Weekend Edition 🫀

Sup sweeties. The Dirt staff shares what we’re reading, eating, buying, and streaming. ICYMI, here’s our September playlist!

DAISY ALIOTO

Magazzino Italian Art

Magazzino in Cold Spring, NY is one of my favorite places in the world. I took my husband there on one of our first dates and we try to go a couple of times a year to pet the Sardinian donkeys(!) they have on-site and see their robust arte povera collection. (Somewhere in the archives of the foundation is a video of me interviewing Michelangelo Pistoletto.)

Anyway, they’ve just opened a second pavilion to accommodate more guest exhibitions. Currently on display is a curation of Murano glass works by Carlo Scarpa. There’s also a new café and store. I love that Magazzino does a lot of programming to engage the local community and if you’re coming from the city they’ll pick you up at the Metro-North station.

Tablet Plus 

Do other people know about this?? I’m not a “points” or “membership” person at all (really, my brain just doesn’t work that way) so I was very skeptical when someone told me about the Tablet Plus program which is $99 a year for perks at any of the hotels booked through Tablet like late checkout or a free room upgrade. I love a staycation in a boutique hotel and spent a long time trying to figure out what the catch is but I don’t think there is one. Hotels in NYC are so expensive right now that after a couple of free upgrades and one glass of champagne I would say this will pretty much pay for itself.

Ugo Mulas photographing Lucio Fontana

Ugo Mulas was an Italian photographer famous for capturing artists in their studios. You might have seen his picture of Lee Bontecou on the cover of Spoon’s 2007 album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. (No? Ok, well we can’t all be cultured.)

Lucio Fontana is a genius painter and sculptor best known for creating canvases with puckered slits in them. Let Peter Schjeldahl explain:

“For full ‘Dolce Vita’ effect, imagine a Cut hanging in a chic living room with cool jazz wafting from the record-player. Critical paeans to his work, in Italy and, increasingly, abroad, yawed between symbol-mongering—the apertures as female genitalia or the wounds of Christ—and poetic lucubration on themes of space and time.”

Anyway, a while ago I stumbled on an online translation of Mulas’s biography where he describes trying to get a photograph of Fontana doing one of his cut canvases. It’s the greatest testament to compromise between two artists. I mean, I think about it all the time:

“I appealed to Fontana to pretend to make a few slashes. We put a new canvas on the wall and Fontana behaved like when he is waiting to make a slash, with a Stanley cutter in his hand, leaning up against the canvas, on top of it as though the work were to start in that moment. We see him from behind, we see a canvas with nothing on it, there is only a canvas and he in the pose of someone who is starting to work on it. It is the moment when the slash has not yet begun but the conceptual elaboration has already been cleared.”

Read the full story here.

~Extremely niche recommendation~

Thai With Us, Augusta, Maine

It’s 2023 and we’re all in search of novel experiences. You could attend Burning Man or one of dozens of copycat festivals, drink a CBD-infused espresso martini at a sex club, or move to Portugal on a bitcoin visa. Here is what I am going to do: I’m going to drive to Augusta, Maine, specifically the Augusta State Airport. I am going to walk into their on-site Thai restaurant called THAI WITH US. I am going to order an iced tea and crab fried rice. I’m going to watch the sun set over the tarmac and I’m going to be fucking happy.

TERRY NGUYEN

See Saw, available only on iOS

Art galleries in New York are back from summer break, and there are plenty of new shows to catch. I’m no thirsty gallerina; I prefer to gallery hop on weekdays to avoid the crowd claustrophobia at openings. See Saw is my favorite app to use to keep track of exhibit openings and closings across Manhattan. It also features galleries in LA, Berlin, London, Paris, and Seoul. There’s a handy function for you to customize and filter shows that you’re interested in, and the interface offers a small (but crucial!) sneak peek of the art on display. If you’re in NY, Tanya Ling’s show Col de Montagne at Harper’s in Chelsea is not to be missed. The London-based painter can also be seen working at a nearby space, where she is in public residence at until September 30. I am not one to engage with artists when they are in the zone, but I felt very much like a Peeping Tom spying on Ling’s process.

JOCELYN SILVER

The Pleasure Lists

In 1954, Bertolt Brecht composed a poem consisting solely of a list of pleasures: excited faces, the dog, being friendly. It's very sweet. And inspired by the exercise, a few months ago writer Dalya Benor decided to try out making her own list of pleasures. She told friends, who eagerly took to the practice, and it's become a Project. Now, you can submit your own list to The Pleasure Lists Instagram account, and read lists of pleasures from various artists, writers, and other influential types, who like cool things but also tomato sandwiches and sweet animals. Writing my own pleasure list really turned a bad day around; it's lovely to be reminded that the world is full of beauty, including tomatoes.

Chocolate Chip Cookies in Los Angeles

Thanks to a few errant tweets, I have been thinking a lot about chocolate chip cookies in LA lately. But I think about them a lot anyway, because they are DELICIOUS. Which is surprising, due to the city's famed emphasis on wellness culture. But if you like a salty-sweet chocolate chip cookie, flavored with the nuttiness of brown butter and a sprinkle of crunchy Maldon, LA is really the place to be. Top-tier chocolate chip cookies I have enjoyed include offerings from Proof, Doubting Thomas, All Time, and the Sunset Tower. People like the All Day Baby cookie, but it's too soft and sweet for me, much more of a Levain-style treat. Which brings me to my controversial point, which is that New York is the better city, but LA has waaaay better food. Including the chocolate chip cookies. Bakers in New York seem allergic to sea salt!!!

Books I Have Read and Enjoyed Recently

Yes, I am extremely late to these, but they were all excellent. I can no longer talk about anything unrelated to The Troubles in Northern Ireland or the atrocities at Nanking. I'm a lot of fun to have at dinner parties!

• Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

• Ex Wife by Ursula Parrott, with introduction by Alissa Bennett

• The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg

• The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt

• The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang

MICHELLE SANTIAGO CORTÉS

Chang Yuchen’s Coral Dictionary

I get giddy every time I glance at my bookcase and make eye contact with Chang Yuchen’s Coral Dictionary. It’s a dictionary of 216 words the artist translated between the Malay language and the coral fragments the artist encountered, categorized, and hand-drew during her residency on Dinwan Island in Malaysia. From the publisher: "The Coral Dictionary is a poetic investigation into the nature of language and the language of nature."

Amateur (1994) x Demonlover (2002)

An accidental double-feature I produced for myself while binge-watching movies on The Criterion Channel: Hal Hartley’s Amateur (1994), which is about literotica and magazine porn. And Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover (2002), which is about the business of online and virtual porn. Both feature perennial favorites like: corporate bloodlust and duplicitous heroines. And they’re incredibly moody and stylish fall picks.

OSIRENE

Moving to a new city? Follow local meme accounts

Moving to a new, unfamiliar city is chaotic. You temporarily lose everything that defines you: your daily routine, your sanity, simply knowing where things are. Mentally and physically demanding, moving is a personal olympics of solving problems daily while navigating logistical and administrative challenges of an unknown city. Sometimes most of the anxiety comes from the unfamiliarity of the new area so a little research can go a long way.

A simple Google search won’t cut it though. Tapping into a city’s reddit is a good place to start (r/moving can also have good moving-specific tips). Browsing your 5-mile radius on Google Maps to read reviews of local businesses can help you pick your anchor spots. Another easy and entertaining way to microdose the culture is to follow local meme accounts and start consuming their memes. It’s a fast track to “read the room” and to learn about the local flavor of humor, pain points, fun, and slang before even landing.

Unpacking, a puzzle game about moving

Unpacking is a casual “zen puzzle game about unpacking a life” and is another entrant in the now popular video game genre, cozy gaming, for low stakes and relaxing gameplay. The goal: unpack moving boxes of beloved treasures and mundane items alike, carefully putting them one by one in their right place. As you go through each level, the player unpacks the main character’s storyline (or you, really) as they go through different significant life stages starting from childhood to starting a family.

Charming but also a bit tedious like IRL moving, Unpacking manages to not trigger the negative aspects associated with moving and instead focuses on how our identity shifts with each transition. How we fit ourselves into new surroundings says just as much as what we choose to leave behind. Unpacking can be completed in a breezy 5 hours, faster if you don’t mind being messy, or longer if you prefer to take the time to be neat. In their Discord you’ll find a channel dedicated to stories about moving and photos of rooms filled with stacked boxes of those in an IRL season of transition.

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