Mentioned this week: Richard Dawkins, Mill City Museum, the Twelve Tribes, and more
Five extremely abbreviated reviews
Pope Francis died yesterday at the age of 88. The first Latin American pontiff was, among other things, fond of a joke, particularly those involving popes. He wrote as much in an opinion piece for the New York Times, published just a few months before his death, in which he told some of his favorites. One of them was an extended riff involving a speeding pope and a traffic cop, which we can only assume he read first in Gabriel Smith’s 2022 Drift short story “The Complete.”
The late pope’s exquisite sense of comic timing perhaps explains why he chose to leave this vale of tears mere hours after being visited by JD Vance. “Irony is a medicine, not only to lift and brighten others, but also ourselves,” Francis wrote. We agree. In this week’s Mentioned, you’ll find sede vacante, a fervent congregation, ominous warnings about mauled limbs, a groovy wall mural, and Rotting Christ.
Conclave
FILM
The words sede vacante, announcing the death of the sitting pope, launch the recondite system by which cardinals elect pontiffs — a squalid ordeal, per Edward Berger’s feature. Through dialogue peppered with abstruse phrases like in pectore and abyssus abyssum, the film underscores the cardinals’ effete remoteness, and the persistence of Latin in the Western Rite. The ensuing plot points feel rote and unmotivated: a love child, bribery, a terrorist attack, reactionary cardinals, Ralph Fiennes’s quasi-Washingtonian reluctance to serve. Commonwealth viewers will leave baffled by the lengths these clergy members will go to avoid the most radical outcome: an English pope.
Peter Huhne
The Genetic Book of the Dead
SCRIPTURE
Richard Dawkins’s fandom has come to resemble a kind of religion — the very thing he claims to abhor. His latest release is about how genetic material can be close-read “as a book.” On what he says will be his last speaking tour, the evolutionary biologist, militant atheist, and habitual Islamophobe toured North America like a visiting megachurch pastor. At the Newark stop, there was scripture (references to his many texts), psalms (koanic repetition of Dawkinisms), and a fervent congregation (several audience members dressed as the guru himself, in his signature Hawaiian shirts). Perhaps he’s returning to the Anglicanism of his youth. Lately, Dawkins told the Cato Institute, he’s started identifying as a “cultural Christian.”
Sam Schotland
Mill City Museum
GRAIN
Minneapolis is no longer the flour capital of the world, but its riverfront is still littered with tubular grain silos and washed-up relics of the mills that once dominated the city. One of these, the Washburn “A” Mill, is now a museum. It burned down in 1991, but the mill’s walls and foundations are displayed like the remains of excavated Roman ruins. Museum visitors follow the journey of a wheat kernel in great detail while sampling freshly made biscuits from a “Baking Lab” operated by a modern-day Betty Crocker look-alike. Slick wood-and-glass paneling sits alongside ominous warnings about mauled limbs and flour-dust explosions: industrial chic distilled to its essence. It’s not a big place, but there’s plenty to sift through.
Pradeep Niroula
The Yellow Deli
RESTAURANT
Conveniently located in eleven states, as well as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Spain, the U.K., and Japan, this folksy favorite is owned and operated by the Twelve Tribes, a Christian fundamentalist sect whose track record of alleged child abuse, labor exploitation, and racism has led some (like the Southern Poverty Law Center) to call it a cult. Vibe-wise, imagine if the Grateful Dead took a trip to Middle Earth: the Boulder, Colorado outpost features a groovy wall mural depicting Tribe members flying in a winged rainbow van, as well as rough-hewn wooden furniture and medieval folk instrumentals playing in the background. The platonic ideal of a deli: piping hot breakfast sandwiches, homemade cream cheese pie, and a chance to find, per the FAQ page, “new friends, a new job, a new hairstyle, a new address, and most importantly, a new Master, who will direct every aspect of your life.”
Liam Archacki
Pro Xristou
ALBUM
Hellenic metal band Rotting Christ — spawned in the era of Tipper Gore, video nasties, and satanic panics — was once known for its schlocky aesthetic. Multiple audience members left its 1993 Fuck Christ Tour in ambulances. But almost forty years in, the group has fed on the strengths of its earlier work, metabolizing grind and gore into a hypnotic, almost hymnal record of pulsing drums and cinematic thrash riffs. The band deserves more accolades, but perhaps it’s fitting that the founders’ biggest honor to date was getting a prehistoric marine species named after them. The ophiuroids, their discoverers explained, “lived in a dark, toxic environment in the depths of an ancient ocean, dwelling on the remains of their dead predecessors.”
Joel Glover
