Issue Fifteen launch party tonight!
Plus new Mentions
Tonight at 7 p.m. we’ll be celebrating the release of Issue Fifteen at Night Club 101 in the East Village. At 7:30, issue contributors Jamie Hood, Mariah Kreutter, Benjamin Krusling, Owen Park, Gaby Del Valle, and Stephanie Wambugu will read from their pieces. Admission is free for print subscribers; not-yet subscribers can get in by paying $20 at the door for a copy of the issue.
Whether you’re watching the clock until the Drift party, on the subway to the Drift party, or waiting in line to get into the Drift party, reading our extremely abbreviated reviews is an ideal way to pass the time. Below, you’ll find lights fit for a starlet, an aspiring vampire, dripping wreckage, benign silliness, and America’s Marquis de Sade.
Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever
DOCUMENTARY
Bryan Johnson is widely known as a kind of aspiring vampire: a tech millionaire who regularly injects himself with blood plasma (including, on at least one occasion, that of his teenage son Talmage) to reverse his own aging. But in this Netflix documentary-slash-P.R.-vehicle, Johnson comes off less like a ghoul than a sad little boy whose messianic ambitions clearly spring from chronic loneliness. He does seem happy to spend all day go-karting with Talmage, who, much to his father’s distress, is about to leave for college. “Do you think he’ll be okay on his own?” an interviewer asks not the father, but the son. “I do worry about him,” says Talmage. Johnson inspires a similar kind of parental concern in the viewer. His body, the subject of so much of his attention, is sculpted but pale, impossibly lean, and oddly smooth. You’ll want to feed him.
Aaron Labaree
Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting
EXHIBITION
Three of the canvases included in this career-spanning survey at Gagosian date back to the totemic abstract expressionist’s final productive decade, characterized by a stylistic break so forceful it suggests a crisis of identity. Gone is the dripping wreckage of the triumphant ’50s and ’60s. Instead, the ’80s works inhabit a vibrating cosmos of white void, black line, and warm color curvature that could plausibly be called serene. Explanations for this volte-face hover around the artist’s decision to quit drinking and, more ominously, his worsening Alzheimer’s. The latter led to an increased role for studio assistants in producing his canvases, and, towards the end of his life, a tight-lipped legal conservatorship over the artist and his estate. The taboo around these circumstances, and their glaring implications for these final paintings’ provenance, clearly serves the bottom line. At $300 million, de Kooning’s “Interchange” (1955) is the second-most expensive painting of all time. Even an untitled ’80s work of this later style fetched $385,000 in 1987 — none too shabby for an auction held a few weeks after Black Monday. But the exhibit’s suggestion of an “endless” continuum between these periods serves neither Kooning’s strange and majestic late canvases nor our understanding of the art-historical turn towards an aesthetics of asset management that haunts them.
Ryan Meehan
Just For Us
COMEDY
Alex Edelman’s one-man show about anti-Semitism opens with a decent bit about Koko the gorilla. But after getting that “benign silliness” over with, Edelman dives into the meat of his set: a Nanette-ian retelling of the time he crashed a neo-Nazi meeting in 2017. Though Edelman’s show hit Broadway in 2023 and HBO in 2024, it’s immediately obvious that the material was written years ago. Israel is rarely referenced, though Edelman does mention that his brother competed on the Israeli Olympic bobsled team. In subsequent interviews, the comedian has described his views on Israel as “heterodox.” Last year, when “the Israel-Palestine stuff” came up on Marc Maron’s podcast, Edelman said: “I’m obsessed with listening to it and thinking about it, but I’m not really sure where I stand yet.”
Mark Steinbach
Louis I. Kahn’s bathroom
PLUMBING
The newly reopened Yale Center for British Art has received rave reviews, but I have yet to see any mention of the museum’s best feature: its bathroom. Forget Cecily Brown and J.M.W. Turner; say hello to Louis Kahn’s colossal concrete pillar, tracing a curve to the sink. The mirrors come with dressing room lights fit for a starlet (Madonna did, after all, visit the YCBA in April). The palette isn’t anything out of the ordinary — whites, grays, and the metallic reflections of the paper towel dispenser and trash can. Yet this blankness suits the room’s function as both a respite from the noxious gaze of self-proclaimed art critics and a backdrop for an Instagrammable mirror selfie to broadcast the fact that you are, after all, one of the dilettantes you despise.
Nicki Klar
Dennis Cooper’s WordPress
WEBSITE
Even if you’re not all that interested in what America’s Marquis de Sade has to say about art, books, and weird things on the internet, you’ll find useful advice and minor revelations on his self-titled blog, where he responds to practically every comment. Some of his observations run to the banal — that coke is expensive now, and sincerity is good — yet he still manages to surprise. In one response, he encourages the user Diesel Clementine to “adopt a persona and make a bunch of friends who like the persona and want to be friends with that person, and then, after your persona has been friends with them for a while, revert to who you really are and confuse them.” Couldn’t we all stand to live our lives a little more like one of Cooper’s depraved protagonists? I, at least, plan to start signing off messages the way he often does: “xoxo, me.”