_____________
‘I was a child star in the 90s. Nobody remembers my name, but I was everywhere. I starred in 8 feature films ranging from family-comedy to horror and landed a handful of guest roles on TV shows. I got to do a Pizza Hut commercial with Shaq, an Olivia Newton-John music video. I even hung out with Eddie Furlong at the arcade. I was everywhere until I wasn’t. When my last few films bombed critically and financially, my sister was quickly ushered in to take my place as the family’s child of the screen. We used to rollerblade to the ice cream stand. Now she’s in movies with Jamie Lee Curtis. Many, including myself, would agree she is truly a wonderful actress. In one of her roles, she wore a blonde wig and it made me think of the time I poured a bottle of hydrogen peroxide on her head. I don’t know why I did that, but I remember being angry about something that day and took it out on her, because she was the closest person in proximity to where I was storming around the house.
‘I still feel terrible about that, but I’m too scared to call her and apologize for our entire childhood, because for me to do that, I’d have to bring it up at all. I wrestle between wondering if it’s better to go through life acting like nothing happened, or if things should be a point of conversation at a certain time? I figure we have a decent enough relationship, I don’t want to risk destroying it by reminding her,
‘“I used to torment you. I’m the reason you’re anorexic, because I called you a fatass so often when we were kids. I’m the reason they talk about you in celebrity gossip magazines, wondering, ‘Is she a cocaine addict? Does she struggle with an eating disorder?’ When dad would throw me in a corner and beat me after I failed an audition, whose room did I walk into for the sole purpose of transferring our father’s rage into broken Barbies?”
Kids envied me and tried to emulate my mannerisms back then. I wish other kids could have known me as myself, rather than the characters I played, including the one who possessed my body in interviews. But I was also afraid they would think I’m nothing short of a monster, if they saw the way I’d react to the abuse by taking it out on others. So maybe it was best that they didn’t know me at all. Those were the unhappiest times of my life. I was adored, but there’s such a vast ‘difference between adoration and love, and I desperately wanted to be loved.
‘When a man bought the house just down the street from where we lived, everybody was talking about it. They were saying he was a pedophile. I asked my father what that meant. He told me,
‘“It’s a man who loves children and has sex with them. Stay away from that house.”
‘A month later, I was at the man’s door. His house had a broken window in the kitchen, the result of a neighbor hitting a rock with a lawnmower, and I wondered if that was on purpose. A Christmas wreath hung on the door all year-round. I looked through the windows, trying to catch a glimpse of him. The broken window replayed its demise in my head. I swore I could see a shadow moving in the living room. It was the biggest human shadow I had ever seen. I was too young to completely understand the gravity of the situation, and there was even a part of me that knew it was wrong, but I just wanted to feel that somebody loved me.
‘When he answered the door, I froze and thought maybe he recognized me from one of the movies I was in. He asked,
‘“Can I help you?”
I nervously strangled the words,
‘“Are you the man who loves kids?”
‘He told me to go back home, before shutting the door and locking it. I felt disappointed and confused as I walked home, imagining him watching me from his roof like Santa Claus.’ — Alex Osman
Alex Osman @ instagram
Alex Osman @ goodreads
‘Hand of the Lamb’
Book Review: ‘Scandals’ by Alex Osman
Buy ‘Xanadu, PA’
Alex Osman Xanadu, Pennsylvania
Filthy Loot
‘Welcome to Xanadu, PA. In this town, Olivia Newton-John reigns, her music videos appear on every TV, fist fights are common, some children kill while others make trouble, hearts are broken, and drugs and alcohol are household items. This was once a thriving small town. I don’t know what went wrong. But one thing’s for sure: You can’t escape her out here.’ — Filthy Loot
Excerpt
Extra
Not Worth Living – 009 – Alex Osman
________________
Five Books on Dena Yago’s Shelf
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
‘I read The Golden Notebook when I turned 30. A friend gave it to me as a birthday gift, and it took me a while to read, but it’s really special. To me, it’s about how you don’t need to reconcile the political, the economic, the domestic, the maternal, and so on. These things can coexist and weave together. The book made me think about the pressure to reconcile oneself as a political citizen and an artist, versus allowing oneself to be a citizen and also an artist. The protagonist is politically active, and a mother and a writer and all these other things, and all these roles have different expectations.’
Seasonal Associate by Heike Geissler
‘I’ve always had this book on the reading list when I’ve taught. Geissler worked as a seasonal associate at Amazon, but the book’s conceit is framing it in the second person: You are doing this, you are doing that. It’s one of the best things I’ve read that brings you into the position of being within a logistical infrastructure where you don’t really have agency, and shows what that experience does to your psyche and bodily self.’
The Odd One In: On Comedy by Alenka Zupančič
‘I read this book right after college, when I went with an artist to the European Graduate School and helped take care of her kid in exchange for taking some of the classes. The author was a student of Slavoj Žižek and is a Nietzsche scholar who has written a lot about comedy.’
‘The Odd One In is about short-circuiting in comedy, and how different forms of comedy reveal the instability of different structures. With writing, I have a very specific breed of comedy in my own work—an unstable version of it. Comedy reveals the failure of systems and their absurdity, but more specifically their fissures and instabilities. I play with that a lot with language in the visual work I make—for instance the diptych Down for Now and Not for Long. It used phrases from common parlance, but pushed you to read all their valences: a phrase can be optimistic or cynical, containing both.
‘Zupančič also writes about slipping on a banana peel, and when I think about the work I did with K-HOLE, a lot of it was about pushing things to their points of failure. You can do that through institutional critique or through comedy.’
Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein
‘I was thinking about the books I have in my studio and reach for often, and Tender Buttons is one. It deals with language as material, letting words expand and contract their meaning. Whenever I get stuck—mostly on poetry or phrasing for visual works—I return to it. In my visual work, I try to pay attention to phrasing or words that take on a cultural significance and bubble up into a different meaning than they had previously. The show I did at JTT in 2023 was called “Capacity” for that reason. It was a word suddenly being used in multiple ways: whether one has the capacity for care, or in the professional sense, as a way of trying to be polite. It evokes a kind of exhaustion. I’m interested in things with multiple meanings.’
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
‘The protagonist of Pattern Recognition is a woman named Cayce Pollard, a trend forecaster and brand consultant. I didn’t know that job existed before reading the book in college. It laid out a role I thought I could inhabit. She has a physical reaction to brands: they pay her as a consultant; she walks in, and if the brand is not to her sensibility, she breaks out in hives. Aside from being incredibly cool, she speaks to the embodied aspects of taste. I’m revisiting Gibson’s Spook Country right now for another piece: an essay about logistics, shipping-container aesthetics, and what it all means now.’
Dena Yago Site
Dena Yago @ instagram
‘Isn’t it ironic? No, it’s Cringe’
FIRST HIT, SLOW BURN: Dena Yago in Conversation with Jody Graf
Buy ‘That Figures’
Dena Yago That Figures
After8 Books
‘Gathering 13 amazing essays by artist and writer Dena Yago, co-founder of K-HOLE, That Figures retraces more than a decade of reflections on the creative industry—digging into topics such as Sporespace, Billie Eilish, LARPing, corporate cafeterias, ketamine, precarity, poetry, and the internet’s lures and failures. Yago exposes the contradictions of living amidst the sugarcoated deals of the attention economy, and further proposes a new lexicon to address the numbing and disorienting effects of late stage capitalism. Absorbing but refusing to metabolize the language of commercial culture, she opens a space where critical thinking can still happen.
‘That Figures also features a selection of artworks by Yago, in which the combination of conceptual legacies with pop cultural elements creates new poetical arrangements.’ — After8
Excerpt
Rotten Dot Com
“Wanna see a dead body?” Milo asks from the back seat. The 5 is a white blade under the Valley sun, everything bleached flat, overexposed as we fly toward Fry’s Electronics. It’s 1999. The Acura’s sweating leather sticks to my thighs. My skin feels amphibian, a tween-age Geico gecko blinking too hard, raw in the new light of too much consciousness.
Even at eleven, Milo likes to pull out provocations sourced from some dark aquifer on the internet not yet known to me. Unlike Milo, I don’t have a PC in my bedroom. But we’re on our way to fix that.
Now Milo pivots, unzipping his backpack like a schoolyard dealer to flash two CD jewel cases. Rob Zombie’s Hellbilly Deluxe (1998): an X carved into his gristly forehead flesh, chrome flames across the plastic. Busta Rhymes’s Extinction Level Event (1998): a world on fire, his mouth mid-detonation. “Which one?” he asks.
I don’t answer, reluctant to admit I know neither. Noah, my brother, at the wheel, picks Busta in the rearview.
“If you want it, let me hear you say it (gimme some more),” Busta belts.
I, too, am eleven. A child of a recent bicoastal divorce, spending the summer in the Pacific Palisades, being driven to Fry’s to assemble my first desktop PC—my twenty-three-year-old brother’s gift in the key of fraternal benevolence, pedagogical duty, and Californian techno-optimism. A deal struck with my dad: if we can build it, I can keep it in my room.
Milo—my surf-tanned, platinum-blond, Point Dume–living, feral best friend with an Insane Clown Posse fixation and a household parrot that mimics his mother’s laugh—is along for the ride. He’s beautiful and hectic. I want to live in his house. I want to live in his brain, his skin. I’m high on his confidence the way only a young girl without much of her own can be. So yes, sure: I want to see a dead body.
We pull into the parking lot. Fry’s is a postmodern cathedral dressed up as a computer store, its facade impaled by a crashed UFO, the aisles flanked by gargantuan fiberglass ants—making us feel like we are in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) but shot in Valley glare, catching the reflecting sun of an out-of-reach Hollywood. We move through motherboards, mice, and surge protectors, with Busta—“Gimme some more”—still looping in my head.
Back home, in my specifically Betsey Johnson pink-and-green-inspired bedroom, we drink sun tea, clear Beanie Babies from the desk. We slot in the motherboard, attach the fan. Noah, our IT magus, presides. We wait for the Windows start-up chime to ring out. The tower blinks alive. It’s wholesome enough, with something even like holiness in the air. The light shifts. The internet opens its putrid maw. We are off to see the bodies.
We riffle through the mail pail and find an AOL-installation CD. The dial-up crackles as sound ricochets off the gates of the internet underworld. A rush of cold air lifts the muslin drapes and raises the downy hair on our too-tanned summertime prepubescent flesh.
Milo two-finger types, one key at a time: w-w-w-.-r-o-t-t-e-n-.-c-o-m.
Like everyone else I knew who’d found their way onto the site, he’d first seen Rotten on a friend’s family’s desktop. The name was passed around in hushed tones, traded as contraband on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), slid across classroom desks in folded notes.
It felt like discovering an older sibling’s porn stash, except more raw, more despicable, less human. It felt illegal. Like the childhood certainty, fed by the inevitability of horror lurking at the edge of fairy-tale pages, that you’d be struck by lightning or get bitten by a shark or end up in jail. Who knew? Maybe in life I could end up killing a man or stealing a car. Rotten was a key you turned that locked a door behind you.
The home page was plainer than it should have been: white background, blue underlined hyperlinks laid out with the punishing utility of a DMV intranet. The soft white underbelly of the Net, eviscerated for all to see. Underneath, a subtitle that had the ring of a warning read aloud by a neck-bearded Charon, oar in hand, ready to ferry us across the Styx: “Rotten dot com collects images and information from many sources to present the viewer with a truly unpleasant experience.” Then, below, an inventory of links with one-line captions. “Maggoted: Why does a living man have this condition?” “Meat Grinder II: Very unfortunate kitchen mishap.” The T-shirts, one of which a kid would eventually show up to school in, said it more plainly: “PURE EVIL SINCE 1996. Flush please.” The whole effect added up to a GeoCities-era HTML ledger cataloguing unspeakable horrors in the register of a blasé librarian. Served directly to our oatmeal-mush prefrontal cortexes were botched suicides, severed limbs, an unrecognizably swollen corpse rumored to be that of Chris Farley. Another obese dead body on a sidewalk, captioned “splat.” Patently offensive material, engineered to scandalize adults yet magnetically consumed by minors. This wasn’t meant for us. We weren’t supposed to be there, which is why we weren’t going anywhere.
Extra
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‘This slim novel should be read slowly because on every page there is a treasure: a strange thought that strikes like an arrow to the heart of a target, a surprising observation that nevertheless rings perfectly true, a discreet metaphor that seems to have been created for the first time. Hansen is so delicate, so singular, and so precise, that it seems as if she has only ever read the greatest poets.’ — Anne Serre
‘Blue Sunset streams onto the page in layers or sheets or waves, the emotional weather of the novel meeting the formations of sky, land, and sea. Sublime and inscrutable. In mourning, but alive.’ — Amina Cain
‘When a young woman from Copenhagen, Denmark, named Maja attends an academic conference somewhere in Europe, she’s drawn into a relationship with a successful writer, dubbed simply the Author. She calls herself “a criminal” because back home sits an urn she’s legally not supposed to have, filled with a child’s ashes. Hansen omits details and adds touches of mystery early on, carefully revealing as the novel progresses how violently Maja has been “jolted out of orbit” by grief. Maja and the Author spend several days in the Italian Riviera eating, watching sunsets, buying furniture, and hiking. The descriptions of food and landscape are intoxicating. The relationship seems to be a personal test of Maja’s ability to connect, live, and perhaps love while grieving. There is attraction between them, if not romance, exactly. “When they go to bed everything and nothing has changed, like a minute shift in the atmosphere.” Maja finds she must flee every now and then, by train, because to her, “without whims there would only be stifling passivity.” They travel separately to small towns but quickly end up back together. Maja is eventually drawn home to confront the urn, which has never left her mind, facing an anguish that “feels in a way she can only describe as the sound and friction of hair being pulled against long granite stones.” Hansen’s controlled, poetic prose shines brighter and brighter as Maja’s life and past come fully into view. The quiet but moving climax occurs in a gorgeous, wrenching scene set at the British Library, illuminating a series of parallel motifs and connections between herself and, surprisingly, Percy and Mary Shelley. A lush, atmospheric novella brimming with poetry, pain, and desire.’ — Kirkus Reviews
Denise Rose Hansen Site
Denise Rose Hansen @ instagram
‘Groan’
Interview with Denise Rose Hansen
Buy ‘Blue Sunset’
Denise Rose Hansen Blue Sunset
Dorothy, a Publishing Project
‘At a conference somewhere in Europe, Maja meets the Author. Haunted by a recent tragedy, she leaves with him unexpectedly to his home on the Italian coast, where she wanders into the rhythms of his life, observing the world through the lens of his days. Yet everywhere over their new and tender intimacy hangs the knowledge that soon she will have to return home to Copenhagen, site of her devastating loss. With echoes of Virginia Woolf and Ann Quin, Denise Rose Hansen paints with spare, deft lyricism the complicated landscape of grief and yearning that Maja crosses over on her journey toward something new.’ — Dorothy
Excerpt
Extra
Virtual Book Talk with Harald Voetmann, Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen, & Denise Rose Hansen
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‘Jeffery Berg describes his debut collection of poems, Re-Animator, as “like a mixtape.” On Provincetown’s WOMR, he occasionally hosts Mirror Ball, a disco-leaning show that moves between past and present, much as Re-Animator does. The poems recall horror films, pop songs, malls, actresses, and Reagan-era consumer culture, returning to the places and images that shaped Berg’s early sense of fear, desire, and queer selfhood.
‘The title poem begins with a childhood brush with Rocky Mountain spotted fever, “shots in arm crook,/ round the clock,” then moves from a Greenville, S.C. hospital room to a 1986 movie theater, a backyard revisited decades later, and the memory of a dead neighbor in an East Village hallway. “Memories dissipate,” Berg writes, even as the poems prove how fiercely they persist.
‘The book takes its title from the 1985 Lovecraftian horror film. Berg says another poet described the poems as “reanimating the past,” which sent him back to the movie, in which a serum drives dead bodies into lurid motion. It suits a book that resurrects the 1980s in sensory memories. Rotary phones, Camel cigarette smoke, Reagan speeches, VHS gore, and mall air return, restoring the feel of a world the child speaker absorbed before he could make sense of it.’ — Juliet Leary
Jeffrey Berg Site
An Interview with Jeffery Berg
Songs from RE-ANIMATOR, A Book of Poems by Jeffery Berg
‘Dream Master’
Buy ‘Re-Animator’
Jeffery Berg Re-Animator
Indolent Books
‘Jeffery Berg’s Re-Animator comes at you with all the shock and surprise of a phantasmagorical horror movie, with “edits so quick it makes the murders feel / swift,” a perfect way to encapsulate the 1980s for those of us who lived through AIDS and the absolute indifference of the Reagan administration. Reagan is re-animated here, too, as a sad and lonely clown, along with the music, movies and fashions of that decade, “bygone Big Mac days in rooms / of erased people.” The sexiness of pop culture littered with a few Arby’s bags for verisimilitude and some Pier One candles for flair lends this collection a richness of palette, the way Bob Dylan and the Pointer Sisters and Willie Nelson enriched the sound of “We Are the World.” If you were alive and gay and ready for the world in the 80s, you will get it, and if you weren’t, well…this book will teach you about some of what you missed. Jeffery Berg is simultaneously witty, funny, dirty, moving, eloquent and rhapsodic, like the lyrics to a really good Queen song.’ — D.A. Powell
Excerpts
Yearbook, 1986
It was a great year, cries the cartoon bald eagle,
bouquet of balloons in its talons’ grip.
“Man in Motion” boosts gray, misty mornings
with brassy synths, as a man breaks free to rise
higher, higher, blazing into plasmatic sun.
Portraits of perms and bowl cuts. I run
a brittle black comb through bangs,
I perfect an open-mouthed pout
in a giant tan wicker chair.
The First-Grade grads sing power pop,
squeeze Care Bears to their chests
at ceremony, looking out at prospective wastelands.
There are bygone Big Mac days in rooms
of erased people. The vinyl juniper green
nap mat sticks to my face as we remain
squirmy, earthbound. Hot pink marker X’s
across faces of Greenville. I write to my friend,
Dear God, Let me and you go up. Scalloped
orange paper stapled round school boards.
Paper—glittered, Elmers-dried—drifts, deteriorates.
Could I go back, warn the boy I crushed on
that he’d die in a workplace accident 35 years from now?
A pompous poem in the back dedicated only to boys
who will grow into men who will hold the future
of all living things. I am here to break
surly bonds as I race across blacktop,
under the sun-blaze, slowly evolving
into smithereens.
Shrine
Sometimes Jason is ashamed of the person
he is. He tells his Mother through his mind
he’s doing the best he can. If he had
a record player, maybe he’d dance
to Talking Heads around his shotgun shack
in his overalls and cloth baghead—his beheaded
mother’s head upon a candlelit table. Under
Weymouth’s bass, Jason’s sense of rhythm
is uneven, except for slow, mechanical walking
and breathing. Clumsy when he swings his pickaxe
and then, suddenly astute with spears, or garroting
Crazy Ralph with barbed wire. Jason can be a mystery.
Somehow, he makes it to Waterbury to the house
of Alice, the former counselor who beheaded his mother.
The actress playing Alice is uncomfortable filming
in the aftermath of being stalked in New York.
Jason places his mother’s head in Alice’s fridge
alongside Pathmark milk, Stop & Shop apple sauce,
before he drills an ice pick into Alice’s temple.
The MPAA-approved edits are so quick it makes the murders feel
swift and fleetingly unpleasant as a papercut,
little to reflect upon. The actress is done
with her scene, done with being Alice, and can go back
to her life—hopefully at peace. Jason somehow gets back
to the woods, maybe he gets on a bus or hitches a ride,
with his mother’s head in tow, riddled with worms,
or maybe he walks into streets and off-road into woods,
finding a sense of his way home, the way I would
imagine, while riding backseat along highways, sensing
something baleful running under the road under tires,
slipping out the car into kudzu, disappearing—
to carry on as someone else. See mother, I did it
all for you, Jason says through his mind.
And then a pang of shame hits. I never had the guts
to run away, I stayed in the car as night fell, staring
at the orange-red blur of taillights from all
the enormous automobiles, as Jason, somehow,
in his shotgun shack of tin roof rain,
had the patience to carefully, methodically, light
candle after candle, lamenting his mother.
Extra
The Life of a Poet with Jeffery Berg
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‘Man shall be humbled on the plains of his development. He will wander blind from ruin to ruin, cold with fear and chattel to the hunger that gnaws at his bones. His hubris will be stoppered like a flask of wine. He will know his fault by the sun which stands in fiery witness and the wind which breathes its judgement in the final silence of the world. He will roam without a home or a quiet place to make his comfort, the dirt his master and his slave by which he will drive his spirit across the barren waste. He will live as the rats of the field on gnawed corn and dried roots and the decay of drooping fruits. For Man proclaims the light while stepping into darkest night.’ — Sean M. Huber
‘He began to hike up towards the tree line, grasshoppers jumping out in front of him as he walked. The dirt road lined with chicory and wild geranium, their open petals shining and twirling in the breeze. The air filled with their hot flowered scent and his throat clogged with pollen. Spitting a thick yellow stream. The ferns in the roadside blowing like turkey tails, shaking back and forth as if pulled on a string. Cresting the top of the hill, he enters the shadowed woods. The sound is deafening. This was the year of the cicada, seventeen years had passed for them to crawl from their chthonic womb and hang legion in the understory. Blaring a dirge hypnotic, disorienting him in this blurred fluorescence. The birds chattering like chimpanzees and the woods themselves seeming to chant some obscure rite. Initiating him into its mysteries. Branching off the logging road is an old path, not much larger than a game trail. He takes it and it begins to switch back upward before descending in a slight depression. The trail gutting out in a small ravine in which a creek flowed. The creek stones darkened with the sluicing water and dotted with the delicate white flesh of dogwood petals where the wind had blown them down. They lay as if spread by a childs hand, skipping to the sweet music of the creek and emptying their baskets of posies to mask the plague scent of mud.’ — Sean M. Huber
Sean M. Huber @ goodreads
‘Sacra’
‘Offerings’
‘Hectacombs’
Buy ‘Prey’
Sean M. Huber Prey
Organ Bank
‘Our carrion-prince Sean M. Huber guides us through four incidents of predation. The mysterious, the hunted, the inhuman, the trapped. Each introduced by poetry.
‘Suffocating, biblical prose. Dense atmosphere.
‘Wash the blood from your hands in the creek behind the power line trail. Bathe in The Glow of sacrifice.’ — Organ Bank
Excerpt
Extra
Searching for Dragons: Hecatombs by Sean M. Huber
*
p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi, jay. Me too. I think a tattoo would just lock me down. Interesting that you encountered Tim Shaw. ‘Well Tempered Clavier’, I need to see what that is. And so I shall. Things are good over here. It’s finally fall. How sweet is that? ** horatio, Hi, h. How excellent to see you. Yeah, I picked one of the Happy Halloween pix to represent the post on instagram, and a fuss erupted that I did not anticipate. I’m so jaded? ‘Pug-ified’, nice. The term, I mean. Texas? Why would he move there of all places? Apologies to any Texans. I’m so sorry about your heartbreak. Oh, gosh. He’s a fool to prioritise locale? That’s my guess. Yeah, I do actually make a point of excising homophobia from my work. Books and films. Partly it’s my great dislike of generalised thinking. There is homophobia in my novel ‘My Loose Thread’ but hopefully it’s at least depicted complicatedly there. I went to a private all-boys school in my high school years where a bunch of the teachers (all male) and even the principal were closeted gay. That surely contributed to ‘Closer’ being an all-male context. I don’t remember there being any homophobia at the school at all, even from the jock-type boys. Strange but useful. I wish you all the luck dealing with whatever happens with the guy. I hope whatever emotions transpire they’re very rich at least. And, again, hes a fool. ** _Black_Acrylic, I remember that fact about Leeds now that you mention it. It’s true: claiming that identity and dressing the place up a bit would be a total tourist lure. Form a committee! ** Dominik, Hi!!! I think it’s always kind of interesting to be the stranger in a crowd of believers in something else. Like it would have to be interesting to sit through a Taylor Swift concert just to pick up the foreign adoring vibes, you know? I hereby appoint love the position of Mayor of yesterday’s post. Love entering and winning a sand castle building contest, G. ** Carsten, Gotcha about your reasons re: Korine. I’ve never loved anything by Fincher, but he’s interesting, I agree. For the ‘welcome’ post, here are several previous ‘welcome’ posts for poetry books if that’s helpful at all: one, two, three, four. ** Sarah Palmer, Hi. Thanks for the tip on the Almine Rech show. I’m going to traverse the Marais galleries today or tomorrow. The Jenna Kaes work looks really good at first glance. Everyone, Sarah Palmer alerts us all to a gothic-adjacent artist named Jenna Kaes. Look. Right, the Lyon Biennale. I’m going to try to go. I haven’t been to the Biennale there in a few years. It’s always pretty worthy, in my experience. Enjoy, and pass along highlights if you don’t mind. I’m way due an art week, and I truly think this might be the one. ** Adem Berbic, The metro/trainwash tour wasn’t exactly funky, but it did feel like being somewhere that relatively few have been. They only do that tour on two days a year. Compared to the NYC subway, Paris’s seems quite pristine. But not as pristine as London’s, okay, definitely not. Thanks but no thanks about the late night dancing. The second screening is not for sure. It happening will depend on how full the first one gets and how quickly. I’m talking with the venue today, but I think tickets go on sale next week sometime, yes. So sorry about and hopes re: your friend. My week will be ideally intersected by some art now that the season is back, and some progress of some sort on the new film, and, gosh, don’t know, will see. ** Ruth, Hi, Ruth! Thanks a lot! Even though Korine has certainly gone off course, i.e. ‘The Beach Bum’ for one. I maintain a reasonable amount of faith that if he dives deeper into AI that he will turn it into interestingly distorted garbage, but fingers crossed. Honored that my work would enter your mind while reading ‘Naked Lunch’. ‘Cruelty Squad’, no, and ‘Hotline Miami’, no too. I don’t know them. But I will go fill in my blank. Thanks for that too. Same hopes for your day! ** HaRpEr //, I would certainly think so. At the same time, I’m kind of happy that my early writings are at NYU and not on my computer. I feel sad that my school years were pre-Goth. Hippie kids were cool sometimes, but not as cool by any stretch. I think if you have a vampire in your novel you should expect the Goth writer tag, at least from the casual reader set. ** ⋆˚꩜｡darbbzz⋆˚꩜｡, Whew, the post passed the big test: you! I don’t know what anhedonia is, but it sure made you wax wonderfully poetic there. I guess the blunt helped a little too, haha. I will absolutely post your post, and if it can make the Halloween deadline, all the better. Thanks, pal. ** Malik, A 100 day collective epic. Now that’s a great idea. I assume you’re barreling along now? That Michael Jackson Vigil film does sound fascinating. I hope it finds a festival home over here. Have the swellest week. ** Okay. Five books I loved recently, that’s the deal. See if any of them seem(s) to suit your appetite. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
Hi!!
These posts are always one of my favorites, but today’s selection is especially delicious. I want to read Xanadu, Pennsylvania immediately. Thank you!
Okay, that’s true. I kind of checked out at the “big crowd” part. It’s very interesting to witness other people’s belief/adoration/dedication, especially when it comes to objects I myself don’t find moving. (Like Taylor Swift. Or the Pope.)
Thank you! And congratulations to love!
Love showing some mercy and making the 150-page Google Doc I’m working on come back alive—right now, every single change I make takes about a minute to load, which isn’t really fun when one is trying to proofread and has a deadline, Od.
Hey Dennis,
Haha I have to agree with you on Spring Breakers being Franco’s only noteworthy performance. I’ve seen him in a lot, but he’s not that interesting as a performer compared to the idea he had of himself back in the early 2010s. I’ve still to watch 127 Hours and since he’s basically the sole actor in that maybe that’s also a good performance? But I’m well past caring much for biopics that just play it straight and simple for Oscar bait and taking someone’s tragedy or suffering for people’s entertainment and morbid fascination… I liked Freaks and Geeks although I was 13 when I watched it and even then Franco was the least interesting character in it when compared to Linda Cardenilli, Busy Phillipps, Jason Segel, or even John Francis Daley’s characters.
Woke up today with a bleeding spot next to my mouth from yesterday having become a bigger scabby spot, and some scratches or bruised lines under both my arms — I was sick over the weekend and it feels like my body is falling apart hahaha. Either it’s a group of random things or I’m a lot sicker than I realize. Ironically enough I found this one Susan Sontag book at work in the wrong section that I’m reading, called “Illness as Metaphor & AIDs and its metaphors”, two essays written a decade apart with the first being about Sontags own cancer experience and how the use of cancer (or tuberculosis in the 19th century) as a metaphor can end up conflating personal and moral failure with these diseases, with the rise of alternative medical treatment in the 70s regarding cancer and treating it like a personality trait… Not far enough in to decide whether or not I agree with whatever she’s saying, but interesting nonetheless. I think I started feeling this sickness the day after picking it up too lol.
I’m excited to hopefully see Resident Evil this week. I’ve been looking forward to it for the past couple of months, and read what I assume now to be a genuine script leak months back. I’m a huge Resident Evil fan, as you probably know from my updates of my playthroughs earlier in the year, but I’m also both mature enough to not expect some direct adaptation of the games in the film, and aware of how cheesy the games stories are. A lot of people I know have been talking about the press release and comments about fan backlash being manufactured rage for PR, but that’s due to the internet being far more tribal now and no monoculture really existing anymore; I had to stop looking at the Resident Evil subreddit because people were being so annoying about it. It’s not “trolling” either, it’s genuine people who are either too young, or too immature, to realize that you can’t just adapt exactly a game about doing environmental puzzles in a giant mansion with zombies, frog-lizard men, and giant snakes/sharks/spiders, without it becoming a slog to watch; the pretty fine story of the games is not a hindrance when you as the player are vicariously living through Leon or Jill or whoever and feel like you are there, but it is if you had to sit and watch them do it.
A similar thing is happening with the upcoming Narnia film by Greta Gerwig: the fans are going crazy (and embarrassingly gamergate/antiwoke about it, which I was not surprised at considering how Narnia has a very obnoxious Christian fanbase) at any slight detail change, whether large like a shift in time period from 1900 to 1950s, the clothes that Jadis (the White Witch) wears, or that Aslan is apparently going to be voiced by Meryl Streep… They’re calling her a disgusting narcissist because she described Aslan as “cosmic” instead of saying “our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” and that she’s removed any and all religion (sub)text from the text based on… two interviews and a promotional picture. Granted I don’t really expect people active and dedicated online to a book series made for children to be the most mature or intelligent, and there’s definitely stuff about it that makes me feel like it’ll be more Barbie than Little Women, but I’m just looking forward to finally seeing an adaptation of my favourite book of the series The Magician’s Nephew (the second-last released book that’s a prequel acting as a Genesis story, both for Narnia as a place and Narnia as a series) which has never really been adapted due to both the BBC films in the 80s and the Disney films in the 2000s starting with The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, and following the release order. The further they ever got was The Silver Chair in 1990 which is probably my second or third book, but that TV adaptation series had combined Prince Caspian and Voyage of the Dawn Treader into one story, whilst the Disney films ended with Voyage as it’s own separate film; this wasn’t intentional as there was plans to adapt Magician’s Nephew after (and then The Silver Chair in 2016) but the production company’s license had expired and one of the main producers who held get those films greenlit and made had died in 2011, but those three films are the three books aside from The Last Battle (which is basically Avengers Endgame in how every “our world” protagonist join up) where at least two of the Pevensie siblings are central protagonists and can work as a trilogy centered on them. The Silver Chair follows their cousin Eustace who came with them to Narnia in Voyage and grows from a spoilt child to an honourable boy in an Odyssey-esque tale in that novel, to the central protagonist with his friend Jill in Silver Chair. Anyway sorry for that ramble.
Just wanted to jump on here and say, “Hi, Dennis!” And also round of applause to Alex Osman!! We did a novel trade in the mail and I’m loving Xanadu too!! Very cool!
Alex Osman – Xanadu, Pennsylvania is the one that happens to have piqued my interest here. Filthy Loot Press staking a claim to be the essential cultural touchstone of the moment.
I’ll be heading in a taxi to Leeds Print Workshop later this afternoon and I’m hoping to usher in some exciting new artwork!
Wonderful variety of styles & spirits up there, as is to be expected from your curations.
Yes thanks, the links to previous poetry “welcome” posts is very helpful indeed.
Re. Fincher: Well I’m one of those children of the 90s/00s for whom the “Fight Club” movie was a pretty big deal. I revisited it not too long ago & it holds up pretty damn well for a big studio movie. And Fincher is surprisingly dark for such a big budget A-lister. His next film looks odd though: a sequel of sorts to “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” written by Tarantino. I don’t think their sensibilities mesh at all, but we’ll see. What did you think of the Tarantino movie, especially as an Angeleno? I found it equal parts superficially entertaining & bloated & annoying, as usual with QT.
That Alex Osman (I keep wanting to add “Spare”) excerpt is hilarious. I see Sacra has artwork by Katarina Urbaniak, and Huber’s other books also have interesting artwork.
Lovely Goth day earlier, Dennis. It’s been a pretty goth-y few days (even) for me. Saw 4K restoration of Kwaidan again, beautiful visuals of course, but that soundtrack in the first and third segments is just out of this world. I dug out all my Takemitsu and Kinshi Tsuruta CDs and ordered more. Then Chronovisor was hugely enjoyable. Has it been in Paris yet?
Bill
Dennis! Thank you 1,000x, I’m honored and happy you enjoyed Xanadu so much. It means the world to me. It felt good to finally allow myself to be vulnerable and inject more personal stuff into this book, rather than hiding behind cryptics or feeling too scared that some family members or old friends will see it. I can’t remember who said it, but they said something along the lines of, “Better to write about it now and deal with the backlash, than to wait your whole life for everyone you know to die and write afterwards.” 100%!
Hope you’re having a good week so far, and here’s to an even better week ahead!
hello again! what a wonderful post to be back to. and wonderful to catch up on the three posts i missed, too- goth day was great, as someone who enjoys gothic things but without actually being goth, whatever that means. from this post: xanadu, pennsylvania; that figures; and especially blue sunset have all resonated.
the music festival was more fun than i really expected but i’m glad it’s over. pixies were ultra fun in concert and the crowd was super into them which was nice. i also saw fontaines dc, chaka khan, and kim gordon. they were all okay! i also read dreaming of dead people by rosemary belbin, which was quite good. how have you been? more importantly: how was the train car washing?
Thank you for your hopes. My hopes are sat next to yours, but it’s all to play for right now.
I wouldn’t call the Tube pristine — for soot levels, it wipes the floor with the Metro — but its dirtiness feels more impersonal than in Paris, if that makes sense.
I figured you wouldn’t be chomping at the bit for the techno, but worth a shot. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for the ticket drop.
That sounds like a modestly promising recipe for a week to me. My week is already turgid, so I wish it had more “will see” than it does.
As elsewhere, ‘Xanadu, Pennsylvania’ feels like the golden ticket to me. Congrats to the above Mr Osman. Now I can play the game of trying to order from a US small press to the UK without needing to take out a mortgage to cover shipping. Thanks for the tip-off.
Hey Dennis, Welp, now I have to track down ‘Xanadu,’ ‘Blue Sunset,’ and ‘That Figures.’ The latter seems like a slim yet behemoth book? It’s 216 pages and 2.5 pounds? How? As usual, I’m often “here” to pick up new recommendations, and these surely fit my bill. That Dena Yago excerpt is fascinating. By the way, loved your recent older posts, esp. the Warhol, Halloween props (the Covid cough thingy is too good), and Harmony Korine Day. When will his film ‘Fight Harm’ ever get released? Or has it already? I could probably only ever watch that one in theory. He must have been higher than high to pick fights in the hope of getting beaten up. Oy! Anyway, missing Europe these days, naturally. We bounced back over to London to fly home but (yay!) sadly missed our flight, so stayed for several more days. Now I’m spending too much free time plotting how to return to Paris, since, as you know, it’s all that. Hope all’s great! Take care, Don
Wow, these all really excite me. I love filthy loot and talented perverts. Very enviable to have a well designed pocket sized book like that. I’m unfortunately going to have to wait until my pocket thickens before I can hold one of these, but I can’t wait.
That is true about the vampire inclusion provoking a particular label, but I’d like it infinitely more to be seen as a gothic writer than a trans writer, but it’s not a horror novel, so I don’t know what people will think. I will say that I’m at the point that I’m getting anxious that I haven’t had any responses yet.
Though I’ve never been one who has wanted to join a sort of subculture (because I like existing on my own terms), I find it really beautiful that goth has become this static thing that people who identify with it will find. It was probably only cool to be a punk and wear safety pins in your ear for about five minutes, and then BAM, someone calls you a poser, but goth is forever. Like, there’s this older punk guy in my hometown always walking around with his ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’ shirt, leather jacket and spiked hair, leering at young people who he thinks look strange. Ironic, obviously. Like, if punk teaches you anything, shouldn’t it be that it’s an outlook, not a t-shirt? And not that you’re just some bastard angry at everyone who isn’t like you.