the children long for character-driven fiascos

Are you Bricking yet?

I got a copy of Wuthering Heights because I wanted to see if it held up ahead of its highly anticipated Emerald Fennelling; kind of shocked to realize it’s a solid 330-page paperback when I remembered it more as a Gatsby-esque slimboy. But apparently the movie will only cover the first half anyway, so it’s very much a Titanic Tape #1 situation. Will let you know if it’s worth revisiting! (For the record, I hated reading WH originally in high school, but the image of those damn Yorkshire moors is burned into my brain, so for that we thank Mrs. Strom and her efforts.)

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Is everyone “Bricking” except you?? Building on our recent discussion of digital hygiene as the New Year’s resolution en vogue, Julia Pugachevsky has the story in Business Insider on why all your friends are demurring all of your aggressive groupchat link dumps with claims of how they’re currently “bricking” — that is, using a $59 gadget that prevents one from looking at certain apps on your phone unless you physically “tap the Brick,” which for example might be located on your fridge at home. Several friends have already mentioned using and loving the Brick unprompted in conversation. I’m intrigued but kind of have a fear of like…losing the Brick or somehow getting locked out of it. And then what? And then I just die??

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I’m kind of chuffed at how the creators of Industry, ahead of the premiere of Season 4, admitted that they don’t have a grand narrative plan for the show: Per Mickey Down in Variety, “We don’t know what the fuck is going to happen. We’re constantly making it up as we go along … We never had a big thesis statement about the world or capitalism; we just write what we think is interesting at the time. And that sometimes manifests in weird fucking things.”

Good! Lately I’ve been feeling very of a mind with the vibe of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, in that most TV shows do not benefit from presenting as great overarching theses full of predetermined meanings (I’m thinking, of course, of the Stranger Things fanbase so conspiracy-brained about the lackluster long-awaited finale that they deluded themselves into thinking maybe it was bad on purpose!!). Or the heady Pluribus, whose philosophical promise maybe will deliver in 2-3 years, but at what, the cost of watching characters do banal chores for a few more hours? Give us our daily (weekly) Industry instead: simple sensory experience, vicarious chaos, competitively posh accents. You know what else is an ongoing character-driven fiasco with no discernible grand arc? Life!

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Everyone was talking about the photographer and art director Szilveszter Makó’s vintage Vogue-esque photos of Rama Duwaji for The Cut; I also love his latest photos of Elle Fanning for WhoWhatWear released today. There’s such an appealing flatness to Makó’s now signature paper doll style, not unlike Modernist painting’s insistence on the quintessential artifice of image-making, versus its slyer attempts at pure representation, that made you appreciate, say, paint blobs as blobs and not as a rendering of baby Jesus. Even Makó’s yen for shooting subjects inside box-like structures — it’s very the person as product, the set as reality. Easily, he’s the most interesting photog in the game.

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Five journalists figured out that Condé let the Gourmet magazine trademark lapse and — crucially I think — got Ruth Reichl’s blessing to relaunch it as a newsletter. They did go with a new, Graza squeeze bottle-y logo, though, which is probably legally wise but makes it a little less renegade. Just look at what Whitney Mallet is doing with brazenly un-Whitney-affiliated The Whitney Review! You can (probably) just do things!

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IRL rec: There’s a gorgeous Nicolas Party show at Karma in New York full of little oil-on-copper paintings that are so vivid and smooth you could just eat them up. My favorites are the still lifes of these pearish shapes that look like a cross between stuffed plushie and Pixar character. Go see ‘em before Valentine’s Day!

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