Mentions | Fall 2024
“We were roaches in those days retreating into the walls,” the first poem in Jacob Eigen’s first book begins. “Or we were fish inside a tank in Chinatown.” These are New York tales, complete with snow on a windowsill in Queens, surreal encounters with Russians, and the art of “Balancing / the takeout on your handlebars.” Eigen, who dedicates the book to Louise Glück, shares his teacher’s precision. So a ball, at mini golf, rolls through the last pipe with “a saddish, being-swallowed sound.” I myself made such a sound when I read one of the book’s droll summations: “The time after college is over.”
M.Z.
In the lead-up to New York fashion week, Vogue released a late summer surprise: a special canine package featuring sixteen celebrity dogs. On one of its twelve digital covers, Sydney Sweeney’s rescue pitbull mix, Tank, floats on some pillows in a Los Angeles pool. On others, Glen Powell’s Brisket mugs in his movie premiere attire, and Mariah Carey’s Mutley poses by a grand piano in his “home in Connecticut.” Interviews with proud pet owners dig into profound questions like, “What is the most dog thing your dog does?” and “Who would voice your dog in a movie?” (“A.I. Tupac,” apparently, for ASAP Ferg’s Australian Shepherd named KrasH.) Ultimately, Dogue fails to bridge the gap between celebrity culture and the quotidian, reaffirming that stars are not just like us, and neither are their dogs.
M.F.
In n+1 writer Richard Beck’s new book, no resource has been spared to preserve the feeling of scabbed-over mania that marked the aftermath of 9/11: the miniature American flags, the “freedom fries.” But for all the quirky dysfunction of those years, Beck reminds us that they also soft-launched a number of insidious contemporary crises. Sprawling and delightfully deadpan, Beck’s book links the War on Terror to just about everything, high and low, from the rise of superhero slop and the baffling popularity of the Hummer to the erosion of government accountability, the creation of the surveillance state, and the disarming of international law. “History is something that you have to try to understand even as you live through it,” Beck writes in the introduction. His book offers a weighty substitute for anyone who didn’t.
J.W.
You might assume from their titles that Astrid Sonne’s “Do you wanna” and Charli XCX’s “I think about it all the time” are just about having sex. But actually they’re about getting knocked up. Following Sheila Heti’s Motherhood and Olga Ravn’s My Work, the singers are bringing pregnancy musings to the pop charts. “Do you wanna have a baby?” Sonne asks herself. “I really don’t know,” she answers repeatedly. “Would it give my life a new purpose?” asks Charli. She doesn’t know either, but says, “I think about it all the time.” It’s uncharacteristic fodder for pop music, yet Sonne and Charli are taking the question seriously. Will they actually go through with it? “I’m havin’ his baby,” Taylor Swift teases in “But Daddy I Love Him,” before correcting the record: “No I’m not, but you should see your faces.”
L.C.
Hyped as a Fitzgeraldian take on the legend of Faust, the latest “immersive production” from Emursive Productions (the company behind Sleep No More) is a choose-your-own-adventure that sorely tests the viewer’s tolerance for repetitive scenes, wordless dance-fights, mouth-breathing strangers, and exercise. The play is set at Wall Street’s Life and Trust bank, and features 42 actors whom audience members struggle to follow around a hundred-thousand-square-foot maze. The experience ultimately resembles nothing so much as rushing from terminal to terminal at an airport where everyone is speaking a different language. At the end, you’re pitifully glad to have located the bag check, and yearn for the simple pleasure of sleep.
R.F.
If you ever feel the need to explore Nate Silver’s world, skip the book that he wrote with “significant help” from his “creative muse,” ChatGPT. Instead, go to Polymarket.com, the venture-capital-funded “prediction market platform” (read: betting website) where he is now an adviser. Unlike Silver’s proprietary election forecasting model, which as of October 29 placed the odds in the 2024 race at practically 50-50, the denizens of Polymarket gave Donald Trump 66.5 percent odds of winning. A separate prediction market (“Will Nate Silver correctly call the Presidential Election?”), however, boasts similar confidence — Polymarket users have put his odds at 65 percent. There is arbitrage everywhere for those with eyes to see.
F.N.
The Harlem Globetrotters meet Rocky Horror for guys with mullets in a Republican way. This baseball-team-cum-circus-troupe is sweeping the nation; as of this writing, it has more TikTok followers than any MLB team. Fans put their names into a lottery months in advance, hoping to experience what the team insists is “the greatest show in sports.” And they might be right: they’ve got a player on stilts, and another who sings pop music; a squad of “dad bod” cheerleaders; and an emcee in a blinding, disco-silver blazer who calls himself “The Young Professor.” The fat is trimmed and the volume is dialed up. Pitches come whip-fast, as everything from Bruno Mars to the Burger King jingle blares in schizophrenic ten-second clips from stadium speakers. The whole first inning lasts less than ten minutes, while the pregame show runs over two hours. Sport, it seems, yearns for theater.
S.A.Z.
The premise of this National Book Award nominee could have been a story overheard at a wine bar in Park Slope: a perimenopausal woman’s gut-churning sexual obsession with a younger man leads to the loosening (then the liberatory breaking) of the marriage bond. Miranda July, in her second novel, openly plunders her own experiences, such as getting a personal trainer and consciously uncoupling from her husband, and adds the kind of details present in her films (the erstwhile lover works at Hertz, we are repeatedly told) to quirk an old story up. I was shocked to learn that the book was not satirizing its own ideas of marriage, womanhood, and art, which feel — to this reader, at least — like the insights delivered, with brittle, messianic goodwill, by women who believe having an affair or getting a divorce makes them revolutionaries.
E.G.
In September, noted designer label-wearer and Zero Bond enthusiast Eric Adams joined a storied lineage of New York City mayors when he was indicted on charges of bribery, wire fraud, and conspiracy, in part related to $123,000 worth of luxury travel benefits. In 1932, Jimmy Walker, known for his flamboyant suits, his patronage of speakeasies, and his penchant for “chorus girls,” was forced out by FDR for, among other charges, personally accepting one million dollars in bribes. In 1872, A. Oakey Hall, or “Elegant Oakey,” infamous for his dapper style and for partying with Walt Whitman’s bohemian cohort, faced criminal charges related to Boss Tweed’s corruption racket. Plenty of NYC mayors have skirted consequences for open grift on their watch: take, for instance, Ed Koch and the Parking Violations Bureau scandal, or Bill de Blasio and donor kickbacks at City Hall. Given that those incidents went unpunished, one has to wonder whether these three clotheshorses’ real crime was not corruption, but revelry, panache, and swagger.
C.D.
The narrator of Flann O’Brien’s 1939 classic At Swim-Two-Birds proposes that “the entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required” and that “the modern novel should be largely a work of reference.” Swap out literature for cinema, and you’ll find this absurdist-modernist creed realized in Despicable Me 4. The movie eschews plot for a series of barely related episodes that function mainly to reference previous films — borrowing not only from the venerable Despicable Me-Minions cinematic universe, which already boasts six titles, but also from franchises as diverse as The Terminator, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, and James Bond. Where we’re headed, it seems, is a “cinema-cinematic universe,” in which movies are only ever about one thing: other movies. The good news is you probably won’t need to see them.
R.H.
To mark its twentieth anniversary, Mamoru Oshii’s 2004 follow-up to his 1995 feature Ghost in the Shell was redistributed across North America in June. The sumptuously animated sequel follows a stoic cyborg counterterrorist as he investigates a line of artificially intelligent sex dolls that turn homicidal. It was tailed by a sixteen-minute documentary on its production and loss at Cannes, where the first film’s reputation led the second to be the only anime ever to compete for the Palme D’Or. Innocence lacks a bibliography for its dialogue’s many, many unattributed aphorisms and allusions. (Wikipedia attempts a partial one: “Buddha, Confucius, Descartes, the Old Testament, Meiji-era critic Saitō Ryokuu, Richard Dawkins, Max Weber, Jacob Grimm, Plato, John Milton, 14th-century playwright Zeami Motokiyo, the Tridentine Mass, and Julien Offray de La Mettrie.”) The result is a snapshot of a future in which our personal A.I. bots stage spectacular shoot-outs and metaphysical denouements instead of just drafting our LinkedIn posts.
R.S.
In Kelly Reichardt’s debut feature, now celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, new acquaintances Cozy and Lee embark on a crime spree across a patch of no-man’s-land between Broward and Dade Counties. Cozy, an ennui-ridden housewife and the Bonnie to Lee’s Clyde, narrates the duo’s escapades, which include stealing unattended shirts from a laundromat and a half-eaten rotisserie chicken from Lee’s family home. She romanticizes her days on the extremely small-time lam with a self-mythologizing desperation: “I could feel the butterflies in my stomach as I tumbled deeper into a life of crime.” Much like the film, she quickly moves on from her husband and kids at home as she tries to discover “where all those highways headin.’” Cozy finally manages to reach terminal velocity by committing an actual felony, then finds herself thrust into the first thrill of her new life: bumper-to-bumper traffic on I-95.
J.I.
Were any of the eponymous magician’s famous illusions as impressive as 51-year-old Eminem’s ability to make rapping over a minimally altered, slightly obscure rock song sound somehow vibrant? On a promo video call with David Blaine, Eminem said his “last trick” would be to “make my career disappear.” If this single is any indicator, he hasn’t succeeded yet.
J.G.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mentions | Issue 13
One thing is undeniable: Kevin Costner’s three-hour western epic, the first of four planned installments, which he began writing 36 years ago and helped to finance with $38 million out of his own pocket, is an American saga. Just not the one he imagined. Almost no one showed up to the screening I saw, and those who did left confused. Very little happens. Costner doesn’t even appear in the first hour. The movie ends with a teaser from Chapter Two, which was pulled from the release calendar shortly after Chapter One debuted. Three and Four might not even be made. That’s the magic — what could be more American than an old man only facing the reality that his prime is decades behind him after massive public humiliation?
B.B.
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’s 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’s 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.
This collection of 25 prose pieces, Anne Carson’s first original, non-translation work since 2016, comes by its name because, Carson claims, “the pieces are not linked.” Indeed, like all of her writings, they resist easy genre classification, touching subjects as diverse as Guantanamo, Roget’s Thesaurus, Carson’s parents, Putin. It seems the allegedly discrete pieces have been compiled into an ostensible whole out of marketing necessity. “I recognize that humans find a temporal framework helpful in grasping larger ideas,” she writes in “Lecture on the History of Skywriting.” She added, “so let’s pretend that the eras of my development as a writer succeeded one another as days of the week.”
H.L.
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 the so-called Pussy Posse 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.
