The Monday Media Diet with Julia Harrison

On Monterey Bay Aquarium, Sewanee Review, and Julian Barnes

Julia Harrison writes for AD and runs an interesting creative community called Saloon.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a 27 year old living in Brooklyn, NY. I’m a writer at Architectural Digest, and the founder of a creative community called @saloon. I write an all-too personal newsletter called orzo bimbo . I’m from Virginia, but I’ve been in and out of New York since I was 19. I first came here in 2018 because I needed to escape a vitriolic group of sorority girls and a mold problem at my tiny Tennessee college. I found my way into and then out of publishing and book publicity. Went back to school for an English degree and a job at the Sewanee Review; moved to Sardinia to help begin an artist residency, to an island in Maine to help with some restaurants, before landing back in the city. Otherwise I spent a lot of time navigating relationships in my twenties, losing friends, making friends, getting my heart broken. Those feel like the big things, the ones that defined my life with intensity.

I started writing orzo bimbo while working a meaningless bureaucratic job and going through my worst breakup, so it began as a chronicle of really intense heartbreak and an overwhelming sense of living beneath my potential. Now it’s a bit different—though the themes of disassociation and disillusionment are the same—I’m online dating, caught in the content loop, making a living from affiliate linking AD, no longer going to Bushwick. I’m building out saloon every day and going to ridiculous events all the time. I’m making the most of New York before I call it off and move to Maine, or California’s central coast, or Mexico. You’re catching me at a good time: writing, working, without-boyfriend—this is Julia with a healthy hair routine on a low-dosage of SSRI’s.

Describe your media diet.

Well, it’s bad. I’m a grossly uninformed person, in both news and pop culture. My sister will laugh to see me doing this, who had to tell me about Alexa Chung in like 2021. I watched the Oscars this year just in case it came up with her. My entire media diet is basically: essays, magazines, really scary Instagram reels, Substack think pieces. A lot of music.

Working for Condé, I have free access to all our publications, so I’m reading Vogue and New Yorker all the time. I’m really enjoying the New Yorker’s Goings On, not so much because they nail it but because it tells me what people are talking about. I read Vogue with the passion of a 15-year old. I don’t care what people say, it’s an exciting publication to me. I read a lot of AD because I genuinely love AD. I use Substack for pop culture— Hung Up, Feed Me. @Rose Anderson is doing a great notes series where she posts about art worth seeing in the city, Chloe Pingeon does a great culture roundup, Clubstack ® and gunkyard tell me where to dance and what shows are on this month. I love reading about design on Substack, too—Nobody’s Home, Love and Other Rugs, Schmatta, Design Lobster, @ART DIRECTION.

I use Instagram for a lot of my art/design/fashion awareness. I love the idea of following 1,500 lives and perspectives. I love @folkartwork, @grayzna.g._a, @mepaintsme for art archives, @claudehome, @casa__shop, and @doubles_tennis for design. My favorite artists on there right now are Leah Schmidt, and Shana Cave, Ames Lizzie, Shane Gabier. I also love following Metrograph and Mubi on there, they clue me into so much film.

When I wasn’t busy 80 hours/week, I was watching a ton of movies, a lot of Westerns—they’re so therapeutic to me. We used to watch them when I was a kid. I also love to watch a movie that’s two hours long, and completely sans plot. Often not in English. One of those girls. You can see why I once enjoyed Bushwick. Most recently I’ve loved Sunburn, The Big Country, and Janet Planet.

I’m going to museums and galleries about every week now, that’s how I’ve been spending my Saturdays. I love the old stand-bys—The Met, the Guggenheim, the MoMA, the Whitney, The Frick. For galleries, I love TIWA, Emma Scully, Europa, and Jacqueline Sullivan. I keep a close eye on everything they do—I think those curators are so on the pulse. The USM store on Greene feels like a gallery in-and-of itself, so does Printed Matter in Chelsea, the Lalique showroom uptown, and Casa Magazines in West Village.

I love a little magazine. I subscribe to the Sewanee Review, the Paris Review, Lux, I’m always snooping for a riso print of @Gunkyard. I’ll sometimes read Elephant magazine (for Sam Falb), Burnaway, dirt, Worms Mag; I also like certain things from NY Review of Arch, and Forever Mag, and the spicy shit from byline. They’re always dropping some essay with a take that infuriates the Internet. @Brittany Deitch just wrote a great one on the death of Liam Payne that’s getting her cyberbullied in the comments.

I am shaking in anticipation of the new Chef’s Table season (April 28, y’all!!!!!!!). That show brought me out of the dark more than once. Otherwise, I love reality TV. I’m watching Farmer Wants A Wife right now. It’s bad. For real TV, I go back and watch a show that was popular years ago. Most recently that’s looked like: Narcos, Big Little Lies. I’m watching the first season of White Lotus right now.

What’s the last great book you read?

People don’t want to hear me talk about this anymore, but Lonesome Dove. It was so good my boyfriend and I broke up. Then I was a shell of myself without it, so I had to start reading other huge, perfect books like East of Eden.

What are you reading now?

The above brought me to Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Someone in the McNally Jackson in Seaport wrote some recommendation for it along the lines of “Did you just read a huge epic book that broke your heart and left you morose and stranded in the desert of your own mind and you’re looking for anything to satiate you? Try this book by Doris Lessing.” I walked out with that and my first Ottolenghi cookbook.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

I read it through. If I think a piece is bad, or it doesn’t grip me after 5-10 pages, I abandon it. I’m learning not to feel guilty about that kind of thing. (I still feel guilty.)

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

I want Julian Barnes to have a revival. He moves me in a way others can’t and haven’t. Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel made a splash and then disappeared into the ether but that’s a super modern book. I think people will be talking about that for some time. Same with Rachel Mannheimer’s Earth Room. I don’t know, I kind of read the slow-paced cerebrally indulgent stuff that English majors do—Rachel Cusk, Lydia Davis, Adrienne Rich. I love Natalia Ginzburg. I tell people to read Meghan Garvey so much she’s probably getting scared.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

I pay $40/year for “PictureThis,” a plant identification app that I find to be super accurate, plus it tells me if I can eat the plant. I never do—just in case—but the point is it’s interesting to know. It also tells you how the plant is used culturally or medicinally, along with all the basics: genus, family, species, etc.

Plane or train?

This question is too hard. The answer is obviously train, because of the ripe emotional experience of moving through a landscape like that, and what it facilitates in our thinking—we get so reflective, our heads against the cold glass and the music speaking perfectly to the scenario. I always feel that going upstate to visit my best friend Isabel. But a plane is so exciting to me—every time I’m in one I can’t believe that’s happening to me, that I can pay $400 to see the Colorado River like that, barrel through the air with a shitty coffee like it’s nothing. At night, too, when the cities are spread like lit scorpions. I love that.

What is one place everyone should visit?

Monterey Bay Aquarium, probably. I don’t remember much about being a kid but I remember that. I’ve been really moved by Jenny Lake in the Grand Tetons, clearest water I remember ever seeing and there was something that felt really untouched about it. It was July and somehow we were the only people there. I would rent a car and drive around Sardinia for 3 months if I could—that was a landscape I won’t ever forget: martian in some parts, brambly in others, wide swamps just a mile away from bright, teal ocean and white sand. That was a place that felt untouched by modernity, like those people had been there forever and chose to keep it exactly the same every day because they like how it is. It’s hard to find places like that now.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

For a long time I was obsessed with Camille Saint-Saëns’ song “The Swan,” from his musical suite Carnival of the Animals—or actually I was obsessed with Clara Rockmore’s rendition of it on the theremin, which you can watch here. It’s transfixing. That is a woman who knows grief and god. Theremins are the stuff of the liminal, there’s something uncanny about them—sound made with manipulation of space. I was obsessed with theremins for a while—a guy I was writing letters to actually sent me one a long time ago.

Anyway, years after that I started dating this guy who loved techno. He started sending me all this electronic music and I loved it—I started listening to Orbital and Moby, AFX, BICEP. I didn’t realize electronic music was something other than 100 gecs, really, or like—David Guetta. So then I got really into it, and realized all these bands I’d long loved were deeply inspired by electronic music, early techno, house, dance, and that all of this stuff existed in tandem, in a tangle of influence. Boys always know about this shit somehow. So I went back to the beginning of electronic music. I found this playlist called Pioneers of Electronic Music on Spotify, and found the Wikipedia page on musique concrète. Unlike the pulsating, trippy, often feel-good sounds of electronic music since the ‘90s, early electronic music is deeply haunting. It makes you feel outside of your body—like your mind is in a dark, wet warehouse with no doors or windows and slime is coming in through the cracks of the floor, and earth is 20 billion miles away. Here, listen. I hate the feeling, of course, but love that sound can take your mind there.

Then I learned about the women behind the electronic music movement, many of whom worked for BBC in the 1960’s—in particular Daphne Oram, and Delia Derbyshire, who wrote the original Doctor Who soundtrack (never seen it). Darbyshire also initiated a program with BBC Radiophonics in 1964 called Inventions for Radio, a type of “radio writing.” In the four-part series—titled The Dreams, Amor Dei, The After-Life, and The Evenings of Certain Lives—the interviewees speak about their dreams, their belief in God, life after death, and aging, voiced over ambling electronic sound. Dreams is particularly frightening. You get the sense that these people are imprisoned, and between worlds. You can listen to the second part Amor Dei here. It’s weird, uplifting, sad. We make up our belief and then take it so seriously—that’s my takeaway.

I found then that the work of these early electronic pioneers seriously informed the oeuvre of Angelo Badalamenti, who did the scores for David Lynch’s movies, and the Twin Peaks theme—all of which influenced Aphex Twin, whose instrumentals fuel my ability to write daily about daybeds and the best coffee makers on Amazon for AD, so it all comes together in the end, really. (JH)