Offline Recs: Ryuichi Sakamoto, post-pandemic cities, Jackson Pollock's house plant

Plus, a Netflix for underground culture, a Japanese prep bible, and a solution for sharpening knives.

Hey pals. We’re popping back in from our short break to bring you a new installment of Offline Recs, The Culture Journalist’s monthly digest of books, music, TV shows, and other cultural ephemera we can’t stop thinking about — regardless of where they fit in the news cycle.

This time around, we share some recs that got us thinking about the history of prep fashion, the fate of cities in the era of remote work, parasocial relationships, and the curious story of a spider plant owned by Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, and whose babies are still being passed from person to person decades after their deaths.

If you’re looking for something to tide you over while we work on the next slate of free episodes, Emilie was just tapped in as an “expert source” on Electronic Beats’ new podcast The Week, where she goes long on the creative, legal, and ethical implications of using AI in songwriting and music production. You can also listen back to our most recent free episode, where Cory Doctorow shares everything you need to know about the phenomenon of “chokepoint capitalism.” And, as always, you can sign up for a paid subscription, which gives you access to a free bonus episode every month, plus ungated access to all Offline Recs editions (including this one), essays, and more. 

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Take Ivy, with photos by T. Hayashida

While reading Hua Hsu’s recent piece for The New Yorker about the history of J.Crew, I was reminded that friends had been telling me, for years, that I absolutely needed to check out this 1965 photo book by a group of four Japanese style enthusiasts. It’s easy to think of so-called “Ivy style” as an invention of mass market brands like Ralph Lauren, Abercrombie & Fitch, and J. Crew itself —  themselves, approximating the elbow-padded sartorial quirks of America’s old-money elite — but apparently, many of these retailers were taking cues from the creators of Take Ivy, who traveled to the U.S. in the middle of the last century and created what is essentially a time capsule of the way that students at Ivy League universities used to live and dress. Both J.Crew and Ralph Lauren reportedly used to display it on their shelves.

The book, which was arguably just as influential among young shoppers in Tokyo’s Ginza neighborhood as it was in the States, was reissued in 2010 by powerHouse books, which is how I snagged a copy for my coffee table. Come for the beautifully washed out photos of Dark Academia libraries and students trudging across the quad in penny loafers and no socks; stay for the ethnographic commentary about how looking slightly sloppy and having the right “strut” are just as important as the clothes themselves. I have also been hearing good things about this seven-episode series on the history of prep by Avery Trufelman’s Articles of Interest podcast, which discusses the book’s impact on fashion in both countries, along with the aesthetic’s historical double life as a symbol of exclusion and oppression and a tool of resistance. —Emilie Friedlander

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City Limits: Beware the Doom Loop (Today, Explained) 

Vox’s daily podcast Today, Explained is always a great antidote to the contextless deluge of the newsfeed. But its recent “City Limits” series, on the future of cities post-pandemic, is particularly smart and edifying. This episode, “Beware the Doom Loop,” offers an illuminating look at the impending economic and social consequences most of us don’t think about wrought by the shift to remote work and our post-pandemic work culture. It explores how cities are struggling to recover even as pandemic restrictions are lifted, and how empty offices threaten to set off a downward spiral of declining tax revenues, waning services, and urban flight. —Andrea Domanick

Hot Slots (Nowness)

As a sound artist and a former Las Vegas resident, this installment from Nowness’ terrific Experiments series admittedly dog whistles at two of my niche interests. But regardless of whether you care about those things, it’s also a sensory and cerebral feast. Artist Erren Franklin takes us on a Super 8 journey through the sights and sounds of a Vegas casino at 2 a.m., exploring the visceral thrill of aesthetic overload that these places unlock, and all the aspirational existential underpinnings therein. Shout out to Nico Georis, who brilliantly composed its score from slot machine samples. —AD

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Ryuchi Sakamoto playing “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” in late 2022

Last December, a friend from my music writing days invited me to attend a livestreamed piano performance by the late, great Ryuichi Sakamoto. The Japanese electronic music pioneer, composer, fashion icon, and Yellow Magic Orchestra co-founder had apparently pre-recorded it over the course of several sittings, debuting selections from his 2023 album, 12, which he recorded over two years of declining health. Reading between the lines, it seemed like everybody — including Sakamoto — knew that the performance was going to be his last. 

To be perfectly honest, these circumstances made the thought of tuning into the session quite painful; nobody wants to think about death, much less that of a person whose compositions radiate so much of what is beautiful in life, in such a stark and paired-down way. But I mostly remember it for being deeply peaceful and full of beautiful melodies and space, just like I’d always known his piano music to be. His team hasn’t released the full thing — at least not in U.S. — but here is his interpretation of “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” the theme he wrote for the 1983 film of the same name, in which he co-starred with David Bowie. It’s the first solo Sakamoto composition I ever heard. For more Ryuchi memories, check out this archive Andrea put together of live performances and interviews he did at KCRW over the decades, spanning from 1988 to 2016. —EF