Friday Night Dinner, 5.16.25

By the time you're reading this, I'll be on my way back from Brimfield (an outdoor antique flea market) hopefully with a car full of lamps and plant stands. Someone on Instagram called it "Coachella for people over 29 who live in NYC and own a car," which is not inaccurate. I went last year in July and bought a giant framed giclée print that is currently hanging behind my bed:

You might have seen this illustration on a bottle of wine, but it comes from a 19th century French bicycle company and represents the start of the women's rights movement in the late 19th century. In 1896, Susan B. Anthony said, "Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel." The artist behind it is anonymous, so... probably a woman.

What treasures await this year? I will report back if there's anything of note. In the meantime, here's what I've been thinking about this week:

Getting back into "RPDR" is the best thing I've ever done for myself. Forget eating healthy, exercising, adopting cats, etc. No matter how horrible the day is, I can always push through knowing there's an episode of 🎶 "RuPaul's Drag Race," may the best drag queen winnnnnn 🎶 waiting for me. If you're not watching the new season of "All Stars," skip to #2 because you're about to be bored as fuck.

• I'm into the March Madness bracket format, I just wish the bottom four queens gave their points away in secret for max paranoia/drama. It's nice to have three full episodes with only six queens.
• Bosco was one of my S14 faves, so it's no surprise she's tearing shit up once again. In just two episodes, she's given us CUNT in the form of fashion (zippers, Lydia Deetz and Elvira's love child in a snatched coffin); that slow burn "Murder on the Dance Floor" lip sync; and the bedazzled eye patch-wearing, glass eye-sporting Kitty Laveau.

• After this look, I am now an undying Irene the Alien fan. I never expected the hair to crack in half like an egg.
• Kudos to Aja for making me almost like an Ice Spice song for three minutes. She was also great on "Give it to Me Straight."
• Give DeJa an Emmy for "I'm just being a nosy neighbor." I've watched it 10000 times and it's still funny. Add it to the canon!
• When it comes to the other groups, I'm most excited to see Butthole and Acid Betty. Butthole went too soon (and in tragic fashion) on S17. Acid Betty got a villain edit on S8, but the only truly heinous thing she did was insult Trixie's makeup during an inappropriate moment.
• I like Ginger Minj, I'm just not sure we need her back for a fourth time.

Until this interview with Bella Freud, I didn't know much about Bethann Hardison. I had seen images of her incredible personal style and knew about her OG modeling days from Robin Givhan's book, "The Battle of Versailles" (2016), but the rest of her career was stupidly not on my radar. In her 40s, she founded her own agency with a focus on racial diversity, working with incredible models like Naomi Campbell and Veronica Webb. She also started Black Girls Coalition with Iman, which called out racism in casting and acted as a support group for models of color. The portion of the interview where she talks about this is excellent because she's so gd confident and matter of fact that you instantly see what makes her a great advocate. On a less serious note, her opinion on hairy male toes peeking out of Birkenstocks made me feel seen!

I've really come to enjoy Freud's interview style. She's not afraid to admit she doesn't know something, and she actually lets her guests talk. I've been working my way through all the episodes of "Fashion Neurosis" and so far, my favorite is with Jonathan Anderson (current artistic director at Dior Men, former creative director at LOEWE, founder of JW Anderson). When I finished his episode, I not only had an appreciation for his career/vision/work ethic, I felt like I had some deeper understanding of him as a human. I sometimes listen to the show in podcast form, but watching is preferable since the room they film in perfectly sets the mood. In a nod/wink to her family history, Bella Freud, Sigmund Freud's great-granddaughter, conducts each interview with her guests lying on a couch.

For my 30th birthday, Jo gave me this painting that I instantly fell in love with as soon as I saw it at her house.

It's by a Louisville artist named Larry Steinrock (RIP). Sadly, none of his other work comes close to capturing the magic of this skinny pink house. Jo has a few of his other paintings from the same series and while I like them, I don't feel drawn to them like I did with this one. Everything about it is spooky and surreal. The proportions of the house make no sense a la "House of Leaves." It belongs in "Practical Magic," "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina," or "Coraline" (which I will not let Neil Gaiman's fuckery ruin for me). I'm not sure if it shelters a coven of witches or one solitary woman who murders all the rotten men that live in her town, collecting and displaying their eyeballs in various sized jars.

When I can't think of what to journal about, I look at this painting and invent different scenarios. Maybe a young girl lives there alone after her parents mysteriously disappeared. She knows that if the authorities find out, she'll be sent to foster care, so she does what she can to survive. At night, her cat leaps through the eerie countryside, stealing pieces of jewelry for her to pawn. Will she subsist like this until adulthood or will circumstances lead her to more extreme behavior? Only time will tell.

I hate when people try to diminish art because it's honestly the only thing that keeps me going most days. I'm not afraid of death, but I'll be sad when I can no longer spend evenings looking at this painting.

One of many stupid things about cancel culture is that it's made famous people more hesitant to trash each other in the media. Even on "Drag Race," queens get torn to shreds by the fandom for throwing shade. If I was ever famous, I would want to have at least one public nemesis to keep life interesting. If someone sucks, you should be allowed to say so without major penalty. It's not like this is the same as telling everyone to go burn their house down (although with the ubiquity of parasocial relationships and the dominance of social media, fans might find other ways to ruin their lives). No matter! I don't have the brainpower to get into a serious discussion, I simply wish to offer up yet another Reddit thread full of gossip, insults, and famous people who've been drinking the haterade.

As I see it, there are two brands of insults. The first is well-thought-out, straightforward but polite, and cuts to the core because of its undeniability. Consider Ursula K. Le Guin on J.K. Rowling in this interview with The Guardian:

Q: Nicholas Lezard has written 'Rowling can type, but Le Guin can write.' What do you make of this comment in the light of the phenomenal success of the Potter books? I'd like to hear your opinion of JK Rowling's writing style

UKL: I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the "incredible originality" of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid's fantasy crossed with a "school novel", good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.

The second type of insult is provocative and impromptu, like Gore Vidal calling William F. Buckley a "crypto Nazi" in an ABC television debate or referring to Truman Capote's death as a "wise career move." There's nothing I love more than a sassy, famous hater with a mile-long shit list and zero filter.

Sometimes a random thing from the old internet pops into my head and when I check to see if it still exists, it's usually gone (e.g., Dollz). This was thankfully not the case with Dead Presidents. I remember looking at it in grad school, so it's been around since at least 2010/2011 and is still regularly updated. It's run by a presidential historian named Anthony Bergen and, like many of the beloved Tumblrs of yore, consists of q&as, original writing, and article reposts. It's great for learning trivia to whip out at dinner parties if you don't mind people gossiping about you when you leave the room. For example, this fun fact:

Juliana Canfield – the awesome actress who played Kendall Roy’s long-suffering and loyal (but principled in the end!) assistant Jess in Succession – is the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Lewis Cass, who was Secretary of War under President Andrew Jackson, Secretary of State under President James Buchanan, and was the Democratic Presidential nominee defeated by Zachary Taylor in the 1848 Presidential election.

Other things I've learned:

• Custom-made presidential cowboy boots exist, and they are all ugly as fuck. I imagine Michelle threw Barack's directly into the dumpster.
• William G. Harding had a 15-year-long affair with his best friend's wife and, back when he was a senator, fathered an illegitimate child with a different long-term paramour, Nan Britton. When Harding died, his covert financial support ended, so Britton wrote a book to support her family. What happened next is, of course, predictable: everyone called her a money-grubbing liar and shamed her for tarnishing Harding's legacy. She wasn't vindicated until 24 years after her death in 2015 when genetic testing confirmed paternity. Scum of the earth!
• LBJ conducted so much business from his pool in Texas that he had separate rafts for a telephone, a notepad, and a pencil.

The header image is a still of Nancy Kwan in "The Wild Affair" (John Krish, 1965), a very underrated fashion movie that involves signature haircuts and dresses by Mary Quant. I used it because Kwan has a memoir out called "The World of Nancy Kwan" that I plan to read as soon as my copy arrives. You probably know her from "Flower Drum Song" (Henry Koster, 1961), where she sings "I Enjoy Being a Girl," but may not know about her other assorted badassery (here's a primer).

P.S. My brilliant friend Sophie wrote another book ("about the ways in which the nuclear family model is failing us") and you should preorder it or request that your library purchase it. You've probably heard me mention Sophie many times before, most recently via her cats, Norman and Puppy. Support Norman and Puppy's mom! She has a human child, too, but you know where my loyalties lie.