3x3: May 9, 2023

sex stories, power pop, & space race psychedelia

Welcome to the first round of o/n/o — a recommendation roundup of 3 old, 3 new, and 3 offline experiences of art & culture I’m thinking about this week. Here we go!

old (≥ 25 years)

Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill (1988) — A brief story collection that deftly illuminates how resentment and the lust for power take root in various relationships, like those between sex workers and their clients, older men and younger women, and ex–best friends. Flat, clean prose that nevertheless strikes you between the ribs.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) — A Stanley Kubrick film so weird that audiences at the original screening walked out. And yet it looms undeniably large over Hollywood’s imagination: Star Trek, Star Wars, Interstellar, Gravity, and every other movie/show about space travel owes its sleek futuristic aesthetic to the set design of 2001. If nothing else, it’s fun to marvel at the absolute grip 2001 has over the next several generations of sci-fi.

She Hangs Brightly by Mazzy Star (1990) — A guttural and lovely album replete with tambourines. Best listened to wistfully, while driving through the gritty dusk in a car so old you hear everything rattling out on the road. “Blue Flower” is my favorite, on account of its gristly guitar and the two times Hope Sandoval croons, “I never really wanted your heart.”

A still from the 20-minute warp-speed scene in 2001. Apparently devoted fans used to time their acid trips to peak during this part.

new (≤ 1 month)

Showing Up (April 7) — This is kind of cheating, because it’s just over a month old, but Kelly Reichardt’s film about artists at an Oregon collective is the best movie I’ve seen all year. Michelle Williams is dazzlingly neurotic as sculptor Lizzy, and Hong Chau is delightful as her laissez-faire landlord/friend. But the best part of this film is how lovingly it depicts artists’ relationships to their own perception: Lizzy is a brittle perfectionist, reworking the limbs of her tiny clay figurines over long nights in the studio, while her brother Sean is a disheveled experimentalist, digging 6-foot holes in his yard for no reason. They are total opposites, temperamentally unable to understand one another. When they finally connect, over a climactic act of tenderness, it is wordless and sublime.

“Are You Thunder or Lightning?” (April 27) — An absolutely tremendous dispatch from Sophie Haigney of the Paris Review, about all the fun ways there are to categorize people (thunder/lightning, still/sparkling, Yankees/Mets). It immediately reminded me of 2021 StirFry’s brunch reunion, where we all proposed niche personality charts. Colin had a grid on his whiteboard where guests could locate themselves along the axes of “literal–metaphorical” and “cigarette–beer” (I’m a metaphorical beer). Brennecke offered up the axes “can hang–can’t hang” and “gets its–doesn’t get it,” as well as examples of people who can’t hang and don’t get it but somehow manage to be dear friends. Elliot said he and his friends like the chiller–tweaker–narc triangle, noting that most people are two but very few are one or three. These are my favorite games, and Haigney nails the appeal of them:

With bonus love to Brenn for her prescience in sending me both this piece & the above screenshot, which encapsulates its/our ethos of attentive friendship.

Everything Harmony by The Lemon Twigs (May 5) — Old-school power pop with plenty of panache! Ballads from the Beatles reincarnate! I especially dig “Any Time Of Day,” but I’ve also enjoyed going back for “Baby, Baby,” from The Lemon Twigs’ 2016 debut album Do Hollywood.

Genuinely just begging everyone to see Showing Up. I love it so much.

offline

Sent a big old project at Cliffs of Id — I’ve spent a fair few sessions on a long & burly overhung V5 at our local climbing gym (which, btw, gets its name from Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, a book that divides LA into the Foothills, Autopia, Surfurbia, and the Plains of Id. Mystical!) I finally finished it, which I’m thrilled about, but more than anything I’m grateful for the perfect feeling of flowing through a boulder problem after spending hours refining beta from every angle, figuring out how to hone my body’s grace & strength to match its demands.

Sofia Kourtesis x Baalti at Sound Nightclub — Last Friday, attended amazing back-to-back DJ sets at a gorgeous club in Hollywood. The lighting is stunning; there is a huge matrix of lanterns and disco balls that rise and fall from the ceiling with the movement of the music, plus there is a shark-shaped (!) disco ball (?) over the stage. Sofia crushed it, and I had the transcendent, transporting night of dancing that I needed.

I <3 our public land — Spent 10 total hours over Saturday & Sunday lounging in two beloved neighborhood parks: microdosing, journaling, sending voice messages to friends, aspiring to embroider, brainstorming essays, sharing a blueberry/cacao smoothie, doing yoga, playing tag when we meant to play tennis, stumbling into yard sales, reading, sunscreening, eavesdropping. An idyllic spring weekend for the books.

Another shot of Sound, because isn’t this sick?

bonus: what’s on hold at the library?

Featuring a bunch of recommendations from Sigrid Nunez and Elif Batuman’s Writers at Work interviews in The Paris Review, as well as one indirectly from Nova (who introduced me to Sabrina Imbler’s Dyke (Geology), which the library sadly does not have yet). This is too many books (14), but it does not top my current record (17), and in my defense, Couplets, Palo Alto, Monsters, and Biography of X are all on order and won’t arrive for months.

Happy reading & with love,

Izzy