Fast & Loosies #3

a perfect summer album, a fabulous beach book, an effective shampoo (???), an edifying podcast episode, some really great online reads, and more

I don’t even think this is #3 I’m just making shit up as I go? Who cares! I felt caged in by the 5 things format (a cage of my own making, many such cases). So this is more free form, a gaggle of things I’ve delighted in recently. I’m trying to figure out a way to start talking about/sharing fashion because it’s one of my deepest interests¹ but of course my shadow has invented a crowd of men with Pitchforks(ubscriptions) who will scream “NO! Talk about Archers of Loaf” if I do, so working through that. I suppose if I was really about that life I would have to disclose that this week I purchased a pair of Phoebe Philo shoes at full retail price, something for which I should probably be put in prison where they do not allow you to wear chic suede mules.

Anyway let’s get into it:

this was in Paris two feet of hair ago but you get the gist (I miss that KNWLS top)

ALBUM

This is a small preview of next week’s Bandsplain episode about our favorite music of Q2 (I have an MBA so I’m allowed to use that word) but an album I’ve been listening to nonstop is Forever by the Danish producer, DJ, and songwriter Hekt (real name: Jesper Nørbæk). Between this and the new Iceage album, I don’t know what the fuck they’re putting in the water in Denmark, but babe, it’s working.²

Forever is a big, beautiful, vibrant electronic dance record (I just learned what IDM means but I won’t be using that word). The exquisitely sequenced tracks move through a myriad of emotions (anticipation, yearning, romance, balls to the wall LFG, and more) and it all just makes me desperate to hop on a Lime bike³ and speed through the London night (this is not LA music) with it blaring in my corded headphones, a heat-seeking missile aimed toward what might be the best night of my life. (Inside me the wolf who goes to sleep at 9:30pm and wakes up with the sun to go to hot yoga is having its ass beat by the wolf who wants to slam a Celsius, put on a halter top⁴, and hit the fucking streets).

BOOK

Allie Rowbottom sent me her new novel Lovers XXX a while ago but I was balls deep in Madonna month and precluded from reading anything that wasn’t work related but I’ve finally read it and it’s so engrossing and juicy and page-turny. It’s also largely set in 80s Los Angeles, and as a sort of LA native (famously from Torrance) I will read any book that deals with past (imo better) eras of the city⁵. The LA Times called it “the definitive literary Valley porn novel” I’m sorry but what more do you need to hear.

SHAMPOO

I’ve been on sort of an endless hair improvement journey since I was a teenager but it ramped up in intensity after I lost a bunch of hair after the fires (this probably calls for a larger violin but let’s keep moving). My hairdresser Rosie recommended this line Najeau - she mentioned another of her clients was using it and her hair was noticeably thicker. So of course I was like - say less babe. I went straight to the website and ordered…everything? The shampoo, the conditioner, the copper sequence scalp spray, the Sunday scalp mask, all of it.⁶ I’ve been using it all pretty religiously for a few weeks and besides the fact that the bottles are beautiful and the product, in particular the shampoo and conditioner, smell incredible (not not important), the quality of my hair after using all this stuff is noticeably better? My curls are naturally softened, my hair feels way less dry. I don’t know if new hair has magically popped up on my scalp but I’ll keep you posted, though to be honest it will be impossible to tell which intervention (the products, the HigherDose red light hat I use a few times a week, the Celluma Nova I use most nights, the DHT blocker pills I take, the stem call scalp micro needling I’m doing next week with the Beverly Hills Skincare Muse) will be the cause. I’m not a woman in STEM okay.

PODCAST EP

Remember I said I love fashion? Well if you love fashion you probably already listen to Lauren Sherman’s podcast Fashion People but in case you don’t, I can’t recommend the latest episode where she interviews legendary fashion photography duo Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. The talk is so rich with ideas about art, fashion, partnership, collaboration, as well as incredibly fascinating memories and details from their work with other fashion icons. I think anyone who makes any kind of art will find some stimulation/inspiration in here somewhere. I loved it so much I listened to it twice.

FURTHER READING/LISTENING/WATCHING

• Amanda Dobbins posted her first Substack and of course it’s fabulous because she’s brilliant and funny and a true journalist. She teaches us how to make a perfect Negroni and shows us her RealReal searches, because she knows what the people want. (Maybe next week I too will divulge my RealReal searches or even, more hallowed, my Gem.app ones).

• No Bad Days did an incredibly fun and funny interview with John Early around his new film Maddie’s Secret, which I am dying to see.

• Everything Patrik Sandberg writes makes me smarter, including but not limited to this essay about our modern society’s baffling addiction to being outraged.

  • “When someone disturbs, confuses, irritates, offends, or terrifies me—especially if they terrify me—it’s not my instinct to lash out or decry them. I look closer and ask why. I unfailingly find comedy in the experience. I love people who appear to operate much differently than I do. I love to scrutinize what drives them to have the ideas they have and behave the way they do. Sometimes I simply indulge in the spectacle.” He tore with this.

• Criterion has curated a collection of six movies starring Courtney Love that went up this month and will be up I believe through the summer. I was thrilled at the opportunity to rewatch 200 Cigarettes, the best New Year’s Eve movie of all time, and of course, Love’s brilliant performance in The People Vs. Larry Flynt, but it was Beat, which I had never seen, that I found most compelling. It’s not a great movie by any standard but it’s certainly interesting, especially because it centers Joan Vollmer (played by Love), a woman whose murder at 28 years old has been minimized by history to just a crucial plot point in William Burroughs’ artist development story. This is extra cool because…(spoiler) he killed her! Anyway she was actually a complicated and highly intelligent woman who inspired pretty much everyone around her and whose writing career was stupidly cut short (much like Courtney’s acting career tbh). Watch this space because maybe somebody interviewed somebody else for this and it will be up on the Criterion website soon…

• Speaking of Dobb Mobb, I went on The Big Picture podcast with Sean Fennessey and Amanda and Adam Nayman to talk about one of my greatest loves, the films of Mel Books.

• And finally, last week week we kicked off Bandsplain’s 80s Movie Soundtracks series with a 3 hour rumination on what is probably the greatest soundtrack of all time, Purple Rain.

See you next week xx

1. I have a closet beyond band t-shirts

2. I have to google this every single time

3. blatant sponsorship seeking here

4. do we still do going-out top?

5. Eve Babitz’s Fast Days, Slow Company and Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon being the queen and king here

6. These are shop.my links as I am a burgeoning 44 year old influencer. You don’t have to use them! I don’t care.