5 things I loved this week
a song, a film, a skincare product, a vintage store, and a martini
Happy Friday. Someone in the F&L chat suggested this 5 things round-up as a type of post and I am here to serve. I’m also too worn out and brain dead from weeks of being in Madonna jail to do a big new music round-up (I promise to do this soon though). If you haven’t yet, check out (all 3 and a half hours of) part 1 of Bandsplain’s Madonna series, with my excellent guest, Interview Magazine Editor-In-Chief Mel Ottenberg. I developed psychosis for you so I hope you like it.
Also I’ll be in conversation (love to converse) with my longtime, brilliant friend Mary H.K. Choi for the LA stop on her book tour for her excellent new book Pool House. It’s at Skylight Books on 6/11 and you can get advance tickets HERE.
What else? Did some Madonna cosplay (need hospital), spent an undisclosed sum on The Real Real in a fugue state, and was in a Weezer promo video “playing” a massive bitch (see below).
I’m sure you know by now that tasbeeh herwees has the best newsletter about Los Angeles, and this week she interviewed the owner of one of my favorite LA eateries (half the year anyway) with one of the best vibes in the city, Sal’s Place.
Speaking of good vibes, I like the new Charli XCX song “Rock Music.” I like the glitchy guitars and the 90s power pop sensibility put through the Charli prism, I like how short it is, and I love the video. It’s not the song I love this week though. But I do like it. Anyway, enough edging. Let’s get to it:
SONG
In “We Are So Back” news, Ceremony put out a new song called “Other Hells” and it fucking rips. It’s got like an 80s hardcore punk feel (return not to form per se, but next door to form?) with some tastefully places synths and a real slam your body down and wind it all around energy. It’s two minutes long and I have listened 200 times? I love it, I love it, I love it.
A FILM
I was lucky enough to attend the premiere of the new film Backrooms, directed by 20 year old (!!!) Kane Parsons and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass. It’s a horror film (sort of). I wasn’t super familiar with the very popular web series Parsons did under the same name, but I had seen the original creepypasta image floating around the internet and was definitely into those liminal spaces memes (were they memes?) that were a thing for a while.1 Probably because, much like the film, they echoed something chilling and nauseous about the world we live in. The film is excellent - it has just enough plot to create a cohesive and engaging experience but not so much that you’re not able to let your mind spin out all kinds of meaning from the incredibly rich metaphor of an endless series of antiseptic but increasingly uncanny and bizarre rooms. I love a movie that doesn’t hit you over the fucking head with what it’s about. To quote my own Letterboxd review, it’s: “a real Rorschach test of modern misery and dread, both personally and socioculturally, with measured deployment of levity and blood pressure blows.” A kink of mine is when my thoughts are provoked. The sound design is AMAZING and there’s a brand new, fucking sick Boards of Canada song over the credits. It it officially out in theaters May 28th.
