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Inside its Milan store at 10 Corso Como, Gentle Monster introduces a new centerpiece that shifts the energy of the space. The GIANT HEAD KINETIC OBJECT reflects the brand’s ongoing focus on perception, awareness, and emotional response.

Developed by the Gentle Monster Robotics Lab, the sculpture consists of three distinct heads. At the center, a face slowly closes its eyes and tilts as if lost in thought. A smaller and a larger head move around it in a continuous rhythm. Eyelids blink. Pupils shift. The entire structure responds like a nervous system.

Other sculptural elements, shaped like stars, are placed throughout the store. They speak to inner movements, to invisible but constant processes of the mind.

This is not decoration. It is a study in motion, mood, and atmosphere. Gentle Monster continues to build spaces that speak without words. The result is physical and emotional. Every detail counts.

Merging themes of interstellar travel and cultural convergences, Zak Ové creates large-scale sculptures and multimedia installations that explore African ancestry, traditions, and history. The British-Trinidadian artist’s practice is deeply rooted in the narratives of the African diaspora, focusing on traditions of masquerade. He delves into its role in performance and ceremony, as well as masks as potent instruments for self-emancipation and cultural resistance.

Ové’s interdisciplinary work spans sculpture, painting, film, and photography, exploring links between mythology, oral histories, and speculative futures. “His sculptures often incorporate symbols, iconography, and materials drawn from African, Caribbean, and diasporic traditions, merging them with modern aesthetics to celebrate the continuity and adaptability of culture,” his studio says.

Ové often delves into the relationship between contemporary lived experiences and the spirit world, like in “Moko Jumbie” or a glass mosaic installation in London titled “Jumbie Jubilation.” In these works, the artist brings an ancestral spirit rooted in African and Caribbean folklore known as a Jumbie to life as a spectral dancer, cloaked in banana leaves with a torso of a golden, radiant face.

The motif of rockets has emerged in Ove’s recent installations, like “The Mothership Connection” and “Black Starliner,” which feature totem-like stacks of African tribal masks and lattice-like Veve symbols—intricate designs employed in the Vodou religion to represent spiritual deities known as Lwa.

“The Mothership Connection” combines architectural elements referencing the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., and a ring of Cadillac lights nodding to Detroit, “Motor City.” The crowning element is a giant Mende tribal mask that glows when the 26-foot-tall sculpture is illuminated at night, with a pulsing rhythm suggestive of a heartbeat.

The title is also a reference to the iconic 1975 album by Parliament-Funkadelic, Mothership Connection, in with outer space is a through-line in the group’s celebration of what BBC journalist Frasier McAlpine described as a response to the waning optimism of the post-civil rights era. Mothership Connection soared at a time when “flamboyant imagination (and let’s be frank, exceptional funkiness) was both righteous and joyful,” he wrote.

Ové echoes this exuberance through vibrant colors, repetition, and monumental scale. Library Street Collective, which exhibited “The Mothership Connection” on the grounds of The Shepherd in Detroit late last year, describes the work as a nod “to a future where Black people are included in all possible frames of reference.”

In a monumental assembly of African masked figures titled “The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness,” Ové conceived of 40 graphite sculptures organized in a militaristic grid, each six-and-a-half feet tall, that have marched across the grounds of Somerset House, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, San Francisco City Hall, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The title of this piece references two groundbreaking works in Black history—Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, which was the first novel by a Black author to with the National Book Award, and Ben Jonson’s 1605 play The Masque of Blackness, noteworthy for being the first time blackface makeup was used in a stage production.

Ové reclaims and reframes dominant narratives about African history, culture, and the diaspora, interrogating the past to posit what he calls “potential futures,” where possibilities transform into realities. “By fusing ancestral wisdom with Afrofuturist ideals, Ové ensures that the voices of the past remain integral to shaping the futures we envision,” his studio says.

“The Mothership Connection” will be exhibited later this summer and fall at 14th Street Square in New York City’s Meatpacking District, accompanied by a gallery show at Chelsea Market. Dates are currently being confirmed, and you can follow updates on Ové’s Instagram.

There’s no wrong time of year to drink tequila. Whether you like it neat, on the rocks, or mixed into a margarita, paloma, or another cocktail, this agave-based spirit is always in season. There’s a tequila for every palate and every price range. It’s also a great choice for whiskey and rum drinkers looking for a change of pace. And although we could get into the various price ranges, today is all about inexpensive tequilas.

When it comes to bargain drinking, you have to be careful with tequila. While there are well-made, affordable varieties, there are plenty of inexpensive offerings that would be better used to power your lawn mower. Don’t let that discourage you though.

When we talk about bargain tequilas, we aren’t talking about bottom-shelf swill. We are, however, limiting the discussion to tequilas priced less than $30. You’ll be glad to know there are many balanced, noteworthy tequilas that fit this criterion. 

What are you up to this weekend? We’re doing the link list a day early because the boys and I are heading to Cornwall tonight to visit my aunts, dad, brother, cousins, and cousins’ kids, and to eat our weight in Cornish pasties. Hope you have a good one, and here are some links from around the web…

Happy Juneteenth! Here are nine places to celebrate today. (NYTimes gift link)

Very cool vacation pants.

The Ohio woman who won that raffle for the cottage in Ireland paid $12.67! (NYTimes gift link)

An English house with amazing details, like the alphabet poster and green bedroom.

Excited to watch this movie on the flight.

Celine Song, the director-writer of Materialists and Past Lives, actually worked as a matchmaker years ago. “Everybody’s very honest with the matchmaker in a way that I think they’re probably not as honest with their therapists. Of course, that’s something that I talk about in the film. It’s like, well, a therapist, it’s about the soul. It’s about what you’re going through. It’s about a psychological crisis. But when it comes to a matchmaker, you’re saying like, ‘Oh, I would like to acquire a boyfriend and I want the asset that I’m acquiring to have these specs.’”

This brush has been great now that I’m air drying my hair.

Baby ducks working up their courage to join the mom in the water. Gahhh!

Who else wants to eat picnic-y dinners all summer?

Also, curious about moisturizing socks. Has anyone ever tried them?

Hahahhaha.

Plus, three reader comments:

Says Anonymous on a very low-key summer checklist: “1. Ice cream once a week, min. 2. A fruit crumble; agnostic to fruit type. 3. Just bought my first bikini in 15 years and gonna wear it at the pool! Under a UPF rash guard because I’m not a maniac but still! THE BIKINI WILL KNOW SHE’S THERE.”

Says Sequoia on a very low-key summer checklist: “Every summer my son and I master something. So far, we’ve had summers of pancakes ’21, lemonade ’22, ice cream ’23, last year was the summer of the terrible job, and this summer we’re back with the summer of pizza.”

Says Carey on a very low-key summer checklist: “My daughter loved satire so I introduced her to Onion articles, as they became more appropriate for her. ‘‘Unconditional Love Given to 15-Year Old Who Just Called Mom a Bitch in Middle of Hollister’ was a touchstone for us.”

Lots of love, and we’ll still be publishing Big Salad while we’re traveling, if you’d like to sign up. Have a good one. xoxo

(Photo by Vradiy Art/Stocksy.)

Note: If you buy something through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission or have a sponsored relationship with the brand, at no cost to you. We recommend only products we genuinely like. Thank you so much.

17 COMMENTS

Ask 12 people the purpose of science fiction and you’ll get 13 different answers, but two likely agreed-upon definitions are ever-present in 28 Years Later. The first is to reflect contemporary anxieties — which a story of a deadly virus is sure to do just five years removed from the COVID-19 breakout. The second is to show us things we’ve never seen before, and it may surprise you to learn just how much Danny Boyle’s entertaining, poignant, seemingly grounded zombie sequel adheres to this tenet. It’s an amusingly strange (and appropriately strange-looking) horror blockbuster that may as well take place in an alien world, despite feeling uncannily familiar.

Packed to the gills with themes and ideas that shouldn’t mix, the third part in the series (and the first entry in a brand-new trilogy) is both visually and narrative propulsive, in ways that make it a delightful oddity. Boyle returns to the director’s chair alongside screenwriter Alex Garland, whose collaboration on the gritty, lo-fi 28 Days Later (2002) helped resurrect the zombie subgenre and popularized sprinting “rage zombies.” The beginnings of their original apocalypse can be glimpsed in the sequel’s prologue, which opens on a group of terrified children watching the world go bye-bye. Numerous flailing, blood-puking “Infected” tear through a sequestered living room in a scene that’s appropriately jolting and surprisingly fun to watch.

As the title suggests, the real story is set 28 years after this eruption, but its focus remains on the way adolescents process the world around them — especially those born into a postcollapse civilization. Twelve-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) lives on an isolated islet with his gruff scavenger father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), his ailing mother Isla (Jodie Comer), and their small close-knit community. It’s a big day for the soft-spoken youth, as the whole village celebrates his first trip to the British mainland — via a small, rocky bridge that emerges during low tide — for his first taste of slaying zombies with bows and arrows. The rules handed down to Spike and Jamie are firm but fair: Should they fail to return to the island’s heavily guarded wooden gates, no one will be sent to save them.

The old world, and the world outside Britain — where time has progressed normally, mostly ignoring the ending of 28 Weeks Later — may as well no longer exist, as 28 Years Later remains tethered to the norms of this new reality. It’s oddly beautiful at times. The lack of light pollution returns the night sky to a gorgeous, pre-civilization hypervisibility. But there’s an equal and opposite ugliness lurking around every forested bend. A sense of ritual pervades each scene: The father-son hunting excursion is a key step in the community’s coming of age, but it’s not the only ritual we see. In fact, it seems like the zombies on the mainland may have, in some ways, evolved, as evidenced by a freshly decapitated deer head placed intentionally on a tree branch, like some perverse form of art (or warning) staged by an intelligent being.

However, despite the ways the Infected have developed over the years, Boyle and Garland aren’t interested in deconstructing the zombie movie. Rather, they seem to revisit their efforts from 24 years prior with brand-new digital tools and a renewed thematic approach. Where 28 Days Later was shot on rough Mini-DV tape, their decades-later sequel employs numerous iPhone 15 Pro Max smartphones, either placed on drones or rigged up side by side. The various lenses and attachments give the movie a more traditionally cinematic look, at least on occasion, but the iPhone’s miniature size allows for Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle to get up close and personal with the drama. As Spike and Jamie traverse the dangerous highlands, their fears and uncertainties are captured with extreme intimacy.

However, the aforementioned rigs (which line up several dozen iPhones) create a disorienting sensation during bursts of intense action. Anytime arrows pierce an Infected’s skin, the frame slides between these various lenses, in what feels a modern descendent to “bullet time” in The Matrix, which employed similar techniques. The chaos seems too kinetic to even process — for the audience, but especially for Spike, who has no reprieve from the bloodshed. However, despite his paralyzing fears of the undead, Spike is forced into action when Isla’s headaches and memory loss start to get worse. Folk tales of a mad doctor who lives on the mainland send the young boy on a fetch quest to seek out this mythical figure, who may be his only hope of saving his mum.

It takes a while for the movie to find this focus, and the subsequent bittersweet theme of a young boy learning to accept death as a constant of life. However, this thematic inversion of the first film — in which human characters thrust into a sudden apocalypse eventually regain hope — isn’t as bleak as it might seem. There’s a perverse beauty to it, especially when Spike eventually comes upon strange and disturbing monuments to death itself, which soon take on surprisingly touching meaning in the story’s larger purview. But while the movie takes its time to reach these conclusions, the interim is raucously entertaining.

Jon Harris’ topsy-turvy editing ropes in both disturbing dream sequences, as well as footage of old movies set during world wars and medieval battles, framing the event of 28 Years Later as the natural next extension of human conflict. The zombies themselves are a delight to discover, as the decades-old rage virus has begun to cause divergent mutations. Some of the Infected are slowed down and engorged; they crawl and feel like otherworldly fauna emerging from the ground. Others have become supernaturally strong and swift, leading to some of the most jaw-dropping, ludicrous on-screen gore in any Hollywood studio film. It’s hard not to laugh at the sheer absurdity of what transpires. And yet, these moments of over-the-top violence dovetail gently into the movie’s more stirring scenes, yielding a daring emotional whiplash, as Spike learns to live and grow in an unforgiving world that has accepted widespread death and disease as normal.

Perhaps strangest of all is 28 Years Later’s eagerness to set up a sequel or two — via some incredibly bizarre climactic happenings — but these teases are thankfully relegated to a postscript, once the film has closed the book on its character-centric story. Despite its scattered nature, it’s a wildly fun experience with a deeply human core, fashioned through images no major studio film has ever thought to put on screen. You couldn’t ask for much more from big-budget horror sci-fi, and the fact that there are at least two more sequels planned is an exciting promise.

28 Years Later opens in theaters June 20.