Keri Russell in the bathroom, ABBA on the screen
Two nightmarish days in London at The River Cafe and ABBA Voyage
Housekeeping:
Oasis is back, which has caused me to learn Liam Gallagher has a clone son that got in a “brawl” at a Hampstead Tesco.
This post is a day late because I was flying to the United States from the United Kingdom, where I was when Oasis announced they were back. More on this in Thursday’s weekly update.
I used to go to London to see family all the time, but until last week I hadn’t been since COVID. It doesn’t feel like much has changed—civilians are still wearing Lazy Oaf—except London used to feel expensive and now it feels cheap. The pound is hardly more favourable, but since lunch has become $45 dollars in America, not having to tip on a £25 lunch of the same size made me rich. The only other thing that’s changed is me, since spending so much in the city of New York, New York: London is even cleaner and more efficient than I had remembered. Apart from Brick Lane having transformed into an uncanny TikTok impression of the East Village, nothing about the cities feel of the same universe. When I walk down the street in lower Manhattan, for example, it will take less than 25 minutes for me to see a famous person. Apart from a vegan-restuarant-run-in with the Game-of-Thrones-cum-Megalopolis-third-tier-actress Nathalie Emmanuel circa 2017, I had never before seen a celebrity in London.
Something I’ve likewise always found lacking in the United Kingdom is the grandeur of American amusement. The airports are no-frills, the cinemas without freestyles machines. There is no Disney theme park anywhere in the country, nor any real equivalent. The closest you can come is the Harry Potter Studio Tour, which itself is an uncanny impression of Universal Studios in the States, mirrored atop largely fabricated “sets” in the middle of nowhere. When I go to London I am hanging out with my family and eating: it’s not that I’m seeking some sort of theme park experience. But the absence of American extravagance—the kind that is clearest in Disney World but an important foundation of every major destination and experience in America, like going to Regal Essex—can be felt the second you set foot in the UK, a country viscerally snagged in a liminally progressive and conservative purgatory of tuna salad sandwiches and robust federal subsidization.
My evaluations of London as a place without celebrities or the thrill of spectacular American money were eviscerated this week in two nightmarish days of encounter, between myself, progressivist technology of the Industrial Light and Magic corporation, and star of Felicity. Let’s walk through them.
The Wednesday night dinner from hell
I have been vaguely aware of The River Cafe, a horrifically trendy fine dining restaurant in London, for a while. Its owner looks like this:
Apart from this crazy woman who plays cards with Austin Butler at her crazy restaurant, I have had little real interest in The River Cafe, which advertises run-of-the-mill fancy fare on menus scrawled in pen. Though if I were into fine dining it is the exact kind of establishment I would care about, due to Austin Butler playing cards there. But also because it complicates something I’ve discovered called font.
There is a trend, birthed just before and fostered throughout COVID, of brands curating a potential sense of virality exclusively via the font in which their logo is written; if in the Trump era brands became cute with stylized cartoons, companies deemed cool by 24-year-old city transplants now operate in a sparse realm of bubble letters and squiggly cursive, either sort of illegible or almost too, coldly, readable. In a very particular color palette that spans Watermelon Sugar to Minion, I call this phenomenon simply “font.” Anything can be font, but food is plagued by font in a way other industries are not.
With splashy appliances, a logo swirling around itself, a spin-off restaurant called “The River Cafe Cafe,” to an untrained eye The River Cafe seems the epitome of font. I always thought it’s actually what font wishes it were, what font consumers assume real font is: actually, really cool. Plenty establishments patronized by Austin Butler (Ella Funt) are try-hard imitations of earnestly offbeat design and organization, but The River Cafe is a real, aesthetic one-off, designed by a real person. More importantly, it isn’t known for hosting influencer dinners but card games with Austin Butler. Its door revolves with kind of (Sam Taylor Johnson) and very famous (Sarah Jessica Parker), kind of (Wolfgang Puck) and very cool (Michael Mann) people, in large part due to Ruthie Rogers’ podcast, which I have never listened to but advertises the restaurant and Roger’s celebrity vis-a-vis her new and old friendships with these artists and socialites.1 It boasts elevated, comforting classics (something curated by the podcast’s signature personal question, “what’s your comfort food?”), but at a price point meetable by few. This adds another element of elevated comfort: Michael Fassbender can be at ease knowing no one who could afford to sit next to him at The River Cafe would be disarmed by his pedestrian public appearance. The restaurant and associated font is thereby more a cultural enterprise than anything to do with food. None of that seems particularly novel, until you live it.
I had a reservation to eat there at 9 PM on a Wednesday, and the restaurant is in Hammersmith which to me kind of seems like if the trendiest restaurant in Chicago were in Evanston. I wore flats that are stained from walking through Lincoln Center in 90° rain and didn’t put on lipstick because it was a Wednesday in Hammersmith, a far cry from the LES thoroughfares where I dodge Addison Rae and The Kid LAROI like bullets. When we arrived at The River Cafe and there were no fewer than 7 cars running outside, their professional drivers dead asleep in the front seats, I knew I had made some sort of error.2
The inside of the restaurant was almost completely empty, a normal condition for a trendy restaurant at 9 PM on a Wednesday. They told us we could have any table. My boyfriend pointed at one. It wasn’t until I got there that I could hear Ebon Moss-Bachrach talking very loudly about 8 feet from my chair. Before I could even alert anyone to this problem, I looked the other direction. There was a very old man sitting there that looked like Sir Michael Caine. Isn’t Michael Caine dead? No, he’s sitting right there. I said “hey,” to my boyfriend, “look over there,” gesturing at Michael Caine, 16 feet from Desi. “Never mind,” I said, “I have to think about it.” That can’t be Michael Caine, I think Michael Caine might be dead. “Yes it is,” my boyfriend replied after glancing at Michael Caine. “And that’s [NBA player].”
I did not know who that is, but he appeared to be sitting 3 feet from us in yet another direction. I shrugged; Ebon Moss-Bachrach, cleanly shaven for Fantastic Four, was talking a little too loudly for me, putting me on edge with a consistent reminder that I am physically proximal to Desi from Girls, but it was otherwise all par for my NYC course. At some point shortly thereafter, Odell Beckham Jr. appeared at the NBA player’s table directly in my sightline, where he would proceed to yap away over langoustines for 3 hours. That was also fine with me, as I barely know who that is. Then I ordered a paloma.
My boyfriend keeps making fun of me to others, saying “Clare quits alcohol 3 times a week.” But this is true, and I wanted a drink at the fancy restaurant. Well, what I really wanted from The River Cafe—what I always want—was a Coke Zero or, as is more common in England, Pepsi Max, but there is little more humiliating than ordering a sodie pop at a fine restaurant: I am old and not 11. So paloma it was, though he was right to chastise, as I should never be allowed to drink again. It was heavily poured and I drank it too fast, disarming me for what was to come.
We ate some food. Don’t recall what—fine. A short man walks briskly past me, kicking up wind and nearly clipping my bag. “Clare,” my boyfriend says to me, “Noah Baumbach.” Funny, I thought as I watched the great mind behind White Noise disappear into the toilets. He’s short. And sure enough, when he returned from the toilets facing me, he was short as ever. Where there is smoke: who is he dining with? I considered this briefly, but was starting to get earnestly annoyed by the onslaught of faces around me. This shouldn’t be happening—not here. I still have yet to see Kaia Gerber in the West Village when I go there to look at raw milk at Happier Grocery and say, “ew.” At some point, of course, Greta Gerwig emerged, seemingly from thin air, and walked very slowly past me, looking right in my eyes, wearing the ugliest dress I have ever seen.
At this point, my brain was marinating in whatever was in the paloma that I drank in under 2 minutes (it wasn’t tequila or I wouldn’t have ordered it), and I was distracted by my discussion with my boyfriend about what celebrities we would “really” be excited to see in public (Tom Cruise). I don’t ever want to be mid-laugh and look up to see Greta Gerwig’s haircut ever again. I burst into tears.
I do like Gerwig quite a bit. I have nothing negative to say about her. But she’s not Lena Dunham. She’s not one of my parasocial love interests. I can’t, therefore, really explain the response I had, but it felt miserable.
Well, surely that’s it: I’m overtired and overstimulated at The River Cafe, and Greta Gerwig is the finale. In a way, she was, as I like her cultural products and presence the most of this list of people. Though, as I was about to depart The River Cafe, leaving my boyfriend to accrue credit card points for the million dollar meal I would later have to pony up my half for, I headed for the bathroom. It was crowded but only 2 stalls, the doors masquerading as seamless panels of an acrylic, red wall. I peed normally, albeit increasingly annoyed by the genuinely cool aesthetic seeping, oppressively, through the bathroom walls. I opened the stall door, and Keri Russell was staring at me, laughing, holding wet paper towel: “where do I throw this away?”. I showed Keri Russell the garbage can underneath the sink, which made her laugh even harder before thanking me and shuffling out the door. There was someone else washing their hands that looked familiar but I was too scared to study the face. It was time for me to go home.
I love to bitch about font. Font is rarely good and frequently overpriced, standard fare. The River Cafe, while hawking overpriced, standard fare, seemed different: its owner, also present for our meal, reeking of cigarettes and seemingly very close with Odell Beckham Jr., is clearly insane. Insanity rarely breeds font, because font is a market tested formula, not authentic design. An exception, the only one I can think of, is Morgenstern’s, a chain that is somehow fonty, good, and run by an insane guy. While it isn’t quite fonty, these things might also ring true for The River Cafe, which is ultimately not selling a product at all but curating something I’m not in, a private club where celebrities can be babysat by a plate of pretty good pasta. But I can buy a ticket to witness this as spectacle—a freakshow—which, like Keri Russell, is very American.
ABBA holograms: Na’vi outsold
Phil wrote one of the best pieces of cultural criticism of the year about ABBA Voyage, a “virtual reality” screen-based ABBA concert housed by a defunct Olympic stadium in the London suburbs. I’ll invite you to read that post to learn the specifics of “what” ABBA Voyage “is,” as well as to appreciate an opinion of it other than my own. Phil thought ABBA Voyage was convincingly, aesthetically and extratextually, frightening. I thought it was a boring application of the screens I’ve been staring at for 7 years in Pandora: The World of Avatar inside Disney’s Animal Kingdom park.
In the latter, proprietary ILM screens stationed in the backgrounds of physical environments simulate multi-plane dimensionality on a flat surface, creating an illusion of screen-based proportional wildlife and nameless Na’vi walking through real (plastic) water and greenery. This is effective for a split second when you first see it, and in 2017 really impressed me. It adds a sense of dynamism to the classic form of a “dark” amusement park ride, making it feel briefly as if the room you logically know is enclosing you actually expands infinitely into a world beyond its walls. But after you see these screens, which are frequently frozen and looping vague animations of weirdly static Na’vi warriors, once, you never need to see them again. The effect wanes, and Disney’s Avatar world is otherwise deeply unpleasant. ILM doesn’t have the juice; try as they might to fool me into believing otherwise with unconventionally lit pixels, screens are flat, and living beings are not.
ABBA Voyage, opened in 2022, seems identical to Na’vi River Journey in aesthetic gimmick and technological form. Any realism to the flat members of ABBA, scaled to human size proportional to the real stage around them, is entirely dependent on the room’s spatial composition. Before the “holograms” are even beamed onto a screen, random kinetic elements descend from the ceiling to enshroud the crowd and flank the stage. These weird mirrors and chandeliers are mirrored in CGI form on the stage’s many screens, mimicking Disney’s simulation of spatial expanse: the screen can be passed through!
No it can’t! Any momentary simulation created by the arena’s architectural design is collapsed if you get too close. We bought standing seats in the pit—30 pound cheaper than the alternative—and were just far enough back for the illusion to catch at certain angles.3 But if the figures move, or you move, you are very quickly watching a large television. The spectacle also relies on shadows and obscurity, with the figures spending a lot of their time in the dark. This gimmick was actually charming: when a song finishes, the holograms bow as the lights go dim, only the sequins of their costume still visible in reflection of any leftover illumination. Other gimmicks, however, were tiresome and confusing. The figures are too bright to seamlessly blend with the live band, almost too crisply projected in their novel LED resolution to seem like anything but pixels.
The biggest problem with Voyage is that the figures are not people, not recordings of real human bodies mapped into a CGI realm, but the old members of ABBA made skinny and “young” with CGI. As we all know from Rogue One, Romulus, and the like, this kind of drastic re-facializing looks like shit. It makes the figures incapable of emoting, and some combination of this and ABBA’s real ages made it so the figures can barely move. Phil aptly calls them “PS5-exclusive” avatars, and that’s all there really is to say. Do you want to watch new age SSX Tricky cut scenes with unrecognizably bastardized likenesses of the members of ABBA for 90 minutes? I don’t think so.
The holograms stand there, proportionally, for much of the show, with fake LED screens appearing behind them in CGI, doing the most to stretch and snap the arena’s sense of space. But most of the show is cut scenes: AI Reels fodder playing on loop, with ABBA’s greatest hits booming through a poorly calibrated sound system.
The most distressing part of this experience was the rest of the crowd’s reaction. Seated onlookers sat politely as if at the cinema, while those in the pit uncomfortably danced to the songs that were in Mamma Mia!, otherwise slowly swaying, unsure where to look. The average age of these people was around 45, and they were not impressed by anything occurring around them. When the show starts, the room falling black before beaming into synesthetic spectacle, the holograms pause for an applause that never fully came. At another moment, de-aged Benny addresses the crowd, saying, “it’s really me, not just the image.” This is meant to incite “ooh”s or laughs, but instead confused the women wearing feather boas and carrying wine. What do these LED pixels look like to them? Without the reference point of a PlayStation, what is a CGI face to you?
I don’t regret paying for ABBA, nor going all the way there from West London. Phil is right: there is nothing else like this in this world. To use the Na’vi spatial organization in the setting of an arena concert, both replicating and denigrating that experience through different technological spectacles completely devoid of liveness, is fascinating. Though, it is still more entertaining, spectacular, and funny when the LED pixels are characters from Jim Cameron’s Avatar.
I also don’t regret paying for The River Cafe, an aesthetically youthful and casually suburban celebration of wealth that couldn’t quite exist in an American city. Maybe it is font, after all, but font isn’t always so bad. And maybe the otherwise horrifying technological and consumerist concept of ILM screens can delight us, after all. Or, maybe, I should just stay in America, where novel spectacle and elevated comfort are impossible ideas.
Simran Hans just wrote a great, thorough, funny breakdown of the confusing River Cafe podcast for Vittles.
At no point during this experience did I fear nor anticipate Austin Butler would be at The River Cafe, because he is filming the Darren Aronofsky baseball movie in New York City right now. Knowledge is power.
It is called “the dance floor” not “the pit.”
I'm glad "Font" is finally written into the record. Also, why are Tom Holland and Ruth Rogers holding hands like that?
clare asme NOW