We’re back with Victoria. Read on to find out what she’s into, and if you’re new here, hit subscribe for artist’s recommendations every week.
Victoria Comstock-Kershaw is an arts journalist, reviewer, and God’s favourite critic. She is the author of the humble but always correct saltzpeter Substack, editor of ‘the thinking woman’s magazine’ Fetch London, and co-founder of ‘that bastard of Diogenes’s dog’s collective’ CriticsOnCritics.
☞ SALON:Verdurin is a cultural space in East London named after the hostess of the Parisian salon in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which should tell you everything you need to know. Excellent book selection (including some really delicious pamphlets by Everyday Analysis), an incredibly stimulating program, and some very fine pickled foods.
☞ PUBLISHING HOUSE: Glasgow-based Hyperidean Press is putting out some of the most striking and interesting books on the UK market right now. Plus, all of their writers are incredibly good-looking, which as we all know is what really counts in literature.
☞ ADVICE: Do not sleep with psychoanalysts. If you must, make sure it’s not yours.
☞ FOOD: A spoonful of Dino’s fried onions dipped in Kewpie mayonnaise. Extra points if eaten at 3AM over the sink with only one boot on.
☞ ART: Over the years, I have been lucky enough to see some of the most impressive and sacred art of the Western, contemporary and post-internet canon. My favourite artwork has been, and always will always be, this ragecomic from 2010:
☞ WATCHING:Rien. Nothing good has come of the invention of the camera, except perhaps Joan Rivers and Wallace & Gromit.
☞ PLAYING: Oblivion Remastered. Todd has once again wrestled sixty hard-earned European dollars from my sticky little hands with a decade+ old game.
☞ READING:
Tom Wolfe’s essay The Me Decade alongside Julie Salamon’s The Devil's Candy: "Bonfire of the Vanities" Goes to Hollywood, which explores how and why Wolfe’s foray into film went so terribly, terribly wrong. Always satisfying when people (writers in particular) are guilty of the same sins they condemn.
J.R Firth’s collected studies. “You shall know a word by the company it keeps.” Philosophical foundations for LLMs and vector semantics and embedding. Think of him fondly every time I ask something particularly asinine of my ChatGPT.
The White Pube’s Confessions of a Commercial Gallerist: one of the funniest bits of art writing to come out this year. The sentences “Fra Angelico was a Dominican Friar from 15th Century Florence. He was unfamilar with the conventions of a business plan” in particular.
Kindness Report, a sumptuous, chaotic and totally incomprehensible collation of some excellent writing including the contributions of such Substack darlings as Phillip Traylen, Evanie Laurent and Klaus Zynski. Will crash your browser the first time you open the PDF.
☞ LISTENING TO: Moutainhead - Everything Everything. Statistically unlikely that only one album in the entire world was released in the year of our lord 2024, let alone that it would be such a good one, but there you have it.
☞ HATES:
British people who hate America. They lack magnanimity, greatness of sovl, ROMANITAS, semen retention, etc.
America
Taxes
The noise the bath makes when it finishes draining
Always a 💥
❤️🧅❤️