Renegade GOATS
Deep-cut '90s gems that look better than ever; art, TV, and fast food perched on the fault line between reality and fiction; director drip & more
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.
Check our list of the world’s 35 slappiest shops, where Spyfriends have added a ton of favorites in the comments.
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Real quick —
On the chance you’re in Paris next Thursday, June 20, 18h-21h, join us as we co-host a party during fashion week with Neighbour and Colbo at Le Mary Celeste — one of the Marais’s best restaurants, on one of its most beautiful corners.
Let’s get to it —
If you’ve seen Ren Faire, the new 3-part documentary miniseries from Elara and HBO, you know it’s a wild triumph. If you haven’t, hop on it. Director Lance Oppenheim — who studied documentary filmmaking under tha doc god Ross McElwee — embedded at an enormous, multimillion-dollar Renaissance Fair in Texas, staffed by all kinds of fascinating people and run by an enigmatic octogenarian founder named George who rules with an iron hand from the back of an Escalade with a gold-plated grill. George has also seemingly isolated himself, Lear-like, from anyone who loves him — a problem he tries to fix by bringing dates he meets on Sugar Daddy apps to Olive Garden. There’s suspense & drama about who will succeed him in running the Faire, but really, you’re there to float through a bizarre alternate reality.
In addition to being a monstrously gifted young documentarian, Oppenheim f**ks with Blackbird Spyplane. So I (Jonah) was stoked to hop on the Spyphone with him the other day for V.I.P. R.A.D.A.R., where Vibey Illustrious People share Rare and Dope A** Recommendations with us —
Blackbird Spyplane: A few Spyfriends worked on Ren Faire — Teddy Blanks did amazing titles as always, and I saw Nathan Fielder thanked in the credits. What did he do?
Lance Oppenheim: “Nathan watched a bunch of cuts early on — he’s always been someone, to me, who created or at least popularized this genre on the invisible line between reality and almost manufactured reality.”
Blackbird Spyplane: All three of your picks today are about that line, in different ways. First up is old episodes of To Catch a Predator??
Lance Oppenheim: “Yeah, I’ve been re-watching To Catch a Predator lately, and what really interests me is, I can’t tell if this was the moment culture changed, but the show feels like it popularized watching raw reality — watching someone’s severe humiliation on camera, watching their life basically end — for a whole generation.
“With Chris Hansen, there’s this dramatic arc he brings to each encounter. He’s a great improviser, almost a comedian. These men come in, talk to the decoys, and you’re uneasy. They have problems, they need to get help, to say the least. Then Hansen comes out and somehow everything shifts: He acts in this way that’s so conceited, and he luxuriates in their pain and humiliation, and you almost start feeling bad for the guys. Then he reveals what they typed online and you’re like, eughhh, no, this person deserves it. And then for the last trick, they ask if they can leave, and he says they can. You register this flash where they’re, like, ‘I could change my life, drive to Mexico’— and they get up and they’re attacked and beaten by police officers. There’s this whole Chris Hansen universe of other things he’s done since then. The people who watch it are seeking out something so raw, not just in terms of subject matter, but cruelty. And you can see something of that across a lot of reality TV and just nonfiction videos generally: It’s almost like people associate truth with humiliation now.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Mamma mia. Your next pick is a restaurant that is not off the beaten path, but I’d bet most people in Spy Nation haven’t been inside one in years — Taco Bell. Make the case for this nasty s**t !!
Lance Oppenheim: “Along with Subway, Taco Bell is the thing I ate the most over the past few years when I was shooting Ren Faire, and I feel like my body went from very skinny and scrawny to now I have the physique of a boxer from the 1950s — not muscle, I’ve just eaten so many weird Taco Bell chemicals and meat that might not be meat that it’s altered my bloodstream and body shape. A lot of people will tell you to do the Chalupa or burritos, but I steer clear of those. I recommend the Cantina Special they’ve got going right now, the Doritos Locos® taco, and the Cheesy Gordita Crunch. That’s an incredible item. I don’t recommend delivery. Get it there, get all the sauces, and take it down with a Coke.
“And yeah, speaking of reality, I like going to Taco Bell because [a lawsuit in 2011 alleged that the chain’s ‘seasoned beef’ contained more flavorings and fillers than it did meat — the suit was dropped and Taco Bell denied the allegations, but even if they’d been proven true] then I know what I’m getting into when I go there. I’m not being sold a bill of goods — I’m eating food that only Taco Bell can deliver.”
Blackbird Spyplane: And finally, a literary double-feature from Philip Roth and Janet Malcolm.
Lance Oppenheim: “The Counterlife is one of the best books of all time, and I just re-read it along with the epic poem that is Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, which everyone on the planet should read.
“The Counterlife has these classic Philip Roth themes, where this composite of himself, Nathan Zuckerman, is dealing with his brother, who wants to keep an affair going but also he has heart problems so he’s faced with this question of, Do I get surgery that might save my life but might mean I can never have an erection again? I don’t want to spoil it, but the book almost becomes like a multiverse thing, of characters and choices and pain and being a Jew but not a Zionist — and it was written in the ‘80s.
“The Journalist and the Murderer is compulsively readable — you could put it back in a day — but, as documentaries and nonfiction storytelling are increasingly all the rage, it’s good to think about the things Malcolm is exploring. It’s about a guy accused of murdering his family, who entrusts someone to write a book defending him, but the writer does the opposite — he betrays his subject. When Malcolm comes in, the guy is suing the author for basically lying to him. Malcolm zooms out from the case, arguing that all nonfiction storytelling is extractive and manipulative. Maybe there are ways you can do it carefully and ethically, but ultimately if you exist in nonfiction storytelling, you are a liar and a cheater. And she makes the point that the subjects in these things often want to be in something, to be seen in some way, so they allow themselves to be manipulated, too. So it’s about that, it’s about not being s**tty when you’re working with someone, and it’s about our relationship to the idea of nonfiction as ‘truth’ — which it isn’t.”
Ren Faire is on HBO now. Lance Oppenheim is on IG here. His other documentary features are the fascinating Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld.
Meanwhile —
Some of the most beautiful & exciting clothes of 2024 owe their existence to a deep-cut apparel-industry RENEGADE GOAT currently enjoying a renaissance — she has been doing amazing work since the ‘90s, and in addition to new pieces you can find secondhand slappers out there for the low: