Olivia Nuzzi’s much-maligned memoir American Canto opens with a phone call and a cockroach rave. Stomping down Fifth Avenue in front of the Met, Nuzzi argues with croaky-voiced bear-crime-scene-stager and whale-beheader Robert F. Kennedy Jr…I mean, The Politician…about whether their long-shot presidential candidate x political journalist affair is wrong (it is). Answering his invocation of … Continue reading
Chain restaurants at the mall used to mean something in this country. Stand-alone restaurant storefronts just a short jaunt away from the mall’s irresistible gravitational pull did too. Or at least I thought they did. When I was a teen in suburban Pittsburgh during the early aughts, Olive Garden, TGI Fridays, Outback Steakhouse, Texas Roadhouse, … Continue reading
A car crash is the most American way to leave this planet, isn’t it? The freedom of the open road and the promise of auto manufacturing fracturing into shards of metal and glass, airbags blowing into bone, skidding tires squealing before the crunch. And…welcome to the car smash! Certainly, I’m not the only one who … Continue reading
In Lucas Hilderbrand’s The Bars Are Ours; Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After, the pictures, a collection of bar flyers, ads, photographs, gay press headlines, and various ephemera culled from fifteen years of research, are worth as much as—if not more than—the text. “Lick your way through the summer,” beckons … Continue reading
“Paris is a cunt.” These four simple words, muttered in a preternaturally husky rasp by pinhole-pupiled Lindsay Lohan as she snickered in the strobe light glare and high-volume snapping of paparazzi cameras outside of the Roosevelt Hotel (which is now an overstuffed migrant shelter), perfectly encapsulate the gossip rag-driven cultural moment of the 00s (or … Continue reading
Our new Bible (all photos by moi) Susan Sontag may have written the most renowned and widely considered definitive consideration of camp, but let’s be honest, Susie could not be camp if her public intellectual life depended on it. Regarding the Pain of Others, Illness as Metaphor, or even, On Photography aren’t exactly laugh riots! … Continue reading
I’ve recently been suffering from a fever. No, not that kind of fever. I’ve been struck with a Thomas Kinkade fever! Yes, the less-than-esteemed painter of shopping mall schlock (before the fall of malls) and the bane of snotty critics recoiling at the satiated bad tastebuds of Americans enamored with all those little queasily quaint … Continue reading
I doubt I’ll look at a butter knife the same way ever again after reading Jamie Stewart’s Anything That Moves. That cool, silver, kind of fussy utensil will forever be etched in my brain as tossed unceremoniously into the bushes like Sally Draper’s Barbie doll after an indulgence in childhood anal fixation. Those rounded edges … Continue reading
It’s cliché to point out that people in the United States now exist in completely different realities, typically broken down by political leanings. Just hop on any social media platform and you can bear witness. For one faction, Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton are eating babies and guzzling adrenochrome in the basement of a strip … Continue reading
You may not know this, dearest Filthy Dreams fanatics, but I’ve occasionally been accused of being long-winded. Rambling. Exhausting. Draining. Just a tad wordy. In a culture where we have writers and editors tweet-advising us to make articles shorter and more palatable for readers, I tend to do the opposite. I don’t care who likes … Continue reading