Last Thursday was my birthday, so there was no newsletter, but I do have to write in praise of my favorite birthday day-of activity, which is going to an art museum. I try to do it every year, time allowing. It’s a meditative experience; art stays old while you get older. This year I went to the Philips collection and enjoyed the Bonnard landscapes and its canon-expanding “Out of Many” exhibition, which included a beautiful pink still life by Morris Graves, a now relatively obscure American modernist painter. It’s nice to go beyond the famous hits.
Today in One Thing, a bunch of culture links (don’t miss the twisty moka pot) and film criticism on Die My Love and Frankenstein from Emily Chang — Kyle Chayka
In Los Angeles, everyone loves enormous front doors. (Worth it for the photos alone.)
In the AI industry, everyone loves serif typefaces for branding, presumably because they imply the literariness and high, human quality that AI entirely lacks. That’s why you’re seeing Baskerville everywhere from Perplexity to David bars and Anthropic baseball caps.
ART INVESTORS BEWARE: Did you ever wonder what the deal was with Masterworks, that company that let you buy shares in blue-chip art? The one that was advertising everywhere a few years ago? NYT finally has the investigation. There’s no big crime or scandal, but buyers have to cherry pick which works they invest in — bet on the Basquiat — and they have no control over when the work is actually sold by Masterworks, so there’s no guarantee your Basquiat shares will be liquidated when the market is hot. Art is a notoriously illiquid commodity and its valuations are notoriously fictional until someone pays the sticker price. So I’d treat this more like sports gambling than investing, but the matches take a decade.
Charli xcx has her own Substack, which is yet another high-water mark in newsletter culture. A newsletter is just table stakes for online audience-gathering now, like having a Twitter account used to be. Charli’s ratio of 10k likes on her debut post (which happens to be a heartfelt and worthwhile meditation on the creative process) to 22k subscribers might be a record.
TURBO MOKA: Returning to a classic One Thing theme, check out this bizarro stovetop espresso pot designed by Matteo Frontini that looks like a Salvador Dali painting. Its swirling, melting design, modeled after plane turbines, is meant to bring more water in contact with heat faster.
UPSTATE FANTASIA: Audrey Gelman, of The Wing fame, opened an upstate New York hotel spinoff of her kitschy, bucolic ecommerce brand Six Bells, which sells knick knacks (quilts, candles, napkins, like a highway-side shed in New England) under the guise of a fictional village. J Lee, the perhaps familiar food critic of Feed Me, reviewed the Six Bells Inn for Interview magazine with hilarious harshness.
“It’s rare to get to spend the night in someone else’s personality disorder, but it’s not as scary as it sounds. It’s mostly boring. There’s nothing to do in the hotel, no pool, no spa, no massage, the rooms don’t even have televisions (they’d ruin the aesthetic), and the restaurant stays closed till five. There’s a children’s playroom with the most beautiful mural, and no games in sight.”
by Emily Chang
Director Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein are really running the PR circuit right now, and after seeing them I can’t stop thinking about both of them, for reasons that surprise me. I became a big fan of Lynne Ramsay’s work after We Need To Talk About Kevin, and the starring actors Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence are both masterful performers who are always a joy to watch. And yet I found Die My Love insufferable to sit through.
Most of the PR around the film has been around the fact that it’s about postpartum depression, but it’s much bigger than that. It’s more of a visceral, violent turning of the inside outwards and seems to be almost made for no audience at all. You feel as if you are a voyeur in the young couple’s life, the days blurring together into one, like a slow Sunday that aches with anxiety. It’s no spoiler to say that their personal disasters deepen.
But what I find interesting is that, despite feeling disappointed and antsy as I sat in the theater, I am actually considering seeing it again. My expectations of what the film would be are not as important as the real estate it’s been occupying in my head and the nagging feeling that Grace, Jennifer Lawrence’s character, is all of us, in a way. That is, if we acted out exactly what we felt internally when we’re at our worst, in moments when nobody around you can really quite see you. Her freak out is relatable.
Guillermo del Toro’s epic Frankenstein, starring Jacob Elordi, Oscar Isaac, and Mia Goth, is arguably a better film on the surface. It has much better reviews, is freakishly, gorgeously composed, and has a storyline that takes you through the emotional journey of watching creation bend into death and re-emerge into the harshness of life. Yet it hasn’t stuck in my head the same way that Die My Love has (though its screencaps have stuck around in my feeds for sure). Perhaps that’s because it’s simply a more literal movie, complex in story but less so in the psychology of the self.
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