Mentioned this week: everyone’s favorite Sauron-inspired surveillance-tech giant
Plus counterfeit poems, a neighborhood drunk, buxom desert strippers, and toxic dust
Last week on the subway three bald men, all wearing athletic shirts with graphic patterns like layers of sedimentary rock, formed a phalanx around me. We rode together for several stops; I enjoyed being among them, perhaps because I myself am balding. It was like they were silently initiating me into their society — you’re safe here, they seemed to say. When they departed, a man boarded wearing a black felt hat, topped by a red, puffy ball at its center. I thought of the game of catch I played as a child, with a neon-pink ball in my right hand and a neon-green circular Velcro “mitt” in my left. There was always something embarrassing about that game; it felt like it was pretending to be baseball. The man with the felt hat wore shoes that came to disturbingly sharp points. I smiled at him. He shared my gaze.
One of the pleasures of a bounded space — a subway car, an extremely abbreviated review — is its sharpening of attention. In this week’s Mentioned, five writers notice counterfeit poems, a neighborhood drunk, buxom desert strippers, toxic dust, and everyone’s favorite Sauron-inspired surveillance-tech giant. If you notice something you’d like to review, submit a draft to mentions@thedriftmag.com.
— Jordan Cutler-Tietjen, Mentions Editor
The Endless Garment
ART
Since 2015, Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky have been collecting bootleg T-shirts from the likes of CNAHEL and MAISON MARQIELA, reappraising these circumventions of copyright as sites of linguistic renewal. At a recent group exhibition at Pioneer Works, interspersed among the piles of textiles — through which visitors were encouraged to rummage — were pages of poems, operating in a similarly ruptured vernacular: “It’sNotWhoYou Are… / It’sWhaYouWear… / 1Mean, / WhoReahy Cares.” Such lines lack, by design, the transcendent senselessness of the surrounding clothes; they are counterfeit poems, no match for the real (fake) thing. The sharpest verse came from a MOSCHMO shirt: “after form / admim wob / is a uniq afired.”
Isabella Cacdac Ampil
Hank’s Saloon
FILM
If you’re under a certain age, you might not realize that the lopsided black box of a building at Atlantic and Third holds a hallowed gravesite of that endangered Brooklyn species, the actually cheap dive bar. This documentary pays respects to the titular establishment, tracing its hundred-plus-year evolution from Prohibition survivor to ironworker’s haunt to pukey country-punk pub to long-vacant real estate void. You won’t get the recipe for Patty’s Panties, but you will get to see some haunting hidden interiors, a guy playing pool with a two-by-four, and a cell phone-free dance floor. Like a neighborhood drunk, the movie rambles at times and lingers too long, but goodbyes are never easy. At a March screening, when a regular told director Leon Chase that he’s “not bitter” about the bar’s closure, the audience screamed back, “You should be!”
Ariel Courage
Euphoria
TV
Just as the color palette of the series has shifted (from Petra Collins blue to deep spray tan), so too have its tone and subject matter. In its third season, creator Sam Levinson abandoned high school melodrama in favor of Western noir, and when we meet the Euphoria characters all grown up, several of them are working in the sex industry. Levinson is a passable auteur and a better troll, daring his haters to cry “male gaze.” But why take any of this seriously: we’re in high camp territory now, with a giantess Sydney Sweeney trampling Los Angeles in a leopard-print bodysuit, and more buxom desert strippers than a Russ Meyer film. Pity the poor Gen-Z viewers who can’t appreciate the homage.
Sascha Cohen
Steal This Story, Please!
FILM
Scrappy journo-activist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! spends much of this documentary about her career out of breath. It opens on her chasing a cagey Trump official up the stairs with a microphone. It closes after she reveals why she’s often coughing: the toxic dust she inhaled post-9/11, when she and her team stubbornly continued to broadcast from their Chinatown headquarters. Midway through, Goodman recalls telling The Intercept cofounder Jeremy Scahill that she would work with him only if he stopped smoking cigarettes. I thought of the breathlessness of the news cycle, the many last gasps of independent media. Then I walked out of the theater and lit up.
Ben Gambuzza
Palantir’s lightweight chore coat
FASHION
After some poor soul presumably wished to a mischievous genie to no longer see so many rich people wearing Carhartt, the couturiers at everyone’s favorite Sauron-inspired surveillance-tech giant released their own line of work shirts this spring. “Chaos is Tolerable; Pain is Tolerable / The Only Thing that Matters is to Win,” reads a tag sewn into the inside of the garment, which comes in cobalt blue and Schutzstaffel black. As of this writing, the $239 jackets are sold out in all sizes, so I am unable to assess their quality, but the Palantir store boasts that they are made from “100% American grown cotton,” for fans who are nostalgic for that kind of thing.