This week sucks dick. Brian Wilson, Sly Stone, and Pippa Scott died; Trump deployed active duty troops to LA; Senator Alex Padilla was assaulted for asking a fucking question at puppy killer Kristi Noem's press conference; Israel attacked Iran. The list goes on! None of it is even remotely funny, but here's something we can all laugh at:
more crime in america
— derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) June 13, 2025 at 1:27 AM
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With protests raging this weekend and Father's Day quickly approaching (yuck), I hope everyone stays safe, pets a fluffy animal, eats a little ice cream treat, etc. Please take care of yourself as you rage against the evil forces hellbent on destroying humanity. Ok, one more dumb thing for fun:
i saw rfk jr swimming through the chuck e. cheese ball pit like an eel
— slate (@pleasebegneiss.bsky.social) June 2, 2025 at 10:18 PM
Are there any modern writers you're obsessed with even though none of their work has deeply resonated with you? Like maybe you keep reading them because they come very close to knocking your socks off, so you think it's only a matter of time before they do? Stephanie Danler is that kind of writer for me. I put her in the same category as Sloane Crosley, who I kept reading and feeling meh about until she published "Grief is for People" (2024). While reading that book, I internally screamed, "YES! This is what I've been waiting for."
I read "Sweetbitter" (2016), Danler's first novel, the summer I moved from Brooklyn to Ann Arbor. I was in between apartments and sleeping on my friend Karl's couch in Harlem, going slightly mad due to the lack of AC and my assorted mental illnesses. If memory serves correctly, I was totally absorbed in the narrative even though character development was lacking. It took me back to my own destructive early 20s when everything was haphazardly stupid, and the future felt like an unreal construct. I don't know how many copies of "Sweetbitter" were sold, but it was on the NYT bestseller list for weeks, and was eventually adapted into a truly terrible tv show on Starz in 2018 with Ella Purnell (Jackie in "Yellowjackets") as the protagonist, and Tom Sturridge and Caitlin FitzGerald in supporting roles.
I found Danler's second book, a memoir called "Stray" (2020), similarly lacking, although there were some vulnerable gut-punch moments that I still think about despite once stating otherwise. This is all a very long preamble to say that while I haven't exactly enjoyed her books, I hold her shorter form writing in high regard, especially this piece on Substack about her dad's death, followed by the dissolution of her second marriage. If she writes another memoir about this period in her life, I have a feeling it will give me that Sloane Crosley "finally!" reaction I've been hoping for. She also wrote the foreword to John Gregory Dunne's "Vegas," being reprinted by McNally this July.
I've been following Jane Dashley (FKA Jane Aldridge, AKA Sea of Shoes) on the internet since I was in high school. She was the first fashion blogger on my radar and the only one I've kept up with over the years. Unlike many influencers of today, she had a legitimate interest in the history of fashion, which was evident in the fun/elaborate photoshoots she staged with her mom. It pissed people off that she came from wealth, and I remember a big hullabaloo over this 2012 profile in Texas Monthly that quotes her dad saying he invested "several hundred thousand dollars" in the blog. On one hand, yes... the wealth disparity in this country is insane. A teenager shouldn't have that much money to spend on clothes and accessories while people die in poverty. On the other hand, why the fuck wouldn't a teenager with rich parents take their money and do something fun with it? (Commenters have noted in my "Gilmore Girls" recaps that the way I write about money is often conflicting, and I don't disagree! I simultaneously resent and envy people who were raised with privileges I didn't have.)
Dashley (left) and her mom (right) always gave me "Grey Gardens" vibes (complimentary).
As an adult, Dashley no longer blogs about fashion. These days, she's busy painting the type of weirdo shit that really gets me going. Each piece is a strange fairy tale nightmare fever dream with exaggerated proportions and layered colors/textures. After following her for decades, I can see how previous interests — her love of animals, Japanese toys, folklore, and children's books — inspire her art. For someone raised in Texas with money, her politics seem shockingly sound, and her social media posts routinely make me laugh. One of the things I enjoy about following people on the internet is watching their lives unfold in ways I never expected that pleasantly surprise me. It's nice to look at someone who creates art you enjoy and say, "Wow, there's a decent chance they're not an asshole."
To be clear: this is not a recommendation, but I just watched this movie and need to scream into the void. I wasn't even going to see it because the trailer (accurately) makes it look atrocious, I disliked "Past Lives" (2023), and I'm at the age where torturing myself with shit I know I'm going to hate isn't fun anymore; however, I knew that I had to go when Alex texted me, "I went to see "The Materialists" and whatever I admired about it was kind of ruined when I thought about "Gossip Girl" for about five minutes." Ok, Alex... fine. I'll go watch this dumpster fire in the middle of a weekday with a horde of octogenarians so we can lament how much we miss Blair Waldorf. So that is what I did, and now I'm pissed.
This is one of those movies that thinks it's about wealth/class when it's actually about nothing. None of the characters have discernible personalities, so never at any point will you give a shit about what happens to them unless you turn off your brain and think dumb thoughts like, "These people deserve happiness because of how hot they are." The opening and closing scenes repulsed me. The dialogue does not accurately reflect how humans speak to each other. As with "Past Lives," I thought the direction was good, which made the bad writing even more obvious. It's a good idea for a film! I'm always desperate for some updated Jane Austen, I just want whoever creates it to grapple with the ideas it raises instead of barely skimming the surface. I'm probably angry enough to write something longer about this, so stay tuned. Spoilers are necessary for me to properly express my displeasure.
If there's one thing I love in this world, it's depressing art created by Italian women. I can't articulate why, I just think we have similar sensibilities. In a past life, maybe I was a depressed Italian woman. In this one, I'm a depressed American woman. In a future one, maybe I'll be a depressed cat? A step up.
Maura Delpero's second feature, "Vermiglio," takes place right around the end of WWII in the Italian Alps and focuses on a large family. The father is the village schoolteacher, the mother is perpetually pregnant, religion is a mainstay, and the children are all fucked/naïve/sheltered. The film's primary story focuses on Lucia, the eldest daughter, who falls in love with a Sicilian soldier and learns in the most traumatic way that (some) men are scum. What I like about the film is that several of the children, even the ancillary ones like Dino, feel like fully formed characters; they aren't just there for set dressing. And while Lucia's story propels the plot forward, the film is more about the village's whisper network and how knowledge is passed down within the village. Mikhail Krichman, Andrey Zvyagintsev's frequent collaborator, does the cinematography, and thanks to him, each scene looks like a goddamn Renaissance painting. It's a beautiful film that initially felt like nothing special plot-wise, but stuck with me for days. Watch it on the Criterion channel when you're in a melancholy mood.
I'm finally catching up on old New Yorker articles, and this one made me feel very seen. Here's a snippet:
The phone eats time; it makes us live the way people do inside a casino, dropping a blackout curtain over the windows to block out the world, except the blackout curtain is a screen, showing too much of the world, too quickly. As Richard Seymour writes in the book “The Twittering Machine,” this avoidance of time’s actual flow, this compulsion toward the chronophage, the time-eater, is a horror story that is likely to happen only “in a society that is busily producing horrors.”
Each day, a fresh new terror! It doesn't even matter if you're not currently looking at a screen. Your brain has already spent so much time looking at screens that screens are your new reality, baby. You live inside a screen. And what else lives inside that screen? The Gulf of America, One Big Beautiful Bill, Project 2025, a bunch of dead people who didn't deserve to die, ICE, NYPD drones, and a bunch of AI slop. Isn't life a gift? Doesn't it make you want to reproduce? And by "reproduce," I mean order a bunch of drugs off the internet, ingest them, and wait for the curtain to fall? Have I gone too dark? Are you going to unsubscribe? Oh, no.
I leave you with this poem from Sam Pink's 2019 collection, "99 Poems to Cure Whatever's Wrong With You or Create The Problems You Need":
The Woodchuck
The woodchuck in my backyard
doesn’t trust me.
& he’s right.
Because the first chance I get
I’m gonna put this tiny witch hat on him.
Stupid piece of shit.
If you Google image search "woodchuck in a tiny witch hat," the second and third results are AI-generated images because of course they are! This is hell.
P.S. The header image comes from Miles Aldridge's "Doors" series.