It’s Friday, it’s basically Christmas, and we’re sliding down the chimney of your inbox with GQ culture stories for you to read. (We don’t care if you’ve been bad or good.)
Abe Beame talked to Guy Pearce—who embodies capitalist villainy in one of the year’s best movies, Brady Corbet’s epic The Brutalist, and might well win an Oscar for doing so—about why he stopped chasing the traditional leading-man roles that were his by dint of bone structure alone. Speaking of bone structures: In the first installment of our new recurring feature Location Scouting, Gabriella Paiella interviewed Nosferatu director Robert Eggers, whose Prague and Prague-adjacent picks include an ancient ossuary full of skeletal remains, plus good places for the living to drink beer and eat meat. Paiella also spoke with one Ron Paparozzi (#PynchonNames!) about teaching A Complete Unknown star Timothée Chalamet to play the harmonica like Bob Dylan.
More music: Grayson Haver Currin traveled to the rock-n’-roll capitols of the world—Boulder, Colorado and St. Augustine, Florida, obviously—to witness the category-defying brilliance of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and grill the Australian sextet about what it’s like to go from being a weirdo cult band to being, uh, a very popular weirdo cult band. Will Schube talked to composer/producer/audio auteur Brian Eno about the new Apple Music chill-out station he’s helping to program with Zane Lowe, and the ever-more-important role that soothing ambient music can play in our miserable lives. And Pulling Weeds columnist Chris Black shared a playlist of the songs that got him through this year, including Waxahatchee, Dudes Rock lifestyle ambassador MJ Lenderman, and X.com power user Father John Misty.
In other popular and semi-popular culture news: GQ’s Frazier Tharpe (whose column Tap In is now available in convenient weekly-newsletter form) recommended two ‘00s thrillers you’ll love if you liked this year’s Carry-on. Juan A. Ramírez dug into Luca Guadagnino’s Queer and suggested that its divisive take on William Burroughs’ novel of drugs and desire is a feature, not a bug. And Killian Faith-Kelly reminded us that among its many other virtues, In Bruges is a Christmas movie.
If you need more than that, you’ll have to ask the man with the bag (as we believe William Burroughs once said.)
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