Not Everyone Should Wear White T-Shirts

I’ve been eating wild blueberries we picked ourselves from the bushes and swimming in the lake. The penance for such simple pleasures, I’m sleeping on an ancient mattress and my back hurts. I’ve been reading a lot. I bought a kindle for this trip. I’ve torn through Calla Henkel’s Four Terrible Parents and Courtney Bush’s Learning. Both are new. Both are wonderful. Both are by writers about my age.

I’ve been coming up to this cottage my whole life. It’s my grandma’s now but when I was a little girl it was her aunt’s. No one in my family could probably afford to buy one today, but in the 1960s, an unmarried nurse without children and her brother, a regional bank manager with a wife and five kids, each were able to get a cottage (or at least a plot and build one from a Sears kit). Middle-class white people could really dream then. These cottages (both on the same lake) were later passed down to my grandmother and her sister who use them as their primary residences. There are always lots of dogs around.

What else to tell you?

My interview with Interior Motives host Ben Mora is out on PIN–UP with photos by David Brandon Geeting. The photos made it onto Pop Crave yesterday. Interiors Motives is my favorite show and you should become addicted to it like me. Also an interview I did with Antenne Books is up. And The Whitney Review is part of a Guardian story on reading trendiness / hot literari. Also, I made a cameo in a music video! No Bra’s “18th Floor.”

There’s a sad story playing out the last few days in New York. A young gallerist passed away. An artist who’d worked with the gallery trusted a journalist and spoke with her about the late gallerist. The artist is now devastated (and posting on Instagram about it) seeing that the full article his quotes are included in is not-so-positive. All the while the body is still warm. I’m sorry he had to learn the hard way. But I’d never speak to a journalist about someone’s death. This is coming from someone who half-identifies as a journalist.

I’m going to weigh in on the white T-shirt discourse and say not everyone should be wearing white! I know you’re maybe sick of the seasonal colors chatter and these women armed with a rainbow of swatches trying to sell you a consultation (“color clerics” per Kay Poyer). Or you have no idea what I’m talking about because you weren’t alive in the 80s and seasonal colors’ zillennial rediscovery hasn’t punctured your filter bubble. But depending on your coloring, this idea that the perfect white T-shirt is out there and you’re going to look dressed-down yet expensive if you just do enough research and spend $150 could be a fool’s errand. Low chroma people will almost always look better in a grey T-shirt. Think charcoal, graphite, oyster, pebble, fog. Or a muted blue can be a good neutral.

I went to another party at the Chelsea Hotel. It’s starting to feel “third space.” I can walk to it from my apartment, so I'm usually interested when something happens there. I wonder if I’ll ever get sick of it. In June and July alone there was Prada Mode, then the Moomins talk and dinner, and now the premiere party for Shards after they screened the first episode (out tomorrow) at the SVA Theater a block away. The party felt very TV & film industry. Wholesome in a way. All these “new faces” celebrating with their parents and managers. Palpable each face has an investment behind it. Everyone well-behaved and self-contained. No one’s aura spilling over to the larger room. Except maybe Dianne Brill and her explosion of peroxide curls. I thought the chicest person in the room was Homer Gere’s date. Kuby and I told her we loved her look and she was very shucks-me-I’m-not-even-in-the-biz. Or Angela Trimbur who mentioned she’s looking for a larger apartment to accommodate her pet birds.

The summer’s becoming a blur but some other highlights were the funny besties pair Alissa Bennett and Naomi Fry doing a talk on Carol Rama, during the last weeks of her Hauser & Wirth show. And Collier Schorr presenting Chantal Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle at Metrograph. Collier did a short conversation with Matt Wolf before as an introduction explaining her new book, which uses the film as source material, Writing a Letter: Akerman Ballet, Act 1 published by The Song Cave. I noticed neither talk worried about audience questions. This struck me as a good decision. One I hope becomes a trend!

I went to Shelter Island with a friend who’s been going out there with family since he was a kid. Our group became obsessed with this local business owner “Marie Eiffel” who has both a clothing store and a café out there. I don’t think “Eiffel” is her real last name. I assume it’s part of the persona she’s built offering French things to the island. We asked what her sign was and she told us, she actually has two birthdays because she was in a car accident and for a short time died. We got her whole near death experience story. I’m not ready to put into words this woman’s bizarre charm.

Bopping around this summer, I’ve ran into both Julio Torres and Ryan McNamara, and gushed to each of them how excited I am to see the performance they’re making with Martine Gutierrez called Marina. Part of the Whitney Biennial. At Little Island. To the three end-of-August dates, tickets sold out immediately. They were only $15. I looooove Little Island. Which you may know was conceived by DVF’s gay husband Barry Diller. I heard there’s a little ramp into the water tucked alongside the island’s concrete supports where employees can take their breaks. How nice! They made this little oasis just for the workers? Well, no. Barry actually made it so his yacht could dock there, but then realized that was probably bad optics.

Summer has me back on my quest to watch every (American) thriller possible from about 1975 to 2001. I’ve also finally dug into this book about Brian De Palma by Chris Dumas from 2012 called Un-American Psycho. It’s a dense academic film studies book, the bulk of its argument about how De Palma has been maligned and misunderstood. I got into watching De Palma’s films renting them from the library in college. He’s probably my favorite director, but for a longtime I never knew how poorly a lot of his films were received. The book emphasizes that De Palma was shot by a cop as a young man. This made me more curious about his biography and I also discovered he has two daughters, one of them named Lolita.

Next I want to read the book about the making of the The Bonfire of the Vanities: Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco from 1992.

Recent watches:

Someone to Watch Over Me (1987) directed by Ridley Scott (the villain and plot mechanisms are thinly drawn, but everything else is worth watching for: the peak-’80s glamour, the glittering cityscapes, the chemistry between the uptown socialite and the Queens cop)

Stormy Monday (1988) directed by Mike Figgis (who went on to big hits like Leaving Las Vegas and Internal Affairs, and then made some real artsy films around the turn of the millennium: think completely un-commercial video art but with huge stars. Figgis clearly has a way of winning actors over. Even his debut Stormy Monday he was able to land a cast of Sean Bean, Sting, Tommy Lee Jones, and Melanie Griffith) *hat tip to Brad Phillips for recommending this one

The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992) directed by Curtis Hanson (he also wrote and directed The Bedroom Window with Isabelle Huppert and Elizabeth McGovern which is in some ways better. The Hand is very much a nuclear-family-under-attack thriller. The evil nanny’s clothes are perfect. They aren’t anything special, it’s just wardrobes from that era meant to build normal-to-upwardly-mobile characters are very inspiring to me)

The Juror (1996) directed by Brian Gibson (this film was roasted at the time. Demi Moore even got a Razzie that year as a kind of joint effort between this and Striptease. Idk. Sure, it’s not exactly original, but Demi, Alec Baldwin, and James Gandolfini make it a lot of fun. Demi’s character is also a conceptual artist. She makes these sculptures inside boxes that you have to feel and can’t see. They’re pretty compelling, certainly more convincing than any of the art in Rest and Relaxation imho. Part of my study of these films has branched into trying to understand why so many of them were really panned. Do I like them because they’re camp? Or are movies now so much more poorly crafted even mediocre movies from then hit better?)

Books queued on my kindle for the rest of the week: Rachel Cusk, Book of M (I’ve been picking at it, which says something, not necessarily that I don’t like it but that it’s slow). Charlie Fox’s Drool (so far I’ve gathered it’s about a pyromaniac). Hallie Elizabeth Newton’s debut Agnes Lives! (period fiction set in 2014, SoulCycle is central). Mary H.K. Choi’s Pool House (about a mother and her adult daughter living together in a pool house, maybe well-timed to read this week while my mother and I are sleeping next to each other at the cottage on a pair of twin beds on the enclosed porch).

It’s annoying of course to remind that fall is around the corner. But I want to let you know that I’m doing a walkthrough with artist George Rouy on the opening weekend of his solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth on September 13. It’s free and open to the public but reservations are encouraged. George and I chatted last week over video and it’s got me quite looking forward to meeting him

Some art things I’m also excited about: the Marianne Wex survey at MoMA (K8 Hardy has work in it). Camille Henrot’s performance that just was in Aspen will have its New York premiere. Then coming at the end of November, this big survey at the Whitney about the history of internet art titled Artport. Rhizome is also turning 30. Here’s my trip down memory lane about net art from a few years ago (visuals by Molly Soda)

One more thing, because I’m writing from Canada. For the past few years, from any Canadian IP, you haven’t been able to see posts from news organizations when you’re on Instagram. It’s so bizarre and always takes me a minute to remember. I’ll be looking for a specific post…like wtf. It’s somewhat arbitrary which magazines do and don’t get blocked as “news.”

The backstory is that because massive platforms like Google and Meta benefit from sharing news content while the journalism organizations have been losing ad revenue, the Canadian government tried to negotiate a compensation deal where these platforms would compensate Canadian news organizations for their content. Google agreed to a deal. Meta didn’t. So the result is news is blocked on Facebook and Instagram when you’re in Canada (even American news). Feels like a lose-lose for everybody!