Offline Recs: Daisy Alioto
Scottish noir, Gorpcore hiking boots, and other hot picks from the CEO of DIRT, a.k.a. "'The Village Voice' for the internet"
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Hey pals. Welcome back to Offline Recs, our monthly digest of cultural ephemera we can’t stop thinking about.
In our work as culture journalists, we have the good fortune of meeting a lot of people who do interesting things for a living — things that usually happen to coincide with being exposed to a lot of cool stuff, and developing a highly intriguing and idiosyncratic sense of personal taste. We spent some time mulling over this series during the break and realized that it was a lot more fun to put together when it wasn’t just us talking about the books and songs and shows and movies we’ve been obsessing over. So we’re going to start using this space to spotlight some of these interesting people and ask them to share some of the things they’re obsessing over, too. Who knows? Maybe our mystical calculus will be successful, and they’ll recommend something that will change ur life.
To get things started, we jumped on a call with Daisy Alioto, a journalist, editor, and prolific commentator on all things “future of media”-related who currently works as the CEO of DIRT, a digital culture publication she co-founded with the writer Kyle Chayka. We caught her at an exciting time: DIRT, which she sometimes likens to “The Village Voice for the internet,” recently migrated from Substack to a colorful new website, along with unveiling a novel, NFT-powered take on the subscription model. (FWIW, DIRT mostly covers stuff that has very little to do with web3, like how social media is basically television at this point and why our generational fascination with houseplants is actually kind of depressing. This, in our opinion, makes the approach even more interesting.)
Lucky for us, she also just got some Christmas presents that she’s pretty, pretty, prett-ay excited about. You can peep some of the listening, viewing, and reading recs she was kind enough to share with us (in addition to our own) after the jump. Or, for the full experience, you can listen to her conversation with Emilie, where she also tells us about a pretty mind-bending article she just penned about The Republic of Užupis, a 7000-person micronation located inside Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. It doubles as a critique of Balaji Srinivasan’s crypto-libertarian ayahuasca fever dream The Network State, which is pretty Mindsetty if you ask us.
Watch
Annika
Daisy Alioto: I just finished watching season one of Annika. It stars Nicola Walker, who plays a detective who is working for Glasgow’s Marine Homicide Unit. Her backstory is that she's Scandinavian, or one of her parents is Scandinavian. So even though the show takes place in Scotland, it definitely has this sort of Scandi noir-adjacent vibe.
Annika originally aired on Masterpiece, though I watched it on Amazon, and I think it was renewed in November for a season two. I later realized that Walker also starred in Unforgotten, which is another British crime show that originated on Masterpiece. I've never seen it, which is rare, because I feel like I've seen every show in this genre. So I think I'm gonna watch Unforgotten next.
Possessor
Andrea Domanick: If you missed this sci-fi thriller from Brandon Cronenberg when it dropped in 2020, now’s a great time to change that. His highly-anticipated follow-up, Infinity Pool, starring Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgård, opens this weekend, with a heap of Sundance buzz preceding it.
Possessor is about an elite corporate assassin who uses other people’s bodies via mind control tech to execute her high-profile targets. As the son of David, Cronenberg demonstrates that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: Possessor is filled with plenty of the sleek design, dystopian intellect, and, of course, body horror that his auteur father is known for. But the feature also sets him apart as a formidable filmmaker with a fresh vision all his own. It’s a lean package that offers as much tight action and psychological thrills as it does surreality — and just the right amount of exhilarating storytelling to help the corporate surveillance paranoia go down.
Wear
HOKA hiking boots
Daisy: I had been eyeing these HOKA hiking boots for a while. I didn’t buy them for myself, because I knew I wasn’t really going to hike in them; I just had this Gorpcore attraction to them. [But] I ended up getting them for Christmas — I think through L.L. Bean, which sells HOKA hiking boots and Uggs, interestingly enough — and I've been breaking them in by wearing them around the house. I think they're the Anacapa Mid GTX.
I'm very excited to be in my Gorpcore era. I hope I will actually do some real hiking in them, but I might also just be wearing them around Brooklyn this summer.
DIRT's Early Majority badge
Daisy: This one's physical-digital. I don't want to use the word “phygital,” because it's horrible and we gotta find an alternative, but I wanted to talk about this cool badge that DIRT designed with the brand Early Majority and my friend David Alderman. He did DIRT’s logo and branding, which became the basis for the design that Fictive Kin did for our new platform, dirt.fyi.
Early Majority is an outdoor clothing brand/system. And they have a unique membership model. They offer the ability to mint a lifetime member badge NFT, which represents access to the community and discounts and a private server. But [it] also can come with this physical badge based on another community you might be in. So we have a badge that we did with them. It's [an image of] daisies kind of growing out of our logo. Friends with Benefits did a badge with them as well.
I think membership models are the future of consumer, whether they're technically living on web3 rails or not. And I like the idea of this modular badging system with clothing that's already sort of modular, because it's all about layering. I think it's really cool, and [that it will] contribute to this environment that we're entering, which is a lot more based on sustainability in fashion. [Editor’s note: Early Majority say their approach to fashion is grounded in the principle of “degrowth” — an economic philosophy we discuss in the latest episode of the Culture Journalist, with media theorist Douglas Rushkoff].
Read
Central Places, by Delia Cai
Daisy: My friend Delia Cai’s book, Central Places, comes out on January 31. It's a novel about an Asian millennial who's revisiting her past in the Midwest and realizing that there's this schism between her New York self and her Midwestern self, and trying to reconcile them over the course of a single holiday. And also in the context of her new engagement with her fiancé, who really only sort of knows her New York self.
I really liked it. There's been this genre of the millennial novel, and I think it brings something fresh to that idea. Even though it's sort of a fictionalized perspective on somebody's identity, I still felt like I learned [a lot about the narrator] and that experience.
Listen
Home to the Sea, by Anita Kerr, Rod McKuen, and The San Sebastian Strings
Andrea: This 1969 orchestral/spoken word album was a blind $5 purchase I plucked from the Experimental/New Age bin at Atomic Records in Burbank. Nostalgic for a recent trip spent field recording along California’s central coast, I was lured in by the fact that it featured “ocean sounds” and a track called “There Are No Beaches in Magic City, Texas.” But what really sealed the deal was this warning in poet Rod McKuen’s liner notes: “If you are thinking of buying [this record], I urge you to listen to it before doing so or to talk to someone who has — otherwise there are a good many other, more predictable records I could suggest for your collection.”
I won’t spoil the mystique, but as someone who has listened to it, I would encourage you to sit with this one like a strange and delightful companion. Anita Kerr (a vocalist known as one of the chief architects of Nashville Sound and, as shown here, a prolific pop composer-arranger) and McKuen (a contemporary of the Beat writers who eventually became a bestselling poet and late-night TV regular) made remarkable work as both collaborators and individual artists, and I urge you to dive into their life stories and catalogs.
Natural Light, by Steven Halpern and Dallas Smith
Andrea: This 1984 electronic-jazz-ambient album comes courtesy of the groundbreaking composer Steve Halpern, who creates music specifically to soothe the psyche (among other spiritual-existential use cases). Here he teams up with musician Dallas Smith, who helms the formidable Lyricon, the first and only totally expressive electronic wind instrument. It’s basically a flute synth. There’s nothing else that sounds quite like it.
The same could be said of Natural Light. It’s warm but crisp, still yet continually in motion, delicate but saturing. Or, as one of just two YouTube comments puts it, “I've never done LSD. But if I did and was having a bad trip, I'd consider listening to this.” (The album isn’t on DSPs like Spotify and Apple Music.)
Fun fact: In 1992, Smith and fellow Halpern collaborator Susan E. Mazer, a jazz harpist with a doctorate in human development, co-created the therapeutic C.A.R.E. system, which pairs original instrumental compositions with natural landscape footage to support healing and relaxation among hospital patients; it’s used by over 1,000 healthcare facilities around the world.
The blended Spotify playlist
Daisy: I don't know when or why we created this, but my husband and I have a blended Spotify playlist. I think this was rolled out a couple years ago, but Spotify has this function where you can designate another account that you want to blend your music with, and it generates one playlist. And the playlist is constantly updating based on your individual listening habits [over time].
Recently, we've started listening to it on long car rides and talking about why a certain song is in there, because next to the song, it will have the avatar of the person whose account contributed to it. And so we'll be, like, “Why is this song on there? What were you thinking about when you were listening to it?”
We drove to Maine to visit my parents a couple weeks ago, and Ben got excited to see that Dinosaur Jr. was on there, because I have a playlist that has the song “Start Choppin’” on it. And he was like, “I didn't know you like Dinosaur Jr.” Ben is a playwright, and he has a playlist for a play that he's working on right now called Vampire Vibe Shift. It's sort of like Suspiria meets “blood boy”: a satire of a Peter Thiel-esque evil billionaire who's harvesting blood from gig workers, basically. There’s this dancer who signs up for what she thinks is going to be a controlled medical experiment, but it's really just harvesting your blood for this guy.
There were a lot of songs on our blended playlist that came from the playlist he made, including songs from the original Suspiria soundtrack. [As we were driving], he was telling me what sort of scenes he was imagining when he was listening to this music, and what listening to it had generated in the text of the script. It feels intimate to share our individual music tastes with each other in this way. And definitely kind of weird if the song is from, like, a part of my life that predates Ben, or maybe one I even associated with a previous relationship — but I kind of enjoyed it.
Wild Card
LastSwab
Daisy: My parents got me this reusable q-tip for Christmas, which I guess sort of fits in with this idea of sustainability. It's [from] this Danish brand called LastObject that is interested in combating single-use products. It comes with its own little carrying case, and it sort of feels like something that Muji would sell. I'm kind of obsessed with it. You have to wash it yourself, which is a little gross, but I don't know — I like sticking things in my ear. I'm not gonna stop. So if you also like doing that, you should buy this so you can stop spending money on q-tips.
Daiso
Andrea: I was reorganizing my art supplies over the holidays when I almost made the mistake of buying overpriced storage bins from Target. Luckily, a good friend set me on the righteous path: “Dude! Just go to Daiso.”
If you’ve yet to have the pleasure, Daiso is a chain of Japanese dollar(ish) stores that have been around since the ’70s, but only more recently started staking a claim in the U.S. Its ultra-low price points and batshit variety of *stuff* skew traditional dollar store, but the chic-cheap quality and genuine pragmatism of its goods make it more akin to Target’s Threshold brand or even the Container Store.
Like with any dollar store (or its more upscale counterparts), the fact that it’s all so cheap and abundant does suggest something about the labor conditions of the places producing this stuff and its environmental impact. But it’s also just a fascinating place: From office supplies, to kitchen tools, to gardening and, uh, fishing gear, it’s all there. In addition to some nice storage bins (for the cool price of $1 a pop), I also took home a bunch of other stuff I not only thought I needed, but have since actually used: some new knives, kitchen magnets, surface cleaning erasers, ink brush pens, a magnetic towel rack, an acupressure foot massage ball (highly recommend), a chic box for organizing/concealing the cord chaos under your desk, and, of course, some Japanese candy.
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