Introducing Offline Recs, our monthly culture digest
A compendium of movies, music, books, meals, and other cultural ephemera that we can’t stop thinking about
Welcome to Offline Recs, The Culture Journalist’s monthly digest of the movies, music, books, meals, and other cultural ephemera we can’t stop thinking about — regardless of where they fit in the news cycle. We’re making the March edition available to everyone, but you can sign up for a paid subscription to receive this round-up every month, along with full pod episodes and other goodies.
Books
Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
The cover design for this book is so disarmingly cool and strange that I had dismissed it for years as the kind of release that well-heeled young people with artistic ambitions will leave sitting out on their coffee table to seem, well, disarmingly cool and strange. Turns out, it’s a story about a young woman in the early ’00s who is actually so disarmingly cool and strange that she decides to sleep for an entire year, armed with a bathroom cabinet full of pharmaceuticals, miscellaneous bodega snacks, and the soporific stream-of-consciousness ramblings of her boy-obsessed best friend, Reva.
It’s hard to believe that Moshfegh will be able to carry this thinly veiled metaphor about escaping one’s past trauma for over three hundred pages, but she succeeds in turning a book about sleeping into quite the page-turner. And for the native New Yorker in me, this chronicle of art-kid malaise in the actual Indie Sleaze era wound up to the September 11 attacks in an extremely brutal and frisson-inducing way. —Emilie Friedlander
Journalism/Criticism
Post45, Dark Academia package
Earlier this month, we welcomed writer and fashion theorist Biz Sherbert onto the show to discuss Dark Academia, the learning-obsessed Gen Z subculture marrying threads that look straight out of Brideshead Revisited, or Oxford University circa 1922, with a love for classic literature and fictional chronicles of student life like The Secret History and Dead Poets Society. I’m always curious about what actual academics think about the trend, largely because the nostalgic fantasy it conjures seems completely divorced from the increasingly vocationalized and consumer-optimized world of contemporary higher education. Which is why I was delighted when my friend Naomi sent over this heady package of essays from the folks at Post45, which digs into juicy subjects like “Tweed Jackets and Class Consciousness,” “The Adjunct Complaint,” and “Dark Academia, Dark Money.” —EF
“The Curious Life and Mind-Altering Death of Justin Clark”
This deep dive from New York’s Christopher Robbins looks past the buzzword of the “psychedelic renaissance” to examine the intersecting cultural, political, and economic factors surrounding the fascinating life and tragic death of a veteran psychonaut and researcher who worked behind the scenes on the hit VICE TV show Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia. Addiction to psychedelics is decidedly rare, but, as the article puts it, not impossible, and the piece holds a mirror up to our contemporary psychedelics obsession to parse the gray areas surrounding the industry’s impending capitalization. —Andrea Domanick
Pods
Once Upon a Time… at Bennington
Speaking of The Secret History, I’ve been casually making my way through Lili Anolik’s dishy, celebrity-studded chronicle of life at Bennington College in the ’80s while cooking, and it’s such a wild ride that I sometimes notice myself screaming back at it, occasionally at Analok herself. Based on the Vanity Fair writer’s 2019 oral history of an unusually decadent and artistically fertile chapter in the Vermont hippie college’s history, the podcast offers a riveting, at-times hilariously fawning window into the crisscrossing lives, eccentricities, and sexual misadventures of a cohort that included some of Gen X’s greatest literary minds, including Donna Tartt, Jonathan Lethem, and Brett Easton Ellis.
Tartt’s agents reportedly asked Apple to take down the podcast, and I can’t say I blame them: I wouldn’t want a reporter dredging up all the details of my college dating life, either, and the podcast’s handling of that material can be pretty cringy at times. Still, for fans of the Dark Academia ur-text that Tartt would begin penning during her Bennington years, it’s fascinating to connect the dots between The Secret History’s story of an insular group of performatively preppy students coalescing around a mysterious classics professor and her own experiences. (For a teaser, I recommend checking out this New Yorker profile of Claude Fredericks, Tartt’s actual classics professor.) —EF
TV/Movies
I’m convinced that we are, appropriately enough, entering a golden age of dystopian TV. The critical acclaim and cult-like ardor surrounding shows like Black Mirror, Squid Game, Watchmen, and Station Eleven make for just a few examples on a longer list that I’ll save for another post. But more than any other genre, sci-fi is pushing TV forward as an art form, while laying alternative touchstones when it comes to making sense of these :::gestures broadly::: times.
Enter Severance, AppleTV+’s ambitious foray into the dystopia game, and a contender for the most thrilling addition to the genre yet. That’s in part because it tackles a particularly 2022 brand of the banality of evil: work-life balance. Executive produced and co-directed by Ben Stiller, Severance imagines a world where a simple, elective procedure can surgically section off the memories you are able to recall at work from the ones you can access when you’re off the clock. Behind it is a mysterious and monolithic corporation called Lumon Industries. And that’s just to start.
The acting is best-in-class, with a dramatic turn from Adam Scott alongside Christopher Walken and John Turturro; the Kurbrickian cinematography and art direction are both surreal and sumptuous; and the writing is disorientingly sharp — I often find myself on the verge of laughing, but I’m not sure why. Even the opening credits are good.
Six episodes into a nine-episode first season, the series is still raising more questions than it’s answering, and could very well end up going the way of Lost. But if you’ve ever found yourself at work, wishing you could skip ahead to the end of the day — a sentiment that is as ordinary as it is bleak, and that reportedly inspired the show’s creator Dan Erickson — asking questions is a pretty damn good place to start. —AD
I’d be curious to hear what the circus community thinks of it, but I really enjoyed this uber-stylized 1940s period thriller about a drifter with a murky past (Bradley Cooper) who gets a job at a carnival, works his way up the ranks, and eventually strikes out on his own as a psychic who entertains rich people in Buffalo, NY by guessing personal details about them at parties. After he correctly surmises that a femme-fatale and psychologist by the name of Dr. Lilth Ritter (Cate Blanchett) is hiding a gun in her purse, the story spins out into a trippy meditation on scams, psychoanalysis, and our inherent gullibility as humans that reminded me a lot of Janet Malcolm’s 1980 book The Impossible Profession, though the movie is an adaptation of 1946 noir novel by the same name. —EF
Music
If you think there’s no room left for truly original sounds, just put ears on The Long Count, the second album from Mexican-American producer Delia Beatriz, a.k.a. Debit. In a space obsessed with looking towards the future, the artist taps technology to explore music of the past and instruments most of us have never heard before, specifically the flutes of the ancient Mayan courts. For her raw material, Beatriz sourced archival recordings from the Mayan Studies Institute at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma, processing them through an AI machine learning program to produce a series of lush, dissonant, ambient soundscapes. It’s a record as beautiful as it is unsettling, recasting our conceptions of lineage, technology, and creation into something that exists entirely of its own space and time. —AD
Jeremih, Late Nights with Jeremih
I have a pet theory that we are living in the middle of a time warp where everything feels like a throwback to 2012-2014. If you are old enough to remember that chapter of the music internet, when underground producers began to sound more like pop stars and pop stars began to sound more like underground producers, you will probably recall that Jeremih’s Late Nights with Jeremih mixtape was a moment — perhaps best encapsulated in the gauzy, pitch-shifting atmospherics of “All the Time,” with its unforgettably raunchy, bleating chorus. Last week, seemingly out of the blue, the tape resurfaced from the ether and hit streaming services for the first time. Kind of a weird coincidence, huh? —EF
Cooking
Betinna Makalintal’s @crispyegg420
This isn’t exactly a recipe, but my talented former VICE colleague Bettina Makalintal has an Instagram account called @crispyegg420 that I highly recommend if you’re looking for culinary inspiration — or at least, if you enjoy looking at colorful images of artfully scored mushrooms, farm-fresh greens, and perfectly cooked eggs. I recently tried recreating this very umami antipasto-style salad on my own, but if you’re looking for more hands-on instruction, I would point you in the direction of Bettina’s TikTok account, where you can watch her making some of these dishes and bask in the calming ASMR sonics of chopping up vegetables and tossing them in a sizzling pan. (Also, this kale sauce pasta is incredible). —EF
Wildcard
Patreon-supported English-language newsroom The Kyiv Independent has been tirelessly reporting on the war in Ukraine from inside the country since Russian forces invaded in February. You can support their work here, or donate to a fund to support media workers in Ukraine. —EF