No. 33
Antinatalists; 'Take what you love and make an Ark out of it'; beige food; Hello Kitty; helpful delusions; WINE-WORLD SWINDLER!; Brutalist churches; Merrill Joan Gerber
Kia ora, hello,
It’s late at night/I’m fighting a miserable cold/I’m packing to go away - so all I have to say is: here are the links! Enjoy!
And, as always, thanks for reading,
~Ellie
Hah! ‘Few contemporary filmmakers inspire lore like Christopher Nolan, whose pre-Oscars press run for Oppenheimer has spawned tales of disgruntled Peloton instructors and therapy-mediated marriage negotiations. And while the most infamous story about the director’s finicky nature—the one about him supposedly banning chairs from his sets, because he can’t stand actors sitting down—has since been proven false, there’s one thing he does hate, and that’s actors reporting to work in snuggly, shearling-lined booties.’
‘The Governess Confesses: In servitude to Moscow’s super-rich.’
‘The Big Sleep.’ A piece on the intersection of Los Angeles architectural history, the social and economic realities of many LA residents, and ‘Hollywood Forever Cemetery’s first vertical mausoleum, an enormous three-building development that will eventually hold the remains of some 60,000 deceased Angeleno’.
The kind of personality test we should all be embracing: ‘[T]he old systems are collapsing. Rigour and standards do not matter anymore. It’s time to invent a universal personality taxonomy system based on nothing but whim and vibes. Enter, The Based Evil Turbulence Index – also known as ‘BETI’ – the world’s first, best and only vibes-based personality system. BETI has opinions on everything from politics and romance to HR decision-making, celebrity commentary. BETI provides insight and guidance on all big questions.’
A piece on the delights of Carla Willams’ self-portraits [see above] - ‘Such is the poetic depth of these pictures, which, when edited and sequenced together in Tender (TBW, 2023), seem as expansive in scope and meaning as any historical survey or anthology, as any book of photojournalism or one made in a documentary style. Beyond the sheer sense of wonder and discovery that will likely be experienced by anyone previously unfamiliar with this work (as I was), there is also a disarming blend of irony and intimacy, of performance and delicacy, that runs like a thread through this book.’
Insights into a marriage, and ‘the lure of divorce.’
‘Actually they agreed on basically everything, including that new human life is not a gift but a needless perpetuation of suffering. Babies grow up to be adults, and adulthood contains loneliness, rejection, drudgery, hopelessness, regret, grief, and terror. Even grade school contains that much. Why put someone through that, Alex and Dietz agreed, when a child could just as well never have known existence at all? Among the antinatalists.’
‘The Helpful Delusion: Most people thought my dad lived alone. He didn’t. He lived with God and the French actress Catherine Deneuve.’
Two Guardian long reads: a pet food deep dive, and ‘Solar storms, ice cores and nuns’ teeth: the new science of history.’
Apparently ‘Pistachios Are Quiet Luxury’. (Don’t mean to brag about my life of quiet luxury, but just ate some the other day. 💅)
A new serving of *thoughts on AI*: ‘Science was supposed to have banished God, but he keeps turning up in our latest technologies. He is the ghost lurking in our data sets, the cockroach hiding beneath the particle accelerator. He briefly appeared three years ago in Seoul, on the sixth floor of the Four Seasons Hotel, where hundreds of people had gathered to watch Lee Sedol, one of the world’s leading go champions, play against AlphaGo, an algorithm created by Google’s DeepMind.’
Anything by Patrick Radden Keefe automatically goes into the newsletter: ‘A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld.’
Thoughts from Jonathan Franzen on stray cats/the ‘No Kill’ movement/how it’s a myth.
Photography: Brutalist churches. And Charles Rabot’s Arctic Photographs c. 1891: ‘They are so beautiful, so magnificent, those deathly solitudes, so strange in their fleeting finery of brilliant colors, that they always leave one with a burning desire to see them again”, Charles Rabot wrote in 1894 of the particular allure of boreal landscapes.’ (Photo collection is at the end of the text.)
Excellent paragraph here: ‘Like Ruskin, Charles III serves as the Apex Bopea philosopher king. With his tireless environmentalism, Perennialist theology, and mystic outlook, Charles has set the agenda for a bohemian neo-medieval revolution that places harmony and ancient wisdom at the centre. As Aris Roussinos writes, as “a Christian mystic, a layer of hedgerows and protector of the soil, there is a mythic quality of identification between our King and his land which we have not experienced for some time”.’
And more from the article ‘The Dawn of the Bohemian Peasants’ here. (This gives if-Gawker-was-earnest vibes, and made me laugh. Also, just in case you’re wondering, I adore Charles (issues with monarchy aside), because of the aforementioned eccentricity/commitment to mother earth/he seems empathetic.)
‘Why Is Everything So Ugly? The mid in fake midcentury modern.’
Don’t want to be a hater, but hard not to include this: ‘“I wake up, bleed, sleep real estate — shit real estate,” a broker from Yonkers tells me when I ask him how business is going, projecting his voice to rise above the happy-hour noise. "Everything is real estate.”’
Hello Kitty intel. ‘"Her basic shape is really appealing. She's huggable, and there are no sharp edges to her. I think everybody can relate to that and be like, 'Oh my gosh, she is just so cute.’” […]"But to call it cuteness is just not enough—it goes beyond that. It's a feeling that you get from looking at Hello Kitty that's almost like being in love. It's this insatiable hunger."‘ [ ! ! ]
And a question for our times: ‘Why Are Restaurants Filling Up With Fake Flowers?’ All is revealed.
Twenty Questions with Deborah Levy:
‘If you could be a writer in any time and place, when and where would it be?
The century is the twenty-first, mostly because a female writer can travel alone with greater ease. The place is coastal, tropical, humid, the dish of the day is fish.’
And Twenty Questions with Ocean Vuong:
‘What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Take what you love and make an Ark out of it.’
‘In this excerpt [in Vanity Fair mag] from Capote’s Women, the famously caustic author fans the flames of America’s most notorious sibling rivalry: The Strange, Toxic Friendship of Truman Capote, Lee Radziwill, and Jackie Kennedy Onassis.’
(This is peak Vanity Fair scenes: high society (do we say that anymore? maybe not), feuds, money money money, status/snobbery, bitching, betrayal etc etc. Excellent.)
‘In the Kidnapper’s Kitchen: An Interview with Colin Barrett. ‘“I can’t believe they let you write spumous dump in the New Yorker,” I told Barrett when we spoke in 2022 about his story collection, Homesickness. “We all make our little contributions to history, Naomi,” he replied gravely.’
BOOK RECC: Excerpted here is (only part of, frustratingly) the titular essay of Merrill Joan Gerber’s collection of memoirist essays, Revelation at the Food Bank. A critic speaks: ‘“I have a lot to say from my own mouth”—so Gerber confides in her readers with admirable candor and enviable chutzpah. There is much here that is unnervingly intimate—close-ups of a very long marriage, painful memories of a brother-in-law who was abusive to his family before taking his own life, the disappointments as well as the rewards of an intense friendship with a famous woman writer embittered by religion and politics—all of it narrated in Merrill Joan Gerber’s distinctive voice.’
She has the kind of wry humour and deep insight into the ways of the human that only very few can put into words. (Such skill!) She’s not ‘lyrical’ (my worst thing) - instead she talks about how to be in this world, how we are in this world. Such a delightful discovery. Get involved!
Excellent intel and insights in this piece by the screenwriter Mary Harron on adapting Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho for the big screen; she also ended up directing it. ‘I had a lot of thoughts about the 1980s and a lot of things I wanted to criticise and make fun of about the 1980s. […] But I really wanted to keep one of the most startling and disturbing things about the book, which is the way it shifts very abruptly with no warning from a scene of social comedy to a scene of horrific violence. You’re being whipsawed back and forth between worlds, which I found really startling but also amazing that a book would do that, and I wanted to keep that, so that you would never know where you were.’
Black Box, a podcast from The Guardian. ‘At some point in the past few years, humanity collided with a new kind of intelligence. And things are getting strange. People are being accused of crimes by algorithms; falling in love with digital beings; pioneering new ways to fight old diseases; turning to machines for comfort in their worst moments, and using artificial intelligence to commit - and hide from - terrible crimes. The Guardian’s Michael Safi investigates the story of a technology so complex that its own creators have no idea what it is thinking, and captures a snapshot of the era when people first made contact with AI.’
The Granta mag podcast has, after a hiatus, relaunched: ‘In each episode, we speak to a Granta author, past or present, about what they're reading, writing and enjoying. Tune in for conversations with Brandon Taylor, Lauren Oyler, Sheila Heti, Andrew O’Hagan and more.’
Haha that piece on ugliness is amazing but descends into madness by the end.