February 1, 2023 Culture Diaries Postcard from Hudson By Laurie Stone Belted Galloway. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0. The other day we went to Albany so I could return all eight items I had bought online from Athleta. The store was in a giant mall that smelled tragically of Cinnabons. The Cinnabons reminded me of the TV series Better Call Saul, which is set in part in a Cinnabon shop, and the way Saul Goodman was unable to resist pulling a con. He missed his old life. Jail was preferable to feeling unknown to himself. The clothes in the store were made of fabrics that were “what is this?” and “no.” And there were mirrors, unlike in our house. Richard said, “Let’s go to the Banana.” He wanted a cashmere sweater. There were two he looked great in, and it made me so happy for someone to look good in clothes I said, “Buy both.” He said, “I don’t deserve them.” I said, “No one deserves anything. You are beautiful. Beauty is its own whatever.” One of the sweaters had a soft hoodie thing, and Richard liked walking around in the house in it. The hood came down a little low. I said, “You’re getting a seven dwarfs thing happening with the hood.” He pulled it back a little, and it was perfect. Read More
November 29, 2022 Culture Diaries Lil B Death-Ritual Potlatch: A Week in Austin, Texas By Barrett Avner Day One Productivity experts say that people shouldn’t sleep in the same area they work in, but what is bad for productivity is good for me. I wake up on the cheap, stained mattress I have next to my work area. To the right of the mattress are a lamp I bought because it looked like it belonged in a private investigator’s office, six guitar pedals, my guitar, and my laptop. There’s also my wooden desk, the drawers of which are filled with guitar picks and bug spray. I usually spend all day here drawing, playing with Photoshop, recording music, podcasting, watching stuff on YouTube, and staring off into space. I’ve lived in this apartment for four months, and in Austin for twenty, but I feel like I’ve lost track of time. In Austin, it’s easy to do that. On the mattress I watch Lawrence of Belgravia, a documentary I’ve been avoiding because I don’t want the images of people I admire tarnished by knowing too much about them. It’s about Lawrence Hayward, the front man for the English eighties and nineties bands Felt, Denim, and Go-Kart Mozart. Lawrence (who goes by just his first name) never did anything not great, but at what cost! The doc shows him burning through bandmates and spiraling into homelessness and addiction before ending up, in his fifties, in a London council flat designed by Ernö Goldfinger. There’s a wonderfully OCD quality to Lawrence, who at one point explains his preference for white shirt buttons and at another specifies the only kind of guitar pick his band members are permitted to use. In the film, he intently studies the books and LPs that have inspired his songwriting: we see him examine the bindings, the liner notes, an image of Lou Reed. Why, he wonders, hasn’t he achieved stardom? It’s clear that some personal idiosyncrasies have hindered his progress. He talks about how great it would be to have his own private jet, but he refuses to own a phone or a computer. “Nobody has ever made any money on the internet,” he says, which makes me respect him even more. Out-of-touch people are the people I respect most these days. Read More
September 1, 2022 Culture Diaries Seven, Seven, Seven: A Week in Cambridge, Massachusetts By J. D. Daniels Edouard Godard & Vilmorin-Andrieux & Cie, Les plantes potagères, 1904. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. DAY ONE I sit at the long blond pine table I use for a desk. Nothing happens. Maybe I can make something happen. A few years ago there was a popular self-help book called How To Make Sh*t Happen, never mind that peristalsis is involuntary. I eat some mango slices and a green apple and a banana. I drink twelve ounces of whole milk with a scoop of whey protein. I find a leftover fried artichoke in the fridge, wrapped in aluminum foil. I listen to Michael Gielen conducting Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, but it’s not loud enough. “Have you seen the ghost of John?” we used to sing at my elementary school. “Long thin bones with the skin all gone. Wouldn’t it be chilly with no skin on?” It would be red. My inner life is none of my business. Now I’m listening to Otto Klemperer conducting Bruckner’s Seventh, turned up loud enough that it’s antisocial. Read More
August 18, 2022 Culture Diaries Barefoot Astroturf Situation: June in New York By Rebecca Panovka The Drift launch party on the rooftop at the Public Hotel. Photograph by Meredith Huelbig. June 10 I wake up to three missed calls and matching voice mails from a blocked number that turns out to be FedEx Express Heavyweight informing me that since I was not around to receive my thousand-pound skid, it’s on its way to JFK. The delivery in question is Issue Seven of The Drift, the magazine I cofounded and co-run, and it was supposed to arrive next Monday or Tuesday in time for our launch party Thursday at the Public Hotel. Evidently it’s early … and sleeping in was a potentially multithousand-dollar mistake. Kicking myself for how late I stayed out last night—there was a party at Russian Samovar for Joshua Cohen, whose novel The Netanyahus won this year’s Pulitzer in fiction—I dial FedEx and shoot an email to our printer. I got through most of The Netanyahus in a single sitting last summer, before I’d met its author. It’s mostly a satire based on an anecdote told to Cohen by the late literary critic Harold Bloom, but it’s also pointedly presentist, a self-conscious parable for liberalism in the Trump years. Early on it draws a dichotomy between history and theology that I’ve been mulling over since I encountered it. Read More
August 11, 2022 Culture Diaries Therapy without Professional Help: A Week in Los Angeles By Maya Binyam Photograph by Maya Binyam. July 24, 2022 I live in LA, but I’ve just flown in from New York after a month away, so I wake up early, too early, at 4 A.M., and read a book called Healing Back Pain. The author, John Sarno, is a doctor who argues that most back pain is psychological—the result of tension, which arises from repressed emotion. He makes his perspective sound like the most obvious thing in the world, and makes the common explanations, like sitting too much, sound completely idiotic. Most people have been taught to think of chronic back pain as arising out of an inciting incident and to think of the spine, especially the lower spine, as very fragile—even though, he explains, bodies are resilient and spines exceptionally strong. I want to believe him, because if I do believe him I’ll never feel back pain again, or if I do, I’ll have my delicate psychology to blame, as opposed to an innocent object like my chair. Sarno has a cult following; I google him, careful to read only the testimonials about how the book has changed people’s lives. Then I fall back to sleep. Read More