The September 2026 Lurid Things

Get it fired up in a hurry, wanna get...lurid. Photo by Anshu A on Unsplash

Hello!

How was September? Did we pspspspsp the new species of cat, the adorable Leopardus tilcayo? Did we marvel at the new spineless potato? Did we break into hysterical sobs like I did the other night because we watched a clip of Céline Dion at her new Paris residency?

The Glorious Bessandra. This month, Bessie’s vet walked in on us debating the filter for her profile pic. Obviously, this is the one that Bessie chose.

Without further ado…

Merriam-Webster defines ‘lurid’ as:

Lurid: adjective (lu· rid) ˈlu̇r-əd1 a: causing horror or revolution b: melodramatic, sensational2 a: wan and ghastly pale in appearance b: of any of several light or medium grayish colors ranging from yellow to orange3 shining with the red glow of fire seen through smoke or clouds

September’s Lurids:

(Book) Isabel Livino’s Immaculate Twist

(Movie) Oppenheim’s White Whale: Primetime

(Music) A Faintly Familiar Tune: Katseye’s “Hootie Frutti”

(Art) Surreal Globalism: The Art of Post Wook

(Sensation) A Cornell Memory

*No (Science) or (Object) this month, folks! I’m BUSY

(Book) Isabel Livino’s Immaculate Twist

Madalena is pregnant. Not just pregnant; Madalena is unwed pregnant. 1877 religious Pernambuco, Brazil pregnant. Her lover, the very wealthy Leandro Neves, doesn’t know yet, but she intends to tell him at the São João festival. At least, that’s the plan she spits out to her mother once she’s cornered in the church courtyard she fled to when her morning sickness interrupted Sunday services. “The odds were stacked against you before…and now…He’ll say it isn’t his,” her mother warns her, like a grim omen that haunts Madalena’s thoughts as Leandro ushers her to his carriage a week later amidst a terrifying storm. Thunder and lightning shake and rattle the carriage, yet the joy on Leandro’s face at the unexpected news is unmistakable. Even after everything grows dark, and Madalena wakes later at his estate, she remembers the love on his face.

All is very quickly not as it seems, and the charming and confident Leandro appears before her bed a changed and different man, cowed and meek before the mysterious Doctor Lobo and the evasive Maria das Dores. An Immaculate Deception has all the hallmarks of the gothic tale but with a mystery-thriller twist: Why can’t Madalena go home? Why is Leandro so different, and why does his bedroom smell of another woman, adorned with her jewelry and clothes?

I was slack-jawed at the plot twist, one that I simply did not see coming. So clever and tight is Livino’s prose that the reader finds themselves questioning plot points step for step with Madalena, so that no reaction misses Livino’s masterful pen strokes.

You can purchase An Immaculate Deception on Bookshop.org

(Movie) Oppenheim’s White Whale: Primetime

Not unlike Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Dan Plum, the heart of Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, auditions for a role that he doesn’t even understand, only that it will help him achieve his dream of being a part of something great. Thus the central perspective of the film braids from the righteous Chris Hansen, his cool and collected producer Andie Bender, and his chief predator researcher-cum-spotter Xavier Von Erck. After a traumatizing baptism by fire and later counseling by the experienced seaman (ha) Hansen, Dan establishes a rhythm aboard the production’s “vessel” with crew and filmed subjects. Like Moby Dick, we bump against portions of perspective and story—and just as briefly row away—as we’ve caught wind of an elusive white whale, a pedophile in office, or even “the president of the United States.”

I found David Bolen’s cinematography haunting and lyrical, symbolic with frames and lighting at times both sinister and unobtrusive as eating a snack behind a backstage monitor while a pedophile engages with Phoebe Bridgers’ undercover decoy. Merritt Wever is in her acting element as the stoic workhorse Andie (please tell me I’m not the only one who was obsessed with her performance in Unbelievable), the foil to Robert Pattinson’s expertly stunted Chris Hansen. The whole cast, in fact, does a great job of bringing moments of grounded surrealism to the film.

An interesting point that I’ve seen made is that the film seems to shy away from deeper contexts and textures, but I respectfully disagree; I think the depths of the piece are plumbed when the viewer comes away from the film feeling a superficial disquiet. It’s hard, I suppose, in our consumer culture that the NY Times review references, to see Oppenheim’s final implication when “every facet of ordinary life…has been turned into entertainment.” I think the hollowness that the Times references is the whole point of the ending: How can a tale about exploitation, punitive morality, or Christian nationalism be proffered up honestly when the frameworks supporting a film like Primetimeprop up those same exact topics? Further still, how can there be a tale of clear victors and aggressors, angels and demons, Indian mythological devils and white supremacist saviors, when each one of us is capable of a great evil and a greater good? The world that launched To Catch a Predator into primetime hasn’t changed since then. It’s hard to write a piece criticizing reductive moralism while also tying it up in a reductive moralist bow, as we are all implicated participants in Primetime’s spectacle, watching the multiple camera angles of Pattinson’s character rehearsing the final dialogue that will never be shot as each screen blinks out to offline, sea blue. Even Dan Plum’s character is left indecisive; after all that he’s experienced and (ha) plumbed, the lure of the hunt tempts him again as he runs his fingers over his new SAG-AFTRA card. Coming to the theater to watch this lurid tale, we are as equally culpable as the innocent Dan, the torn Andie, the hungry network, the eager production crew, and the ambivalent post-production team were, or even Hansen, a predator himself. The only difference between us and them is that once we are done watching our spectacle, we can get up from our seats and—glancing a final, confused time over our shoulders—walk away.

You can catch a Primetime in theaters

(Music) A Faintly Familiar Tune: Katseye’s “Hootie Frutti”

Katseye’s August release, “Hootie Frutti,” has already garnered polarizing reviews: overt sexualization, AI slop lyrics, and Brazilian appropriation. As to the latter point, “Hootie Frutti” reminds me of the Y2K, regrettably racist, and vaguely (Frankensteined) Latin-inspired “Spice Up Your Life” by the Spice Girls:

Yeah, unfortunately Mothers very much did not Mother.

“Hootie Frutti” also bears a lot of similarity (it’s the same song) to Ice Spice (see what I did there) and Tokischa’s “Thootie”:

Especially with the literal lyric: “So he gon' eat this tutti frutti (Thootie)”

To the former point about Katseye’s overt sexualization, the argument falls into two prongs: that the artists themselves are young women being hyper-sexualized, and that their audience is mainly impressionable teenage girls. I haven’t yet watched Netflix’s Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE, but from what I’ve read, the young women are inordinately creative and hardworking and entirely capable of evolving and pivoting (and “borrowing”) into a new artistic direction beyond their original fanbase. I personally don’t find the music video that bad (it actually made me laugh), but that might be because I grew up during Y2K, or the period Katseye’s fan base apparently seems very keen to emulate:

“Dirrty” asked the hardest-hitting questions of our day, such as: What if Mad Max: Fury Road had way too much water?

If anything, watching Katseye’s music video directly after Xtina’s makes “Hootie Frutti” seem laughably tame. The young women are not in an underground, flooded boxing-sex bunker, for one. (Who is competing in wet boxing? Do they bet for more water?! What type of economy is this waterborne society based upon?! Do they even know about sand?)

For another, the “Hootie Frutti” lyrics themselves are as silly as Xtina’s, so hardly AI slop, though Katseye’s more directly state female pleasure as the goal, rather than Xtina’s (commanding!) yet vague lyrics about havin’ a rOwDy!!!! ‘ole time:

Gonna get rowdy
Gonna get a little unruly
Get it fired up in a hurry, wanna get dirty
It's about time that I came to start the party
Ooh, sweat drippin' over my body (yeah, yeah)
Dancin' (nasty, you nasty), gettin' just a little naughty, wanna get dirty
It's about time for my arrival (oh, oh)

Unruly?! Bless her heart.

Compare that to Katseye’s lyrics:

Hootie frutti on your tongue, hootie frutti all night long
Hootie frutti, if you want it, come and get it ‘fore it’s gone
Hootie frutti all the way, hootie frutti every day
Hootie frutti like the twenty dollar smoothies in LA
Hootie frutti (Uh-huh), nice and juicy (So juicy)
Yeah, you crave it, and you’re not even a foodie

Erewhon? Get em, girls!

In conclusion to this very serious, scholarly essay, no matter where you land on the pop-thumping embankment, know that “Hootie Frutti” is not only a song that has come before, but also one that will come again. And again. And again. Until it is dehydrated.

And then maybe those “rare” orange Tic Tacs will become a thing of the past…

All by myseeeeeeeellllllffff. Don’t wanna be…

(Art) Surreal Globalism: The Art of Post Wook

You can purchase this print on Post Wook’s website

Post Wook, or Natasha Chomko, is a powerhouse. With over 669,000 followers on Instagram, Wook is the reigning queen of surreal landscape collage art.

Wook’s artistic vision is for global interconnectedness with an entirely manual (i.e., no AI) process.

Her subjects are often expansive, global landscapes interspersed with psychedelic elements. Recently, Wook has introduced cheeky writing into her artwork:

I was drawn to Post Wook’s art because of my love of vintage psychedelic sci-fi book covers.

You can order Post Wook’s 2027 calendar here!

You can join her Whimsy Club here!

(Sensation) A Cornell Memory

On September 28, 2026, District Attorney Matthew Van Houten of Tompkins County, NY, announced that the 2024 Cornell gang rape case would be reopened and submitted to a grand jury in light of the new civil lawsuit submitted by Jane Doe. Online, women and men have posted their outrage at the DA office’s fumbling, the university’s mild response, and most chilling, the president of Cornell’s violent attitude towards protestors instead of gang rape:

Many have also discussed the amount of times Cornell alums, professors, doctors, and scientists are named in the Epstein files (hint: it’s a lot), which creates a far thornier and insidious picture of rape culture than the purported (and heavily implied) one-off tragedy of Jane Doe’s lawsuit.

In the past couple of days, reading about Jane Doe’s testimony, I felt a lick of rage along my spine, righteous and incandescent. How could this have happened? How could those boys think their actions were okay? That she would be okay after all that ketamine? And then after she reported the rape, how could it have been so soundly dismissed? I read posts calling for doxxing all the members of the frat that were on the Snapchat group, that read those vile messages, that sat back, said nothing, and watched. I kept scrolling, my horror and disgust growing until I felt a reflexive tug, a little flick at the back of my head, and then I remembered: I had been to a Cornell frat party on a Saturday night, too.

The main difference was that the power dynamic had been reversed.

I toured Cornell several years ago with my comedy team. We were invited to perform our comedy hour at their performance center, and afterwards, our director was approached by our point of contact.

“They’re throwing us a party tonight,” he said some moments later when he stepped over a jacket on the floor next to our makeshift changing area by the door. It was February, so there were a lot of large puffer coats. “As a thanks for the show.”

We all looked at each other, confused. These were college kids, and though we weren’t that much older, we still knew that going would be weird. I was the youngest of the group at twenty-three, and I had been in the middle of packing up my props to go back to the hotel. “That’s cute,” I remember muttering to myself. There was no way we were going. I, for one, was hungry, as I hadn’t eaten much before we performed because I’d been nervous to perform in such a large theater. “What did they say when you said no?” He mustn’t have heard me, because he didn’t look at me. “Hello?” I didn’t have the best attitude that evening, as I’d spent the past five minutes wondering if Ithaca had gluten-free pizza.

“Really,” one of the guys asked, stepping past me to our director. Apparently, he also hadn’t heard me. From behind, I could see he’d crossed his arms, rightly suspicious. “And where exactly is this party?”

Our director slung his backpack over his shoulder, apparently not hearing him either, and headed for the door. “I have the address. Meet you guys outside!”

That was how I found myself at one of Cornell’s frat parties on a Saturday night.

There must have been more debate on our way over, but I don’t remember it. I do know that I was really mad, as I would have had to catch a cab at that hour by myself (unsafe) in a place that I was unfamiliar with (unsafe), head back to the hotel by myself (unsafe), and then go down to the front desk at a later hour and pick up carryout (unsafe), advertising to the front desk who knew what room I was staying in (unsafe) that I was alone (very unsafe). I didn’t know how prevalent sex trafficking was in hotels back then, but I’d had an inkling. I’d also decided after a dismal Google search that a fabulous Chinese meal would be just the end to a lovely evening.

Unfortunately, we ended up going, and neither pizza nor Chinese was had.

“Are we at a frat?” I whispered, panicked, as we walked through the front door.

Again, the others must not have heard me. I looked around and was struck by an immediate othering. It was very subtle—we were honored guests, after all—but I clocked it in the eagerness of the expressions around us and the cups that appeared in multiple directions. In that moment, I was no longer just a beloved court jester: I was a girl in a frat house. Up until that night, I’d never stepped foot in any type of Greek building before, and I, a former art student living in New York City, was shocked at how fast it took one of them to offer us cocaine. I, and the rest of our team, of course declined, but I have the distinct memory of staring at a dinosaur figurine lording over a glass mirror plate with three fat, chopped white lines.

Everyone was nice enough, and with every poured beer offering, there was the option to choose a closed glass bottle. I chose a closed glass bottle, because I knew from headlines back then that a frat was a frat was a frat and that the word for rape was frat, no matter how polite, young, and eager the members around me were. So when I was offered a sweaty Solo Cup by one of the kind-seeming frat boys, I laughed and pointed at the cup.

“Now that looks roofied.”

The young guy paled, looking horrified. “What?”

My teammate, who had attended a college with a Greek life, immediately grabbed my elbow. “She’s good, thanks!” he said cheerfully, steering me into another room. “Knock it off,” he warned me under his breath.

I shoved him, laughing as I did. He groaned at me and shook his head, venturing into the crowd past me. I flipped him off under my coat once he was a good distance away. He was well-meaning, but I didn’t need to be reprimanded. I contemplated the scene from the doorway. The drink the kid had offered me was probably fine. But then again, who knows? I joined my teammates at the beer pong table, feeling superior in my decision to provoke discomfort. Me! At a frat house! All I knew that evening was that I felt entitled to make my joke at the frat boy’s expense because, you see, I had been roofied before. I’d been roofied before on three separate occasions.

The first time it happened was a few years prior, while I was in college. I went to a show fundraiser at a bar that’s now a restaurant five blocks from my apartment. Back then at NYU, non-main stage productions had to raise money for their production costs, and so we came out in large groups to buy drinks to help support our friends’ art. The high glass windows facing the street were glazed with condensation from the musical theater kids dancing. Another cold Saturday night in February. It was also rather empty, if memory serves, keeping the regular crowds away because of the light snow. I was still nursing my second drink when the bartender offered me a free one. I took a sip. It tasted funny. I had already decided I was done for the evening, so I took it as a sign to sneak it back onto the counter, and I wove my way as innocuously as I could past my dancing friends. A couple blocks later, I started to stumble, and if it weren’t for the snow and the need for wearing some sort of grounded boot, I probably wouldn’t have made it home safely. I then proceeded to vomit for the next three hours. A friend of mine popped over to check in on me the following night. I was aching, disoriented, and nauseous, different from a regular hangover. We determined I must have caught a flu. I felt sick for another full day, and then I went back to class.

The second time occurred when I stayed late after closing my shift at the restaurant I worked at the summer after graduating. It was still summer on the Bowery that night, another Saturday, and I’d had nothing planned when my coworker asked me to stick around for a drink. He was maybe three years older than me, overly friendly, and not at all someone I was interested in, save a passing work friendship. What surprised me was that my other coworker, a guy a year older than me who never seemed keen to socialize after work hours, invited himself to join us. We wandered upstairs after closing, piling into one of the large banquet booths, while our significantly older manager stepped behind the bar to fix us drinks. Overly Friendly Guy offered to help, popping up from his seat to assist.

There was no mustachio-twirling as they both made it back to the table with the beverages in tow. I sipped my drink, and then I sipped another, and sometime later, the world went underwater. At one point, my grumpy coworker must have sensed that something was amiss, because I remember him dragging me down the street, asking me where I lived, and then hauling me back to my apartment. He stayed outside as I stumbled inside my lobby, and he then instructed me to text him the moment I locked my front door. I called out sick the next day, thinking I’d caught some sort of summertime flu, and quit two months later. The restaurant has long since closed.

The third and last time it happened, I was celebrating my sketch team’s successful Saturday night show, some months before Cornell. I was also meeting my boyfriend’s parents for the first time that night, and in my nervous state, I’d left my wallet back at my apartment. I was questioned at the bar’s door due to my young-looking face (the Globe still stands), but it wasn’t a problem! I was let in! I nursed one drink and then my boyfriend approached with another, saying the bartender had told him he made an extra for me. My boyfriend then went off to be with the other half of our team, and I sidled into the booth with his roommate and our mutual friends. I took one sip of the drink and gagged. It tasted acrid, wrong. My boyfriend’s roommate asked me what was the matter, and when I told him, he took a sip himself. He didn’t notice anything wrong with it and continued sipping. I called him crazy, as I immediately felt sick and later had to have my boyfriend half-carry me back to my apartment, where I threw up. The next day, I had chills and sweats, paired with a vertigo so severe that I thought I was going to fall out of my chair onto the floor at brunch the next morning with his parents.

When I went over to my boyfriend’s apartment the following Sunday, I was still unwell, and his roommate came rushing at me, ashen-faced. He gripped my arms, surprising me.

“WHAT WAS IN THAT DRINK?!” he cried. I noticed he was still wearing a bathrobe, and the sun was setting. “I WOKE UP ON A PARK BENCH, LAUREN! THEN I WALKED THE ENTIRE LENGTH OF THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE1! I BLACKED OUT AND I DON’T KNOW HOW I GOT HOME!”

“I’ve been sick since Friday,” I managed, my gorge once again rising. Though the vomiting hadn’t continued past the first spell, the nausea still lingered. “And I only took a little sip.”

“Someone slipped something in that drink!” He dropped his hands from my arms once he realized he was shaking me. His eyes were wild. “I vomited for a whole day, Lauren!”

It was then that I put two and two together: We’d been roofied, and I’d been roofied two times prior. That night, I called the Globe’s offices, telling them that their bartender had roofied me and my friend. I was asked if I could identify the bartender with a description. My boyfriend didn’t remember when I’d asked; it was dark.

“Well,” the woman on the other end of the line sighed, “sorry about that.” She didn’t sound sorry, only tired. “I’ll pass it along.”

“Then—”

She hung up before I could respond.

Nine months later, we toured Cornell.

I’ve taken those three nights out of the box in the years since, passed them under a lamp for inspection, and given them a good shake. Still, they landed right in the same exact position: that I’d done nothing wrong in expecting the world to treat me with dignity and respect, and that I was lucky and terribly naive. Enough time has passed for me to see that I’d been balanced unknowingly on three opened pairs of scissors, a precarious position in which the softest of exhales could have tipped any of those evenings into terrible unimaginables. But that night in the Cornell frat house, I was twenty-three, hangry and intent on messing with the students around me, surreptitious in their glances. I knew what they were, and what they could be: rape. Never mind that I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. For once, I was going to make them feel like prime beef shank.

“Uh oh!” I cried, taking a perverse pleasure in bugging my eyes out and pointing at a table of beer poured into twenty cups alongside the beer pong table, “Roofie ciiiiiiiiiiity!”

Faces pinched on the few that heard me, whether from guilt or innocence, I’ll never know. I wasn’t that loud, and I wasn’t that bold, turning away to say my joke so that my teammates wouldn’t hear. I had thought at the time I was hilarious. Instead, I was self-righteous, drinking beer bought on someone else’s allowance that I didn’t intend on finishing. I felt invincible, protected by my adult status, and far too clever for any shenanigans to occur. Who would rape a woman mocking them? How naive I was, and how narrow my definition of sexual violence. I’ve since learned that there are many ways a man can break a woman, and at least one of them involves her spirit. But back then, I opted into the next round of beer pong, smug and superior to whatever meager community this frat had to offer. This was where rape culture began! And here I was, having been a victim, standing tall in the middle of a frat house! Untouchable! I’d survived. Not just once, but three times!

My ball landed in a cup. “I’m not drinking that,” I laughed when a dirty cup was offered by way of penalty. I twirled my safe beer, feeling pleasure in being exempt from the house rules, from saying the word “no” loudly enough for a predominantly male room to hear, and from knowing that we had a hotel to return to eventually, and then to an apartment that was my own far away from whatever this night was. My ball landed into a cup. I smirked, and sipped my beer. A win for feminists everywhere.

Some time later, though I don’t recall exactly when, we agreed to not discuss that night. It was problematic that we’d accepted the frat’s flimsy invitation in the first place; amongst us, we were twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, and twenty-eight. Too old to have attended a college kid’s party. I rolled my eyes when no one was looking. I’d felt at the time that it had been predatory of us. But like the others, I capitulated and went along with it, and I’d enjoyed briefly exploiting the power imbalance to work off my lingering anger. Even with my self-righteousness, the knowledge of our communal wrong didn’t sit right with me then, and eventually, I forgot we’d attended at all. I doubted my memory when others mentioned Cornell, confusing details of that night with the other New England college we’d performed at (where we did not attend any parties). The shame most of us felt turned the promise in my mind into a clean forgetting. For a while, that night and my entitled behavior had never happened.

I was back in the dusty closet, where all the other boxes were stored. Messy, they lay in haphazard stacks. Cornell was at the bottom. I placed the cardboard lid back on nicely and stood up. No, I decided after an hour’s worth of scrolling. I worked my jaw muscle, tight from clenching, and took a step back. I hesitated and then took another and another until I was back into the safety of the hallway. Slowly, I shut the door, knowing that I was leaving the boxes on the shelves in disarray. I turned off my phone, and so out went the light.

RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline: (+1)800-656-HOPE