Take a Trip To a Seductive, Mysterious Place…
How are we all doing inside! It really depends on the hour, doesn’t it? Someone I once sorta knew I think once sorta said something like, “A day spent inside is decadence,” and there is a dark glamour to it. But none of us ever expected to be inside this long, and here we are FaceTiming the hell out of everyone and doing a lot of sitting down and standing up. True escape seems hard to find, but if there’s anything we here at Very Famous know, it’s how to take a sparkly little trip to the dimly lit corners of places. Here’s a running list of virtual transportation…
☎️ A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour ☎️
Margaret and Corey are documenting themed motels and 24/7 Valentine dreamscapes across America. Their most recent trip takes us to the eleganté Sybaris Pool Suites, a Midwestern hotel chain with indoor pools and water slides or as Margaret says, “a haven for Midwestern couples who just wanted to have a sexy time in a private place where their kids and their inlaws would not find out.”
☎️ Dan Bell’s Mall Videos ☎️
Filmmaker Dan Bell’s videos exploring dead/dying malls around the country take a Vaporwave look at these quietly exciting places. The abandoned retail community of the internet has always been fascinating to me (it’s huge!), and one of my favorite Dan Bell vids is this night-time tour of Frederick Towne Mall in Frederick, Maryland. The neon signs in the otherwise decimated stores have been left on, and those echo-y, far away ’80s voices soundtrack it all.
☎️ Interviews with Jackie (and sometimes Joan) Collins ☎️
For conspiratorial Hollywood glamour (“Well, Eva Gabor, her younger sister, told me the story”), please watch any old interview involving Jackie Collins. She gets into a very British passive-aggressive fight with Romance Dame Barbara Cartland on an old BBC1 show, and this Piers Morgan (ugh!) interview with Joan and Jackie, dynamically flirty and talking about their dates with Marlon Brando and Warren Beatty, how to get old in Hollywood, and Jackie’s handwritten manuscripts.
☎️ Maximalist Retro Homes on Instagram from @thehouseofadora ☎️
Adora, the Nashville Glam Queen we interviewed in August, finds the very best green-carpet time capsule homes that have survived miraculously intact. There’s this 1970s condo near San Diego below, or a teal-carpeted, brick fireplace gem in Seabrook, Texas. There’s also her own beautiful, Hollywood Regency-inspired home in Nashville that can be rented for shoots!
☎️ Club Quarantine☎️
It’s an online dance party, every night of the quarantine on Zoom! Join @ 9pm EST –>
☎️ Delish! ☎️
There’s something surreal about Delish.com that I can’t quite put my finger on. I think I love them because they cover mostly accessible and/or commercial food news and recipes, a definite rarity during a time of endless high-brow food coverage. Whether it’s highlighting a particularly great deal on Costco cheese flights, a new flavor of Mountain Dew, or Cheesecake Factory offering free cheesecake, this is the kind of food coverage I can relate to. Disappear into their world of French Dip Squares and Thanksgiving Jungle Juice!
☎️ Italian King @grossypelosi ☎️
Speaking of culinary escapes, we must recommend the Instagram of Dan Pelosi aka @grossypelosi living a beautiful life in Brooklyn with effusive color, tropical paradise plants, and LOTS of pasta! We are expressing the sentiments of many when we say that his Instagram makes us feel like things will be alright again soon.
☎️ @NightOpenings Movie Premieres ☎️
From Laura Dern’s black-cowboy-boots-red-blazer ensemble to Drew Barrymore’s thong strap, @NightOpenings captures the cheekiness and wild chill possessed only by movie premieres from around 1985-2003.
☎️ Type “Second Life” accompanied by pretty much any phrase after ☎️
Fantastical, sometimes sexy virtual worlds are all we have right now to take us places! Typing “Second Life” followed by “coffee shop” or “ballroom cloud” or “nightclub” feels like jumping jacks and backbends for my eyes—energizing! There are even “virtual furniture magnates” in the world of Second Life. One guy in Portugal makes $3000 a week designing jacuzzis, beds, and chaise lounges for the game.
☎️ E! True Hollywood Stories ☎️
Before streaming-service documentaries and true-crime podcasts, there were E! True Hollywood Stories. The first one aired in 1996 about the murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer, who was killed by an obsessed fan. Airing weekly for 17 seasons, we love that any kind of celebrity could receive the E! True treatment, from Traci Lords to Female Bodybuilders to Andy Kaufman to Michael Alig to Home Improvement. The series was brought back last year, but as a Vice article pointed out, it feels somewhat unnecessary this day in age.
☎️ Shana Molton’s Whispering Pines ☎️
Emitting the energy of Julianne Moore in Safe but with way more camp & color & joy, Canadian artist Shana Molton named her exhibition and video series after her parent’s senior citizen mobile-home park near Yosemite National Park. The video series feels like an unlabeled VHS tape of public access shows, and it tells the story of Cynthia, a hypochondriac on an enlightenment quest in the form of new-age kitsch.
This is a running list! Send your mysterious, seductive internet trips to kelsey@veryfamousmagazine.com!
