May 6, 2026 On the Internet Rotten Dot Com By Dena Yago Henri-Charles Guérard, Composite print of Japanese masks and a death’s-head (1888), from the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Public domain. “Wanna see a dead body?” Milo asks from the back seat. The 5 is a white blade under the Valley sun, everything bleached flat, overexposed as we fly toward Fry’s Electronics. It’s 1999. The Acura’s sweating leather sticks to my thighs. My skin feels amphibian, a tween-age Geico gecko blinking too hard, raw in the new light of too much consciousness. Even at eleven, Milo likes to pull out provocations sourced from some dark aquifer on the internet not yet known to me. Unlike Milo, I don’t have a PC in my bedroom. But we’re on our way to fix that. Now Milo pivots, unzipping his backpack like a schoolyard dealer to flash two CD jewel cases. Rob Zombie’s Hellbilly Deluxe (1998): an X carved into his gristly forehead flesh, chrome flames across the plastic. Busta Rhymes’s Extinction Level Event (1998): a world on fire, his mouth mid-detonation. “Which one?” he asks. I don’t answer, reluctant to admit I know neither. Noah, my brother, at the wheel, picks Busta in the rearview. “If you want it, let me hear you say it (gimme some more),” Busta belts. I, too, am eleven. A child of a recent bicoastal divorce, spending the summer in the Pacific Palisades, being driven to Fry’s to assemble my first desktop PC—my twenty-three-year-old brother’s gift in the key of fraternal benevolence, pedagogical duty, and Californian techno-optimism. A deal struck with my dad: if we can build it, I can keep it in my room. Milo—my surf-tanned, platinum-blond, Point Dume–living, feral best friend with an Insane Clown Posse fixation and a household parrot that mimics his mother’s laugh—is along for the ride. He’s beautiful and hectic. I want to live in his house. I want to live in his brain, his skin. I’m high on his confidence the way only a young girl without much of her own can be. So yes, sure: I want to see a dead body. Read More
May 5, 2026 On Art The Ignorant Art Historian: Ice Floes By Hal Foster Claude Monet, Ice Floes, 1893, oil on canvas, 26 x 39 ½ inches, via Wikimedia Commons. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, licensed under CC0 1.0. The Ignorant Art Historian is a series by the art critic Hal Foster, in which he tries to “demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it.” You can read his introduction to the series here and the first installment here. The next two entries will appear later this month. Almost everyone passes right by this Monet at the Met. Unlike the paintings of his iconic Haystack or Rouen Cathedral series, examples of which are nearby, this bluish-white blur is easy to overlook. You have to wait on this picture, attend to it, in order for it to appear at all. Read More
May 4, 2026 On Books Wolfgang Koeppen’s Structural Musicality By Joshua Cohen © Suhrkamp Verlag, courtesy of New Directions. Wolfgang Koeppen, the maestro dirigent of the post-Nazi German-language novel, was born in the cold old Prussian port of Greifswald in 1906, a bastard, as they used to be called, the out-of-wedlock son of a seamstress who moonlit as a theater prompter and an ophthalmologist father, who dabbled in winter sports and competitive ballooning and refused most contact. Mother and son moved around a lot, from Koeppen’s grandmother’s house to the house of his mother’s stepsister. In 1912, the year Death in Venice (not Death in Rome) was published, the pair settled in Ortelsburg, Masuria, which is now the Polish city of Szczytno, where Koeppen attended Realschule. Mother and son fled west with World War I, heading along the Baltic coast until returning to Greifswald, where Koeppen made efforts to resume his schooling before dropping out totally and working as a deliverer for a bookstore, a cook, a ship’s cook, an assembler in factories, a theater usher, a movie theater usher, a projectionist, an ice maker and deliverer, and a tester of light bulbs. Each of these occupations, it might be argued, is a metaphor for “novelist”: delivering the books, preparing nourishment, et cetera. They certainly provided what in German industrial circles is called “material.” Read More
May 4, 2026 First Person My Friend Bambi By Brontez Purnell Bambi is in the front, to the right. Photograph by Daniel Nicoletta. Bambi Lake had come into my life like a specter or apparition, at first, faintly present, but something that would grow in intensity at every conversation had thereafter. I was go-go dancing at this bar in San Francisco on Polk Street called Club Rendezvous for a bygone SF night called Club Macho. The party had spilled out of the club and onto the street up near the doughnut shop and I remember dancing naked in the street and in the background, I saw her looking at me, Bambi. Like, tall, EVOCATIVE blond bob, vintage mid-century baby doll dress and, like, a fur coat. I was wasted and dancing but I just remember her being burned into my retina, the way you could look at someone and just know they were somebody; the word is striking—every time I saw that woman she was well dressed and just visually striking. Her fashion sense alone could melt fucking lead. Read More
May 1, 2026 On Art When the Confederacy Came to LA By Harmony Holiday Installation view of MONUMENTS, October 23, 2025 to May 3, 2026, at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and the Brick. Photograph by Fredrik Nilsen. This is not a traditional review but a look at the set of myths and the sublimated pursuit of dominance that have made it necessary to mount an exhibition featuring decommissioned Confederate monuments disrupted or forced into deeper layers of disgrace by remix and recontextualization. The result is a humiliation ritual that both targets and empowers white nationalism in the American South, instigating its reactionary temperament just enough to arouse productive tension but not enough to alleviate it or rehabilitate the temperament itself. Since its opening this past October, which came in the wake of the brutal, live-streamed assassination of Charlie Kirk and public fallout that ranged from glee to real mourning to opportunistic purposing of the optics of both grief and outrage, MONUMENTS, at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and the Brick in Los Angeles, has been an institutional zone wherein real and symbolic clashes between far-right extremism and bourgeois liberal dismay are played out in pantomime. We are all of us characters in this impromptu theater of convoluted archetypes. Paradoxically, in the museum or gallery, ornate propaganda for the Confederacy gains some of the dignity of archaeology. Its monuments become pendulums swinging backward, gathering the momentum that comes from being the subject of protest and outrage, kept at bay and in check by that attention, but not for long. They haunt better there, stalking the mind like hunters in an offseason. Think of Billie Holiday’s tawny tone belting “This year’s crop of kisses are not for me, for I’m still wearin’ last year’s love” or the deceptively whimsical opening line to “Strange Fruit”: “Pastoral scene of the gallant South.” Read More
April 30, 2026 Diaries Notes on New Book By Patrick Cottrell Hermit Notes, 2023. Courtesy of Patrick Cottrell. In the late summer of 2023, I kept a log of process notes, so I could keep track of what I was writing and chart my frustrations. I had suffered from writer’s block for several years, but there were moments when I experienced true lightness and clarity. Some of them are described here. July 14, 2023 At the beginning: The memorial gathering on the five-year anniversary of my brother’s death + the new mystery At the end: The person disappears and you can’t bring them back July 16, 2023 Each day is pain/writing and yet I see myself writing new things and trying to add dimensions in order to justify this pitiful book but all i can hear are the doubts and critiques about WHY was this necessary, WHY am I doing this—“He’s repeating himself.” “He’s rewriting his first book, but trans.” “Sorry to Disrupt the Peace II: The Sequel No One Asked For.” Read More