REVIEWDUMP: BOUNCING BIRTHDAY BITCH EDITION
your honour i did NOT kill Frank Gehry
diaristically navel-gazy report this week, sorry. promise I will be intellectual in the new year.
KILLING FRANK GEHRY @ THE GUGGENHEIM BILBAO ★★★★☆
In 2023 I started an Instagram account dedicated to drinking a margarita every single day of the summer, with the eventual goal of convincing the fine folks over at Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville Bar & Restaurants to let me open their first location in the Middle East, preferably on the Gaza Strip. Jimothy Buffet died two months later. I fear I have done the same to Frank Gehry by visiting the Guggenheim Bilbao.
Ostensibly I’m here on a press trip to write about the Arts of the Earth show, which really is tremendously good, and you can read my full thoughts on here should you care about whether I actually think greenwashing in the arts is as evil as everyone says.1 However, it’s also my first time at the Museo in general and I’m slightly gobsmacked at how good their general collection is. The Maria Helena Vieira da Silva show (curated by Flavia Frigeri of London’s very own NPG) is top-notch. This is helped, of course, by the fact that she’s one of the best painters ever ever ever, but the way the exhibition groups and gaps her chronology elevates her work to new heights. I hadn’t seen her figurative WWII-coded stuff before, and boy oh boy did I send a soppy text to my Jewish dad after I had. I want more geometry, in life and in art.
The rest of their stuff is just as good. I can take or leave Koon and Kusama (as one of my journo companions puts it, “I wish the infinity room went on for a bit longer”), but fuck man, the Rothko was superb, Mark Leckey’s sculpture was superb, so was the Chillada, Jesus, even the Holzer got me, and I have an aneurysm every time I get off the Eurostar about how much I hate the piece she’s got up in St Pancras.
And then, of course, is the Matter of Time installation. I’m generally a little unwell about Richard Serra. Well, no, I’m fine. I’m normal. In Vedic and Puranic cosmology, time is vast and cyclical; one world-cycle is made of four yugas, after which the universe is destroyed and re-created by Brahma. When this particular cycle ends, I hope that whatever residue carbon stardust my body is made of in this one gets recycled into the metal Serra uses in the next. I want my bones and soul in these works, in this life, in the next. Whatever. Normal.
Over the press lunch I try recounting Alan Horn’s charming story about him having a first kiss in the shadow of a Serra, but my Spanish is middling at best, and instead I tell the curator of the Guggenheim that I want to get cracked against Torqued Ellipses (1996-98). I also ask for a blowjob instead of a straw at the bar, but this is the Catelans’ fault for having the word paja and pajita sound so similar.
BIG BIRTHDAY BASH @ THE WINEMAKERS CLUB, FARRINGDON ★★★★★★★★★★
I’ve found an interesting hack to circumventing lost’s ‘no phones’ policy: if you offer to spend enough money it turns out that they will in fact unlock the pouch they shove your mobile in, even if it is just to use Apple Pay. I assume a wave of short stories about pre-alcoholics set in a darkened cinema-cum-nightclub will hit the London reading scene in about 3 to 6 months; they will all be terrible and I’m looking forward to reading every single one of them.
Anyway, my birthday was gorgeous, thank you for asking. Every year my life gets better, my legs get longers, my boyfriends get hotter. I am never more than five days away from being.a woman in a nice dress with a glass of free wine in her hand. What a joyful time to be a pretentious, opinionated young person in London. I recommend it to everybody regardless of age or location; the pretencious and opinionated bit is what matters.
MARTINIS, VARIOUS @ THE WEST INDIES ★★★★★
Speaking of London, this week is the Die Quieter Please ball AND The Toe Rag’s pastoral issue talk AND V1L3 B0D13S’s birthday bash AND SRS at lost, but I am in the West Indies until Christmas, a fact I have decided to be insufferable about in order to combat the FOMO.
It’s so beautiful here, of course it is, everyone is so lovely, the food is so good, etc etc. They’re playing reggae Christmas music at the pool bar. It’s 2PM and I’m slamming my fourth drink of the afternoon. Your email finds me sunburned in the way Mizrahim that have long abandoned their passports get after six fingers of bourbon, petting a fat dog with a bib that says DO NOT FEED on it.
“I am assuming all charges for your room go to your parents?” asks a receptionist so beautiful it makes me feel a sudden kinship with Marlon Brando.2
“Yes,” my father replies, “it’s been like that for 27 years and judging by her career path isn’t about to change any time soon.”
Please find my reviews of various martinis attached.
RUMPRESSO MARTINI
★☆☆☆☆
Dare I say… derivative? I’m not saying you can’t improve on a classic, but there’s a reason the expresso martini works so well; the bitterness of coffee constitutionally matches the sharpness of vodka. Rum is a beautiful alcohol, but it is too mellow, too melodic for the solemn ache of kaluhua.
MANGOTINI
★★☆☆☆
Dangerous. The sort of drink that is so easy to digest you will spend an entire evening talking to middle-aged Floridians about, ah, fuck, I forget now, because at least a quarter of your brain cells were wiped out by pure ethanol. You will give them a sheepish smile when you pass them by the pool the next morning and they will ask if you can still taste the mango. You will hate that they are right.
MANGO MARTINI (not to be confused with the Mangotini)
★★★★☆
I’m absolutely slammed at the beach, which is great, but I’m taking away a star because I’m reading Norwegian Wood, which sucks.3 Every couple of chapters I hear the following tweet in Udith Dematagoda’s voice:
COCONUT MARTINI
★★★★★
Perfect. Simply perfect. No notes. Creamy, cutting, served by the sort of man they wrote racist penny dreadfuls about in the 80s. I want to bathe in this drink, I want to marry this drink, I want to smoke a cigarette through my left nostril with this drink. *Patrick Bateman voice* oh my god, it even has grated nutmeg on top—
FINAL THOTS
Just learned that Julia Cameron returned this year with The ‘Daily’ Artist’s Way, which possibly says something very depressing about the current state of things. Luckily I have no opinions on culture, arts education, history.
BALSHAW DOWN!!! I’ll likely have more opinions about this soon. Send me yours should you have any, especially if you work(ed) at the Tate.
Earlier this year I drove across America with a drug addict. Ethics Magazine was kind enough to publish my only mildly exagerated schizoversion of the trip in their fourth issue; you can now read it online here.
TEXT OF THE WEEK
For full disclosure my magazine sponsored a talk at Saatchi Lates earlier this year about this very topic. In short; I don’t.
I’m aware that Polynesia is not the Carribeans, however the other option was including my second fiancé’s - who trained under various Jamaican chefs and developed an appreciation for both the food and women of the Islands - full government name, which seems a little mean. I believe he still reads my Substack, hi doll!
One day I shall compile a list of writers most likely to convince women to be misandrists; Muramaki will be up there, but not above Hemingway or Foucault.
You asked for a wank. A blowjob is "mamada" so you know for the future 😂
no point getting fomo over lost, it's gone to the dogs