Taix rhymes with Sex and that's what LA was gathered to Eulogise. Or rather, confess. Hollywood appears to have been copying our Superstar bit: there is anonymous writing celebrities everywhere. Jack Skelley edited the iconic Barney: A Modern Stoneage Magazine in the near '80s, whilst writing The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (semiotexte, 2023), an editor favourite. Skelley writes an absurd sexual scene report in a style we thank him for: Miley Cyrus is back on shrooms.

As below events occur, empires careen thru history’s stoopidest war.

“Not the CNN/TikTok wars; nor the 2004 Simulacra Wars of Ikea pressboard
rationales, such as WMDs; nor the counterfeit meme wars of 2024 – ‘they’re
eating the cats and dogs.’ Today’s war churns hydra pedogarchy’s smashing
and eating of babies and placentas for Peter EpThiel’s Mars colony. After this –
ha! – abandon hope, all ye of democracy fig-leafs. For now, the striptease of
market cabals gives hard-ons to patriarch missiles. But check it out: Their own AI
foresees the collapse of ugly naked body empires. So Antifa Luke Skywalker
tangles his tow-cables around the ankles of those big, armored snow walkers,
and – boom! – the fuckers fuck themselves. See what I mean?”

This is Miley Cyrus whispering into my ear with her licking and flicking tongue.

We are standing on Sunset Boulevard outside of Taix (pron. “TEX,” rhymes with “sex”)
restaurant, soon to be demolished. I adore Miley more than ever since she’s back on
shrooms. We’re all out here in a sidewalk wake staged by Sammy Loren in eulogy to
Taix, the romantic hang and receptacle of confessions from the naughty ids of Los
Angeles.

Lily Lady is here too. Lily leads the crowd in a cheer: a chance Sunset sidewalk
chanson of:

TAIX, TAIX, TAIX, TAIX!!!
(pron. TEX, TEX, TEX, TEX!!!)

One by one, the artists and writers recount memories of blowjobs and choke-sex in the
Taix restrooms. Oh, wait. that wasn’t Taix. That was El Prado, down the street. Or was it
Footsies in Highland Park?

It’s funny because, the following week, I run into Miley Cyrus again at the St Patrick’s
Day House Party: This is the lit-reading I throw with Lily Lady at Lily’s vacant Gothy
avocado courtyard apartment in lower Los Feliz. It is there I remember that Lily Lady
and Miley Cyrus both performed in Alejandro Jodorowski’s film Blood Brother, in which
Miley plays Lily. (Blood Brother has since evolved to become Lily’s new book of poems,
launching April 30 at Poetic Research Bureau, where I will QA Lily and get to the bottom
of all this!)

Before our guests arrive, Lily points out the MAKEOUT ROOM. It’s the bedroom, but
instead of a bed, the floor is filled with plushies pillowed 3-feet thick. Mostly white-and-
red Snoopies and Hello Kitties. Also cerulean Blue Smurfs peppered with paisley Labubus.

“If people get horny, they can do it in here!” beams Lily.
The reader/performers include Clarke E Andros, Ryan Lynch, Molly Larkey, Jo
Stone, Danielle Altman and Diva Corp. Andros’ love sonnets are tight and tender. Diva
Corp manifests as a video of artist Petra Cortright enacting Diva Corp’s poem “Gun” in
fiery arcs and blurs.

Altman reads “Striptease,” a sexy confessional, including:
I try to gather the pieces of myself together
But he pulls me back on the sheets
Reassembles me roughly
Strokes me past language
One can’t help imagining the “I” of the poem as one of Danielle’s Instafit teddy selfies.

After the reading, I find Miley. She’s holding a paper cup of Jameson Irish Whiskey.
“Are you drinking Jameson in honor of Fredric Jameson, the Marxist theorist and
Octopus of Totality?” I ask. “I just wrote a one-act about an encounter between you
and Fredric Jameson. You know: When you were tripping in the Bonaventure Hotel?”
Miley’s response – and it’s a St. Paddy’s miracle! – is to press her tongue again into
my ear! “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Into the plushy MAKEOUT ROOM we leap. Haloed by Hello Kitty cherubs, Miley is
erotodelic goddess. Miley is a radical of insurgent licking, scooping and choking.
Roughly dis- and re-assembling her, I nuzzle Snoopy into Miley’s heart-shaped treasure
wet with warmth. Preverbal and compressed, Miley is small, vowel-shaped, fiercely
obedient. Then, side-by-side, soothed in DDLG growls and whispers, she tongue-fucks
secret grammar. She strokes me past language. Miley shines. Miley murmurs...
“Now, together, we see thru the lizard-brain default mode the System forces upon
lab-grown psyches and bodies toward endless abuse, wars and genocide. The
System being – let’s fucking face it – capitalism and its hydra proxies of morality,
politics, culture and The Kardashians. But, ah, a sexy Sacred Heart alchemies
base Matter into a Flaming Lips dawn. Together, we bestow unity of
consciousness – thru flesh – to our sum inter-experience, including precious
love, and triple star-loads of soulpocalyptic orgasm ripples. Can I get an Amen?”

END.

Introducing Hollywood Superstar's 16 year old rock reporter, Nico. Cameron Crowe fuck off.

We asked him: What you want to write about?

He said: Mitsubishi Suicide and Samba Jean Baptiste.

The editors said: Ok, Go, Nico, Go!

The editors say to you: Keep the Semi-Secular Faith; out in the lonely nights of London.

Atomiser Presents: The London Bulgarian Choir and Mitsubishi Suicide at The Crypt. 13/03/2026.

I embrace a strong sense of faith as I descend, into the crypt below St Martin-in-the-Fields, appeasing my scepticism on the discordance of tonight’s forthcoming performances. Being in the underground hall that is sprawling but airless, makes me notice that the venue’s secularity is suitably emulated by the musicians: Mitsubishi Suicide’s reformulation of the screamo, post-rock, American tradition and the choir’s iterations of folk chants.

Having claimed a spot next to the stage, I feel fooled as a voice announces the choir will begin performing on the other end of the crypt. Tales of esoteric courtship rituals, forbidden love and such -a song was about trapping a wife in the foundations of a house- are enchantingly sung, converting the initially teasing and subtly condescending crowd to hushed meditation. Still, a few heads twitch at the familiarity of a cadence resembling Crystal Castles’ ‘untrust us’.

The polyphony-induced daze I dwindle in and out of is briefly broken by the sweet and sometimes boisterous song introductions courtesy of Dessisalva Stefanova. She is the true star of the night despite her awareness of the anticipation for their successors; she expresses this in introducing a belting chant, “I know you are all here for screamo so now we will screaamm… you can stay here we love you.” By the end of the performance this love is evidently reciprocated as the final applause lasts accordingly.

We turn back to the stage and the band (with two new faces) are testing pedals and tuning without seeming to notice the crowd. They are arranged in a diamond shape, facing each other. A cool jitteriness is emitted by the quartet and audience as we hold our breath, awaiting the terribly impending music. Unannounced, the rapture commences.

The opening songs seem to be a summation of Mitsubishi Suicide’s history, realized through extended epics that morph crawling, sustained phrases into theatrical moments of emo-violence - inspiring half-hearted moshing that is quickly impeded by the immense pillars that (somewhat sardonically) are the foundations of a church.

Older songs like Ilex court are delivered lovingly, with the new guitarist adding tasteful ornamentations. The music’s effect on the crowd is hard to generalise, due to the liminality of the band and its fans between conventional rocking out and something more like wistful reverie.

Perhaps in virtue of the archaic undertone set by the choir, I reflect on the affinities of Mitsubishi’s allure and that of This Heat, a London band which was similarly cherished for its deviance from the sounds the underground of its time (76-82) was promoting. A band that embodied the claustrophobia and murk of London while also evoking the alien and tribal, an effect Mitsubishi echo through their distinct reformulation of midwestern sounds. The quartet’s heady bass tones and capricious arrangements sound sublime in this crypt and I imagine so would This Heat’s- but I don’t know if Thatcher would’ve let that slide.

More explicit and direct influences can be heard in the 4-piece’s music which ended the show with a cataclysmic piece, reprising a riff from “biblical-violence” by (Zach Hill’s) Hella; the bassist tells me he loves that I loved it before I emerge out the crypt.

Outside the church, screamo diplomat Random Guy bestows on me a few words of wisdom; testifying the show was the perfect reunion for the band he’s followed since its beginnings and illustrates the exclusive novelty of attending a screamo show in London. He has faith in the scene, populated by bands such as Scadenza which I would consider paying attention to if you like the sound of screaming.

My pulse is altered as I walk through Trafalgar square, and I conclude that the lineup: which initially seemed a reach, or maybe a stroke of luck turned out to be pretty miraculous.

Private life & AM Radio present Samba Jean Baptiste +3 Album Listening Party. Thursday, February 19th 2026

Me and my friend burst when we read the undisclosable address of Samba Jean-Baptiste’s listening party; we had often yearned for our experience in this venue which hosted a “quiet show” by Harto Falión and some of his boys (including Cajm) in July- a wonderful anomaly within the evenings of my GCSE summer. The trackside auditorium evokes a funny purgatory vibe, with paw shaped windows from which you can spy on dads liming home and yg’s doing loons in London fields’ February twilight. You can tell the crowd are initially disoriented by the nowhereness of the space as they roam wondering where to sit and conclude to stand.

I am happy to be back; images of Harto rapping on a sofa with his feet up, veiled in a scarf that brushes his microphone are rekindled. Another reconception of music experience will be induced on my revisit.

Theodora's 10-minute, oceanic keyboard piece inaugurates the evening- this is also my introduction to her work. Amidst the pianist’s sustained arpeggiations, which cause metal pipes to rattle, I grasp onto a key theme that will be true across the 3 acts of the night: they all nicely comply to Brian Eno’s definition of ambient music, music that allows for drifting attention, and “accommodates many levels of listening without enforcing one in particular”. There's an entrancing quality shared by the three musicians, characterised by repetition, birthing an underlying progression that is not blatant as it is purgative.

Smokers return and so the room is chilly when Cajm’s set commences, going mostly unnoticed by the condensing crowd: greatly populated by capes and cloaks. I don’t know whether to expect a mix featuring some of his production for the likes of Jawinino or John Glacier, something more industrial-inclined or anything else- his YouTube features derivations of church-organ music. His set is an idiosyncratic, electronic prelude to the album, humbling the many that thought they could nod their heads to his perpetually mutating beats while also talking over most of the music- which he mixes on his knees.

Samba rises from the audience which has decided to wait on the floor- shuffling pedantically, you can tell the males are perplexed as to whether they are looking suave or infantile. He makes an endearing speech, confessing his shyness about publicly sharing his music that he is used to approaching privately- he is awkwardly content to be ‘braving the cold together’. The opening track is beautiful, and all of a sudden I feel the urge to apologise to my dad that I'm not with him on his birthday. The coolness of the crowd shatters.

The artificial-whispers that remind us we’re listening to ‘+3’ in most songs, and his recurring use of floaty autotune makes it feel like I’m listening to a zany strain of a trap mixtape.

Samba has nothing to do with the nostalgia-baiters and Dean Blunt impersonators that a soundcloud mix may foolishly associate him with- he’s one fine songwriter. The emerging and vanishing synths over his cloudless guitar distinguish this album from his past work; the fuller compositions seem in a fleeting exchange with his balmy contralto, summoned in such a way that wouldn’t wake up his roommate. Portrayals of life's physical traces and ashes throughout the ‘mixtape’, evoke anagogical interpretations of the ordinary. Everything he utters turns vital.

In paralleling this listening party with Nettspend’s (in which he bleh’s out as many sounds as he would at a concert) that has flooded my fyp, I affirm the significance of tonight’s experience. Samba is definitely not performing and maybe not even exhibiting his work, but it’s nice to think he is an equal subject to it as me. It seems that he wrote these songs to materialize moments of his being- while they are certainly vivid glimpses for me, I’d expect they are much more so for him.

+3 was precious. I can sense its fables will act as a sweet remedy for 2026’s cruel twists of fate.

A note on solidarity—as I write this, the US-Israeli killing machine continues to annihilate. My heart is with Iran. May Western imperialism collapse and the entire empire fall… No amount of art discourse comes above this.

Manic! That’s how I was feeling. I didn’t go to any of the actual fairs (cuz honestly you don’t need to), but I went to about 10ish fair adjacent happenings in LA and experienced shock… delight… confusion… everything in between…

I started my art week rendezvous Monday night at untitled (halo)’s performance of Ryan Trecartin’s BUCKLE YUP: CUE SHOES at the Kiko Kostadinov store on Western. It took me 40 minutes to find parking and I had 3 cups of complimentary white wine. Trecartin was not present (as far as I know—I had grandly misassumed that there would be some showing of Trecartin’s video work that I was dying to see), but it’s okay cuz untitled (halo) was great. I had the most fun when I was getting my third cup of wine and impulsively asked the Kiko Kostadinov bartender if he was single and he said no but that I was “really pretty” and he was “flattered” and we laughed about it and wished each other well and it was honestly a beautiful, vulnerable moment…

Fast forward to Friday, my day began at 99CENT—a show by Barry McGee and his “100 closest friends” in partnership with galleries Jeffrey Deitch and The Hole. When you first walk inside that pink 99 cent store on Wilshire, you’re hit with a distinct smell that’s a mix between the stale scent you’d expect from a defunct 99¢ store and the light b.o. radiating off the mass of bodies in there with you (doesn’t help that the weather has been in the high 80s—in fahrenheit, clarifying for all my readers in better parts of the world where celsius actually means something other than an energy drink). But what you experience in the nose is quickly eclipsed by what you’re intaking through the eyes. You’re visually bombarded by just a million artworks sprawled across the floor, the walls, atop the cash register (even video works playing from the cash register screen), the ceiling, and inside the freezer sections, patiently situated amidst the many people (somewhat slack-jawed) weaving between it all inside this grungy retail space built to sell cheap mass-produced goods.

Now to quote my Create Mode post that inspired this piece,

“I witnessed the "skaters" people [by “people” I mean DIVA CORP who had posted about the skaters on their IG story] were talking about — every time they did a trick there would be an awkward pause and then a small woot and some light clapping. The reaction was so unsure and the moment was almost underwhelming but also endearing because it was awkward and honestly you literally can’t help but have fun because the inside of the store is just Pure Spectacle and the sheer mass of art and objects to see in there meets the viewing-pace of a public whose majority would identify as having fried dopamine receptors like the experience of consuming the art in there requires my eyes to glaze over slightly the way they do when I’m watching Reels and like I really can’t hate that because it satiates every need to see More More More New New New…”

The overwhelming “chaos” of sorts is certainly an entertaining, sensorial experience the way the zoo or even Disneyland is. With the skaters, graffiti, floor-to-ceiling cardboard structures, and grime all in that one abandoned store (“abandoned” being disputable here because allegedly it was previously occupied by mutual aid groups), there’s definitely this street aesthetic and post-apocalyptic vibe happening. I befriended one of Barry McGee’s “100 closest friends” in the aisle he was working out of. Through him, I learned that the show actually came to be kinda randomly and is very much tied to the graffiti scene. It’s funny because Barry comes up on Google as an “American artist” but this show was less about him and his artist friends than it was about him and his graffiti friends. The show supposedly started as this casual invite from Barry to just throw some stuff up in this empty store with these graffiti guys but because the store was too big, they got like galleries, brands, and other people on board—it’s all a fuzzy, haphazard web of both loose and tight connections but I think that’s the appeal. Also don’t quote me on this because this is secondhand information.

My new friend (who I’ll call “G”) is also a graffiti writer and he said that’s how he got to know Barry since Barry is one of those legends in the scene I guess (Barry’s tag is “Twist”). G had to teach me all this new vocab… No we don’t call ourselves “graffiti artists”... We just say “graffiti writers” like “yo what do you write?” and then you’ll say “I write _____” and the blank is your tag name—the name that you graffiti. G was running the aisle that had art and clothes made by himself, his friends, works from John Doe gallery, and merch from NYC-based brand Homerun. I ended up going back to the show again on Sunday when the Anti-Fascist Zine Fair was happening so that I could gather this intel. G introduced me to the guy who runs Homerun (who is also a writer but I can’t remember his tag) that’s like this buff, charismatic guy with nice teeth who supposedly had G and some other dudes doing pushups in the aisle the day before (similar to the skaters it’s like spontaneous performance art but not really). That was the day they had already done the “5k Run Against Fascism” from the Nike-funded Homerun x John Doe Gallery popup on West Adams all the way back to 99CENT on Wilshire. It all contributes to the What Is Even Happening feeling of it all.

G and I debated about the show calling itself anti-fascist (with many artworks shitting on Trump, ICE, etc. too), clashing with things like the Nike collaboration, displacement of the mutual aid groups there, and many of the galleries in or promoting the show still being these larger white cube galleries whose clients are probably in the Epstein files. While my personal opinion is that there’s definitely a reduction of anti-fascism to an aesthetic or spectacle experience happening (Walter Benjamin tap in), I was comforted by the conversations I had with the folks running zine booths there who are actually engaged in mutual aid groups and a Real Praxis. I guess it should still stand to mean something that an event calling itself anti-fascist drew such a large crowd that there was a line to get in that Sunday. Glass half full… Glass half empty… You choose… At the end of the day, what I’m satisfied with is this feeling that I’ve cracked open some kind of secret, guarded underbelly of LA—the graffiti scene—and its ties to the greater art world here.

If I wasn’t already over my word limit, I’d really get into the other great shows I saw but here’s my blurb of honorable mentions:

Sayre Gomez at David Kordansky (Precious Moments). As a city, we will never tire of art with a keenly LA Aesthetic, and frankly neither will I. I’ve always believed in divine coincidences but when I just so happened to see the real Play Pen building after seeing Gomez’s Playpen (2025) painting earlier that day, it felt like a kiss from the universe. Truly.

Ryan Trecartin’s visiting artist lecture at the UCLA grad studios in Culver City. This time I got to see Trecartin in the flesh. He screened a new video piece (funded by Fondazione Prada I think) that featured the uncanny post-millennial personalities of his late-2000s-era work but this time their faces and movements were being morphed and mutated by AI. Love his vibe. Not sure how I feel about the AI direction. Don’t even want to talk about how nice the studio space was compared to mine that’s on main campus. I have no space for envy in my heart.
{optional image tbh}

The Worst Rave In The World at And/Or Gallery presented with Dem Passwords. And/Or is one of the most special places in the world for browser-based artists like me or really anyone who has ever cracked open a book about Net Art. Legends like Olia Lialina, JODI, Cory Arcangel, and Petra Cortright have been inside those Pasadena walls. The Worst Rave In The World was an installation of animatronics and multi-channel videos by Matt Barton and Extreme Animals (Jacob Ciocci and David Wightman). From the show notes: “The show plunders from the failures and noise of contemporary culture, which, when recombined, is no longer bad or good…” It’s truly the worst rave in the world, but also possibly the best rave in the world? The figures dance in this clunky, jerky way that is so pathetic yet endearing that you feel for them as if they were human. By the end of art week, I felt like the slumped figure in the back gallery—there’s a realism to this “rave” because yeah exactly there’s always going to be someone k-holing in a dark corner.

Maya Man’s performance lecture StarQuest. This isn’t the exact wording, but I was most struck by the line, “It isn’t about Images and the Real. It’s about Images and Power, and who gets to win…” There were references to the reality TV show Dance Moms, Addison Rae, Charli D’Amelio, the renegade, Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, and the world of competitive dance that is all too familiar to me too. I have a picture of me doing #TiltTuesday around somewhere. Of all the artists working with AI, Maya is the only one I can really get behind. [There’s more I want to say so I shall save it for a future review perhaps!!!]

Sizzler as part of Wilshire Online (on the same block as 99CENT) curated by Grant Edward Tyler. Inside of that dim forest green interior of an old Sizzler restaurant, there are works adorning the booths, the walls, and a particularly eye-catching light installation inside what used to be the salad bar. 99CENT had a more energetic bustle that kept you constantly moving in the space, while Sizzler was more still and conducive for a hang-out vibe. People were perched in the booths and against the walls chatting, having a smoke or a beer outside… Fab.

Wondering what the landlord for these vacant retail buildings on that particular strip of Wilshire thinks about the art world and this compulsion to show artwork in these defunct spaces… What you feel inside these spaces is kinda what you feel when you’re on Main Street inside Disneyland. Non-places that are imbued in a mysticism yet haunted by the Real—the ghosts of the actual Sizzler restaurant, 99¢ store, the Colorado and Missouri towns that Main Street is based on… These shows felt like temporary shelters for art (and the people who want to see it) that have their appeal in the post-apocalyptic, grungy aesthetic of it all that exists as the “cool” “edgy” alternative to the clean, glossy fairs across the city. You’re reminded of the dystopian state of the world we live in, but it’s really only kept at bay at the back of your mind, until the art week frenzy and haze lifts and you realize it’s time to get back to Real Life. Art can only do so much before Reality sinks in.

Clowns in a Cubicle: Cat Valentine’s Notes from Inside Ormside Projects

29 January: Performances by Bornweekend, Gabrielle Levie and Charlie Osborne

Pepe at the door gives me the iconic Ormside stamp. I’m sure someone, somewhere in South-East London, must have it tattooed.

I walk up the stairs. I smell the incense they always burn there.

“I haven’t been here in a while,” I think to myself. “And I’m glad to be back.”

Ormside is where I did my first line of K. Ormside is where I first learned a little bit about who and what is happening in London. A couple of years ago, Ormside introduced me to a certain type of millennial — the ones making deconstructed club music, putting on riverside raves, orbiting Dean Blunt. Music sounded experimental in a literal way, not in a genre way. People’s vibes were austere and spiritual - A kind of woke militancy. Lara Croft dressing mixed with keffiyehs. Clunky military shoes slowly giving way for streamlined activewear trainers. People walking around in those five-toe Vibrams, or the weirdest, froggiest Y2K Diesels you’ve ever seen.

Everyone who plays there seems to want more fog, more strobe, more layers of haze to hide behind. The room immediately evokes nostalgia and occasion, like you’re early to something that doesn’t know what it is yet. It’s the opposite of Cafe Oto, which could book similar acts but feels institutional — ICA-ish — somewhere you go to see something that’s already been decided is worth paying attention to.

I was a bit drunk and ketamined and remember almost sending [redacted] a sad text along the lines off:

“i canr believe ur not here.. youre missing the WHOLE THING.. Dont u care anymore?!!”
<\3

Let’s talk about what that WHOLE THING was.

I arrived into a cabaret performance by a life-sized nutcracker doll: Gabrielle Levie. Her movements were perfect, somewhere in between a music-hall ventriloquist act and an Oskar Schlemmer figure — those Bauhaus dancers dressed in geometric costumes, bodies turned into moving objects — half human, half prop. Gabrielle’s costume is self made.

She was lip-synching to old French cabaret music. It almost sounded like the voice she was channeling came from her, but not quite, which I like. If lip-synching is too good it stops being good — it feels like trickery, like someone hiding the seams. The good ipsyncher channels the voice in an idiosyncratic way.
Gabrielle ended her set by walking into the crowd, throwing little dice around. The room felt hazy and carnivalesque, like a travelling show back room only meant to exist for one night.

When it’s in between sets, Ormside visitors disperse over three main areas:

Outside smoking.

Buying a Vodka-Mate

Standing in line eagerly awaiting a bathroom cubicle door to open. When a door opens, often not one, not two, not three, not four, but five, six, sometimes seven people spill out of one tiny cubicle. Like clowns in a car.

Whispers start going ’round the three main areas that the next set is about to be on. Everyone reassembles in the main room, except for the poser losers who stay back doing drugs and taking pictures in the cushiony, loungey sofa area in the back. It feels vaguely clandestine back there. Like a soft-furnished VIP section no one officially declared VIP. I imagine this is where scene overlords whisper co-signs into the ear of the Next Big Thing.

Sometimes I am one of the poser losers, but not tonight, because next up it’s… Charlie Osborne.
Charlie is wearing a red-and-white maiden gingham dress with their logo screen-printed onto it. It looks strangely pristine, like it’s been through a cartoon laundromat — flat, glowing, unreal. Which is funny, because Dylan McDonnell told me he worried it would smell off the million cigarettes he smoked while sewing it together on the floor of his tiny room.

Charlie’s set-up is a table with a MacBook and something that looks like a keyboard but is actually a synth. Beside it: a mic stand. Beside that: a drummer. I think his name is Pike.

Charlie keeps moving between the stage and the audience, circling back to the table, blending sounds — stuff thats self-produced, stuff they've sampled, scraps of speech, glitches ripped from obscure videos — then a guitar loop, or a piano, orchestral and dramatic.

They sing live, mic in hand, then slot it back into the stand and starts clicking again, doing laptop wizardry on what I imagine is a completely overcrowded desktop: a hundred tiny files, half-finished exports, things called FINAL_FINAL2.

Charlie is in performance mode. There’s a manic twinkle in their eyes. This isn’t the soft-spoken Charlie voice I’m familiar with — it feels possessed. Sometimes a digital witch, sometimes a distant child.

At one point, they pukes green slime down the front of their dress.

At another, they accidentally plays a well-known song from the laptop — breaks character for a second, like “sorry hahahah” — then keeps going.

I love the drums. They have that Midwest-emo, sample-pack crispness — thrilliamangels-type drums — except live, so there’s heat and air around them, perfectly locked into whatever chaos Charlie’s building.
Let’s call this chaos a digital orchestra.

Thrilliamangels makes digital orchestra too — stitching together loops, vocals, scraps from all over the internet. They sound like songs, not mixes, but you can hear the seams, hear the collage. When he plays live he doesn’t try to hide the digital collageness. He doesn’t perform it either. He presses play on the CDJs and does a weird, funny dance. I like his irreverentness to IRL-ness, he lets the bedroom sample construction speak for itself.

Charlie makes it come to live.

The drummer makes it live. Her running back and forth to that crowded laptop makes it live. Pressing the wrong thing makes it live. I feel the labour.

After Charlie’s set I need a break. I go for a cig. I run into my friend Gulliver.

“I saw you in the audience headbanging, you looked cool,” he says in a sardonic Gulliver manner.

The Ormside whispers make their rounds to me: Bornweekend is on.

I amplify the whisper:

“BORNWEEKEND IS ON.”

As I watch Bornweekend’s set I become a sexy emotional robot-bug.

Bornweekend is wearing a grey oversized suit. He confidently speaks poetry into a microphone stand. He is not hiding behind fog or strobes, he is right in front of me, in yellowish light. He moves mechanically, like a tin me. He asserts himself physically - shoulders squared, planted stance - but his eyes reveal a slight bashfulness.

The lyrics feel intimate and emotional, but filtered through something non-human. Not quite “his” feelings. More like feelings processed by a small metal creature inside him trying to understand the world.

Hopes, dreams, little fantasies — textured with biology and debris and artificial sweetness and stickiness.

Rhymes like:

Little purple dinosaur, always leaves you wanting more. Engine running in my chest. Can’t you see I tried my best. Cracked skull full of smudge. Trying not to hold a grudge.

It’s not really diary-writing. It’s more like: the world through the eyes of an emotional robot-bug, maybe a bug with some Laurie Anderson DNA running through it. Everything disasters, love, the internet, random objects nicely flattened into the same deadpan tone.

Cupcake… Earthquake….
Empire state… Exaggerate…
Barely there… jump scare…
Like, share, comment, yeah….

He speaks his lyrics over a backing track he produced himself. Bassheavy and quite minimal, there’s room to hear the sounds he uses as individual textures. They sound squishy, slippery, wet, bubbly, squeaky, clicky, carbonated, plasticky in a bit of an oldschool way. They also sound fun and satisfying and like I want to dance with my hands in my hair, sexy on da dancefloor.

I look around the room and see people like me dancing with their hands in their hair, I see my editor bobbling around with a smile on her face, then I see her making out with a guy.

When Bornweekend plays his last song the audience cheers and claps and demands another song.
“I don’t have another song hahahh” Archie AKA Bornweekend replies. I think he played the entirety of his Photo Album.

He looks happy, he looks a bit overwhelmed. He slips off the stage, people pop up from everywhere congratulating him. I ask him how he feels… how that was… He replies something along the lines of:

“I’m glad it’s over hahahah.”

I personally wasn’t glad it was over but I was excited for what would come next…

…the afters…

Writing this I had to google “what is a keyboard thing that isn’t keyboard called?” Also: this wasn’t the whole night. I only caught three acts. Later, when I was asking my friend Rosie what she thought the angle for this article could be, she showed me one of the tiny dice Gabrielle had thrown into the crowd — she’d kept it in her pocket like a little souvenir — and told me there’d been a wedding band on earlier. Apparently it had a spooky, retro, kitsch-from-the-past energy. I think she was referring to the Faux Fibbers.

I missed them.

You never actually see the whole thing. You just catch your corner of it. Or read about someone else’s.

This valentines day we would like to dedicate our love to The Femcels.

Not that they need it — as we have heard they are totally not celibate!!! We aren’t mad about the fact these e-girls are fuckin' — but MANY MEN ARE. Especially the enormous chud contingent of Welcome Jpeg's 2 million followers.

OUR ORIGINAL ARTIST TAKE WITH THEM IS HERE

Much like Jesus Christ,
first they hate you for being sexy
Then they say you’re LARPing

Although we are shrewd businesswomen who make so very much money from our mega underground cultural criticism, we really are just sentimental at heart!

So, we would like to put our heart out to our first post, their first press, nearly a year ago we introduced The Femcels (to our then 300 followers) .

Gosh — doesn’t our first post look so primitive?
Now we are pros on adobe express- it’s our Xerox machine, the cursor our scalpel. Gen X eat ur heart out.

So we ask them, in the wake of their album release, is there anything that they would like to express that they have not yet expressed?

ROWAN PLEASE:

“I have a huge spot to the left of my chin which I always have when I kiss someone famous but this time I think that it means that we are going to be famous.”

Thank you, The Femcels.

if the British TV broadcasting had any sense, you’d already be on Mock the Week.

We also would like to rank our favourite tracks:

1. Come Let us Adore Him. This song is like the Femcels if it was the film the history boys.

2. She Seems Kind of Stupid. The perfect Fifa 14 song and the whistle at the end reminds me of Revolver.

3. No one Will fuck me if I wear two different shoes. Bc Gabby talks about a) the green room and Rowan talks about b) fucking a rockstar.

4. You're Gay and You're in Love With Me

5. I'm So Fat. Dating twinks is a hatecrime to your self. I like a man with meat on his bones??? eat a burger.

HSR correspondant, artist Tasneem Sarkez bravely brings her trademark wit to the vibelessness of one of those Exclusive Art Parties... in NYC!!! It was vampireville, duh. Reader, you're better off in the streets...

Walking in through the clear glass doors of the Whitney museum in 10 degree weather, to the Dare djing in front of Glenn Ligon’s Rückenfigur (2009), amidst a crowd of millennials who paid for the price to feel like an emerging artist, made the work come full circle in a way that for a split second the stupidity of the room faded to a whisper and I heard Ligon screaming in my ear saying "You seeee!!!”

The Whitney art party is a fundraising event, particularly shaped by what the Whitney imagines to be their “young and cool networks…” The average age in the room was at least 37. And the party ended at midnight with no afters… The People weren’t even drunk or coked out enough to start giving me their real thoughts on Whitney, the party, or the “art world” for that matter.

The young and cool art crowd kept finding each other gasping for air in between conversations with older folk who related that they were a member of the Whitney, and that they paid for their ticket, but that on top of all of that they’re an "aspiring painter.”

The best part of the party was finding the similarly minded young people laughing at how gimmicky this all felt. Drinking into the irony of the situation, because the meme “is the art world in the room with us rn?” never felt more true. None of it felt real, nor pertinent, but it all made sense when you think about the pretentiousness the art world likes to manufacture.

“It’s all the people that want to be around the cooler younger crowd–without the cooler younger crowd”

The PR team was trying to drink from an empty fountain of youth. Why have the dare dj when 75% of that room don’t know who he is, and an even smaller percentage could understand why “the dare” and “the whitney museum” being in the same sentence is a funny joke.

The elevator bar went up and down all night offering people tequila shots as drunken art fans walked around the floors of the Whitney, making sure to have a photoshoot in front of the latest exhibitions.

Random woman: “Is it over?? Or is it just dead??

Elevator Bartenders:

“I’ve been going up and down all night…super fun though”

Cat Valentine takes us down a magical mystery tour of a flatshow in Kilburn, writing up the wisdom of bassnotesonhope, a choir-band of ‘naive socio-geo-political’ inspiration.
If it takes a village to raise a child, it took a global village to raise these beautiful singing children in their twenties, and an Abby Lee-Miller-esque level of determination to rally them into performing. Melodia’s flat hosted the line-up: Charlie Osborne, Bassnotesonhope, WorldpeaceDMT, Floods in Atlanta.
Beaming into the instagram live at the party of dreamers, last night we blurred the line between audience and actor… last night was an episode of Dance Moms…

I’m Cat Valentine, member of choir-band bassnotesonhope. This is my report on the second gig we ever played.

"Almost as if it was just a random houseparty filled with people who, full-time or occasionally, dream of being rockstars."

It was a Christmas show put together by Leo (WPDMT) after he asked on his IG story if anyone had a free house to host. From what I understood, a random kid responded by offering up his mom’s house (without permission) while she was away, under the condition that he could play the opening set. He was in strict charge of the RSVP list and neighbours weren’t a concern of his. I pictured some kind of underground-music-loving Cartman figure who would force us into listening to some awkward set for half an hour.

On the night of, when my Uber dropped me off in residential Kilburn I was kind of stranded with all my instruments for a while. I couldn’t really Google Maps my way to the house, but slowly I started noticing e-girls and hediboys flocking around here and there, so I knew I was getting warmer. They approached me kindly, asked if I was playing, and then offered to carry my instruments and help me find my way. I remember this guy Harry who carried my keyboard—shoutout to you, Harry, if you read this. My bandmates were waiting outside and we all went in together, saying thank you and see you later to the cute e-girls and hediboys, who were made to wait until the “doors” officially opened.

Inside the house I realised that me and my band members were basically one third of the total capacity of people who could fit in this flat. As I was daydreamin about the problems the size of our band will cause for the future shows all over the world we hopefully one day get to play, the “kid” whose house it was walked up to me and asked if I was “Cat.”

“Yes, I am Cat Valentine. Is this your house?”

I was a bit surprised. Turns out the random “kid” wasn’t a random kid but a guy with a music project called Melodia. The house was his and his bandmates’ flatshare.

They opened the night with a cool set. One of them played electric guitar and sang in a nice, vulnerable way; the other played bass guitar using a violin bow. With the exception of Ike and Leo annoyingly having a vain photoshoot throughout most of the set, everyone else was locked in, sitting on the floor subtly head-bumping. To me it felt like being somewhere in between that trancey listening-party space in Berlin—where everyone lies on the floor listening to a set that’s oddly quiet because it’s in a residential area—and what I imagine it must’ve been like (idk, I can only imagine, I was personally a high schooler in Amsterdam at the time) to attend a Double Virgo gig when they were just starting out.

After Melodia it was Charlie Osborne’s turn. She prepared poetry and read it to a score of her friend Eric playing banjo. Charlie’s voice sounded soft and beautiful, and Eric’s banjo playing took me to a fictional place. I sometimes long for: an American road trip in an America I imagine from a YouTube clip of Townes Van Zandt playing Waiting Around to Die, every spaghetti western I’ve ever seen, and the movie My Own Private Idaho.

At this point the living room was so packed I could barely see anything, but for a brief moment I caught them sitting on the floor with their backs against each other, looking magical.

Then I had to gather my troops. We were on next. I found some of them mid doing a line, some doing vocal warm-ups in the toilet, some doing final touch-ups on their costumes. I felt like Abby Lee Miller, losing my shit about choir members losing their stage props and not knowing the order of the setlist (JOJO, HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING?!).

Abby Lee Miller is a good analogy here actually, because bassnotesonhope takes inspiration from naive socio-geo-political themed children’s musical, theatre, and dance recitals.

Think Dance Moms season 3, episode 12, when they prepared a dance recital in honour of Rosa Parks, and for a moment the role of Rosa Parks was undecided between Nia (the obvious choice, as she
was the only black girl in the group) and Kendall (a cute white girl with an overbearing mom who calls her “My Little Kendall,” which on TikTok has now granted Kendall the nickname MLK). In the end Nia got to be Rosa Parks, but Kendall will forever be MLK.

For the Christmas show we prepared a set in honour of Somalis and their right to return to their promised land: Minnesota. If you’re a reader who doesn’t understand what I’m talking about, I’ll briefly explain these geopolitics to you. There’s a large Somali community living in Minnesota. Some of them kinda don’t really integrate in the way certain Americans want them to, prompting Trump to talk a whole lot of shit about Somalia during a press conference. Somalis responded to this by rage-baiting Americans on X and TikTok into believing that they think “The Minnesotas” were promised to them in the Old Testament 3,000 years ago and that they’ll soon be mass immigrating through birthright trips to the promised lands. Bassnotesonhope stands in solidarity with the Somalis. Bassnote memberMartyna read a short text describing how Somali explorers found Minnesota 3,000 years ago, followed by a choral version of Coming Home (not the P-Diddy version—strictly Skylar Grey).

Choir member Bexley came up with the idea to sing from the perspective of Americans welcoming Somalis into Minnesota, so we sang Glad You Came by The Wanted.

We closed with Homemade Dynamite by Lorde, aligning ourselves with peoples worldwide forced to fight back against oppressive states and regimes through guerrilla warfare whether online or IRL.

Our set flew by, and then it was time for the headliner: WPDMT. Rowan Please looked phenomenal.
She’d painted her face and had been painting other people’s faces throughout the night to raise money for the homeless. I briefly spoke to her manager, who had a blue butterfly painted across his face, which was very cute.

Everyone—WPDMT member or not—was singing along or playing some kind of instrument, receiving soft instructions from Leo. When they played Year of the Dragon, an acoustic version of a Bassvictim song, Maria M put a phone in my hands.

“We’re live on Bassvictim. Record.”

I recorded the whole thing, and afterwards we realised the sound had been off during the live.

“I DON’T FUCKING HEAR ANYTHIIIIIIING” a Bassvictim fan commented.

So we did the whole thing again, sound on this time. After that I requested Love Yourself. They played it. I loved it. At that point everyone was just yelling stuff. Someone yelled Beatles! Across the Universe! so we collectively played Across the Universe. Chords kept being played, people yelled random phrases, and out of that the beginnings of a new song were written: Bassnote member Isobel’s line "All of our loser neighbours... can’t stop us from dancing....” spun into a twenty minute jam session, which ironically caused the neighbours to complain massively and then the party was shut down. Unfortunately Floods in Atlant last on the lineup, didn’t get to play his set.

I was asked to review this night, and I don’t think I can objectively do that, since I was part of it. But if I try anyway, and be as ruthless and critical as possible, I’d give it a ten out of ten—because it was fun, DIY, and collaborative in a way where the boundaries across acts, audience, and performer completely disappeared.

Almost as if it was just a random houseparty filled with people who, full-time or occasionally, dream of being rockstars.

Pre-Party hosted by Hollywood Superstar, Chess Club and Gnossienne Gallery.

Photos by Nick Gogh and someone else

Ft.

No Bra (Live)
Floods in Atlanta (Live)
Born Weekend (Live)
LC (DJ)
Soli City (Live)
Enzo M (DJ)

The Wit of the Staircase is the name of Theresa Duncan’s blog on TypePad.com.

From the French phrase ‘esprit d’escalier’, it refers to the perfect witty response you think up after the conversation or argument is ended. The answer you cannot make, the pattern you cannot complete till afterwards, suddenly comes to you when it is too late.
And I am now replying too late, 18 years to be fair... perfectly aligned with l’esprit d’escalier: The Last note on The Wit of the Staircase is from Monday, 31 December 2007. A cheer to a “New Beginning”:

Monday, December 31, 2007
New Beginning

And so each venture


It's a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
 


So here I am, in the middle way, having had
 twenty years -


Twenty years largely wasted, the years of
 l'entre deux guerres -


Trying to use words, and every attempt


Is a wholly new start, and a different kind
of failure


Because one has only learnt to get the better


of words


For the thing one no longer has to say, or


the way in which


One is no longer disposed to say it. And so


each venture


Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
 With shabby equipment always deteriorating
 In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
 ## ## Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what


there is to conquer


By strength and submission, has already 


been discovered


Once or twice, or several times, by men whom


one cannot hope


To emulate - but there is no competition -
 There is only the fight to recover


what has been lost


And found and lost again and again: and now,


under conditions


That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither


gain nor loss.


For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not


our business.

--T. S. Eliot
 East Coker
 Four Quartets

Have you ever seen the movie eXistenZ? Directed by David Cronenberg in 1999, it features as main character the iconic Jennifer Jason Leight under the pseudonym of Allegra Geller. Picture a complex, beautiful blonde woman, whose job is game design and who entertains a relationship with an equally beautiful man played by Jude Law.

Now keep this plot in mind, but to “Allegra” substitute “Theresa”, to “Ted” substitute “Jeremy” and to fiction substitute reality.This blog post, Would I Ever Kiss a Scientologist?, tells the story of a real-life game designer and her resultant suicide.
Cronenberg’s movie ends with two killings, "Death to transCendenZ!!!"; our dispatch starts with two suicides, The Golden Suicides.
With no exclamation marks at all.

Today is Sunday, 27 July 2025. It’s 00:30 and I am sitting on my couch, laughing at myself with Theresa Duncan, just not the right one. I bought this book via Amazon sure about the fact that it was a hidden gem of hers, and I also mentioned it to Taylor (Hi Taylor), who also bought it and two days later sent me this message:

Re-browsing the book I noticed what my blind trust didn’t make me notice before: poems are from 2010. Theresa Duncan took her own life on Sunday, 10 June, 2007.
Turns out this other woman, who answers to the name of T.D., also corresponds to her facial features, having meshed blonde hair and light blue eyes. What a hodgepodge.

This is the starting point of my dispatch, a book I purchased and read, thinking it was from the Theresa Duncan on the right. I am one of the latest truly romantic human beings, and this is a love story. My very favourite field.

Year 2007, 10th Street and 2nd Avenue, Manhattan’s East Village, New York City.
A pretty, young-ish pioneer of blogging and video game auteur responding to the name of Theresa Duncan, age 40, overdosed in her infamously bohemian apartment.
For the sake of the Walgreens enthusiast: on the nightstand there was a bowl full of Benadryl pills, a bottle of Tylenol PM and a glass of champagne. For the sake of lovebirds: there was also a note saying “I love all of you”.

During the night, about a week later, witnesses on Rockaway Beach saw a man take off his clothes and wander into the Pacific Ocean: the light of the following day revealed his wallet, a note and his identity: Jeremy Blake, 35, video artist and Duncan’s boyfriend for over a decade.

They were one of those show-stopping couples of New York, both ridiculously gifted and good looking. She had an intimidating blond head of hair and a pantagruelic mind; he was an art star featuring the Whitney among his lengthy list of credits. Most importantly, they both had love. The most prized possession.

Their passion for their internal world was matched only by the paranoia of their outlook. The two would describe plots by the government, people tailing them and breaking into their home. Friends, who tried to dissuade the couple from their fantasies - that seemed to be ripped from a Tom Clancy novel - were met with anger and exclusion.

After their “Golden Suicides” people latched a lot around the possible causes of this tragedy. Sources mentioned a shared codependent paranoia regarding Scientology, and one of their leading men, the singer-songwriter Beck: easier to swallow than other absurd theories, I chose this to be my favourite and most relevant one. Reason why is I asked out a friend to the closest Scientology church.

I double-blink when I see the eight-pointed cross taking the entire construction hostage on the left. Immediately below, in vermilion red sans-serif font, reigns the word ‘Scientology’. This new building, the biggest in Italy, was inaugurated in 2015, 31th October, Halloween day… dare I say trick or treat?

As soon as we approach the gate going thru it shamelessly it begins to close behind the back of the car. Safe to say we back up at light speed. In the nearby parking lot, without any gate to worry about, we park and hop off. Ten meters and we are in: ten seconds and we get approached by a woman in a white shirt asking the point of our visit with a bedazzling smile on her face. With equally bedazzling smiles we reply, ‘we are in to be into’. Follow the white rabbit.

A sliding door opens onto a tunnel whose red shade is thicker and more stomach-churning than the one chosen for the façade sign. To get to the monster's stomach, you have to go through its mouth first.

All I can remember is being swallowed by a red vortex. Sofas, carpets, chairs, candles, flowers and vases: I am now in some war field where the blood left from a mass murder has soiled the walkable and breathable space. According to the official data begging for attention from the screens all over, more than 6.5 million people have joined the movement. I see why there isn't a single spot uncovered.

While the guide explains to us how the infinite screens and controllers displayed in a serpentine shape all around the space work, as if we had never faced some basic commands, my hungry eyes roam around. Water and fire patterns overflow from the fonts on book covers and from the cheap AI paintings on the walls: mouth-watering waterfalls, endless fields of lavender and corn, groups of smiles as big as whole faces, proud to have said no; no to drugs, no to shapes other than triangles, yes to L. Ron Hubbard!

Above a rail of burning books, a dark bordeaux stain splattered on a marbled table: “See a thought.” I immediately point at it, asking for an explanation. When the elephant is in the room, either you ride it or it stomps on you; not today that I got a new haircut.

My guide makes me hold two aluminium cans and asks me about a person and a situation. Vaguely. This “ultra technology” should capture my aura frequencies and register my body response to that thought. I later, via google, find out the specific object is called 3 E Meter and it is an intellectual historical property of the Institution.

The needle oscillates and she can’t wait for me to see it. I don’t.

The needle of my energy also oscillates and I ask for a coffee. Out from the monster’s mouth, across the courtyard, behind a white door, downstairs, in the gut of the system: the canteen. Hidden from the daylight, a disturbingly and desolating vast room with a cashier rechargeable through the insertion of a coin; 2 bucks for a diet coke, a smarter version of the coffee I asked for: quick, take away, uncontaminated. And of course, red.

Lots of lost faces around, looking at me looking at them looking at my red lipstick. I sense they might be hypnotised from this very specific shade and that's why they all keep coming back to this place. If this Scientology site was a perfume that would be Hypnotic Poison by Dior: red, bordeaux, timeless and poisonous. As a woman in red lipstick. Would I ever kiss a Scientologist?

I’m not gonna write what I’ve seen during the very last moments of permanence under the surface of the visible, into the very core of the place, where the stomachs are fed and the minds starved. My guide made sure I wasn’t taking pictures and escorted me upstairs, back from the dead, alive again. I’d say I haven’t been digested, more like bulimicly puked out.

In this certain way, I must say a Scientologist saved my life. And my wallet.

I wish Theresa could write the same, on her blog, like it was all a game of hers in which she has been trapped for too long. Paraphrasing Cronenberg’s Allegra: "Death to transCendenZ!!!".
Alive again, at the enthusiastic speed of an exclamation mark.

Hollywood Superstar wants to know when the London millennial gallery circuit is going to catch up with the stylish, curatorially erudite and munificent women of Hamburg’s art world?

Presenting reportage from Hamburg from local writer Eva Paden. Chess Club, a Superstar-favourite gallery and wunderkind, invited several Londoners to participate in a 96-hour-long festival alongside other international artists. Amanda, Chess Club’s grand dame, has a curatorial strategy that is as much about enmeshing scenes as it is about strategically positioning works within a space. The festival was organised alongside duo-run AKA studios, another curatorial off-space in the city.

Both AKA and Chess Club aim to foster new connections, including this Anglo-German alliance, which saw a highly specific selection from the UK underground’s writers, performers, painters, photographers, and filmmakers. This was a group of people - a cohort (?) - already familiar with each others’ practices, flown out to reap the delights of European art funding.

While the rest of the art world takes its summer break, 96 hours provides a platform. The festival avoided the drabness of most not-for-profit events (bad techno-DJ empty dancehall filled with serious inauthenticity and a distinct lack of appeal to any artistic participants) by sampling directly from London’s subcultural petri-dish. 96 Hours was filled with live cultures as opposed to culturally disparate artists flown in to fill a bland, identitarian quota. This is not a reference to Kissick’s Harper’s lament but instead a product of direct experience with satellite fairs and off-spaces at Art Basel and Frieze.

96 hours” demonstrates a willingness on behalf of the state-funded Hamburg milieu. A desire to invest in the non-commercial, non-aligned, un-represented art emerging from London that the privately funded (demonstrably by the looks of HMRC tax reports) small-gallery world always ignores to their detriment. Publicly funded institutions, too. Except Raven Row. We love you Raven Row.

Critic Eva Paden reports on the curation, vibe and general atmosphere of this artworld novelty: a non-commercial festival. As Paden writes: “Hosting is the new mode of curating”.

In chess, the move known as “pawn promotion” elevates a pawn which reaches the opposite end of the board to a queen, the most powerful figure of the game.

“96 hours of summer” is a new initiative of Hamburg it-girl collaboration: Chess Club x AKA studios. Chess Club, a downtown gallery run by Amanda Charlott Weimer, and AKA studios, a rave-ready exhibition space/studio housed in a warehouse, run by the two local artists, Noemi Liv Nicolaisen and Mia Lotta Joedecke. Both venues know how to host and are notorious for turning exhibitions into full-blown happenings, each having previously been invited by the Kunstverein in Hamburg to co-host their afterparties. Both venues were given generous city funding for the festival; this allowed the contingent be to opened up, an international cohort was invited, including a large UK contingent, to prop up the 4-day long program:

Thursday: Exhibition Opening at Chess club, with music by Loi

Friday: Exhibition Opening at AKA studios, followed by three performances (Clara Schmidt, Alex Thake (as Hope Slattery), Sasha Lukashenkova and an afterparty with 20Stitches, Speckman, Cielo.mp3, Europa and Schuu.

Saturday: Decompressurization Act II, a play by Emma Bombail and Layo Mussi. Listening room with Soli City, back at Chess Club.

Sunday: Closing day! Summer party at AKA studios with a BBQ. “An informal wedding“ reading program by Charlotte Masha Bialas and concerts by Iku and Charlie Osborne.

I arrive at Chess Club. It’s already day three - around the 40th hour of the 96-hour festival. We’re in the heart of Hamburg’s shopping district. A paved street surrounded by restaurants, the opera nearby and Alsterhaus around the corner. I spot a group of people outside Chess Club, still awake and glowing from the party the night before. Some dart into one of the neighbouring restaurants for takeaway, and there’s an amicable nod from the staff, who are, after a year and a half of the gallery, familiar with Amanda and her crew.

I spot Pauline Schey and Theresa Weisheit outside, friends of Amanda who run Frankfurt-based experimental listening bar “score__”. We sit down on Chess Club’s kitschy, deep-red carpet, a remnant of the buildings former life as a 1980s cowboy boot store, to watch Soli City’s set. Surrounded by dried flowers, humming into his e-flute saxophone, Soli looks like a woodland fairy in an urbane, folk-revivalist Midsummer Night’s Dream. The scene feels melancholic. I’m hit with a strange nostalgia. For what, I’m not sure, but the feeling is sensible: Chess is soon closing its current iteration at Colonnaden. During it’s run, the gallery became a place for artistic hangouts, fostered a community. It has hosted shows, catalogue launches and performances alongside live music events. I usually avoid goodbyes, but as my friend S. once said, they’re meant to be celebrated with friends. That’s what this feels like: an informal, sentimental farewell.

Alex Thake, a Frankfurt based artist, is sat beside me. She explains how her reading, which took place at the AKA opening, was a “Don Quijote story told through Candy Darling”. It reminds me of a TikTok reel I saw about “5 books where you can’t trust the narrator”. She explains her idea of the unreliable narrator. It sticks with me - how we reconstruct events through fragments, memory and second-hand impressions. Nozomi Ngceni’s sculpture HCC² (2025) captures a similar subjectivity. Her xerox black-and-white prints rest on a flat surface, supported by staircase-like structures on both sides. Reflected in the space by the idiosyncratic mirrored ceiling, and loosely balancing on another mirror, the sculpture is endlessly repeated: “A mirrored image that exists in a multitude of dimensions“ Nozomi writes in her artist statement. It’s an homage to the space; the end is the beginning is the end. This is not a final goodbye though - Amanda will continue to do shows elsewhere. Still, there's something about this particular red-carpeted place which will be hard to replicate.

Hung on the conrete wall, I spot Portrait of Lydia (2025) by Callum Hansen, a London-based photographer. The work plays on the black-and-white motif, depicting a woman lying in her underwear, hands crossed almost protectively in front of her while meeting the camera’s gaze. Hansen captures the tension between the openness in her eyes and her defensive posture: a negotiation of intimacy one could only allow from lovers, intimates. “This is Lydia!” Amanda points out, a mutual friend from London, and I take a step closer. She tells me that the artist re-photographed the original plate many times. Through a layering process involving various types of paper, the surface has taken on a dream-like texture, textured by soft scratches and abrasions. These marks are almost distracting. It gives the image a falsely engineered “vintage” feel - a quiet nod to the nature of the medium, it’s tendency to age and how that dilutes or exacerbates the physicality of memory. While it’s conceptually introspective, it carries a strikingly expressive dedication to emotion. If I’m being totally honest, I would say it’s the kind of photo someone would take with them to war.

On Sunday, I arrive at AKA’s courtyard. It’s nestled between the former halls of a 19th-century listed electricity station. Like the aftermath of a Baroque Bacchanale, people lie sprawled, entangled upon huge pillows. It smells of hot dogs, and I assume somebody's parents are managing the barbecue. I want to see the show, so I head inside.

In Aka’s vast warehouse space, every work is either BIG or made of many small pieces. First, I gravitate towards the work of Clara Schmidt, a recent graduate of HFBK (University of Fine Arts Hamburg). Her retail-esque Gossip Harbour (2025) is a sculptural composition made of hundreds of tiny collectables, neatly found together on the shelves for a brief moment. Other works also have stage-like or display-ish qualities, like British-born, Berlin-based artist Hannah Rose Stewart’s Bench Stage (2025) which is used later as a stage for Iku’s and a London-based performance artist Charlie Osbourne’s concert. Instead of building a post-industrial-white-cube-art-space, AKA invites their guests to have fun with the vast halls. Artworks function as props, setting AKA up as the auto-fiction-party girl’s version of Warhol’s factory. Rosa Lüder’s enlarged-early-2000s-flip-phone-gemstones that embellish the windows of the space complete this aesthetic of celebration and playfulness.

A beam of llight emerges from one of AKA’s smaller backrooms. Callum Hansen’s film Memorial Rounds (2024) is projected onto cracked walls. The film shows a camera vlog in first person. Skull bong, car drifting, play-fights; raw emotion and diy-material produce a film of highly intense, adolescent feeling. It fits the space. His quasi-coming-of-age-music video is a rebellious, romanticized non-conformative image of an anti-hero aesthetic. The film is fragmented by two pianists performing Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”. Beethoven died long before youth culture became a thing, but I assume he was something like a proto-rockstar of his times, which makes me wonder what the coke of the 17th century was like.

Amidst all this century-spanning teenage chaos, I sense that the works by Loerdy Wesely and Floss Crossley & Theo Mackenzie offer a more conceptual (ironically or otherwise) counterpoint. One wall works formal and structural discipline form a quiet, calming geometrical rhythm. I look at the title: Señor Hunter Bidens Collection of Victorian Literatuur an unlikely combination of words. The artwork uses paper, and its materiality, as its prime communicator. Paper represents two facets of the artists’ lives. For Crossley, it bears the notation of customer’s orders - her artist bio details that she is a small plates waitress - and is printed with the words of her vocational reading, taken on shift breaks Nabokov’s Lolita.

Passing Australian artist Zach Rockman’s painting of punk-looking-1970’s-like-mugshots, I head back down the stairs to join the Informal Wedding. “You & Me” by Disclosure plays. Two people walk down the make-shift aisle, and the seated crowd starts clapping. They wear soft cotton dresses made in the early 2000s, fringy light brown Patrizia Pepe Vinted finds, polka dots and stripes. Both the romantic sentiment and specific styling contrast the upstairs works, like with sculptor and painter Nicolai Olesen‘s black, sharp, angular sculpture. Flora Lenzmann’s pronunciation of “Lavender Lady“ stays with me for days.

Ozzy Osborne died during the installation of 96 hours of summer. Amanda and I spoke about his passing and how his death set a certain tone. At first, I didn’t understand why (“Millennial low IQ“ - Robin Ogunmuyiwa) but I believe the hippie-heavy metal Peter Pan, Ozzy, became something of a spiritual guide for the extended weekend: Nobody here wants, or can, be alone.

I can’t help but wonder if hosting has become the new mode of curating/exhibiting. While Amanda says the festival is about “making memories together“ Noemi (Aka studios) speaks of the event as “a cultural handshake“ (a more pragmatic interpretation). Either way, it feels like a stage for the kind of community it seeks to create:

“Oh no! No one who was great in this world will be forgotten; but each was great here in their own special way, and each was great in relation to the greatness of what they loved.”

-Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death from Sasha Lukashenkova’s performance on Friday at AKA studios

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Starring: Tobias Bartenschlager, Charlotte Masha Bialas, Emma Bombail, Floss Crossley, Callum Hansen, Iku, Mia Lotta Joedecke, Sem Lala, Flora Lenzmann, Sasha Lukashenkova, Rosa Lüders, Theo Mackenzie, Nozomi Ngceni, Noemi Liv Nicolaisen, Nicolai Olesen, Charlie Osborne, Zach Rockman, Roberto Ronzani, Clara Schmidt, Hannah Stewart, Alex Thake, Lilli Thiessen, Amanda Weimer and Loerdy Wesely.

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