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Coverage Check 08/2022: Fashion flops, literary resurgences, the return of white vests and boxer shorts
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For those of you in London or London-bound on September 28, come down to beasy on Greek Street to see Holly Connolly, Ed Luker, Sofia Paulikovics and Jago Rackham be subjected to my total chaos recreate Three Month Fever live.
Manhattan’s elite can have a little ultraviolence, as a treat
Philippa Snow got down and Dirt-y and salvaged a 00’s cultural relic from obscurity. In Blair Waldorf, Patrick Bateman, she reviews Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer, the gory reimagining of the teen pop culture phenomenon, in which warring high school queen bees Serena and Blair are redrawn from overambitious, ruthless brats to full blown murderers. Is it too hard to picture Blair choking one of her endless adversaries with their own necklace in a moment of rage? Or any of the teen characters populating the series for that matter taking their obsession with social capital to savage extremes never entertained before? If Penn Badgley’s character in You is the inevitable meta-progression of his role in Gossip Girl, it stands that the belligerent teens of the series ready to enact social takedowns against their ilk wouldn’t be that far off from opting for a more permanent end to their perceived competition. Snow notes that teens giving into their bloodlust is nothing new in fiction, with Clockwork Orange a standout. The prose, she says, hasn’t been altered all that much. Gossip Girl’s prolific references to fashion now just come with a hefty dose of blood. In this instalment, the series sheds its young adult ambience, reading like an Expat Press novel “à la the late, great Elizabeth Victoria Aldrich’s Ruthless Little Things.” An apt comparison to say the least, Aldrich being underground literature’s queen bee.
READ IT BEFORE THE SCREEN ADAPTATION DROPS: “In the deepest reaches of a closet was a stack of boxes packed by Eve’s mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside: journals, photos, scrapbooks, manuscripts, and letters. No, inside a lost world.” Joan Didion as “predator who passes herself off as prey,” Eve Babitz a symbol of overindulgence, there to “inspire, inspire being code for fuck.”
The Guardian reports on a new app that aims to connect strangers who like the same books to “deliver real value to communities…in geographical proximity.” That the term “community” is thrown around with no inherent meaning is nothing new. References to community now mostly signify a fortification against any and all who stray even faintly from a particular belief. Circle jerks sans orgasms.
The relentless obsession with total safety and security and complete erosion of uncertainty and ambivalence has become status quo in publishing, an industry poisoned by bourgeois morality. The average reader consumer then becomes a perfect vessel for tech virgins to play out their ambitions for control. What this app seeks to achieve is to flatten the possibilities born from books even further, creating digital bridges and strengthening ideological ghettos, guaranteeing disenchantment and alienation. Why waste time on someone else if your taste in books isn’t perfectly aligned? Why bother ever discovering anything beyond what you are familiar and comfortable with?
I love John Waters but his assertion that you shouldn’t fuck someone if they don’t own books is wrong. You can always gift them a book you feel they’ll enjoy. It may set them on a literary path all their own. Rachel Tashjian’s advice on adopting “a rabbit hole mentality, a passeggiata of the mind” springs to mind. Everyone, she recommends, should “stroll through ideas, culture, and art,” allowing one experience to lead to another in an unbreakable chain of discovery. Aren’t books - all art for that matter - an opportunity to widen your worldview and bring different people into your orbit? And mostly, isn’t it time to fight back against these passive-aggressive sexless losers and bring libido back in the world of books? Not everything you come across will be a masterpiece, but isn’t that part of a life committed to beauty? We could all stand to add an element of danger into our lives. In the words of Emily Reynolds (on her way to a date that seemed dodgy af), “what, you want every one of your experiences to be good? You need some bad ones too.”
The founder insists his is not a hook-up app, an apt observation as the sort of people it is bound to attract will collectively have the sexual appeal of a jellyfish. He comments that party-goers (in opposition to his intended audience, those with so-called “academic” interests) find it easier to socialise, conveniently overlooking that night club and bar closures everywhere continue to rob us of meeting points where true community can be built, even if fleetingly, accidentally revealing he has no connection to party kids (they tend to read a lot from my experience once the party is over). “Readers are hungry for discussion,” he says, but instead of giving people something real, he’s seeking to confine them even deeper into their screens. If people are truly hungry for connection over books, shouldn’t they be seeking to meet others in the real world? If you can’t access readings, you can always create one yourself. You’ll be surprised by how many people show up (and how many are down to fuck).
Ed Luker is done living in fear. He’s no longer holding himself back. In Exercises, he credits the pandemic with his rebirth as a writer. With the world at a standstill, he committed to it with a greater sense of purpose than ever before. Writing about writing is more often than not boring, but Luker makes interesting use of parentheses to disclose (foreshadow?) pieces of a life, at once confessional but unwilling to drill into the details of experiences or feelings past.
…which got me thinking, which books make good use of parentheses? Lolita obvs comes to mind with its striking “I am writing under observation,” which in turn reminds me I still haven’t found heart-shaped sunglasses like in Kubrick’s film, and whatever happened to the British lad who wrote Lolito? That was my nickname too in certain circles back in 2006 (07?) and at the time I was obsessed with reading everything Alberto Moravia had written but couldn’t find any of his books so I watched the Bertolucci film but no Bertolucci film will ever be better than The Dreamers. I remember the summer I watched it multiple times I was smoking Lucky Strikes and my signature outfit was a pair of dark blue denim cutoffs worn with multiple short-sleeved / sleeveless tops and honestly no one has done layers better than Andrew Mackenzie in 2019/2020.
But really, what novels make extensive use of parentheses?
Luker went Del Rey with his rumination on summer and strangers at the pond on below deck. “The men want to listen to the other men, and be near the men, swim close to the men,” he writes, noting the successive heatwaves have sent an almost erotic ripple through the city, witching everyone into a “crazed, sexual” frenzy to surrounding themselves with other people following the protracted periods of isolation of the last three years. Who knew you could write about bodies of water and about men without building up to a sex scene? Perhaps he left out the parentheses on this one.
The Guardian also got me thinking about music. If I am still captivated enough by music to seek out new songs, new experiences. Once you enter your 30s, goes the writer, you lose the part of yourself that gives music an ecstatic dimension in your life. It isn’t a lack of curiosity, that remains and is even strengthened elsewhere. But if the ease and accessibility of streaming is keeping people from opting for physical spaces where music can take on a communal experience, isn’t it in effect curtailing the process of discovery?
A hook up bar I visited in Madrid this spring led me to Karol G’s El Makinon. I spent the morning listening to her third studio album KG0516, going through the highest highs and lowest lows not dissimilar to the first time experiencing Motomami. I’m infatuated with Spanish again. Rosalia, Nathy Peluso, Guitarricadelafuente’s La Cantera. Quien encendio la luz and La Bien Querida’s Permanentemente lullabied me through stressful periods of work when the world felt shrunken small and suffocating.
The music I listen to now bares little resemblance to anything I’ve ever been in love with prior - Lana, Sky, Courtney Love (the list is too long). If Daniel Dylan Wray is to be taken for his word, does that mean my identity is still in flux? Is he onto something or just surrounded by people happy to trade in their “enthusiasm” in favour of comfort? Do people opt for nostalgia as a sedative against uncertainty? If it’s the culprit in the death of discovery, how do we safeguard against nostalgia and avoid a culture producing citizens confined to their screens, severed from experiences they would have made on a night out? Is it just time for new friends?
Best of the Month that was: Gwendoline Riley is an Ozon girl!
Rachel Connolly, famous for burning up the internet at the end of 2020 with a Hazlitt piece on gossip, profiled Gwendoline Riley for New York Magazine. The scene is Tate Modern, the reason the publication of the author’s latest two books in the US by NYRB. There’s talk of art, there’s wine, and Riley’s signature elusive guardedness. London hotties Houman Barekat and Luke Brown weigh in, with the latter framing Riley as having led the artist’s life in a way far more committed than he ever has. Connolly gives insight into Riley’s own thoughts on her books First Love and My Phantoms. Riley views the latter retrospectively as a reflection of how void life without writing would be. “Too frightening to think about,” she says. During their excursion to Southbank, Riley speaks about various works of art, including Lolita, the work of Jozef Czapski, the lover of Sergey Nabokov, Vladimir’s brother, and Francois Ozon’s 5x2 (which led this writer to wonder if she too has had sex to A Summer Dress!). She rarely publishes beyond her books, save for a few reviews on the TLS, but I’d pay good money to read her thoughts on Water Drops (also on Romain in Time to Leave).
August was an intense month for Christian Lorentzen readers, with the critic publishing no less than eight missives in his Diary.
Letter To A Young Critic found him in his Xtina F.U.S.S. era, taking a swipe at New York’s most determined social climber. “It’s a bad idea to be high when you’re attending a show you’re going to review,” he writes, before outlining vices he perceives the emerging critic to be guilty of: “gratuitous self-dramatization, moralizing, name-calling, unnecessary and distorting personal contact with your [sic] subjects, self-pity,” crimes that the fictional Carrie Bradshaw committed almost on every episode of Sex & The City. True, she was a sex columnist, not an art or literary critic, but could the show’s ubiquitousness, with its idealised projection of a writer’s life in New York, be responsible for the self-centredness of critics writing today?
In Skull Football, he says he’s been mainlining Patrick Melrose. I’ve been getting a daily dose of Barbara Payton and Cookie Mueller throughout August, but I realise I’m now self-dramatising, so I’ll defer to Ana Kinsella to express any thoughts on Edward St. Aubyn.
He once again grappled with the question of what a book review is and isn’t (in short, scrutiny.) It’s a question not dissimilar to the one Chris Hayes asks in Weak Thesis: “how much do critics really produce thinking around art anymore?” Lorentzen also notes the role of the publicist is to “serve the literary community by highlighting worthy writing that is obscure” to which I say I DON’T CARE ABOUT THE LITERARY COMMUNITY, I JUST WANT EVERYONE TO HAVE THE OPTION TO READ GOOD BOOKS but that’s a topic for another kind of piece). Lorentzen previously threw a grenade at editorial desks via a Harper’s missive, analysing the demise of critical assessment in the literary sphere and dumbing down of book pages in favour of vapid pieces that pass for book reviews, and, worse, a never-ending stream of content whose only function is that of recommendation, recreating literary journalism into “a form of higher publicity.” To confuse that as cultural capital on the role of publicists would be a mistake. No one benefits from this model (not long enough) and a culture that only deals with things superficially contributes to their demise. Central to this downfall of critical writing was social media, with literary journalism an outlier in the arts according to Lorentzen, having held out the longest (visual arts and film are jointly singled out as having sold out long ago, following the market’s logic).
Lorentzen calls the media’s bluff and refuses to back down on his stand against what he terms the “fantastic fictional character - the casual reader who disdains literary books.” The reading public, in other words, aren’t idiots, nor did they ever ask for things to be dumbed down to their level, to say, a place of “intellectual pointlessness”, precisely because it is not their level. Which raises the question, who are the true brainless idiots here? I’d put my money on whoever’s responsible for not renewing Lorentzen’s contract at New York magazine, and no, before anyone asks over email, I am not his PR. But seeing the continuous decimation of places where his talents (or those of Barry Piece and Tomiwa Owolade) can shine [and serve the literary community better than a publicist ever could] is disheartening. What will it take for this to be reversed?
Then there was High Kampf, his review of Knausgaard’s swan song to My Struggle, originally published in TLS. Reading it this time round I couldn’t stop thinking of a particular sentence: “Writers too dour, too weird, or too difficult never quite qualify for this sort of fame.” He offers Clarice Lispector as one of three examples. I’d add Anais Nin to this mix but once again this isn’t about me.
“I was often in this place where I just felt I was in a kind of freefall.” - Paul Dalla Rosa, Bad Artist Statement
The 8/22/22 entry in Matthew Gasda’s Writer’s Diary has been on my mind for weeks, possibly because it raises questions I don’t know how to respond to.
“Despite the proliferation of confessional writing online,” he writes, “I get very little sense of confession. People seem to be gossiping about themselves—which is something very different.” What are the most unhinged things from my past I can bring forth on this page? Would there ever be a point to it beyond shock value (or self-dramatisation, to return once again to Lorentzen)? Is confession something different than the deliberate unveiling of things that have happened previously undisclosed?
“When the present feels stale, as it does now to me, it is better to go backwards, because the value you’re getting is known, rather than speculate on the future, which is intangible and unknown.” I’ve been reading Barbara Payton’s I Am Not Ashamed and Cookie Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water In A Pool Painted Black [it took a trip to Clapton to buy the LAST copy at Pages of Hackney. Bookstores in central hadn’t received the portion for weeks, something about supply chain fuck ups.]. I haven’t read either of these before but I’m aware of how their respective stories play out. Am I nostalgic for a past not my known and if so what am I retreating in this nostalgia for exactly? What is it that I am not getting in the present?
“A useful thing for a critic to do is tell us that something is a waste of time.” I could tell you not to read Philippe Besson’s Lie with Me, an utter waste of a book (I’m not a critic, so don’t be mad at me Christian Lorentzen, here I am NOT recommending a book!), but I sort of want everyone to feel the agony of going through its dull narration and uninspired dialogue just to get as angry as I did for wasting time. You got to read some bad ones to truly appreciate the good ones.
The white vest got the trend treatment by The Face, attributing its reemergence to the long hot summer that has just ended. Hardly the most imaginative take on all time classic (referred to as “the ultimate thot top and a symbol of unfettered male sexuality” in a previous iteration of this Substack by Berlin it boy Max Grob), the piece references the usual suspects (James Hartford, Marlon Brando) in its attempt to trace the wifebeater’s historic links to working class men (led by what can only be described as a condescending notion of “sleazy, greased-up mechanics”). Straight men, the piece suggests, are coopting homoeroticism (and are aware of it) by virtue of wearing white vests, “reappropriating it through a queer lens.” Or maybe the summer was just too hot for sleeves.
An appearance of the maligned gear in a manuscript I still need to edit:
“He’d text me new fantasies or dreams he had about us and we’d agree we’d act them out once I could go to his again. Few weeks later here we were in our trademark three-striped shorts and wifebeaters, perspiring and feeling faint, in our black caps and beaten up converses, strolling around the city with a can of coke each, smoking cigarettes and having sex in random buildings, hoping no one would come down to the basement or hear the sounds of our bodies colliding.”
In a month of hits and misses, The Face published a guide for sex party rookies that had less sexual energy than a middle school sex ed class. The topic is corny, but what’s baffling is the absence of personal experience. Is it a sex column if there’s no immersion into the subject matter at hand? Always remember, the only sex parties worth attending are free.
Dazed Daniel went nuclear on fashion’s downward spiral, investigating, via Alexander McQueen and Highland Rape, whether fashion will ever have the power to break taboos again. The answer is a resounding no as far as Judith Watt, who authored a biography on the Scottish designer and is quoted extensively in Rodgers essay, is concerned. That is, not fashion produced by the industry. Whereas Highland Rape, the designer’s high concept 1996 collection, was an emblem of fashion’s artistic power, collections today have been reduced to nothing but sloganeering as plain as the white tees said slogan have been printed on. For Rodgers, this is tied to fashion’s now seemingly built-in inability for ambiguity. Whereas the likes of McQueen tapped into their own demons to create “works of art” that addressed some of the most difficult topics of conversation, today’s designers have been utterly neutralised. Nowhere else is this more strongly reflected than in fashion’s relationship with sex. Rodgers explains that although the ubiquitousness of nudity and sex is fun, there’s something missing, an element of subversiveness, of the perverse, a “libidinal charge.” He continues: “fashion’s relationship with sex has never been so plain.” Dull, uninspiring, expected. Look on further than brand collaborations (Ludovico de saint Sernin x PornHub; J.W. Anderson x Tom of Finland Foundation), production of sex toys by luxury houses and celebrities alike (the list is far too long) and you can see that “sex has converged with entertainment” yet another cultural flatlining, nuanced conversations through provocation long gone. There’s an almost political stance at play here. Rodgers comes across Nagle-like in his thinking: “In a society where almost everything is permitted – particularly sexually,” he says, fashion has lost its shock-inducing factor, therefore the power to trade in taboos; or as Watt’s put it, “the purpose of taboo is shock-busting. It’s a talking point.” So by losing this, fashion has also lost all transgressive qualities, the power to challenge the status quo.
Alex Vadukul eulogised Manhattan’s last hourly rate hotel, briefly reminiscing on his first significant romance. Dan Fox has a brand new newsletter, titled Keep All Your Friends, where he has to date dealt with writer César Aira and film director María Álvarez. In the former, pegged to the publication of The Famous Magician, he explores one of the themes central to Aira’s trajectory - whether a life devoted to the creation of art is a life well-lived. In the latter, pegged to the film director’s documentary Les temps perdu opening, he explores the persistent fashion of “raw Prousting”, noting that “most of life is humdrum, unremarkable.” Liam Cagney interviewed three Irish DJs who frequent the Berlin scene for Holy Show’s fourth issue. [Holy Show apparently stands for “ridiculous sight” as in “don’t be making a holy show of yourself.” Example: When I went to Berlin, I made a holy show of myself. I did ketamine with Rob Doyle on an empty stomach and ended up throwing up three times.] Interspersed with these interviews are two clubbing diary entries by Cagney, narrating his nights out at ://about blank and Berghain. I spent the month of August obsessed with runways and paying attention (more so than usual) to people’s style, so Cagney’s choice of “flimsy” shorts and blue fishnet vest are the details that have stayed with me.
Air Mail should be banned from writing about Greece ever again. Someone needs to tell the New York Times that art collectors throwing money on art that will gather dust in lofts or storage facilities isn’t “resurrecting the forgotten art of the AIDS era.” Just how forgotten are Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz and Paul Thek? Reading Nick Haramis’ ode to collector money, I couldn’t help but think of James Greig’s The future of gay sex essay on Dazed, where he examines how gay men of a certain socio-economic background have not only coalesced into the established order, but really only ever desired full assimilation to enjoy the rewards of capitalism to begin with: MONEY, POWER, IMAGE. This sentiment feels prescient in Haramis’ article: “The very act of buying this work [of gay artists, created during the height of the epidemic] is an expression of love,” he writes, reflecting the various collectors’ hunger for accumulation disguised as taste (or worse, solidarity). The artists referenced as the next generation similarly signify the market’s stamp of approval: Doron Langberg (whose work, full disclosure, I love) and Kyle Dunn are on the Art Basel/Frieze trail and have received glossy write-ups in everything from NYT to W Magazine. Lorentzen, as always, stands corrected.
Burberry aimed to bring a biker sensibility to the runway to horrific results. Raeburn aced Copenhagen Fashion Week (I tuned in from my PR job in London before the livestream went dead half way through). In his signature now move, Christopher Raeburn and co deconstructed parachutes and reconstructed them into an array of sweatpants, jackets, shorts, hoodies and protective vests. The colour palette feels counterintuitive to summer, whites, greys and blacks. The greys in particular gave off an almost metallic look mirroring the choice of venue - a basement with similarly muted colours, all concrete with pieces of fabric hanging in between columns. It’s easy to tie the austere feel of this collection to Raeburn’s background in the Royal Air Force, but there’s something inherently hot to his functional fits and materials.
Ditto for underwear if you ask me, in light of Louis Wise’s rave on boxer shorts. HTSI’s (more on this in a future column) resident hottie had an awakening at a Uniqlo in Angel (of the sartorial variety that is). “Inappropriate as it felt,” he writes, “I reached out to touch.” One wasn’t enough, he decided then and there, spellbound by the feel. He’s referring to boxers, specifically “loose, old-school boxers”, so get your mind out of the gutter. He explains that over the years he opted exclusively for the tightness of boxer briefs, briefs and trunks forgoing the looser, more comfortable fit of boxer shorts. With the dominance of skin tight jeans at a definite end, he sees things differently. Part of the issue stems from the fashion industry. There’s been an imbalanced preference on skin-tight underwear in advertising campaigns meaning boxer shorts lost their sexual appeal (Wise mentions the Levi’s laundrette ad starring Nick Kamen as an exception and I can’t think of another myself.). Briefs and trunks were his go-to due to his single status (get in before he’s snapped up lads!), he says, assuming the choice of underwear would influence his prospects of scoring. The skaters who have inexplicably signed up to this newsletter may find this bizarre. But Wise, to my knowledge, isn’t a skater. He considers this change as partly emblematic of his age as he approaches the big 4-0, although judging by how hot - aka hotter than ever before - Rob Doyle and Cat Marnell both look, having recently entered their 40s, I don’t see why he has to worry.