faludi. Or they can watch shock jock Andrew Dice Clay act it out on stage. His 1989 HBO special — an hour of sexual boasting (“I got my tongue up this chick’s ass, right…”) delivered, between cigarette puffs, in a Guido accent — is pure heterosexual camp. Dice Clay’s affected macho persona is a mash-up of Elvis, the Fonz, and Danny Zuko, but more sexist, and it teeters between endorsement and parody. The ambiguity is largely lost on Dice’s frenzied, howling audience. “I don’t write my material,” he liked to tell his fans. “You write it for me.”
S.C.
This AppleTV+ adaptation of Mick Herron’s Slough House spy novels follows Jackson Lamb, a bedraggled, farting, unwashed Cold War hero played by Gary Oldman. He heads the titular group, made up of MI5 fuck-ups who have been banished to a dilapidated building to push paper while they await their long-postponed reinstatement in the field. Slow Horses cuts the cliches of the spy genre to size, poking fun at the supposed necessity of international intelligence agencies, as well as Britain’s post-Brexit xenophobic turn. The slow horses face ax-wielding white nationalists, indigestion, and their own internal bickering, hoping they’ll eventually redeem themselves. Fortunately for the audience, that seems unlikely.
N.R.
The titular poem in Eli Mandel’s debut book is an epic retelling of the life of the uncommonly gifted Brooklyn College philologist Alice Kober, who, before her death at 43, almost deciphered the ancient Mycenaean writing system Linear B. In numbered paragraphs that signal some hidden, accretive logic, Mandel interweaves narration, quotes from Kober’s correspondence and philological work, and translated bits of classical authors (Homer, Pindar, Horace, Josephus). The rich mixture reads like Sciascia crossed with Sebald, expressed in a poetic prose and free-ish verse that shuttle between John Ashbery and Anne Carson. Like Kober, Mandel is as much in dialogue with the past as with himself. The book’s final section nods to Ovid’s letters from exile: “Most of your poems, it seemed to you, formed around a borrowed phrase, / a citation you knew and did not know where to put to rest.”
M.N.
Mentions | Issue Twelve
After witnessing the execution of Marie Antoinette and taking her head as a keepsake, a former soldier of the French Royal Army dedicates his life to squashing revolutions. Being a vampire, his term of service is considerable. Our Dracula decorates himself in Haiti, Russia, and Algeria before succumbing to the infantryman’s ennui, staging a coup in Chile and appointing himself dictator. Thus begins the reign of “Claude Pinoche,” a pseudo-Augusto Pinochet, in Pablo Larraín’s latest. It’s a counterfactual comedy of horrors whose bored antihero lives up to his nickname (“The Count”), and a satire in which evil is as slippery as it is banal. Not for the faint of stomach — hearts are frozen, nutri-bulleted, and imbibed. Still, as our narrator tells us, “There’s nothing more gruesome than seeing a man fall in love.”
A.H.-S.
Based on six rave Wirecutter reviews, I purchased the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e in exchange for $250 plus shipping, extensive personal information, 53 minutes with technical support for set-up, and a contractually binding ink subscription. Several prominent journalists and at least one famous sci-fi author have slammed this notorious refill program as a “user-hostile” scheme. Firmware blocks third-party ink, remotely disables the device when payments are late, and deactivates full ink cartridges when users cancel their refill subscriptions. The scheme arises because the printer is sold below its cost of production. Manufacturers recoup the difference with the profit margins of ink (composition: up to 95 percent water), which they sell at astronomical markups, making it one of the most expensive liquid commodities in the world — after snake venom, Chanel No. 5, insulin, mercury, and human blood.
D.M.
This stage amalgam of two films by Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel — The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and The Exterminating Angel (1962) — seems at first blush like an arduous exercise, yoking together two stories of well-to-do coteries that respectively gather for a dinner that never comes and enter a drawing room from which they cannot leave. Stephen Sondheim’s final musical, posthumously staged at The Shed, refashions Buñuel’s metaphysical scenarios into two deft acts: one with sparse, modernist fixtures, cocaine abuse, and a sidesplitting suicide; the other with well-dressed neuroses, a dead piano, and resurrection. The result is surprisingly uncomplicated but enjoyably caustic, both an homage to avant-garde cinema and a grim view of those fortunate enough to misread everything in their favor. During the intermission, a viewer quipped, “one really shouldn’t try and make Buñuel philosophical.”
Sa.M.
Graphic design duo Hipgnosis’s first commission was from Pink Floyd, for the band’s 1968 album A Saucerful of Secrets. Twelve years later, the partners were photographing a frantic sheep on a custom-made therapist’s couch in the Hawaiian surf for the cover of 10cc’s Look Hear? In the intervening years, Hipgnosis created many of the most iconic album covers in music history. This documentary may be an exercise in boomer nostalgia, but it helps that many of its subjects do a healthy amount of eye-rolling at the pretensions of their younger selves. In the end, it’s Oasis’s Noel Gallagher — at 56, a generation removed from the Hipgnosis cohort — who’s most nostalgic, lamenting that album covers no longer occupy a vital place in the culture. Gallagher’s own output is an inadvertent attestation to the form’s degeneration; his worst cover is a glorified stock photo of the New York skyline titled Standing on the Shoulder of Giants.
To.P.
For fans of calling things “Kafkaesque,” adrenaline junkies who also really love to sit, and Eastern European passengers chosen by border police to experience the arbitrary malice of Brexit firsthand, this detention center offers a surprise seven-hour-plus immersive experience of grand English tradition from start (beige milk tea offered on arrival) to finish (no one holds the heavy metal door for you as you struggle to wheel your trolley through a narrow hallway). Relieved from the burden of constant connectivity by the confiscation of their phones, visitors relax in the windowless holding cell after being guided through an intake interview that dwells on the important questions: why are you here? What religion do you follow? Which of your loved ones would retrieve your body in the event of severe illness or death? Would you like regular or vegan chicken tikka masala for dinner? If you get peckish before then, don’t worry — unlike you, the snacks are free.
M.A.-Z.
This thrilling fashion podcast at the end of history captures the joyful free association available to anyone dressing in 2024. An episode on “Global South-core” spans the rapper MIA, Angelina Jolie, the World Cup, and South London; a theory of the “broquette” postulates that Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop” marked the death of the frat bro; the origins of Tiki aesthetics are traced back to the Enlightenment. An important factor underlying such erudite speculation may be that podcasting is still hard to stuff with affiliate links, and that’s refreshing in an era when shopping content has displaced fashion journalism. Since subscribing, I’ve cut back on compulsively surfing e-tailers and started looking inward, in hopes of dislodging the references that lie dormant in my own interior landscape — terraformed, like those of the three cohosts, by the World Wide Web.
K.V.
Harmony Korine’s psychotic dreamscape set in Miami’s underbelly has been called an “anti-movie.” But Aggro Dr1ft is not anti-sex — every other extra is a stripper, and the antagonist is a literal air-humping sex demon. The combination of infrared-only cinematography, hypnotic techno score, and generative A.I. animation approximates the feeling of playing a psychedelic video game. This is, per Korine, “what comes after movies”: the depthless ramblings of “the world’s greatest assassin,” Bo, who is trying to kill the aforementioned incubus. His motives are somewhat unclear, beyond the sense that the sex demon must die so Bo can live a more balanced life with his voiceless children and big-booty wife. The rhythm of Aggro Dr1ft is so engrossing that by the time Travis Scott shows up halfway through, you’ve already forgotten that there was ever a plot at all.
C.G.T.
In this season, designers are asked to weave personal and political motifs into their garments. Prajjé sews a “43” onto the right flank of a jacket to commemorate the assassination of the 43rd president of his home country of Haiti; Bishme sews a “42” — the age his sister died — to the sleeve of a shoulder-baring bomber; Kara wins the couture undergarments challenge with a reference to the Tulsa Race Massacre, though how a sheer gown garnished with boa feathers relates to the brutal riots goes under-explained. Anna, a new mother, develops “a cute idea element” called “bleeding nipples” — long, twisted, sagging fabric on a bodice. Upon seeing the nips, mentor Christian Siriano insists they not be shown to the judges. If some identities deserve to be represented and celebrated, motherhood is not one of them.
T.B.
On this 2014 collection, the Montreal musician Myriam Gendron adapts poetry by Dorothy Parker into songs as dry and sad as driftwood. It’s perhaps counterintuitive that one of our most powerful interpreters of quiet American folk music is a Quebecois woman who has opened for pummeling post-rock collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor. But life can surprise you: bluegrass icon Gillian Welch got her start playing bass in a goth band.
Se.M.
In season three of the French detective series, gentleman thief Assane Diop (Omar Sy) dons a number of stick-on beards, bad wigs, and imitation police uniforms made of visibly cheap polyester, each more absurd than the last, to pull off a series of heists increasingly hard to believe. What makes Lupin worth watching lies precisely in how incredible it is that a tall, dark-skinned black man might so easily convince anyone of his innocence. The show’s clumsy attempt at antiracism — in which blackness is somehow a protective factor for people committing crimes — results in an unlikely reversal of black masculine criminalization and hypervisibility that, ultimately, is nothing short of utopian. “There’s only one thing more invisible than a black man in his forties,” Diop quips in one episode — referring, bizarrely, to black women. This author can think of many people more invisible than middle-aged black men. For instance, everyone?
C.O.
Here’s a well-paid white professional who owns property and maintains six different storage units. He practices yoga, doesn’t drink, attends to his diet, sleeps fitfully, and listens to music to improve his on-the-job performance. He reports to a lawyer whose clients are venture capitalists. In a cutthroat industry in which everyone’s trying to make a killing, an assassin’s work is instrumental but vulnerable: he’s only one mistake away from a very literal severance. David Fincher’s latest film is a sly tribute to professionalism in a world where competence is tantamount to murder. Like its protagonist’s midday meal, it’s an Egg McMuffin without the bun: no nonsense, all business, just protein and sugar and highly rendered fat. Michael Fassbender has never been foxier. His only flaw? He has a girlfriend.
M.S.
Essex-born left-field pop musician Tirzah’s surprise third album works with a limited sonic palette: detuned pianos, heavily distorted guitars, and a single drum-machine beat. If these off-kilter repetitions at times yield hypnotic results — as in highlight track “2 D I C U V” — they as often leave the listener asking: is this a well-crafted thematic meditation, or did I just listen to the same song on repeat for 33 minutes?
R.B.
In consultation with the James Beard Foundation and the “Kitchen Cabinet” — a conservatively chosen gallery of culinary, philanthropic, and educational bigwigs — the State Department has selected 83 chefs to refine the lunch and dinner programs at State Department events (or, in the words of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, “promote American food abroad”). Many of the delegates do indeed influence domestic fine-dining culture, but few could argue that Top Chef-spawned restaurants define the way most in the U.S. actually eat. There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over what “New American” cuisine should be called, but conspicuously little awareness of how its canonization is used in service of soft power. At least this psy-op is open about its CIA ties. (In this case, it’s the Culinary Institute of America President Timothy Ryan.)
L.M.
For Ottessa Moshfegh, writing is like shitting: “My new shit becomes the shit I eat. I learn by digesting my own delusions.” So it’s perhaps not a surprise that her titular protagonist’s obsession with using laxatives to unleash the mysterious turbulence inside of her is cut from William Oldroyd’s film adaptation, though its script was written by Moshfegh and her husband. Instead, the movie is a less interesting study of noirish light, Hitchcockian orchestral swells, the repressive damage inflicted on us by our parents, and whether the two leads (Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway) can sustain their mid-century accents (they can’t).
L.W.F.
A patron of this 270-year-old bastion of literature, scholarship, and erudition nestled snugly on 79th and Madison, Elizabeth Hardwick once said, “Even though it charges a fee for membership privileges, it is not merely a ‘club’ but a democratic institution.” Today, the most compelling rebuttal to Hardwick’s assertion arises not from the historic site’s $270 annual membership dues, but from its draconian rules. Any writer who dares nibble a dry almond will incur the wrath of its stickler staff. As a white-haired art conservator recently confessed to me, “I eat my tomato sandwiches in the women’s bathroom on the second floor.”
A.L.S.
The most notable absence in this 101-minute documentary is the artist himself. “If you’re quiet or don’t have anything to say,” he once explained, “they say it all for you.” Through archival footage and talking-head interviews with eminent art world figures, directors Judd Tully and Harold Crooks try to do just that. But despite their best attempts to capture the ever-slippery Hammons, they can’t quite pin him down. In the final interview, gallerist Sukanya Rajaratnam recalls Hammons’s reaction to a generous offer on a glass replica of the snowballs he peddled outside the Cooper Union in his 1983 performance Bliz-aard Ball Sale. After he insisted on meeting Rajaratnam on a Manhattan street corner, he presented her with a bowl of water and said, “Tell the client that the snowball has melted.”
C.N.
Those who aren’t willing to part with a minor fortune in Ticketmaster fees can get all the concert they need in this 165-page 1987 banger, the story of a bunch of Dublin lads who put together a soul band. Sound is Roddy Doyle’s subject here. There’s a horn player named Joey “The Lips” Fagan; everyone has a crush on a backup singer; the band may be in trouble by the end of the book, but we’ve gotten an entertaining if appropriately questionable taxonomy of soul, as interpreted by a bunch of appropriators: soul is sex, revolution, the politics of the people, parents (counterintuitively), the people’s music, dignity, and also, Guinness. Maybe that last one’s only true on the north side of Dublin.
M.C.
For today’s listeners, the event that crystallizes a contemporary idea of the Beatles isn’t their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, or even the release of Sgt. Pepper; it’s the death of John Lennon. Since December 8, 1980, every new Beatles product has capitalized on the symbolism of a reunion made all the more tantalizing because of its impossibility. Yet the ten short years he lived after the breakup of the pop group gave little indication that John had any serious interest in playing with the Beatles again. Listen as one of his last demos is raided for an act of drab musical necrophilia by Get Back director Peter Jackson’s neural net and Paul McCartney LLC, and you might understand why.
R.M.
Founded in 2013, this forum soon became the English-language fandom space for all things Hallyu, the wave of Korean entertainment that rose to global popularity in the ’90s. Posts were filled with keyboard-spamming glee, now-defunct image links, unfettered tears, mistranslated gossip about your K-pop “bias” (or favorite idol), and polls about celebrity couples (e.g., “Do you think they had already made sex?”). When the site peaked in 2018 with over 50,000 members online at once, the servers repeatedly crashed, steering fans towards more secure, increasingly corporate pastures. The forum did migrate to a new server in 2019, but it was already too late. Numbers dwindled to a fraction of the site’s heyday; then, the site shut down at the end of last year. RIP to the best place for determining whether your bias had work done.
V.C.
A touring comedy club that’s hosted pop-up shows in a bike shop, a furniture store, and a parking lot, this video series showcases ten-minute sets from up-and-comers — they’re longer than the over-too-soon amuse-bouche of a tight five, but without the commitment of a half-hour special. Behind the Page Six-style thumbnails (“MY PASTOR IS IN JAIL”) grins an elder-millennial cast of post-pandemic jokers, at once mining Covid-era isolation and reveling in the chance to be in a bike shop with a non-virtual audience. “Over the last couple years,” says comic Raanan Hershberg in one clip, “I’ve been watching porn on my phone, using reading glasses.”
N.L.
Yan Ge’s protagonists, for all their cursory resemblance to Murakami’s solitary gray men, know how to eat. Stewed pig feet, sauteed livers, sweet chili fish, breast milk, funeral banquets, frozen pizza, a candy bar hidden behind a gas meter. Yan folds sentimentality, ritual, and banality into an offbeat chronicle of lonely people trying to sustain themselves in strange new roles and tongues, learning how to feed themselves through layers of dysfunction and dyspepsia. These private crises are so tightly wound and neurotic they resemble a sort of existential stress-eating. What would Murakami do, go for a run? No thanks.
A.O.
In 1985, the novelist Nancy Lemann left Manhattan for her hometown of New Orleans to cover the racketeering trial of Edwin Edwards, the Louisiana governor who later won an unprecedented fourth term after his acquittal. This atmospheric, fragmented, and admirably peculiar work, which had only one hard-cover printing and no paperback run, deftly captures New Orleans’s idiosyncratic “tropic zone,” where “a flawed thing may be more full of life than a perfect thing,” and any event possesses the capacity to become a spectacle. Focused on the chaos of Louisiana’s governance, with its yearning for charismatic kings over staid leaders, the book can be seen as a bellwether for contemporary politics. In one scene, Lemann recalls an “existentialist reporter” asking what the governor will do if he is convicted. Edwards responds, “I’ll become a newscaster.”
L.L.
A send-up of a 2006 documentary about Stagedoor Manor, a musical theater sleepaway camp in upstate New York that has incubated the likes of Mandy Moore, Beanie Feldstein, and Lea Michele. Both the doc and the mockumentary brim with young talent; both are surprisingly funny and unsurprisingly gay. But neither compares to Camp, a 2003 feature that also parodies Stagedoor and, with a clumsier, more violent hand, better captures the high melodrama of pubescent theater. Parents wire their daughter’s jaw shut to ensure she stays skinny; a teenage, frizzy-haired Anna Kendrick poisons two different campers in a bid for stardom; somehow, Stephen Sondheim cameos.
J.C.-T.
In a release-day Tumblr post for this record, Sufjan Stevens exited the closet to belatedly announce his partner’s death four months prior. Few people have borne the brunt of our cultural fetish for suffering like Stevens, whose 2015 grief opus, Carrie & Lowell, was dedicated to the death of his mother. But Javelin exemplifies Sufjan’s consistent ability to balance heaviness with hope and humor. Gentle guitar plucks and some particularly worn-down vocals are liberally topped with a song-length Flannery O’Connor refrain, a chorus of recorders, and twinkling electronics ripped from a mid-aughts Christmas commercial. He’s forever the grief-stricken balladeer, but he’s also a goofy 48-year-old making beats on his farm.
Tr.P.
Following in the footsteps of jam band grandads the Grateful Dead and Phish, Connecticut ensemble Goose draws out late-aughts indie rock into improvisations lasting upwards of thirty minutes. Like most jam bands, Goose has albums, but (mostly) eschews promoting them in favor of endless touring. (“Endless” is not an exaggeration. Dead & Co.’s drummer insisted that the legacy group’s “Final Tour” last summer was “not final anything.”) This Rupert Holmes cover, a regular set-list feature, doesn’t appear on any studio albums, but it encapsulates the band’s unaffected silliness: it’s the kind of group that plays the Newport Folk Festival and invites Animal from the Muppets onstage.
C.B.
The American beverage industry is in its ship of Theseus era, slowly reconstructing the outlawed Four Loko piecemeal. Dunkin’ Donuts released canned spiked iced coffee; Monster Energy came out with a non-caffeinated hard seltzer; Canadians, meanwhile, have access to extra-caffeinated “toasted vanilla” Diet Coke. The leader of the pack is Celsius, a so-far zero-proof energy drink that advertises fat-burning properties and nearly three times the boost of a Red Bull. (The best flavor is cucumber-lime; the worst is the mandarin-marshmallow “Fantasy Vibe,” which has notes of blood.) More than a century ago, the entity that would become the FDA prosecuted Coca-Cola in an attempt to remove its caffeine. Now, amid calls from the same agency to end the Adderall shortage, the government should perhaps be grateful to Celsius, its part-owner PepsiCo, and their military-grade distribution plan for making stimulants available 24/7.
E.S.B.
The year that smog engulfed New York and Henry Kissinger finally died provided a perfect opportunity to revisit Larry Mitchell’s 1982 underground classic of gay literature, in which friends and lovers eke out a livable existence at the heart of empire and fantasize about kidnapping the former secretary of state. A gang of “queers dishing the end of the world,” the characters seek the pleasures of sex, humor, and solidarity amid toxic fumes, ascendant fascism, and the ravages of austerity. Upon learning the homeless shelter they attempt to save from closure is practically a death trap, one character quips: “No action is perfect.”
B.C.
In the infamous Bravo franchise, which has always run on the existential anxieties of affluent women, the metaphysical is constantly at hand. Perhaps that’s why the Housewives frequently employ psychic mediums. Many episodes before Atlanta’s Kimberleigh Zolciak met her football player husband, conceived four children, and released a hit single, her spiritual guide Grandma Rose foretold change on the horizon — and correctly predicted two of the babies’ sexes on television. In New York season four, a Moroccan medium prophesied that Ramona Singer’s husband would cheat on her, which turned out to be the case a few seasons later, when Ramona was forced to confront her feelings on location in Turks and Caicos. Less than a season passed before she found herself across the coffee table from another psychic. She cocked her head and asked, “So am I getting married again, or not?”
B.K.
