Mentions | Issue 13
Coup de Chance |
FILM
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.
Uncle Vanya |
THEATER
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.
Ripley |
TV
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.
Mill City Museum |
GRAIN
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.
United Airlines’s favorite artists |
GREATEST HITS
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.
“Composer Portraits” |
CLASSICAL MUSIC
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.
Marina Abramović Longevity Method |
WELLNESS
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.
“Karma” |
SINGLE
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.
trees etc. |
ALBUM
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.
The Court Jester |
FILM
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.
“City” |
SCULPTURE
“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.
Carmen |
OPERA
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.
The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We |
ALBUM
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.
Wrong Norma |
BOOK
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.
“Desolation Row” |
SONG
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.
FSAStore.com |
BENEFITS
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.
Patti Smith’s Substack |
NEWSLETTER
“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.
The Contestant |
DOCUMENTARY
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.
Athlean-X |
FITNESS
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.
Trust |
FILM
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.
“Eton: Class of ’91” |
EDUCATION
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.
Rental Person Who Does Nothing |
NONFICTION
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.
Illinoise |
MUSICAL
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.
Milk: The Biology of Lactation |
NONFICTION
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.
Don’s Plum |
FILM
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.
Poncili Creación |
PERFORMANCE ART
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.
“Take Me Home, Country Roads” |
SONG
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.
Single’s Inferno |
TV
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.
Birth/Rebirth |
FILM
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.
10:04 at 10 |
ANNIVERSARY
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.
Zoomers |
THEATER
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.
Toasted ravioli |
FOOD
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.
Personal perfumes |
FRAGRANCE
“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.
Cane Toads: An Unnatural History |
FILM
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.
Number Go Up |
BOOK
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.
Immaculate Grid |
GAME
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.
Fallen Leaves |
FILM
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.
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over |
BOOK
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.
“Talk Easy” |
PODCAST
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.
The Diceman Cometh |
COMEDY
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.
Slow Horses |
TV
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 Grid |
POETRY
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.
