This was written as part of the "one-day cultural takeover and exhibition powered by Nike SNKRS on September 12, 2026, in Milan, celebrating the archival Air Max Dolce sneaker.". We were pleased to perform as Hollywood Superstar Review.

For six hours, two actresses read out passages from their assembled books, answered questions from the public. For six hours we wore t shirts and clothes that matched the assembled art. For six hours all we ate was the rice crackers hidden in a 3-D printed pink Henry Moore.

HOLLYWOOD SUPERSTAR LIVE BLOGGING 6 HOUR PERFORMANCE TYPE TYPE

More institutions, please!

Dear Superstar, there are many men with means, and there are a few men with taste, and there are about like fourty-five men with means and taste and none of them are doing what they need to do- which is to solve the socio-econo-ethico conditions of my thirst.

On the fact that there are no good bars to drink in, in London, perhaps we can say that these men ought to be a change in this department. And before you protest, please don’t fool yourself: when I say that there is nowhere to drink in London I am not saying there is no cherished drinking institutions. I am talking about the overabundance of mediocrity that leaves me absolutely parched of meaning. Why is there nowhere that has the design element, the exclusivity of clientele, the mystery that is necessary in order to make something like this work out.

In any case, we have two things to say right now on the decorative state of the domestic:

Rich men want to be artists when they should be collectors
We have become too okay with letting strangers into our homes

The post-internet age is one in which the bar has been left behind. We are programming and broadcasting from our bedrooms, homemade negroni in hand, pint can in hand. We proceed to socialise domestically because of zoning laws prohibiting live music and late nights, because a drink costs an hour of minimum wage work, because we can already see everyone we need to see on instagram. We invite people into our homes physically because the rigour demanded by public space is too much when the social contract has been worn so thin, because since we were young we had the history of the entire world shot into our brain as we were wrapped up in our barbie/superman/nonbinary bedspread.

The domestic has already been so public for all of us that the ‘reveal’ in person (because of course there is no such thing as a blind date) becomes about subtlety. It is fitting that London bars are a blank relief of anonymity, when so much of life is lived looking at usernames and overly curated online worlds. The great relief of wetherspoons, the great relief of their lack of music. The even greater relief, sometimes hipster relief sometimes not so hipster relief of a Samuel Smith pub, and their similar lack of music. All of these places are amazing places where you can go and be nothing, as a relief from the supreme individualising process of creating a private property authorship of your own life. But these places are only open for so long, unless you have daddy/company card: we only have so much money, but we all really love to hear the sound of our own voice as we trail off into the night. So we invite people inside, for economic and social reasons.

Those whose lives are not overdetermined by the social or the economic are the errant, arrogant sons of financiers and those navel gazing daughters who did not want to become consultants. The unprofessional trustafarians, distracted and stimulated into becoming artists as an excuse for their own failed identities. What else? What else is there for them to do? I have an idea- how about instead of making your lives so incredibly boring, you might want to fall out of love with your punk, industrial teenage heroes and become a Malcolm McClaren. Perhaps I am leaning too far into familial, socially reproductive determinism here, but I can’t help but wish for some people to be the businessmen their fathers wished for them to be. 

Dear Superstar, when I was being educated at the finest school in all the land, I was taught the most incisive, cutting, high level of the snake-eating-itself of institutional critique. This level of meta-critique means that I might have been put into this situation in which we find ourselves writing at this very moment, which is wearing sneakers to promote a shoe in the city of fashion, Milano. At this very second, we have been installed in a small fashion institution in the railway arches 200 meters from the Milano Centrale Statione. 

When I was taught to criticise, it was always as if I were inside the railway arches, in the bright white of an installed space. Clean, white, pink. Promotional and perfect, my feet fit exactly in these shoes. This is where I am meant to be. This place is good, we are tucked away in the centre of the exhibition. At this very second people are looking at me writing, half-pretending to be writing. LaLaLa. We are here performing for six hours and the lighting is fluorescent but perfect, everyone’s skin shines expensive like the sweat on an Arabian horse. Men come up to me and ask those obvious kinds of questions that you forget people use to flirt: “are you an artist?”.

No, we say. We are bloggers. We are here to blog about the topic: why we should be having more guys design places like Max’s Kansas City- we need more restauranteurs in London. Restauranteurs who don’t care about food. Food is what you care about to care about your body,  but if you go too far along that road you end up like Bateman. If there is anything that we learnt from American Psycho, it's that restaurants were invented so business people could prevent themselves from disclosing the true brutality of their fantasies! 

Lets have a restaurant where you can only see each other from quite close up, red lights and a band in the next room. Let’s have a bowl of chicken wings for the table and a large bucket of Sangria. Let’s have it as a chain; as a public members’ club that wouldn’t have yourself for a member. If you got money come talk to us. But first: let's collect ourselves.

Gloria Steinem died last week, or was it the week before? Famously glamorous, she was what many might call a 'blueprint', in the sense that she went undercover to expose the predictably misogynistic practices involved in the hiring of playboy mansion cocktail waitresses in the late 60's.

Today, there is an endless production and consumption of pale imitations of her real risk-taking (the infamy from Steinem's groundbreaking '68 piece prevented her from publishing for years)- all of it so much less hardcore and in this editor's opinion a complete waste of time: bla bla bla "I am an middle-class 'intellectual' woman read about my secret masquerade behind the scenes of [INSERT RIDICULOUS SLEAZY ENVIRONMENT]'. ETC.

I like, many others, am her igloo sister in the erotics of investigative feminist journalism. The most fantastic thing about risk-taking journalism is that it is an excuse to pretend, lie, and fuck one's life for little to no reward. And still the temptation for pretty girls to go disguise-mode remains; perhaps it's something about Hollywood.

So, in honour of her famous disguises and dressing up, we honour you Gloria, by publishing the work of someone completely different: Edit DeAk. In the same year Gloria Steinem published her playboy piece,1968, Edit DeAk escaped from Hungary to reach New York and all that it offered, freedom-wise.

In 1973 DeAk founded downtown art magazine Art-Rite, which she ran with Walter Robinson until 1978. One of her strengths was her gravitational pull to the sensations and performances of the night club. In November 1980 she organised Dubbed In Glamour, bringing outrageous party-glamour-artists from the Mudd Club to perform in Official Art Area, The Kitchen. Cookie Mueller, Debbie Harry, Vivienne Dick, Tina L'Hotsky, DJ Anita Sarko, Mary Lemley. ETC.

We present here a bit of editorial from DeAk from Art Rite issue 11, 1976. It's about the 'Intellectual Whore', and how you might Hollywood yourself by drawing on a moustache. Performing stardom, performing masculinity.

-- Eileen Slightly

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"PENCIL MOUSTACHE MAKES UP" ART RITE ISSUE 11. COVER BY ED RUSCHA.

The pencil thin moustache is part of the trappings of a certain kind of masculinity, residually based in the Hollywood of the 30's, certainly a cosmopolitan place, rather ubiquitous in reverse (everyone was there). Any man who would be suave or swashbuckling or sinister in the '30s would wear it; yes the '30s, ten cents a dream and the time of the pencil moustache and the performer as mass hero.

There is more than coincidence for this moustache to appear then as an interclass fashion. Movies were a mass medium. This fashion strangely enough celebrates the star as a new hero with is allusion to the performer by "denoting" a "kind of" masculinity, which was really an indicated masculinity, which can only be meant positively in the world of artificially created reality, that is, the performer's. You do not have to be anything, better that you have a presence. Presence- as the new commodity popularised by the star industry- was in fact easier to get across without the "noise" of the whole thing, with the "real" personality left out.

The movies, through the stars, made role-playing a mass phenomena of the '30s, the decade with more great style than ever, and no reality; when regular people excepting the weird types borrowed the visual jargon of the movie world; the pencil moustache which started as a symbol for morally questionable characters was developed to its purest to represent those esthetes of gangstership, the gigolos. The gigolos were flourishing like never before, at supper clubs, on ocean cruises, by the poolside, in the cafes and on the boulevards, both on and off the silver screen, because they were a style.

It's nothing for a man to wear such a moustache; a certain vanity perhaps. But now women- women do not grow moustaches. They must paint them on. Groucho painted them on.

After I had just finished growing up I was subjected to those "measuring up the entity" type glances. It was during this phrase that my mother remarked: "You have legs like a whore's" . In no time I was slapped again on my other cheek to turn, the combination remained restricted. This gave me a real perspective on Marlene Deitrich. A whore in a man's suit is the intellectual whore, for years the only legitimate style for talent in a woman.

I don't really mean whore, but a woman who takes as a chosen character the branded woman (i.e women are branded by an inherited pile of assumptions made about womanhood, and when a woman consciously assumes this stereotyped role, she impersonates the collective character traits of what is expected of her, the “desired” woman, which is simply the same as the branded woman or simply the whore) so that through her desirability she gains leeway, freedom to sell, to finesse some ideas through a social anti-climate.

The intellectual whore, just like the whore, is going to do that with the support of a self-made and made-from-self structure. Except while the whore might turn all of the way around with a pirouette to refer back to her femininity as a commodity to use as a support structure, the intellectual whore would do that as a double entendre: the intellectual woman plays the whore as a style and then puts that very image in a man’s suit- evoking a simultaneous desirability and distilled sexual imagery of intellect. Social conventions are confused this way. Imitate them a bit, and dress like them.

Since I realised that I had to operate between images of my legs, I tried not to think of my legs. But Busby Berkely really liked shooting under the bridge made from like 100 girls’ legs and Carmen Miranda was sporting a 30 foot high headdress of bananas and still no offense in hollywood.

But do it when its not a pattern not a hundred girls, but you and your life. The images between your legs have to be dealth so that your ideas can find a channel to come out. And how to get them out in a performing situation, without the other 99 girls?

Performers looking for a ‘stage’ persona to distance them from their audience and temper their “true” image, need something to function as a mask, but one of minimal means, since the projected persona must also be a person.

The pencil moustache is such an adhoc style (the sort of thing Style is all about- just pick one to drive them crazy), a kind of minimal cosmetics that is deeply intuitive- an accommodating balance of the intellectual woman artist performer and the sensibility of the gigolo, the utmost of the male stud exploitation roles. The motif generates sexual attention (shades of the new sexuality- female aggression) and is armor at the same time (as cooly ambiguous as wearing sunglasses), or as the slippery hearted gigolo).

The intellectual whore finds a new power and security in the sphere of her oppression- her cool sexual turbulence is disconcerting to her loyal opposition. As a reaction to external cues, to oppression (the flesh market), the thin moustache is surface politics that encapsulates a neurotic adjustment to a neurotic social climate. Out of the movies, the pencil moustache is the subject of a reversed focus, the center of the diffusion of personhood; that is it seems the manifestation of endless different conscious and unconscious structures (sexuality, bisexual chic, self-revelation and self-concealment, presence and role control, etc). Through two carefully applied strokes which indicate the entity as they fail to describe it.”

Edit Iak 1976.

No one goes to an art fair to fall in love with art. Or to fall in love. Yoona went because she was in Korea to get a colonoscopy. At the fair, she identitfied that she "Reeks of American individualistic guilt" to her motherland amongst what she labels the condition of uniformity amongst Frieze Go-ers, clothing wise.

Frieze Seoul achieved a level of absurd Frieze anywhere else (™) could never: "They juxtaposed Keith Haring works with hentai cat girl paintings and it was all just so abominable that it brought a genuine smile to my face."

The essence:

Does the amount of complimentary consumables at an art event accurately indicate its wider art scene’s health?

Chanel Bag count: 40

Birkin Count: 4

Non Classic Flap Chanel: 26

keeping an open heart, mind, and eye to whatever piques your interest – which, for me, tends to be works that lean heavily on a certain feminine sensibility.

⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚ 슈퍼스타가 말한다. UwU . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

I arrived in Korea in time to catch the last 48 hours of Frieze Seoul. The week is: gallery nights, cocktail receptions, and performances organized by neighborhood: Euljiro Night on Monday, Hannam Night on Tuesday, Cheongdam Night on Wednesday, and Samcheong Night on Thursday. I missed Euljiro, Hannam, and Cheongdam Night because I was sedated in a hospital bed getting my endoscopy, colonoscopy, bloodwork, and a million other tests done, but as soon as I got out of the hospital Thursday morning it was game time.

Thursday: Afternoon at MMCA (the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) aka my favorite museum in all of South Korea that you just have to visit if you’re ever here. I came for the newly opened Do Ho Suh exhibition and waited in line for an hour, keeping myself entertained with people-watching – as one does – visually surveying those around me for a general sense of current Seoul fashions. The monochromatic ‘safe’ outfit (which ranges in normalcy between Uniqlo mannequin and how you’d maybe see Hyein Seo pieces styled on SSENSE) generally rules the city. For better or for worse, it’s a symptom of the overall culture of social conformity here. That should, in theory, make me feel some type of way standing in that line with my hot pink dip-dye hair and Halloween-hued geometric print L.A.M.B. bag, but I’m no longer fazed by these things because I’m a mildly self-absorbed girl who thinks my outfit is the most tasteful in the room anyways and who has accepted the fact that, to my motherland kin, I probably reek of an American individualistic spirit.

The monochromatic ‘safe’ outfit (which ranges in normalcy between Uniqlo mannequin and how you’d maybe see Hyein Seo pieces styled on SSENSE) generally rules the city.

In short, the Do Ho Suh exhibition was kinda life changing. Suh (born in Seoul; lives and works in London) is best known for his irl-scale sheer fabric sculptures that reconstruct the various homes he has lived in during his lifetime — the home being a space that comes to contain a certain psychospatial energy. And let me tell you, I was Psychospatially Energized. Every plane of Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024), including the ceiling, is adorned with doorknobs, wall phones, outlets, lamps, and other home fixtures from Suh’s life, all lifesize in delicate, bright fabric. It felt like being inside a giant bowl of Lucky Charms cereal. I know the word whimsical is a bit of a touchy word right now but that’s truly what it was. Seeing Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013–2022) in person, I genuinely thought I might cry. The work is made entirely of paper rubbings of the hanok home where Suh grew up, constructed to scale in the gallery space. Rubbing as an act of love is the main conceptual crux of the work, but there’s also this bilingual wordplay with how “rubbing” and “loving” sound the same in English when pronounced by a native Korean speaker. There’s something about that that will always make me emotional… Probably something having to do with some sort of diasporic grief… No need to get into all that here, but all this to say that the Do Ho Suh exhibition at MMCA is a must see.

I had about an hour to kill before I was to meet a girl from Instagram who had messaged me that she was working the ArtDrunk cart in front of Kukje Gallery. I spent that time wandering through the other open Samcheong Night galleries, popping in and out of Gallery Chosun, Hakgojae Gallery, Kumho Museum of Art, and Gallery Hyundai – all of which were brimming with bodies but not much else interesting. When I got to Kukje, host of the official Samcheong Night party until midnight, there was an insane line for the free food catering and every gallery room was teeming with people of all ages – and seemingly of all levels of artistic inclination – among Park Seo-Bo’s paintings. I had never seen that much free food and drink at an art event in my entire life. Like there was something about it that made me feel proud almost, that the Korean art scene was presumably so vibrant and financially healthy enough to offer such Abundance. None of the Frieze-adjacent events I went to in LA this past February had complimentary food and the Kiko Kostadinov × ASICS Ryan Trecartin presentation was the only one I remember with an open bar. Does the amount of complimentary consumables at an art event accurately indicate its wider art scene’s health? Such generosity and abundance being offered by an arts institution to its public… It was a culture shock to me, an American.

Does the amount of complimentary consumables at an art event accurately indicate its wider art scene’s health?

Eventually I found the ArtDrunk cart and met [name redacted] who was so sweet and gave me one of their Frieze week Survival Kits. It included some hangover jelly and instant Americano sticks and I just thought that that was so Korean. Lol. There wasn’t really any artwork in all of my Samcheong Night gallery-hopping that I was moved by. I was there to vibemaxx anyways, but I left early to walk through Gyeongbokgung Palace and went to bed that night hopeful that I’d see something Amazing Awesome Insane Lifechanging or at the very least Memorable at the fair.

The next day, I made my long arduous trek over to Gangnam (I’m staying with relatives in the west tip of Seoul) to the COEX center hosting both Frieze and Kiaf. I started at Frieze, wandering the maze of booths in that giant white hall like some flâneuse without any gallery to beeline for. I think this is the ideal approach to experiencing a fair or any situation where there are hundreds if not almost a thousand artworks in one place; keeping an open heart, mind, and eye to whatever piques your interest – which, for me, tends to be works that lean heavily on a certain feminine sensibility.

My favorite works, in no particular order:

Ryan Gander with Lisson *The thermals made me lazy, or The squatters (Smoky meet Monk’s Deflated Sculpture II (2009))*, 2020

Precious Okoyomon with Mendes Wood *I pray for that which I cannot hold*, 2026 *I swear to you I’m going to get what I want*, 2026

Kimsooja with Axel Vervoordt Gallery *Bottari*, 2022-2026

Jenny Holzer with Kukje Gallery *Missiles*, 2024

Sylvie Fleury with Sprüth Magers *Wet & Wild (Turquoise)*, 2017 *Wet & Wild (Purple)*, 2017

Seung-taek Lee with Gallery Hyundai *Godret Stone*, 1987 *Tied Stone*, 1985

Shin Min with P21 *Milk*, 2026 *Nononononono*, 2026 *Tteokkochi Angel-Siwon*, 2026

Zangano with Kaikai Kiki Gallery *room*, 2026

Damien Hirst with Gagosian *Pharmaceuticals*, 2005 *Nemesis*, 2007 Featuring the girl who stood in front of it for at least 10 minutes taking a phone call while everyone patiently waited behind her to get a better picture… Honestly #fab of her…

Three with Whitestone Gallery *5679g*, 2026

Yoo Choongmok with Allme Artspace *Formation - Moment 10-31*, 2022 My favorite piece from the entire fair!!!!! J'adore…

At a certain point I got tired of the art and felt I had pretty much seen everything I needed to see at the Frieze side. I’d been there for about an hour, which made me feel like I maybe went too fast. So even though I was tired as shit, I forced myself to keep walking between the booths. To appease my bored, dopamine-addicted attention span that thirsts for Reels, I kept myself stimulated by keeping a Chanel bag and Birkin tally in my Notes app. When the count of Chanel bags reached 26, that started getting boring too, so I changed my criteria to increment my counter only if it was a non classic flap. Once my Chanel bag counter reached 40 and Birkin counter 4, I sat down in the corner to rest and post on my Instagram Story – as one should mid-fair.

When the count of Chanel bags reached 26, that started getting boring too, so I changed my criteria to increment my counter only if it was a non classic flap.

I posted about the popular bags I was seeing (the Goyards, Issey Miyake Bao Baos, Balenciaga Cities) and their respective demographics of choice – the points for which I don’t need to reiterate here. After the bag counting game got boring, I started playing Sweet or Sour, where you look out the back of the bus and smile at the passing drivers to see which smiled back (sweet) and which didn’t (sour). My Frieze-adaptation of the game essentially entailed speedwalking by the booths, making very overt eye contact with the gallerists huddled at their corner tables and smiling at them to see what my hit rate would be. I ended with 6 sweet and 41 sour before taking the escalator to Kiaf.

My favorite booth from the entire day was Dohing Gallery on the Kiaf side. They showed these insane, hyperrealistic paintings of porcelain doll objects by Seoyeon Kim. When my aunt went the next day, she said that all of Seoyeon’s work had been sold. Kiaf had more of the pop-art, kitschy, tasteless works like glittery paintings of Chanel and Nike sneakers, rhinestoned Buddha and KAWS-type sculptures, and this one booth I was honestly so enthralled by because they juxtaposed Keith Haring works on a wall adjacent to these hentai cat girl paintings and it was all just so abominable that it brought a genuine smile to my face.

Something I had also noticed across both fairs was that nearly all the Japanese galleries do cute, in the sense that the cute art object appears to be the dominant theme. Cute as a mode – not just for the artists in creating these cute-entrenched, Yoshitomo-Nara-esque works but seemingly for the galleries as well. Almost like the cuteness as branding felt like their approach to selling the work. What felt like leaning heavily into the Orientalist stereotypes that conflate cuteness with East Asia and especially anything Japanese was done to such an overt extent that it almost felt like some radical act of autonomy… a reclamation of kawaii… perhaps even the cute as a mode of self-determination… But this is my generous reading of it dressed up in big words; many of these works were low-vibrational and spiritually-obsolete, or just not my cup of tea but were probably low-hanging fruit enticing to Korean chaebols looking to decorate their newborn’s playroom in their Jeju vacation home, or something.

After perusing all that Kiaf had to offer, I plopped myself in the corner and took a moment to process all that I had seen. I had this epiphany that my approach to the fair – consuming as much as I could within a short period of time without any preordained direction or affinities – rendered my experience of the art into something akin to Clavicular’s speed dating stream. With all the options to see and with the speed at which I was consuming them, an artwork truly had a fraction of a second to pique my interest before I was already onto the next. I genuinely felt like Clav interrupting a girl mid sentence to dismiss her for the one behind her. But I think this Clav speed dating metaphor works really well because, like the power dynamic at play between Clav (who maintains the attitude that these girls are to impress him and not vice versa) and the girls (who come in eager to win him over), I approached the art with the attitude that they were to impress me, and had a mere second to do so. I didn’t have much of this willingness to give in to any piece or allow it to grow on me by really sitting with it – although, I did have my Woah Vicky (the Yoo Choongmok piece).

However, I think it’s important to admit my superficiality as a viewer, because the honest truth is that I only had a very surface-level interaction with the works. The conditions of the fair also make this so, simply because of the sheer mass of art to see, the absence of descriptive context, and the constant movement of foot traffic that unconsciously keeps your legs walking despite your eyes and heart maybe being glued to a piece. An art fair is not where you go to fall in love with an artwork. Or to fall in love. There’s nothing wrong nor depressing about this – most artworks for me fall into the category of Like and rarely into Love anyways – but I think this is what makes art fairs feel like a grand game of surfaces. I had more fun studying the people there than the works, but that is one of the pleasures that art offers; it brings people together. Cliché yeah I know, but true. At the very least, it creates a chance to fraternize with others around some shared aesthetic affinity and what else would you possibly want to do besides that? That is seemingly the predominant mode of living nowadays anyways and Frieze is really just a microcosm of it…

Till next time… Reporting from Seoul… Xoxo.. Yoona…

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Is life how you imagined it as a child?

No, because I didn’t know any of the things I’m now doing existed, let alone that I could be doing them.

Describe the new music video for your single

It’s about me being unable to decide whether to go to a certain celebrity party in Chelsea, NYC, imagining walking there and what it’s going to be like (people dancing awkwardly - the party never really seems to take off), and being caught in an elevator with intensely chatting socialites and celebrities who are giving me funny looks because I’m not one of them. Then it goes into a more general section about not having the motivation or cash to participate in the body perfection culture this party seems to represent (this part is not serious). In the end, I never make it there.

DOES FAME CHANGE PEOPLE?

PROBABLY!

Why should people see you perform?

I heard it’s supposed to be very “intense” and “maximum energy”.

Define the term “Munchausen” and also tell me where and when the best place to listen to Nina Hagen is.

“Munchausen” is a compulsion to show off and lie about things like celebrity affiliations and countercultural achievements, such as playing in obscure bands or catching rare/non-existent stds, and not caring if you’re getting the facts wrong. At some point it doesn’t really matter if any of it is true.

The bit about Nina Hagen is actually only partial “Munchausen” - she turned up at my house once when I lived in Camden - one of my flatmates was friends with her and had been babysitting her kid when they all lived in a squat together some years previously.

Who is the enemy?

Greed.
Neoliberalism.

What is in a name? Where does “No Bra” come from?

The name came from a cover of the now online-only “Daily Sport” softporn mag, saying “Rachel Stevens with No Bra”. [insert image?] We liked the simplicity of the name and the bad grammar - I didn’t really know about the various connotations of the term “no bra” in anglo culture at the time.

Is Page three, as a mindset, quintessentially british?

I see what you’re getting at - apparently it was only introduced in 1970 by Rupert Murdoch though who is Australian tho?

What would your uniform be for eternity?

Mini skirt, trainers, heels in bag, bomber jacket - adapted for climate change.

Does a stage occlude reality or create reality?

It creates reality.

What does Hollywood mean to you?

It’s a place in Los Angeles. It’s also a specific way of telling stories in film that is reflective of a certain 20th century American/western ideology, centred around maintaining traditional power structures, Freud-inspired psychology and binary thinking.

Where is…the original…in music

Originality starts as soon as you’re writing about what’s important to you specifically instead of copying things. Are you asking me what music nowadays is original? I feel like most music i hear is original!

In 2011, you started the weekly Gay Vinyl Club, how do your memories of that time shape up?

​​It was amazing because of the range of really talented DJs and performers we were lucky to have - the idea was to encourage experimentation and let everybody do what they wanted with no rules, besides it was a free party on Tuesdays, so there was no pressure..There was this really amazing energy - it felt like everyone was coming together for some kind of shared mission of sonic/cultural anarchy. Arca recently told me she thinks that Gay Vinyl “shifted the culture” via the quote “creative and emotional fusion that happened during the party”, and it’s where she learned to DJ.

The party also attracted a really mixed crowd, who were generally open to anything musically. I remember one time there were only these two kids left in the club, body-popping across the benches and floor to Coil’s “Where Are You?” for ages, then one looked up, going “i wrap my last kiss in a bandage” - what??”

How is it to work with Bruce LabRUCE?

It’s great! Bruce is a lovely, generous and hilarious person who has maintained his punk ethos to and has an encyclopedic knowledge of movies!

What better way to start the school year than with a review of a live show in Hackney Wick? Teo discusses Beatlemania and how to self-model as an indie band.

Sydney Sweeney asked Teo, What is with WPDMT's Jesus Gimmick? Teo responds:

Once upon a time, allusions to Jesus felt like the price of admission to rock. Despite a wave of late-80s avant-garde bands having put an end to such trends, by opening their album with a gospel choir, Worldpeace seem eager to revive such an outdated fad. The interest in Jesus doesn’t ring as genuine as his in Lennon. It's retro-proactive pop.

Beatlemania thrived off the currency of the young. Not so recently, hating the Beatles was fun. "I hate the Beatles" or "The Beatles are overrated" was something you said when you wanted to be different.

While he reviews WPDMT's new release, FLOWERS POWERS, Teo also discusses the evidence of a PR lead "Beatlemania" revival. WPDMT's album cover takes the original image of kids in America burning the Beatles' albums because, you guessed it, they'd said: "We're bigger than Jesus". In the centre of the flames are two effigies of Rowan and Leo. It reminds Hollywood of a satanic ritual, AKA Jennifer's body, where someone is sacrificed, and the indie band pays the ultimate price, in exchange for... WPDMTmania?

If we are talking about spam instagrams, one side of our heart is devoted to @inthebackofthetruck, the other looks to @thepsychedlicdump.

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REVIEW OF FREE SHOW AT HACKNEY WICK, FRIDAY 28th of AUGUST, featuring Bassnotesonhope and J'wow.

When Worldpeace DMT announced they were doing a free show, I let myself be excitedly lured up and into yet another ex-industrial hall, alongside a queue of Londonese youth alike. So when Sydney Sweeney asked me to review the night, I was caught off guard. I had fun, and I was happy to contribute to the young and local invasion of such a gauche venue; but there’s certainly something to be said about where the show lands on Worldpeace’s cunningly marketed new-Bealtes masterplan.

As she introduced their set, Rowan Please joked about how the crowd was anomalously cool given the location of the free show. Turns out it’s easier than you’d think to pack a bunch of young people into a hot room in the pulseless heart of Hackney Wick.

Debuting their latest live formation, the duet is joined on stage by a guitarist wearing a top hat and a bassist wearing a Fortnite tee. Rayban shades: on, Leo utters the first words of the show “school is out, and I never did it like it anyway” with the sobriety of a judicial testament and continues to set out his childhood plan of proving his parents wrong by starting a band and being “the biggest in the world”- while so far being unresolved, tonight feels like he’s making a case for it. At a time when “Worldpeace DMT” starts to awkwardly make their way into industry-curated festival lineups, putting on a show in Hackney Wick feels like they’re claiming local success and enjoying a glimpse of the Beatlemania-type cultural effect that they’re so hungry for.

The quintet’s nervously jagged acoustic arrangements of “Bigger Than Jesus”, “Big Yellow Taxi” and songs from the forthcoming album “Stick around for Tea”, gently suggest that their music has just as much emotional weight without electronic sounds. Half-heartedly imitating worship, we close our eyes, lift our heads and delicately sway through the semi-biblical verses of “Jesus Jesus”; in contrast to the fuller texture on the album, the guitar romps give the song a closer affinity with The Velvet Underground's own “Jesus”.

While the crowd dissociates into chatter for some unreleased ballads, the band’s self-fulfilling prophecy feels particularly imminent during their few Beatles at Shea Stadium moments, as the crowd bursts into frenzies of bar-for-bar singalongs to “Love Yourself” and “Marina”; when Rowan sings live, her chirps and screams are slightly out of tune, and all the more spellbinding. And now, a gem for the superfans: I was stunned by the tender-hearted, alternate version of the otherwise cute-but-whacky deep-cut “Hey Marshmallow”, sealing the late-August London night with a lovely ambience of world peace.

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### REVIEW OF FLOWERS POWERS, 11 TRACK MIXTAPE, BY ROWAN PLEASE AND WPDMT.

On their inter-album mixtape, Worldpeace DMT powers through a myriad of sounds, with that alternately punning and self-reflective sensibility that made the London duet such an enticing new entity over the last year. Their growing popularity doesn’t seem to have compromised their ethos of fun, or their willingness to be a bit delirious and weird; Flowers Powers is slightly perverse, retro-proactive pop.

It doesn’t take long to hear that the band has sized up on arrangements (budget). At its exposition, the opening hymn “Jesus Jesus” finds Leo in sorrow and seeking repentance, but progresses to sound like primary-school Mass, ornamented by a choir, stabs of strings and what sounds like a tiny rainbow xylophone. The Joni Mitchell cover, “Big Yellow Taxi” picks up on this playful note; the guitar licks sound like they’re being resurrected from Rubber Soul and Rowan’s tongue-in-cheek inflexions: “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” make for the poppiest WPDMT in memory. Following “Surfin’s” capricious kazoo, the quasi-emo, dead-end crescendos uplifting GUCCISAMO’s quivering bars on "Pimp My Ride” briefly glimpse at poignancy.

The slight but generous tracklist seems pretty confused about how the band want to sound; thus making their sound pretty clear, aiming beyond definition, like every beatle phase strung into one tracklist. They’re like how John Peel described The Fall: “always different, always the same” Compared to The VU & Rowan, the somewhat slippery “laptop twee” tag suggested by friends& seems less useful for understanding this release. While a song like “Tabletop” evokes an inclination towards twee, it feels like mere coincidence that they play on this aesthetic. There’s less vocal stutters, bleeps and bloops. If anything, the clanker-cacophony on stinkers such as “Artrock” and the alternate version of “Surfin’” contributes to the canon of post-beatles satire and psychedelia rather than the legacy of hyperpop and The Pastels. It’s retro-proactive music!!

Now a sanctioned member of the band, Rowan Please’s lyrical charm and wit marks the mixtape’s catchiest and most affecting poetry. Such as on the nursery rhyme “Dinosaur Punk”, which reminds me of Television Personalities’ “I know where Syd Barrett lives”, sharing a voice that weaves pop mythology with kidlike fantasy as Rowan sweetly mutters: “Dracula lives above a record store, where they play John Peel to Dinosaurs”. And I can’t help hearing an undertone of wartime-pop underneath the glimmering texture of “When Summer Comes”, in which Rowan lulls herself, yearning for the summer to bring her baby home, who turns out to be Leo: deadpan and expressionless. Distinct from her femcel swag, Rowan’s 60s darling demeanour brings a winsome glamour to Leo’s compositional freak; the sound is an unlikely combination of the pretty and the shambolic, the quaint and the manic.

It’s difficult not to acknowledge that the word “Jesus” appears three times on the tracklist. You wonder whether WPDMT are inviting listeners to reckon with their hipster micro-aggressions- but it feels like Christ is just another character among the likes of Frankenstein, Dracula and John Lennon within the absurd pop-rock folklore of Flowers Powers. Once upon a time, feigned allusions to Jesus felt like the price of admission to rock. By opening their album with a gospel choir, WPDMT seem eager to revive such an outdated fad; but their interest in Jesus doesn’t seem as genuine as that in John Lennon.

Drawing from the same source material as the album’s cover, the innocently provocative summer-hit, “Bigger than Jesus” opens with the 1966 report of when a radio station in Texas was hit by a lightning strike after inviting kids to burn beatles records following John Lennon’s infamous claim that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus- I read this intro and the album’s cover as an instance of plain beatles-fetishism rather than a comment on music, or Jesus- before the verse slaps you with the heart-warmingly cringe, middle-school defiance of, “We don't have a single care, Don't have our seatbelts on” and the maturity of the song peaks at: “I have my own two hands until they crumble off”. The Lord is once again hailed in the acoustic, off-key and off-beat finale, in which Leo (maybe druggedly) asks for forgiveness; ‘Lonesome” feels like an apologia for the alchemical heresy of the tape, which makes you want to play the whole thing over again, and again.

Considering a recent insta story that expressed WPDMT’s intrigue in breaking into the mainstream, the dump of rosy-cheeked hooks and springy 3-chord charms on Flowers Powers feels like a warm tease and wink at the non-commercial route to world domination that the duet are plotting before Stick Around For Tea drops in October.

Curator, writer...Fiona Alison Duncan is the author of "Act Like You Know Me" and founder of the literary event "Hard To Read" as well as an author of the biography of the late and great pioneering artist Pippa Garner. HSR reviewed her most recent Hard To Read, held at Variety Arts Theatre (formerly the Friday Morning Club–a clubhouse for women). READ IT HERE.

In discussing Hollywood's hometown, LA, she says, "LA is a phoenix in the process of dying to be reborn right now anyway" and who better to let us know the metabolics of becoming a celebrity....There is a system, a clout economy, a play-to-play aspect to it, but there’s also chance, fate, timing, talent, beauty, mass prejudice, and a willingness to let go and be read by others."

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Thoughts on fan-fiction and literary theory?

I’ve made fan t-shirts and held fan meetings in honour of of Fanny Howe and have been going to war--gossiping publicly--about the alt-right’s self-serving appropriations of the late French literary theorist René Girard. Both Howe and Girard write towards God.

Do you think that writing ought to be ‘hard to read’?

Any form can be purposeful. An internal motto for Hard to Read is “Read is a word that can be read in more than one way.”

Are driverless cars ‘un-American’?

I started taking Waymo-that’s California’s driverless rideshare company--in LA last year because I was sick of being harassed by male Uber/Lyft drivers. I’ve set my rideshare apps to “quiet mode--” don’t talk to me mode--but that doesn’t stop these guys from blabbing on about their personal problems and fantasies of personal success, the script or app that’ll make them rich in no time, the sexy parties they go to between rides... The more they talk about themselves, the less they pay attention to the road. Driverless cars became the safer choice, a lesser evil for me personally.

I’ve taken several people’s Waymo virginities; I play the Amadeus soundtrack, and people lose their minds. If the world weren’t so dystopian, we’d be in awe over driverless cars; they’re a sign of the future we’ve been waiting for. If only they looked like pumpkins, horse-drawn carriages, or giant cats.

I recently started driving myself again, and I take public transit, so Waymos remain a treat and one that I do associate with America because of the complicit glee they give me, similar to the pleasure of watching the noughties reality show The Girls Next Door--for the girls, knowing it’s Playboy propaganda, knowing about Hugh Hefner’s misdeeds.

I’d trade all the cars in the world, and one of my own legs (from the knee down), for high-speed trains and bicycle lanes across the Americas. Those are tragically un-American because of the car and oil industries.

You do a lot of work to create events, communities, publications- do you feel a sense of duty to do so?

Yes.

Do artists have a responsibility to other artists? **

People have a responsibility to life and death, to humans, animals, rocks, the sky, language.

What makes a social practice? Is it any different from a structure?

An image from my childhood has been coming back to me lately. The park lawns in Montreal were covered in these wildflowers I was told were weeds: dandelions. In their yellow flower stage, you had the makings of crowns and jewellery. Then they’d ripen into fluffy white spheres. I thought they were even more beautiful at this stage and was obsessed with blowing on them and dispersing the fluff, the seed pods, which I understood would make more flowers grow. I think a lot of what I do is like this: gathering, plucking, making chains, dressing up, dispersing things.

Is there any use in the term ‘literary fiction’?

I never use it.

Is experimental a genre?

I wouldn’t have it as a section in my bookstore.

What did you last argue with someone you loved about?

My fear of being taken advantage of, i.e. having my time wasted.

How does one become a celebrity?

There is a system, a clout economy, a play-to-play aspect to it, but there’s also chance, fate, timing, talent, beauty, mass prejudice, and a willingness to let go and be read by others.

What is the difference between a celebrity and a cause célèbre?

The editor in me wants to say that a celebrity is a person while a cause célèbre is an idea or an event--a scandal, a movement--but they can be the same. Luigi Mangione is both. Pippa Garner was both. Chris Kraus has been both. Angela Davis, both. Normcore was a cause célèbre. Who’s a celebrity who isn’t a cause célèbre? They’d have to represent very little but not too little. Even Kim K. is like a cause célèbre for celebrity itself.

Exquisite Mariposa, your first novel won the Lambda award for Bisexual Fiction, what are your favourite bisexual characters? Furthermore, what is bisexual fiction?

My bisexual awakening was the character of Mel (played by Rachel True) in Gregg Araki’s Nowhere but the truth is I’m more like Dark Smith (James Duval), longing for Mel. Ai Yazawa is my most recent bi revelation; there’s George from her manga Paradise Kiss, whose bisexuality is said to be philanthropic, and the Nanas, who are closeted to themselves, comp het heartbreak. The bi characters I relate to most, besides the Nanas, are Chris Cahill (Mariel Hemingway) in Personal Best and Alice Pieszecki (Leisha Hailey) from the L Word. Joe Apollonio and Callie Hernandez are my favorite real life bisexual characters. I also met these two guys recently, very handsome, who previously dated women and now are a couple. They sleep with girls together. I wish I could be them. I’d also love to be Middle Flake, who I’ve been told is very loveable. Her bisexuality is so casual, instinctual, unencumbered by the shame and internalized misogyny that’s wasted my time. Middle’s one of the protagonists of the novel I’ve been writing for the last three years.

Fuck, Marry, Kill: London (Ontario); LA; NYC

Fuck London, Ontario / Marry New York / Kill LA because I could never harm an underdog like the Canadian city I was born in but have no memory of (we left London when I was one) and because LA is a phoenix in the process of dying to be reborn right now anyway. I got engaged in New York last November.

Is life how you imagined as a kid?

What age were you when you started thinking about the future? I’m trying to remember.

What is your relationship to your schizophrenic device?

Life-like, a mixed bag. I don’t think I would’ve traveled alone as much as I did in my twenties if it weren’t for Maps and I probably wouldn’t be here, answering these questions, if it weren’t for the device--that’s the good stuff. The ownership of it all, the data extraction and data centers, the child-labor cobalt mining and water wastage, the addictive algorithms, algorithmic manipulations, shadow banning and surveillance, the unfettered concentration of wealth and power, the broligarchy--all that is fucked, public enemy number 1.

what does hollywood mean to you?

The Boulevard: youtu.be/RVvGRIxAu9I
The Dream: youtu.be/XRh2L7tJqcI

What has Pippa Garner left you? in life and in love and in art?

I hold the keys to her archives and have the geolocation of her "natural" burial site. She was buried in an eco-shroud in the ground. We didn't take her implants out. They won't decompose. Picture her skeleton, implants, and body jewellery (her pussy was heavily pierced) in the deep soil of NorCal. I Killed Pippa Garner is the working title for our story—another book. She left me with a signed contract that said, " Write whatever."

The Superstar is dedicated to speedrunning/recording the history of the present using the convenient placeholder of 'Gen-Z Aesthetics'. In the words of Stone, see this article, which reviews it as "A starting point for establishing a generational artistic identity".

We also wonder how it is with American Birds and plays like Truck at MOMA PS1; loosely inspired by the 1997 documentary Hands on a Hardbody (1997), if the rise of the Cultural Capital Play is the answer to mid-west YouTube documentarians (Andrew, we looking @ u).

THE LINK TO THE FIRST IN THE GEN-Z AESTHETICS RUN DOWN (FASHION EDITION): Yoona on Instagram, Mutation Fashion Realism can be found HERE.

Addressing the fried elephant in the generational room, Johanna Stone finds value in a play which discusses how they might be laughing their way into losing the right to vote. As stated in the MOMA PS1 press text for TRUCK the play intends to "evoke the malaise and melancholia of contemporary life across generations." Well, fuck institutional speak, and Stone actually tells us what it means to address that, discussing American Theater as a conservative alternative to coastal elite thespianism.

Hollywood wonders what the "London" version of American Birds would be, and concludes that, here, Gen Z is a cultural miasma that is thankfully yet to be pinned down by moving image, stage or otherwise. Except for Josiane Pozi and Solomon Garcon in Opening credits 4 sunset beach (pilot) w Josianne Pozi [sub-titles on].

American Birds, written by Lucy Park Urbano, was held at Frank News, Los Angeles.

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LOS ANGELES (AMERICA?)- On a sweltering Saturday in July, I leave a Millennial art world pool party featuring a pepitas kale Caesar, spiked camel milk, and about 10 mid-size dogs to drive across town to Fairfax for a distinctly Zillennial event: the closing night of Lucy Parks Urbano’s play American Birds.

The show is finishing a sold-out second run, and there’s a large puddle of people without tickets waiting at the door. I add two drunks to this waitlist blob, friends leftover from the pool party, and slip inside franknews, the independent journalism-platform-turned-new-work-incubator that took up residence in the small space between a nail salon and third-rate Italian restaurant on Beverly Boulevard (on the same block as Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Theatre) last year. After a whispered relay between backstage and the door, everybody gets in, save for an older-than-zillenial woman who sits on the patio of the adjoining Italian restaurant, drinking an Aperol spritz while the show goes on.

A makeshift three-quarter thrust atop the LA underground’s red carpet passes the initial Brecht-del test; the lights never dim, there was no polite darkness to rest your eyes, leaving HOLLYWOOD to size each other up from across the room.

Moby’s The Ceremony of Innocence starts to play, and a man wearing a plastic bag and neon leggings sashays around the room, making eye contact with each audience member. This is the kind of display that is nostalgic for a graduate of NYC experimental theatre school like myself, the sort of thing that screams there is no fourth wall here, and you are complicit in the capitalist machine. This got nuanced as it went on, thank God.

Lucy Parks Urbano plays an undercover detective investigating the modern American city-state, much like Aristophanes dissected Athens in his classical predecessor The Birds. Although Lucy Parks Urbano tells me she prefers the Greek tragedies to the comedies.

Marcel is a house finch. Melinda is a nightingale who only migrates to the cities you find listed on a vintage American Apparel tote. They’re chirping it up in a tree outside the house of Boy, who’s employed as the social media marketer for an athleisure brand run by his dad.
Boy brings Girl back to his apartment. Girl asks Boy to perform an assisted suicide on her 100-year-old (old, but still poor, the play notes) photographer husband.

The dialogue is high on itself: the classic hyper-referential coked-up humour that afflicts the broader Los Angeles scene:

Aren’t you really sad though
Watching the crowd outside La Poubelle
Become increasingly normal and like employed?

But these observations are cut with a methy edge and carved into delicate lines by Lucy Parks Urbano’s steady hand--

What if
There were wars here
And no one cared
Cause we didn’t care about their wars?

The comedown rattles to an audience of Cuspies stuffed with dieting discourse. LA’s contemporary oral storytelling culture (aka the city’s many autofiction readings) rarely gets so sneakily harsh in its reflections. “I fear that one of the effects of our great city, on me, has been to care about things less, unfortunately, and that my not caring has been rewarded,” Lucy Parks Urbano diagnoses.

The birds play The States Game, naming any state or region that is not California or New York and imagining what it might be like based on a patchwork of cruel stereotypes and free associations (New England is literally/ Old America/ They’re like/ Living in brick houses/ And making quilts/ Their first alcohol/ Was whiskey at the creek/At the pond/ Oh my god yeah/ They got like raped/ On the bed of the pond). This verbal tornado fluctuates across the map, crescendoing on a debate about whether Los Angeles is America at all, and collapsing into a moment that ponders whether people from Nebraska matter, “how they are/ Just like/ Lost in a field of dust”. The conversation-game brings the birds borderline-sexual pleasure, and you feel the tension in their apathy as they giggle away the idea of possessing the right to vote.

The birds’ explicit coastal elitism tends to feel cooked after a decade of warnings about its electoral consequences. Director Dylan Frederick recently captured the inverse American viewpoint in his documentary American Theatre (2025), following a conservative theatre group that creates a musical retelling of the Salem Witch Trials in protest of leftist cancel culture. Frederick confirms the ignorance of Lucy Parks Urbano’s birds remains period-accurate: *“American Theatre takes place in Georgia, and when we show that movie on the coasts, [the audience] is encountering folks who talk and think like this for the very first time, and they’re often in complete disbelief that what they’re watching is real. So much so that many, many people believe the documentary is fiction.”

*The play’s human characters are stand-ins for stereotypical contemporary hetero relations. Girl, played by Lucy Parks Urbano, is a calcified girlboss, self-described as “a wall you can nail anything into” (Lucy Parks Urbano was inspired to write her own roles after being typecast as “a teenager or a prostitute, sometimes both at once” too often throughout her acting career) Girl mourns the decline of her historied husband, who lived through the North Korean occupation of Seoul and the persecution of his family; conversely, the Boy in the room with us feels completely spiritually castrated, a lonely virgin who experiences the Army through YouTube ads, swiping blindly through the algorithmic jungle looking for love, so desperate for any kind of intimacy that he’ll pile onto someone else’s herstory of violence.

Boy can only communicate effectively via Drake lyrics; at the height of the action, he breaks down while attempting to rap the entirety of “In My Feelings” - Melinda makes similar use of “Passionfruit” to deal with her breakup from Tyler, the Robin. This seems to hit home for the audience.

“Lucy is giving herself an opportunity at every turn to make language fail in the most interesting and funniest ways, the ways that are unsettling,” says Frederick. “You’ve got high stakes, and you’ve got people who are meeting these stakes with failing language.” Through a series of circular fumbles, Lucy Parks Urbano fertilises a Yassified Theatre of the Absurd, where language falls flat due to an excess of meaning, every phrase deep-fried with predetermined memetic significance. It’s barely an exaggeration of Zilennial-speak, and gets a lot of laughs.

A fitting genre for a generation stuck in learned helplessness. The play doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions aside from placing a sword in the hands of its protagonist, a gesture lifted from any romantasy novel.

Now for a brief cold plunge down the scenic iceberg, if you even care: American Birds has gestated amid a bubbling ecosystem of Los Angeles experimental theatre, a gap in the city’s art scene finally brought to attention by the arrival of Berlin-based artists Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff’s New Theatre Hollywood, where I saw Lucy’s surrealist 4HL doomspiral short A Business, last fall. Since its arrival, New Theatre has put up a good chunk of exciting new work that blends mediums and comments on the current- Jasmine Johnson’s immersive reality TV series The Death of a Star was a notable early example. Siena Foster Soltis has also brought new life to LA theatre with site-specific psychosexual dramas- her latest, Sugar Tub, was enjoying a simultaneous run across town, with choreography by Mamie Green. Green’s Volta Collective has been a crucial player as well, heavily incorporating text by local writers into their dance pieces.

Less visible yet no less important is the influence of playwright Agnes Borinsky, whose writing workshops have fostered neural networks in the community- I met Lucy’s former teacher and current collaborator, Kap Taylor, in Agnes’ workshop. Borinsky, herself a student of the legendary playwright Mac Wellman, established a name in the NYC downtown theatre community before relocating to the West Coast. I wasn’t surprised to find that Dylan Frederick is good friends with Agnes, and Arne Gjelten, who plays Marcel, is moving in with her next week. Gjelten was offered the role of Marcel after Lucy Parks Urbano saw him in Calla Henkel of New Theatre’s play The End is New at REDCAT, the only place in the city where the GOAT of the theatrical old-guard avant-garde, the Wooster Group, sometimes performs.

More so than its contemporaries, American Birds recalls this very important take that I recently screenshotted off Gen Z starlet Ivy Wolk’s Instagram story, calling for a Zoomer art movement based in its own iconography and history instead of upcycling the millennial, whether that be through drain, sleaze, twee, whatever...The birds’ sadistic song, the Drake crashouts, the surrealist memespeak all feel distinctly like “fetishising what we know and what we’ve seen”, which, as Ivy notes, is at least a starting point for establishing a generational artistic identity.

Underneath their glib exteriors, Lucy Parks Urbano’s characters are desperate to belong to history, to society, to family, to even just one other person, as they survey the increasingly bleak prospects of their existence. The political stakes aren’t new, but the sense of absurdity develops from an intergenerational stasis. In its final moments, the play implicates the audience using a vestige of national unity; the curtain call is choreographed to the Cha-Cha Slide, and when the song instructs, everybody claps their hands.

In rehearsal, I watch as Frederick instructs the actors to sing a line together in harmony. They attempt several times and fail, laughing through each reset. On the night I watch the performance, the singing line has been cut. Set and costume designer Eli Hauser talks to me about the lone dryer sheet on the Boy’s coffee table. “I told Dylan I wanted set pieces that were abstract and ethereal, but still based in reality and domesticity,” said Hauser. “I was like, does that make sense? And Dylan was like, not really… eventually he was like, what about a dryer sheet? And I was like, yeah.” The effort at every level to understand one another’s siloed existence is what makes the thing Gesamtkunst-werrrrrk.

When he’s tired of being told to sit down and be a Good Fucking Boy by Kylie, Timothée Chalamet enjoys being cucked by dominartist Jill Westwood. So much so, in fact, that he asked her to add him to her roster. She declined, because she’s retired now and making art about desiring eschatology in a way Luca Guadagnino won't know shit about. Grow up Twinky!

Jill’s videos, photographs and archive installs are about fucking insofar as Jaws is about a shark. Early work began with liquid latex “second skin” garments she’d sell under pseudonyms – Fetisch or Die and Fetisch World Domination – and performances in her industrial female duo Fistfuck, but now, an art-psychotherapist (people have always wanted her help I guess), she works backwards, restructuring past performances, power relationships, examining ecstasy and violence, the body and the self. Showing at :)) Glasgow’s :)) David Dale Gallery, :// Marseille’s :// Giselle Books* – even :{ :{ east london’s :{ :{ Neven Gallery.

°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°°º¤ø,¸,ø¤°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°°º¤ø,¸

\,,/(^_^)\,,/ 8======D~~

TC Do you like art?

JW In 1983 when I was 23 years old I wrote this artist statement:

To portray the metaphysical side of human nature.
To establish a subconscious link between myself / others.

In the confused time in which we live. I am aware of the kind of despair I portray and it’s not without remorse that I decided to do so. There is no mistake, it is something on which I have staked everything. I believe in all the threats of the invisible. I am fighting the invisible itself. Applying myself to unearthing some secrets. What I want to expose is this mass of desires, dreams, illusions and beliefs, which has resulted in this lie, no one believes any longer. I would aim to revive some images, obvious images, that are not tainted with continued disillusionment. To succeed in showing the mind’s obscure, hidden, unrevealed secrets and aspects by a sort of real projection. Not aiming to create an illusion of things which do not exist. Aiming to make scenarios indestructible, irrefutable. No single gesture must be void of the fatality of life. I grope blindly towards an ideal. I partly know what I want and how to accomplish it. But I believe a chance, a miracle will occur and reveal to us all, that which we still do not know.

TC Does your own art hurt or heal you?

JW I’m interested in the parts of ourselves we’d rather disown: our capacity for cruelty, selfishness, envy or dominance, alongside tenderness, generosity and care. If my work heals, it’s not because it offers comfort. If it hurts, it’s not because it seeks to wound. I hope it creates enough space for people to encounter something true about themselves, however uncomfortable that might be. That’s where empathy begins.

TC When you think about your tombstone, what do you think it looks like?

JW My first thought was Damien Hirst’s ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ along with Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’. Last year my dear friend and long-standing collaborator Antal Nemeth died. Standing by the grave of his ashes in Berlin as the church bell tolled just for him, I unexpectedly found profound beauty in this ritual. I thought, how funerals belong to the living. The finality of death itself remains unimaginable.

TC Is sex like death, or is death akin to sex? Which do you think about more?

JW Both deserve reverence, tenderness and respect; both require surrender, vulnerability and trust. But I think about sex more than death. Not simply as an act, but as a force. For me, eros isn’t simply about sex. It’s about the erotics of knowing and loving life.

TC What do you think about the kink scene in London, and is there any hope?

JW I don’t think I know what “kink” means. I lived through an exploratory phase where fetish practices were underground, socially hidden and unaccepted (1980s). The music, fashion, art and night club scenes crossed over giving rise to a new wave of intersecting contexts, an experimental space. Labels often obscure lived experience. It’s possible that exploring frightening experiences within a context of trust stretches our humanity in ways that expand human consciousness and its mattering in the world.

TC What are you listening to? I wish I could have seen your industrial noise performances Fistfuck (1981-81)

JW Recently I’ve been immersed in listening to Zos Kia preparing a film reel for their performance at VOD. Those Fistfuck performances have taken on something of a mythic quality. From the inside they felt very raw and dangerously precarious. We wanted to discover what performance could do in those contexts, pushing things over edges to find out what happened when sound, body and audience were pushed into unfamiliar territory. I'm intrigued that the energy of Fistfuck has such an afterlife, I’m interested in what those performances were asking more than in the mythology that's grown around them. Although I’m happy to milk their dubious glory now. Hahaha!

TC Favourite worst nightmare?

JW My motto with my long-standing collaborator Antal Nemeth has always been: Love is the Law, Fear is the Key.

TC Do you like ContraPoints?

JW I had to look this up, and yes, I do. I’m drawn to brave people willing to explore beneath appearances. She seems interested in complexity, contradiction and in the instability of certainty.

Dream artistic orgy/sex marathon/ smoke circle.

JW My first thought was a tantric liaison with Bowie. Then I thought what about a fantasy mix of all these ways to be intimate with my favourite people? A gathering of those who have enchanted, influenced or transformed me. Something dreamlike, a beautifully, sensitive exchange of bodies, minds and spirits, so I am imagining an uncensored unfolding, such as you get in dream states, that is timeless and melts from inspiring conversations into sensuous touch that flow into mass-orgasmic splendour. WOW! Seismic Sex Magic. That’s a great fantasy, that could change the world. An erotics of friendship, imagination and aliveness. Thanks for unleashing that thought.

Timmy Tam Juliette, or Justine? And if the latter, do you think Justine ever experienced pleasure, and is therefore an unreliable narrator?

JW This was printed in ID magazine in 1984 to accompany a photograph of me dressed in black latex, leather and stiletto shoes: Dominatrix Vixen “She’s a libertine… “in pursuit of pleasure totally” her alter ego is Juliette a Marquis de Sade character. “My outfit is sexual – involving every aspect of sexuality.” Reading this now makes me smile.

When I made this statement, I was very clear in my desire to find and claim my power. As a young, working-class woman in the 1980s, I felt this was necessary. This was an era of extreme everyday sexism and misogyny, when the Yorkshire Ripper was still haunting public consciousness and Benny Hill embodied what passed for mainstream entertainment. These days I admire my daring boldness and punk spirit; in exploring the sphere and language of De Sade, fetish and transgression, it was a way of stepping into territory usually reserved for men. It was also a way of exploring the frightening capacities in all of us, and of trying to understand the extremes of human experience. De Sade interested me because transgression can expose how power is constructed and maintained. Fetishism can exaggerate social roles until they begin to fracture. My thinking has evolved to understand power as agency rather than domination.

I am not sure how Justine experienced her plight. I can’t imagine she experienced pleasure in the conventional sense. But trauma has a complicated relationship with desire, and fetishism can sometimes become a way of transforming suffering into a strategy for survival.

Marty Supreme Are you happy? Are you single? Can you read me a poem?

JW I recently wrote this poem in Marseille around the opening of an exhibition titled ‘Everything is NOW’ at Giselle’s Books (4 July-16 Aug 2026). This might answer these few queries.

Everything is NOW
Everything vibrates

Skin remembers
Blood feels

Spit
Piss
Sweat
Tears
Shit
Spunk
Menstrual blood

Everything is sacred matter
Every act is ritual

Language is a body
A vast cosmic landscape

Touch it
Feel it
It feels you

Love is a potent magic
Love is a political act
It is how we become one another

We leap
Strapped together
Scared and ecstatic
Already falling

Patti Smith is laughing Jean Genet is smoking in the wings Donna Summer duets with Bowie Singing another QUEER DIMENSION into BEING

Our saints are among us
They are within us
We are they
They are us

Every touch
Every wound
Every dance
Every intimate moment

Every BODY that refused to disappear

WE CONSECRATE EACH OTHER

Through presence
Through friendship
Impossible LOVE

We leave ourselves in one another
Like sacred relics

Still warm
Still breathing

This is how power returns

NOT AS DOMINATION - AS DEVOTION

NOT MINE - OURS

Everything is sacred
Everything is breathing
Everything is NOW

We are already falling…

TIMMY TTTTTTT Has god ever answered your prayers?

JW Making work is an act of sustained attention. Like sex-magic, I hold an image, a feeling or a desire as clearly as I can. I invest myself in it completely, then in an act of transmission into the unknown, I let it go. Sometimes, much later, something unexpected returns from the world and it feels as though your prayer has been answered and that can feel miraculous.

Ages ago, factory girls skipped across the heather and saw the textile mills churning new material. In our new-new industrial era, aspiring it-girls wear the heather greys manufactured and destroyed in our cyclical/vortex image economy. Our signs are wearing, and meaning is thinner than ever! Bringing together trend analysis and taste-signalling in light of the image economy, up-and-coming fashion writer Yoona, begins in this essay to write a Gen-Z style overview in which the aesthetic is mutation itself. Thank you, Yoona for your research... Mint-green, the colour of the asylum help us to reckon with the fact that dressing takes your whole life... I don't think we will ever be ready.

Brianna Perry's shows "confessional poetry" at TG and "Fantasy in Japan" at Matthew Brown gallery close on August 17th and August 8th, respectively.

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In The Feminine Century at Room 3557 in east Los Angeles, six variously dressed retail mannequins pose along a pink floor. It’s Brianna Perry’s ‘ready-to-wear collection that promises an impossible outfit’ (from the show notes written by the artist herself). The garments are sourced from thrift stores and her own closet—each one reanimated with surface alterations in the form of imprinted symbols, custom embellishments and illustration-like embroidery. Most tops feature an imprint of an image: potleaf and gun motifs; the Louis Vuitton monogram; the faces of Che Guevara and Bob Marley. It is anti-establishment chic that does more than just flirt with the political.

Each mannequin presents a look that is meant to be read. It’s the linguistic turn of fashion that Perry touches upon with titles like “Look 04: I Walk Around Reading People, Their Tshirts with Words and Images, Everyone is Text.” The body is a page; style is a code. For me, the pleasure in fashion comes from this process of decoding style and the opaque entanglement between the sartorial, the political, the Internet, and the image.

It is impossible to see Perry’s looks as being isolated from the Internet. Each garment exists within a post-Internet context. But rather than overtly referencing some Internet trend, it is more so that a piece echoes some—albeit niche—Internet phenomenon. Take, for example, the “God Sailor Skirt” from “Look 01: I Am Ready and Therefore Nothing.” The navy blue pencil skirt features a discharge-printed Sanskrit Om syllable (ॐ) repeated across the front—a symbol repeating ambiguously but frequently in recent months across my Instagram, Depop, and Pinterest feeds. At one point it was @harmonytividad’s Instagram profile photo, and I remember innocently wondering if she is Buddhist.

This ambiguous adoption of the ॐ symbol is symptomatic of a larger phenomenon of 2016-coded spirituality (think yoga pose pic in Amaro filter captioned with the lotus flower emoji -type posts) that has become familiar as part of the personal brand of It Girls Of The Internet like Addison Rae. In similar fashion, Perry’s I Am Ready and Therefore Nothing reads like an empty prayer. Look 05: I Am Nothing, When Will I Be Ready? reopens this existential pendulum between Nothingness and Readiness. Look 05’s Evil Eye Acid Wash Rip Jeans hint, again, at another one of the Internet’s beloved spiritual symbols to appropriate.

But there’s a broader discussion to be had here about legibility. Being “early” to what eventually trends is an exercise in cultural cachet. Being “behind” implies some kind of aesthetic illiteracy. The microtrend is simply the outward manifestation of this accelerated cycle of taste-signaling and desire for social + cultural capital that fashion so easily caters to. What gets made in the offstream of this cycle is a class of products that resemble aesthetic mutations of each other and that have this uncannily hyperpresent quality to them. Look 06’s “Formalism vs. Sentimentalism Polo” is my favourite piece in the show because it converges several instances of this concept.

Perry’s Formalism vs. Sentimentalism Polo is made of a deconstructed Victorian blouse, dancer’s leotard and woven cotton. The polo ditches its typical collar for a gold sequined choker with a neck cutout (from the dance leotard) that is playfully kitschy. There is something so Girl Perfect about how the gold sequins work with the rest of the pink and heather grey striped material. The U.S. Polo Assn patch on the front and number 3 in collegiate lettering also play important semiotic roles here. The varsity-style number and the horse and polo player patch both evoke and make legible the aesthetic nostalgia for preppy Americana / “Ivy-League-core” (notably solidified as an aesthetic form in the 1965 photo book Take Ivy). This legitimization as a form denotes its ability to be referenced—this referential quality must exist in order for any subversive meaning to be built upon it. To me, this is what’s at work in Miguel Adrover’s Spring 2001 look that pastiches the Ralph Lauren logo.

The popularity of Perry’s polo gestures at several Internet phenomena that I think can be described as three overlapping yet distinct phenomenons:

1. The Great Polofication of like every Internet-popular brand ever (circa 2025 to early ‘26). This is better demonstrated visually than in language, so here is an image surveying some of the polos released since 2025— also the year that Kim Petras released her single Polo.

2. The dominance of heather greys and stripes (especially stripes combining greys with neons, butter yellow, pink, or mint green/blue) that is still being done by brands today.

3. The aesthetic mutation that blends together silver/gold metallics, heather greys, stripes/polka dots, and collegiate lettering into its own legible genre. This aesthetic mutation [might I add that I do not mean “mutation” derogatorily!] emerged roughly around 2024. This is specifically the year that the first three collections of Lucila Safdie were released: 01—Lick the Star, 02—Girl’s Don’t Cry, and 03—I Desire The Things That Will Destroy Me In The End that were the first iterations I saw, in my corner of the Instagram Universe, blending together these visual tropes (silver/gold metallics, heather greys, stripes/polka dots, and varsity lettering) all into one metamorphosed aesthetic.

In fact, these Lucila Safdie collections are a perfect case study for theorising the aesthetic mutation; coquette-core (the ruffles, polka dots, florals), Americana (the varsity numbers, metallics, red / white stripes), and Zooey Deschanel -esque twee all find themselves in one amalgamated form. I feel that this post-2024 era is marked by a plethora of Internet-popular brands making garments derived from this evolved visual genre that Lucila Safdie forwards. While the post-2024 boom of garments resembling Lucila Safdie designs may only be legible to those existing within the same Instagram Universe as mine, these garments are like fossils preserving the hyperspecific microtrends that produced them. They are fashion’s algorithmic backwash — byproducts of the Internet itself that we may look back upon in 20 years to remember the cultural milieu of this post-2024 era that birthed these styles.

Speaking of the Internet native styles we’ll remember in 20 years, what would a conversation on 2026 aesthetics be without a discussion of MINT GREEN / MINT BLUE / TEAL / TIFFANY BLUE / PASTEL MINT / all of the above?

I recently posted this Story to which a Genzennial-cusp mutual of mine replied to it saying she saw a group of three teenagers at the Palo Alto Brandy location fighting over the last pair of these teal Priscilla gaucho pants. She considered buying them off but figured it’d be futile (it is Silicon Valley after all). I’ve seen Reels of girls lining up for hours outside of the NYC SoHo flagship to get their hands on it or simply complaining about having visited multiple locations just for them to be sold out everywhere. The chokehold that this color has is undeniable.

Mattie Barringer (@nurse_stockings on Instagram and founder of Women’s History Museum with Amanda McGowan) had also posted about the color, saying “The Gen Z obsession with this hospital color speaks volumes of the collective mental state… It’s a color used to calm hospital patients which makes sense because we’re in an open air asylum.” I whole-heartedly agree with Barringer’s observation and believe that these pastel mint and teal colors not only attest to a collective need for tranquility and mental soothing, but also speak to a political fatigue, apathy, fragility, and emptiness. To exist at this moment is to exist within a myriad of intersecting, compounding crises; wars, genocide, climate collapse, stifling job markets, mass deportations, rising fascism, exploding wealth divide, global water bankruptcy, late-stage surveillance capitalism, proliferation of gambling / betting platforms, brainrot culture, the forced spread of (and investment into) AI into every facet of daily life… the list goes on. Personally, it feels like dissociation is my only means of staying sane these days. I have grown fatigued, apathetic, jaded, and numb as a way of surviving reality.

In an interview with Fiona Alison Duncan on their show Grisette à l’enfer (Women’s History Museum’s exhibition at Amant that concluded in February), Amanda McGowan mentions, “Fashion has always been a cultural temperature check. It reflects where people are at. I think fashion right now is speaking to a kind of spiritual and aesthetic emptiness.” To borrow a quote from media theorist Ruby Justice Thelot: “The place where chaos is felt most acutely today is the cultural world. The idea of new aesthetics is essentially taxonomy as a way of making sense of it, as a way of creating order in the cultural world.” Fashion is where the state of the world — for all its frictions, fissures, extremities, and uncertainties — materialises itself.

These mint green colors mean so much more than a passing microtrend. Their affective qualities are symbolic of our wider psychopolitical condition. Certain motifs that Perry engages are similar to mint green in this way.

In the show notes Perry writes, “I was a maladaptive daydreamer looking for an unconscious revolution.” Between Look 03’s potleaf sweater and Look 05’s Che Guevara tube top, I felt like I was standing in front of some kind of signification closet—one that offered this somewhat unserious thought “hm… revolution for today or just get high…?” While unserious, there’s something about this dichotomy that gets at the crux of what it feels like to exist within the imperial core—resistance vs. apathy presented as a mundane symbolic choice, proffered to us in this banal way as if we were just picking what to wear for the day. It’s less about where you sit on a spectrum between revolutionary and apolitical nihilist, and more about how terrifying the mundanity of that choice is—let alone its existence as a choice for us in the West where the pains of the world are felt less acutely; where I can retreat into the comfort of soft pastel blues and not think twice about wearing a Guevara tee.

The politically-charged symbols continue with Look 04’s “Murder Weapon Turtleneck”—a skyblue waffle knit with wooden beads and the faint outline of a pistol on it. I think about the guns I’ll see splashed on tanks by DIY-screenprinters and the girls on Depop tagging their listing as the brands Praying or O-MIGHTY for exposure. The gun is just one symbol from a whole arsenal of strong symbols seemingly emptied of any original meaning when pastiched onto a garment. In its transition from a device designed to kill into a sort of t-shirt appliqué, the gun experiences a remediation into a purely aesthetic symbol. But the violence in this aestheticisation is undone with the choice to call a gun for what it is: a murder weapon. There is something forgotten or ignored when a top with a gun on it is considered cute, but Look 04’s Murder Weapon Turtleneck calls on you to wake up from this cognitive dissonance.

“To wear” is to opt in, to occupy, embody, or externalise—impermanently. The sartorial enables a temporary act, identity, or alignment. What transpires within this idea of the political or the nonpolitical (which, in its denial of politics is itself a political statement) becoming externalised? Talking to Brianna via Instagram DM, I was particularly struck by her point, “I disagree with the common thesis that subcultural and/or political imagery is diluted in the process of mass distribution and mass manufacturing (Che T-shirts, etc). For me, all these symbols remain fanged and subversive.” While the post-Internet connotations I bring to my reading of the symbols may differ from the artist’s original intent in choosing them, there is no denial that these garments are imbued in a charged energy that make it impossible to ignore the imagery and symbols we may have become indifferent towards. The Feminine Century renews and reinvigorates a sense of cognizance to the emptiness of our aesthetic symbols.

When Tiqqun wrote their Theory of the Young Girl, some people pointed out that it was a bit misogynistic, using the assumed vacuity, emptiness, and ultimate energetic frivolity of women and girls in the West as both an analogy, a mode, and a mask that governments, men in suits and anyone (?) under late-stage capitalism can don at any moment. Why always dolls and not women, like cmon now.

As Lou Reid explains, Egner's paintings incorporate the mass-market with the acceptable pre-war pedo vibes of Balthus in a manner that could be read as "relatable" for contemporary femininity. But the young girl, or the doll, can't ever just be a vessel, and is more of membrane, bearing the trace of its observer, or theorist, or painter, who doesnt wash their grubby little hands before handling.

Anyway, post-impressionist paintings of dolls...

— Syd

There is desire, a burning passion for the all-too-real and ultimately unattainable, and there are one-dimensional figments of the imagination – undeveloped castles in the sky to be drooled over, lest any intricacy ruin the dream. Jeff Egner’s recent show “Guest Room” at Lomex dances the line between the former and the latter, conjuring scenes of strange, lurid intimacy with well-heeled influences and unrefined (yet enthusiastic) figurative techniques.

Across twelve oil paintings almost exclusively depicting dolls and feminine playthings, Egner oscillates between the high and low-brow, attempting to merge the (tastefully) suggestive language of Balthus’s children with the more brusque obscenity of the mass-market Temu sex robot. Take Untitled (Room III), 2025, a work depicting a seemingly inanimate girl bent over a table, offering a glimpse of her underwear as she looks directly back at the viewer. Her body is posed unnaturally – her club foot at the end of her outstretched leg bends at a bizarre ninety-degree angle, and her only visible arm twists around her back before disappearing behind her upturned second foot. At the bottom of her raised leg, a mass of thigh resting on the table accumulates into an abhorrent puddle. Two seams appear at the top and bottom of the contorted arm’s elbow joint, definitively marking the figure as a fleshy cast of silicone stretched around a Barbie-like series of pins and bolts. An easy comparison can be drawn between Untitled (Room III) and Therese Dreaming, 1938, a Balthus painting of a young girl daydreaming while exposing her underwear beneath her arched leg. This is a provocative theme, and any work influenced by the voyeuristic gaze of the adult male on the helpless girl must tread carefully lest it cross over into the realm of the flagrantly exploitative. Egner meaningfully tweaks Balthus’s unrepentant examination of his sitter with a healthy dose of self-admonishment, positioning the doll to look back at the viewer, implicating them in their overt sexualization of the figure. The tension (and thrill) of the Balthus work is absent, and instead replaced by the shame and contemplation akin to a fleshlight collector memorialising his own perversion, turning his urges inward and mixing his lust with an unshakable embarrassment. To so obviously fetishise the inanimate qualities of the doll is to take away from its uncanny appeal, and render an otherwise complex being disappointingly flat.

In Swallow’s Nest, 2025, meanwhile, two women appear before a picturesque castle in a crudely painted scene, haunted by a floating male visage. Appearing somewhere between a reflection of a face on a glass pane and the ominous floating phallic rhino horns which crowd the female subject of Dali’s Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity, 1954, the face watches over the women with startling proximity, as though the cloud-like lines which define its hair and brow will soon be breathed in by the girls. The taller woman, wearing a crop top and short shorts, leans against a railing. The other sits on a stone ledge, crossing her bare feet and closing her eyes in a slump. While the painting overtly sexualises the Barbie-like figures of the two women, it is less a piece of toe and leg worship than a fetishisation of detachment, a work dedicated to the “cool girl” as a figure which can be observed yet never approached. Dali referred to Young Virgin as the most chaste of his paintings, in spite of the penis-dream’s paradoxically “erotic appearance”. Egner lands on a similar feeling in Swallow’s Nest, bringing a male figure into a painting in the most ineffectual, flittering manner possible – while the women could breathe in the wispy vapours of the face, they could just as easily turn and blow them away. The delicacy of this relationship is, however, jeopardised by the cardboard-cutout inertia of the women. Painted as placid amazons in fantasyland, they are frustratingly disconnected from the unstable encounter Egner is anticipating.

This is not to say that Egner is incapable of producing complex and captivating work: In Her Blue Dream, 2025, a female figure in a schoolgirl’s uniform looks longingly to her side, straining her right hand to play with the fabric of her sleeve. The woman’s pupil-less eyes do not rest on the viewer, but out a window, conveying disappointment or yearning for something outside the scene. Her face carries more emotion than any of the other inanimate personages here, and her body is posed in an avoidant stretch. The question of the figure’s animation is the painting’s greatest success, highlighting the importance of Egner’s rendering of his girls in the success or failure of his unsettling tableaus. Unlike the mottled and flat daubs which comprise the majority of the show’s works, Her Blue Dream is painted in long smooth strokes, emphasising the drape of the figure’s arms and floes of hair. It appears as though Egner has positioned his doll to reject his advances, engaging the productive tension between each inanimate yet uncannily attractive doll to question the root of his desire. Here – at last – Egner imagines the doll as being able to say no, and produces a portrait instead of another silicone still life.