Gawker Review of Architecture and Interiors

Reviewing the nine Justices' homes

The current Supreme Court seems fairly indifferent to the right to privacy — the legal protection upheld by the 1965 case Griswold vs. Connecticut, first laid out in an 1890 paper as the “right to be let alone.” The leaked draft decision on Dobbs vs. Jackson would overturn Roe v. Wade, on the grounds that personal health decisions like abortion are not protected under that right. If upheld, the decision would, in turn, undermine several other civil liberties that hinge on the right to privacy — contraception, gay and interracial marriage, and non-procreative sex, among them.

This is, apparently, unpopular. You can tell because polling data on Roe finds that Americans support the 1973 ruling by a ratio of two-to-one; just 28 percent of the voting public want it struck down. You can also tell because some of the Supreme Court justices who signed on to the majority draft have been greeted by protestors outside their house for the past two weeks. Republicans, who spent the past year defending the Jan. 6 insurrection as “tourism,” and some Democrats, who never miss a chance to scold the activist wing of their own party, have handled this with typical aplomb. I’d guess privacy sounds fine right about now.

On an unrelated note, here’s the Gawker Review of Supreme Court Justice Houses. Continue reading

Behold, the King's mansion in 1:24 scale

I’ve been to Graceland once, and the cheap necklace I bought in the gift shop with Elvis Presley’s “Taking Care of Business” lightning bolt logo dangling on a pendant broke before we got back in the car. I’ve never been a particular Elvis fan, but I love houses from the ’70s, particularly ones with lurid backstories, especially when they have well-preserved bathrooms and bedrooms. I was surprised then to find myself moved beyond measure by the neo-colonial mansion, chock a block with leopard skins, mirrors, carpets, stained glass, fountains, and loops of “If I Can Dream” and “Unchained Melody,” the last song Elvis played in concert, just weeks before dying at Graceland in 1977. The tour was too short: There was so much visual stimuli in every discordant room that I couldn’t process what I was looking at. Was that a driftwood armchair in the jungle room? — I’d already moved on to the indoor waterfall.

I want to live in the house for a few days and poke around. I swear I won’t touch anything.

The closest magic I’ve found to that experience is an Instagram account I’ve become enamored of over the last year called Tiny Graceland, the 1:24 scale model of Elvis’s estate by a Toronto-based miniature artist named Heidi Athay. Continue reading

Join me in mourning by solemnly playing "1234" by Feist on your Apple Watch.

The last iPod Classic rolled off the assembly line in September of 2014. About two years later, I stole one from my boss at a bookstore in Dumbo. It was a black fifth-generation model (the “iPod Video” technically) with a polycarbonate plastic front case, and it was sitting at the bottom of one large storage container in a stack of several that my boss kept in the back of the store. By that point, I’d had a standard silver sixth-generation Classic that I’d put my entire life on — music, podcasts, film commentaries, stand-up albums, demos from a band I was drumming for. It’s hard to stress how important my iPod was to my experience of living in New York, cramped, broke, fatigued, and not motivated to lug much else with me all from work to class to home. One day I cried on the subway when my iPod died, the prospect of a silent hour-long commute to Brooklyn too much for my 20-year-old soul to bear.

In any event, one boring afternoon at this job none of us were paid enough to care about, my coworkers and I rummaged through our boss’s crap in search of some tool, maybe a cord, or a flash drive. I found the iPod face down, seeing my boss’s name engraved on it. The thought that ran through my mind before I pocketed it was similar to the psychosis that led people to hoard toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic: What if I run out? As in, what if my iPod smashes on the ground or is run over by a car, or, as eventually happened, simply fizzles out? I needed a backup, and a second, free device was there for the taking. Now, the iPod scarcity I was worried about has finally come around. Continue reading

Do I like their new album or do I just really, really want to like it?

It is strange to feel personally disappointed by an artist, but this is one of the many humiliations of fandom. You allow yourself to believe in people you’ll never meet, and you experience that loss of belief as a kind of betrayal. You ask yourself: Why did I ever like this? And you assume the fault belongs to someone else.

This is how I felt when Arcade Fire released Everything Now. The band’s attempt at dance-rock crossover was crammed full of irritating melodies and cringe-worthy lyrics whose social commentary was so obvious even I could have written it. The real-time reaction on Twitter was essentially: what in the hell. I remember listening to the album over and over the week of its release, searching for more than a couple good tracks, trying to convince myself that this time was well spent.

So when the band announced a new album entitled WE, I prepared for something embarrassing. Instead, the two-part first single “The Lightning I, II” felt like a call-back to the band’s heyday, a stirring anthem that rapidly accelerates into precisely the sort of driving, pounding, deeply earnest rock song that they hadn’t released in over a decade. I listened, and I listened again, and I allowed myself, just a bit, to believe.

After all, Arcade Fire were once the sort of band that compels a kind of faith. They arrived just as the NYC scene was starting to burn out, when people were discovering that post-punk would only stay revived for so long and the Strokes were just going to make one record over and over again. They wore costumes and charmed David Bowie and made a classic album on a shoestring — and then they decamped to a church outside of Montreal and made an even better one. Is it any surprise that they were once my favorite band? Continue reading

In the latest season of the HBO Max series, the facade of indifference unravels

In the first episode of Season 2 of Hacks, HBO Max’s alternately tender and biting series about the relationship that forms between two comedians at polar opposite points in their careers, the protagonists revisit an old conversation about criticism. “I thought you don’t read reviews because you didn’t care,” says Ava (Hannah Einbinder), the 20-something who reluctantly became a joke writer for Las Vegas comedy institution Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) after losing a writing deal over an inflammatory tweet. Deborah has just performed an experimental new set featuring material that’s more personal — more likely to appear in a confessional Netflix special than on the Vegas Strip — and, in her own words, “bombed.”

It turns out Deborah has seen what critics had to say about her show in her local paper, contrary to her claim in Season 1 that she doesn’t read reviews because she doesn’t care about them. Deborah tries to maintain her indifference for as long as she can, but in the end, the mask slips when she responds to Ava: “I don’t read reviews because I do care. You’d figure at some point I’d stop.” This admission, wrung out of the veteran comic like blood from a stone, exposes a vulnerable truth: that Deborah, underneath an exterior hardened by decades in the industry, is not as imperviously cool as she would like to pretend. Continue reading