Feed You, Feed Me
Lena, Lana, lawsuits, Lerner
In case you missed it, I took over Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me on Tuesday. The post, provocatively titled “Lana, Lena, and lawsuits” broke some news and received attention from more readers than I’m used to, including Lena Dunham in the comments—I love your work! The extra traffic seems to have made this blog #20 on the “rising” Substack leaderboard in “culture,” whatever that means. So, hi, and thank you!
I wrote there that the inaugural Fashion Fiction series was a success, but didn’t mention the part when, because the lights were so dim at Sloane’s and I was reading from a 1938 edition of an Elizabeth Hawes book, not my phone, I said aloud that I was struggling to see, and Judith Thurman herself (78-year-old National Book Award winner—and Hawes expert) stood up to hold an orb of light over the pages. Visually, I was told, it was like a master passing the torch. Below is proof that it happened, photo by Niall Cronin.
The reading I teased in a previous post is still happening on April 30th, at the Stéle store on Mott Street, but it’s apparently a private event, sorry. Here, instead, are some recommendations for you:
Read this poem by Ben Lerner, from the May issue of the New York Review of Books, right now. As a taste, it’s called National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
See Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978) while it’s still at Film Forum. I love this movie so much.
Also Amalia Ulman’s newly released Magic Farm (2025), with a Q&A to follow at Angelika. Chloë Sevigny will be at Saturday’s 7pm screening.
(Read Amalia’s Mubi Notebook piece for a rare appearance of the ex-husband: “The nerve!…I was already drowning in debt after supporting his life of leisure for years. As I watched the rest of the film, I wondered how I had managed to get swindled so badly. The nerve! My then husband regarded his appreciation for the finest of things as a sort of talent, which he applied to correcting my feral ways...”)
And see Haneke’s Time of the Wolf (2003) at Metrograph.
Plus, if feeling adventurous, the blindfolded movie series City Dudes (you won’t know what movie you’re about to see, and you’ll never guess; there’s no real common thread to them) at the Roxy.
Not that you should be indoors! I’ve been listening to a mix I made with Baba Stiltz two years ago and walking around, reading The Edge of the Alphabet (1962) by Janet Frame. My copy is old, but it’s cool that Fitzcarraldo Editions reissued it with an introduction by Catherine Lacey last year, and that Audrey Wollen wrote about that this year for the New Yorker: “Hearing voices, writing novels, both encounters with the other inside you—what’s the difference, Frame asks, except the page?”