A Chloë Sevigny-directed reading, Joe Macken’s model city, Aneta Grzeszykowska's photographs, Bieberchella
Recent fixations + the best part of Caity Weaver’s carb odyssey
The phone says I somehow logged 26,925 steps yesterday, which blows my previous record of 23,248 (from that 2024 Japan trip) straight out of the water (some fruits from the day below). Rose, one of my inspired friends and proof that nominative determinism is REAL, has been going to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden most days at 8 a.m. since they started extending hours for the season, so I thought I’d join her at a slightly more manageable 9 a.m.. The day unspooled from there. Turns out you become capable of a lot more than you think if only you make like Eric Ripert and flower-bathe first thing in the morning…
Let’s start with Thursday night, which was such a treat: My dearest Rachel Yang invited me to the new Pietro Alexander gallery in Soho for a staged reading of “Summer with Dianne,” a play written by Seth Zvi Rosenfeld (Netflix’s The Get Down, HBO’s How to Make It in America). The reading was directed by Chloë Sevigny and produced by Rachel and David Potters; the cast included Industry’s Myha’la and Sofia Black-D’Elia (no relation).
I’ve gone to a couple of staged readings before done by friends for funsies; this was my first time experiencing the table read as an industry event, where the room was full of commercial theater and film producers. Rachel and David have been doing these amazing renegade theater readings with their crew via @goodevening.rep for as long as I’ve known them; I think the second time I met Rachel was at a reading they put on inside a menswear store downtown in 2023. (That event was so packed that night that I literally fell to my knees and fainted; some nice Australian girls helped me up). It’s been a point of pride to work with Rachel on Deez Links events ever since. Nothing is better than working with friends, or seeing how they raise the bar for New York’s cool factor every time. PROUD OF YOU RACHIE!!
Then yesterday, while killing time before lunch, I wandered into a few galleries on Henry Street and wound up at Lyles & King, where they were showing photographer Aneta Grzeszykowska’s “Daughter” series. I skimmed the photos before reading the show’s press release, which made for a funny reveal: What at first glance looked like some sweet pictures of two teen girls — maybe sisters? — swimming in the ocean, sitting at the beach, arranging flower crowns on each others’ heads — turned out to be photos of Grzeszykowska herself, wearing a literal mask of her 14-year-old self, along with her daughter. (In this photo, for example, you can see where the edge of the mask is visible along the chin.)
When I looked at the images again, they gave me such a delicious shiver of the uncanny, both from the juxtaposition of Grzeszykowska-as-girl next to her daughter as the “real” girl, and from the tension between her docile, blank-eyed mask of youth and Grzeszykowska’s body — her obviously older hands, for example. The show runs through May 9. Go see it!
Meanwhile, uptown at the Museum of the City of New York, I finally got to see Joe Macken’s model of New York City, which opened last February after Macken became a TikTok sensation. (Per this Artnet story on him, Macken himself had never actually seen the entire model city in one piece until it was displayed at an upstate fair last summer — he’d been stacking the panels in a storage unit, which is some real Doing It For The Love of the Game shit.)
There’s an easy, obvious appeal to Macken’s work: Everyone loves getting their brain tickled by miniatures of the familiar, and New Yorkers are, of course, famously obsessed with new ways of looking at themselves. But I loved loved loved how the museum set up the exhibit so that you could only get physically close to certain edges of the map along the Rockaways, the east side of Jersey, and above the Bronx. There was such a palpable itch for everyone in the room to try finding a better view of all the sexy parts of Manhattan; at least one woman was reprimanded for dangerously too far over the edge, her shadow looming Godzilla-esque on the balsa wood buildings.
But that effort proved amazingly futile. You could pick up a pair of the provided binoculars to try your best to zoom in on the “good bits” — the skyscrapers, the usual landmarks, Central Park. Nevertheless, those familiars remained tantalizingly, pleasingly out of reach. The resulting sensation therefore hewed loyal to both Macken’s own upbringing in Middle Village and to so many people’s experience of the city from an outerborough perspective. The ability to gaze at the skyline — sized down and made so enticingly twee, yes — yet still positioned just slightly of reach? Now that’s the real New York experience.
For the second Sunday in a row, I was distracted all morning by Justin Bieber’s second Coachella set, which I Airplayed to the TV off a short-lived @PopBase upload. Very much hoping The New Yorker’s Vinson Cunningham gets to write a follow-up to his review of the first weekend’s performance, which got at Bieber’s livestreamed intimate reminiscences perfectly.
This time around, I felt utterly enchanted by the way Bieber cozied up to the gawping, grasping crowd. Instead of being put off by the various anonymous arms snaking around him (so many phones as third appendage) any time he got too close, Bieber leaned in quite literally, at several points, pulling himself into delighted embraces. Cunningham calls Bieber “pop music’s fallen angel;” I had the thought, while watching Bieber cavort with his overwhelmed, largely female adorers with a wattage that not even Billie Eilish could resist crumpling toward, that Bieber felt so much like America’s prodigal ex-boyfriend — irresistable, intractable, yet always so suspiciously redeemable.
Should You Read That Longass Thing: Caity Weaver’s Carbo Quest Edition? Of course. It’s been nearly 12 years since her Gawker appetizer quest at TGI Friday’s; between that and her 2025 NYT Magazine journey to quit sugar at an Austrian detox retreat, I think we can safely say that Caity is our journalistic Odysseus, forever venturing out and trying to thread the Charybdis/Scylla needle between the excesses and ecstasies of American food culture.
Does that not make her our preeminent food writer? Maybe. But even that seems like a vulgar way to describe what it is that Caity does so well; which in this case is relaying a story about bread that is really a story about the restaurant industry, the publicity machine, national ideas of value, and her family. But even on the merit of figurative language alone, she’s running laps around everyone. I was so dazzled by all the descriptions of the bread — likening its coloring to shades of golden retriever was particularly inspired. But even imagine tossing off an aside about salad like this in a cover story decidedly not about salad. What an image!!
The rolls served at Texas Roadhouse (third place in the best-free-restaurant-bread contest by raw votes) are indisputably soft and white, roundly square, and immaculate enough to have possibly made themselves with no outside aid. Seven hundred years ago, a king might have eaten such satin-smooth bread on Easter; the Roadhouse gives it out for free, in portions that are infinite. (The first basket accompanies you to your table, like a fellow guest.) The menu items my husband and I order during our visit are remarkable in their own way—no rabbits stealing the last of the November lettuces by moonlight ever chewed a colder salad than our Caesar—but without question, the free rolls, accompanied by honey-cinnamon butter, are the only items really worth paying for (besides the lovely, big Diet Cokes).