Anniversary Commemoration. In the mid-1980s Jack Skelley wrote Fear of Kathy Acker, a novel which appeared serially in chapbooks and magazines. Dennis Cooper named it “one of the great lost masterpieces of ’80s experimental fiction.” In 2023 Semiotext(e) published The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker. In 2024 playwright/director Siena Foster-Soltis adapted the novel for the stage, selling out three nights at Illusion Magic theater in Santa Monica, California. Produced by Conjugal Visit and co-directed by Foster-Soltis and Rory James Leech, Fear of Kathy Acker the play featured a full cast, music, dance, and was highlighted by five videos by artist Elle Reck. On the anniversary of Fear of Kathy Acker the play, here are those videos, along with photos, reviews/articles, script excerpts, program and other evidence of the cast, crew and other collaborators. Photos by Elle Reck, Gary Leonard and Emma Lee Benson.
Siena Foster-Soltis
Elle Reck web and Instagram
Jack Skelley
Death Drives (Kayla Dobbs, Viva Hassis Gentes, Olivia Fogel, and Gia Ochsebein surround Megan (Ariana Glover)
The Death Drives and video shrine – Kayla Dobbs, Viva Hassis Gentes, Olivia Fogel, Gia Ochsebein
American Theatre magazine: Who’s Afraid of ‘Kathy Acker’?
Riding a fresh wave of interest with a new generation, Jack Skelley’s 40-year-old punk rock novel about American decline has been adapted by Siena Foster-Soltis into a play.
“Everything you can think of is true,” goes a Tom Waits lyric I find equal parts inspiring and chilling. It’s a line I thought of frequently while reading my old friend Jack Skelley’s trippy picaresque Fear of Kathy Acker, a channel-surfing fusillade of sex, self-loathing, and deadpan humor he originally wrote four decades ago, when he was a poet and musician on Los Angeles’s punk and alternative literary scenes. (We met not long after, when he was my editor at the L.A. Downtown News.) Fear of Kathy Acker’s anxious romp through Skelley’s pop-culture-warped consciousness, rife with jarring juxtapositions and tonal shifts, crudity and profundity, imagined dialogue and interior monologues, is both a kind of literary stunt—trolling before it had a name—and a deeply felt pushback against the tide of Reagan-era consumerism and sellout.
Its uncanny mix of transgression and sincerity may partly account for the book’s miraculous resurgence in the past year, and its unlikely embrace by L.A.’s current alt-lit scene. Published in full for the first time last June as The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker by Semiotext(e), a small but influential West Coast press run by Chris Kraus and Hedi El Kholti, it has achieved niche hit status and is now in its third printing. Even more remarkably, as an article earlier this year in Paper magazine put it, this lost ’80s classic by a straight white man now in his 60s has “emerged as a symbol for a new generation of writers and artists, many of whom are young, women and queer.”
One of those women is Siena Foster-Soltis, a director and theatremaker who has turned Fear of Kathy Acker into a play with her L.A. company Conjugal Visit; it runs for three nights next week, Feb. 27-29, at Santa Monica’s Illusion Magic Lounge. Featuring a cast entirely comprising women and nonbinary folks, the play, Soltis-Foster said in a recent interview along with Skelley, is inspired as much by the book itself as by the phenomenon of its belated embrace.
“A large part of this production of Fear of Kathy Acker is both the actual scenes within the source text that happen as part of Jack’s psyche, but also the modern-day interpretation of the book and references to its relevance and currency today,” said Foster-Soltis, whose previous work with Conjugal Visit included last year’s interactive Contrition Pageant. She’s even inserted herself into the show “as a young woman who’s reading this book,” and the script makes room for “other young women’s reactions” to the source.
Some of those reactions, she admitted, involve “a level of hostility that I think is almost unavoidable when taking something that is a hetero male-centric voice and trying to merge it somehow with a young woman’s voice.” Rather than skirt that discomfort, she said she’s tried to “harness that hostility” and bring it into the play. “There’s also a weird trap there,” she continued. “It’s easy to get overly hostile, to a point where it becomes like a riot piece, or to go the other way, where you’re just completely playing into it, like, ‘We’re sexy girls doing sexy things onstage.’ There’s a line in between where it’s like: I endorse it and critique it at the same time. That’s a line we try to ride.”
Still, the mind reels at the possibilities. How will Foster-Soltis and her co-director, Rory James Leech, stage the book’s opening chapter, “Sexy Day,” for instance, with its matter-of-fact toggling between stickily explicit lingerie fantasies and banal musings about L.A. malls and Dodgers tickets? Or how about the memorable (imaginary) scene in which a giant avatar of porn star Amber Lynn fucks the skyscrapers of Downtown L.A.?
Buzzy as that material is, that’s not what chiefly drew her to Skelley’s writing, Foster-Soltis said.
“The main thing that resonated with me in The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker wasn’t the sex stuff at all,” she said. “Not that I didn’t like the sex stuff, but it was all the self-loathing and self-critique, often in a really comical way—this deep acid flashback of self-hatred, this nihilistic take on the overly consumerist, capitalist surge of the ’80s, which I think people relate to today.”
Indeed, while Skelley’s book sifted with rueful glee (or is that gleeful rue?) through the flotsam of the age of television, long before the internet and social media, and Foster-Soltis grew up with the iPhone, she found common ground in such passages as the following:
“Language exists to fuck society’s constrictions up the butt. Language is the tool of the visionary, the anarchist, the child, the artist, the saint, the lover and Bob Flanagan. Everything else which sounds like Language but is really words used to corrupt people or chop them into little bite-size pieces is not Language, but Clop. Clop is something people swallow to kill themselves. It’s a detergent washing life away. It is sets of word-images that hold people’s minds in one spot for 2.5 seconds until another set of Clop words is introduced.”
If that’s not a prophecy of social media, I’ll eat my Instagram. Skelley concludes Fear of Kathy Acker with a fearful, resigned look ahead to the millennium. I wondered how things look to him as we’re well past that and into a new century.
“I’m glad that Siena kind of fixated on the more anxious, dark passages of the novel,” Skelley told me, “even though a lot of it is very funny and a lot of it is very sexy. The book is a lot about consumer society, capitalist society, apprehending the functions of the culture—particularly electronic media, which was just basically TV at the time—and inflicting its force on the populace in very insidious ways. That really scared me. Looking on the other side of that, if anything, it’s just gotten worse, the way these societal norms, materialism, gender norms, every sort of problem that we have is filtered through media and foisted upon people. I don’t even know how young people can stand it, honestly.”
One way they withstand it, of course, is to make art about it, as Foster-Soltis and her colleagues are doing. Or, as Skelley put it at one point in Fear of Kathy Acker, quoting a beloved L.A. bard:
“Lewis MacAdams said poets will never fucking shut up. No matter how much you imprison, torture, suppress or bore them. Even here in America the vast majority of word-smiths are in the decadent service industries—in advertising and promotion and disinformation—even where most writers are employed by the Megacorporate conglomerates, even here the writers will not shut up. The more the conglomerates try to shut them up the louder they’ll shout, the more they’ll rant about.”
There’s bleak hope in that, I think. I wondered what Jack—who said that while Foster-Soltis has shown him some drafts of her “wild” script, he has been “banned from rehearsals”—thinks about the prospect of watching his book take on another life onstage. He has done public readings from it over the years (including at last year’s book release party), so it has been performed, in a sense, but never quite like this.
“I’m totally freaked out,” he said with a nervous titter. “Siena has told me that the actor playing me, Magdalene Cherry, is a Method actor and has been studying videos of my mannerisms. She kind of even looks like me in one of the photos. It’s weird.”
Maybe not as weird as the passage in Fear of Kathy Acker in which he claims that Loni and Laurie Anderson are in fact the same person, but it’s in the ballpark.
If you’re wondering about the title of the book and the play: They have about as much to do with the punk-rock postmodernist known for her appropriative techniques as Edward Albee’s most famous play has to do with Virginia Woolf. But Skelley certainly took inspiration from Acker, he said, and from women writers in general—another reason, he guesses, that his book may be resonating with women and femmes.
“I don’t pretend to understand, and I certainly did not expect the book to have, the reaction it’s gotten,” he said. “If anything, I was expecting a backlash to it, or even worse, to be ignored completely. But it comes from a love of Kathy Acker’s writing and the writing of other transgressive women. I just love women’s writing—écriture féminine, that’s the term used in French theory. Women have urges and needs too. Why can’t we just all have them?”
Indeed, with a play based on his writing, Skelley is right back where he has so often been before: just looking forward to another opening.
Rob Weinert-Kendt is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.
Trailer
Los Angeles Review of Books: The Pulsing Innards of Jack Skelley
Emily Ann Zisko faces her complete fear of Jack Skelley’s “Fear of Kathy Acker,” adapted for the Santa Monica stage by Siena Foster-Soltis.
By Emily Ann Zisko March 6, 2024
A flash of red taillights: The satin stage curtain of the Illusion Magic Lounge in Santa Monica parts, and a member of the Greek chorus in fishnets and silver booty shorts instructs the audience to keep their hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times. Play ball!
Confused? Buckle up. Like its source material, the stage adaptation of Jack Skelley’s Fear of Kathy Acker is not for the easily daunted. Skelley’s novel, written in installments for an alt-lit punk mag in the 1980s, was rereleased by Semiotext(e) last year to the cult-like acclaim of young ladies and gentlethems of the alt-literati—including yours truly. On a basic level, the frenetic odyssey of sexual deviance and self-loathing follows Jack, the narrative’s hero, as he drives across Los Angeles ruminating on perverse fantasies and Dodgers tickets. More deeply, the book is a revolt against pop-consumerism wrought by the Reagan-era “greed is good” ethos that, in its 40 years of gestation, has choked out American culture.
Now, the masterful hands of writer and co-director Siena Foster-Soltis have brought Skelley’s work to the stage. The show is produced by Conjugal Visit in collaboration with Misfit Toys Collective; in it, an entirely female and nonbinary cast rearranges the pulsing innards of the book into an explosive treatise on being a woman in the arts. Over the course of the play, the struggling playwright Siena (a Frankensteinian creature of her own making) morphs into Jack, the play’s antihero. The result is a three-act metanarrative in which Siena at first doubts her artistic ability yet later gains the audacity (and privilege) only Skelley’s identity—that of a man in his sixties still enjoying a kind of micro-celebrity for the raunchy novel he completed in his twenties—can offer her.
Of course, in doing so, Siena/Jack undergoes a transformation that leaves them facing an existential void embodied by Endora, the witch-mommy repurposed from the 1960s sitcom Bewitched and expanded upon by Foster-Soltis (Endora plays a relatively minimal role in Skelley’s book). Here, Endora’s curse of discontent weaves a trap that no one—not even the voice of Dodgers baseball, Vin Scully—can avoid. Through it all, a Greek chorus of Death Drives decked out in cheap lingerie and plaster-cast nose extensions provides a vehicle for some of Foster-Soltis’s most compelling, albeit occasionally convoluted, writing.
Toward the end of the first act, by which point Siena has fully (and literally) embodied Jack in an attempt to combat her writer’s block, the protagonist attends a party where a member of the chorus tells Jack how much she loves his work and expresses her hope that he’ll read her autofiction in exchange for her admiration. The pair proceed to fuck in a corner as, inspired by their passion, a voyeur pouts; she, too, wants to do something, and so jumps up and down while screaming, “I think I’m interesting!”
Suddenly, houselights flood the audience. The music turns off, the Death Drives collapse from exhaustion, and I see myself reflected in the large, mirrored set. In this new and horrible light, I appear as a young woman in the audience—one of many—who has also asked Skelley to read her short stories, and who also believes that they are interesting. The consequent undercurrent of rage propels Foster-Soltis’s self-contemptuous satire for two more acts. Her caricature of gender, sex, relationships, and fame draws parallels between the powerlessness of a woman in her twenties and that of a man in his sixties.
I left the theater thinking about Siena’s journey. In the play, she traveled all the way through herself, into Jack, and out the other side. And what did it get her? A three-night run.
Romy Kim as Endora
Death Drives – Olivia Fogel, Viva Hassis Gentes, Kayla Dobbs, Gia Ochsebein with Magdalene Cherry as Jack Siena
Magdalene Cherry as Jack Siena and Aviana Glover as Megan
Amelia Whitney as Vin Scully
Artillery magazine: L.A. Mythmaking
In January I was chatting with Jack Skelley, the author of The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (FOKA) published last year through Semiotext(e). We spoke about how young writers are connecting with the older generation in the Los Angeles writing scene—it feels a lot like church, I told him. A strange connection to draw but the scene allows intergenerational writers and readers to collect around something divine, the written word. Skelley’s book is one the community has gathered around, though if you read it, you’ll hear nothing close to a sermon. Skelley’s book is no Bible, yet it has its disciples.
Siena Foster-Soltis, the San Fernando-born playwright, adapted Skelley’s novel into Fear of Kathy Acker (the play) which ran three nights at the Illusion Magic Lounge in Santa Monica, February 27–29. The play had an all-female cast with standout performances by Romy Kim playing “Endora,” and Magdalene Cherry playing “Jack.” Cherry captured the chaos of a writer falling apart from guilt and self-doubt. Laughs abounded from the sultry squad of the “Death Drive” girls, the “Greek chorus,” adorned in fishnets and Foster-Soltis’ signature grotesque masks who played foil to Jack’s pursuit of authentic writing.
The play ran 90 minutes over three acts and followed Siena, a Los Angeles-based writer absorbing the persona of Jack using his identity as proxy to navigate the journey to expression, blending exterior and interior scenes and blurring the lines of reality as the writer finds what it means to both struggle and succeed. Jack appeared in LA clubs and suburban homes battling sycophants as sirens at a reading and low self-esteem personified in the witch Endora who haunted him at every turn.
The book and play are both corralled chaos, an amalgam of wet-dream fantasies and LA mythmaking and at times were an abstraction of the real story. Jack was constantly pursuing his love Megan, played by Aviana Glover, yet was guilty of enjoying the recognition he received for his novel FOKA. Foster-Soltis integrated the references in the book to style everything from the playlist in the lobby before the show to Vin Scully, played by Amelia Whitney, narrating parts of the play like a game at Dodgers Stadium. She succeeded in creating a new object in which she included herself and her experience into the story the “real” Jack Skelley wrote in the ’80s. She placed herself next to Skelley and even though decades separate them in age, they were one for 90 minutes, side-by-side fighting the fight of being writers in Los Angeles.
The exploration of connection between 1980s subversive pervert fantasy and 2024 aspiring female writer in the digital world seems like a vast, impassable chasm, yet FOKA (the play) was a catalyst bringing two worlds together. The play was self-aware enough to understand that in adapting someone else’s work one inherently centers themself. It’s obviously something that Foster-Soltis was dealing with. Consider the quote from Vin Scully in the first act, “With hardly any real talent, incurable cynicism, unrelenting vanity and pertinacious suicidal ideation, it can be a real roll of the dice dealing with Siena [Jack].” Foster-Soltis was successfully placed within Skelley’s novel by making herself the protagonist of the play, but this was not done in a way that was appropriative but instead affectionate. She reflected on their shared struggle in art.
What the audience got was an intelligent and entertaining account of what it means to be a writer, how one tackles insecurities and the balancing act between appeasing the assumed audience and authentic vision. The play was clearly the work of a young artist and that was something to celebrate. Some see art by young writers as encumbered by the limited worldview of youth but that’s too reductive. Instead, one should view Fear of Kathy Acker (the play) as the starting locus of what could be an exciting and ambitious career of an avant-garde playwright and director.
Siena Foster-Soltis
Before curtain, Death Drives – Kayla Dobbs and Viva Hassis Gentes interact with audience
After curtain, Jack Skelley with Magdalene Cherry as Jack Siena
*
p.s. Hey. This weekend the powers-that-be have given this blog the honor of being the house of an exclusive (a relative term on the internet, but still) look-see at the much ballyhooed theatrical adaptation of Jack Skelley’s classic novel ‘Fears of Kathy Acker’ as performed in Los Angeles a couple of years ago. Now we can all take a look for ourselves at what the hell that was all about. Much to watch, see, and read this weekend, and please knock yourselves out. Thanks, powers-that-be. ** Misanthrope, Hi. Good, stay the course. Of course I think your possible indie press is a far more than excellent idea. You’re figuring out the practicalities? How’s it looking? ** Steeqhen, You’re welcome, and thanks. Thought so: the university. Well, get on that dream magazine then, for sure. And I’ll read your article. Everyone, Steeqhen aka Stephen O’Brien has an essay/article called ‘The Words of a Future Expat’ newly in the public for you to read here. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks, the lab work went really well, and the film is now totally finished at long last! Eric LaRocca is a new name to me. Sounds like I should take a quick test only though. I love VÅR. Obviously, since Zac’s and my first film is named after a VÅR lyric. Yes, The Supremes, I can’t explain it haha. And speak of the devil, love mouthed Elias. Actually I suspect love would love to mouth Elias for real, although I can’t speak for him. Here, right here, Between the peanuts and the cage, Between the darkness and the stage, Between the hour and the age, Love calls you by your name, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, It was a good batch, yes. Ouch, although I had a tooth extracted not so very long ago, and it was actually pretty easy, or I should say that once it was extracted it was less painful in the healing part that I imagined. I wish you at least that much luck. ** James, The American healthcare industry has always been fucked, and it’s getting more and more so. I’m sorry but a Gif containing the entire Shrek movie is not a Gif, it’s just a format thief. I’m a Gif acolyte. Silverchair’s second and especially third albums are very good. Well, that guy who you were chatting with a short while back was longing for you, as I clearly recall, so you’re not a virgin. I’ve bagged a few celebrities. It wasn’t hard, you just have to be discrete about it. Dude, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but based on that commentary you described, I strongly suspect everybody knows you’re gay. Not that I’m saying you need to confirm that with them or anything. New writing! Excellent. Go, go go! ** Thomas Moronic, No, thank you. It’s exquisite book. ** Bill, Is it tweaked to acceptability? The poster for the new Bong is not very enticing. Not a big Pattinson fan over here for one thing. ** Steve, Thanks, great, I’ll start searching soap2day. Yes, color correction is finished, end credits are in place, and the film is complete. Boy, was that a long journey. I’m so sorry about your parents. Towards the end of her life, my mom started making almost no sense, and that was … shocking, I guess is the word. ** jay, Thanks! Yes, the film is completely finished. Right, about the twink purists, although, and maybe this is a US thing, but I think Latino boys of the appropriate dimensions have always qualified as full on twinks maybe. Hope the concert was blissful. Happy to get the all-lovely signal from you. I’ll see what I can do on my end. ** P, Hi! Welcome back to the less partying world. The pool table helped a lot when my friends I were bored or too stoned to leave my room and risk letting my parents get a look at us. Bakery, nice, or I’m imagining niceness. And the free baked goods, presumably. That’s exciting that you’re writing! Yeah, just dive in and enjoy yourself and max out your imagination and your way with words. The stores sound really interesting. Obviously the Buena Vista Park one sounds epic. Maximal cheerleading from me. It doesn’t sound remotely dumb whatsoever. And you interested the discerning jay too if you didn’t see his comment. Have the best weekend. ** sasha!, Oh, hi! Wow, thank you a lot for coming in here. I guess you know how much I love your book. I was and am really blown away, and I hope its birth into the world gives you many props. Are you working on something new? I do know Pulp, and I do really like ‘This is Hardcore’. Like-minds. Lots of respect to you, and have a really weekend, whatever that would take on your end. ** HaRpEr, Oh, okay, thank you for the explanation. Yeah, I didn’t quite understand. No, no, it doesn’t sound dumb. I think I’m getting it, or its outlay at least. Sounds super interesting. Oh, ugh. From everything you’ve told me, I feel confident that your prof is an ally of you and your work and is just trying to do his ‘professor’ thing and protect you (and, yeah, probably himself too). I would just try to think as a contextual problem and not take the warning/censoring aspect too deeply. Things are really fucking conservative these days. It’s very shocking to me. When I was in college, there was a group reading by creative writing students, and one of the things I read was this ‘poem’ that was a series of descriptions of child pornography films. I meant it to be shocking and darkly funny. The audience went nuts, but in a happy rioting kind of way. But word got back to the school higher ups, and I got scolded, but that was it. If anyone did that today, they’d be expelled in a heartbeat and maybe arrested and definitely go viral on the internet. People used to see writing and art as a place to exercise the imagination as fully as one needed safely back then, and that’s absolutely not true now. Anyway, blabla, I’m sorry you have to deal with that. And you might well deal with it again, and, yes, and multiply. But, hey, look at me, like you said, I’m fine and not remotely dissuaded. ** Corey, Hey, buddy. Happy to have caught your eye twice. What we were doing yesterday was fine tuning, slightly changing the lighting or temperature or coloring of some scenes, so it didn’t feel momentous, even though it was. Congrats on the promotion! Appear onstage whoa, nice. Scary? I’ll watch the video of her work as soon as I’m out here, thank you. You sound like you’re doing very well indeed! ** Darby𓃰, Good you reposted that because, yes, it hadn’t shown up. You finished the drawing, I trust? Wow, a dog named George Miles? That’s wild. It is not a totaly uncommon name, but I admit I do wonder if the namer got it from my stuff. Huh. I envy you that burrito. I can’t wait until I get to LA and can eat actual, real burritos again. I guess ideally the gym is supposed to make you realise your body is important and to respect it? I’ve never been to gym, so I’m just wondering/guessing. The film will hopefully play in a bunch of other places. We’re working on how and where and etc. that could happen. Oh, PGL is on Amazon Prime and Kanopy and Tubi? Do you have any of those. If not, let me know, and I can send you a link to the free screener to watch it. You aren’t annoying, no worries at all. Every smoke detector I’ve lived with was already pre-installed by the owners of the apartments I was renting, so I don’t know the brands, but they’ve looked a whole lot like that one. ** Right. Make your Saturday and Sunday at least partly a ‘Fear of Kathy Acker’ weekend, why don’t you? I will see you on Monday irregardless.
Now available in North America 
First of all, “Conjugal Visit” is a great name for a theater company. Does “Acker” rhyme with “cracker” or with “baker”? I’ve heard mostly the former, but I recently heard the latter so now I’m not sure.
There’s still a long way to go before we appear onstage. The choreographer (Ella Semo) has to recruit more participants who are willing to commit to a more intense rehearsal schedule. It’s not a “5-6-7-8” kind of choreography, thank God. We start by doing meditative movements that she teaches us and then improvise once our minds are in a suitable state. For the first hour and a half she’s in teacher mode — gives us instructions, dances along with us to model what she wants us to do. Then for the last hour and a half she goes into choreographer mode — lets us loose to improvise, watches us intently, takes notes, gives us cryptic zen-like suggestions. It’s somewhat like the rehearsals in “Out 1”.
Hi Dennis! This is a little revealing of how little I know about the authors I like, but I (for some reason) assumed that Mr Skelley was an author who started recently – like, within the last decade or so. I imagine that’s because I saw the publication date of the Semiotext(e) reprint of his work (and because of how novel his new stuff feels), and assumed that was the original date.
Huh, that’s interesting about Latino guys always being accepted. Our equivalent in the UK is probably Eastern Euro guys, or a particular kind of them that I don’t fit into as someone who’s unlearned the accent and mannerisms – maybe there’s some pattern in first-generation immigrant populations being the ones that are twink-ed, but that may be trying to put a pattern onto something that follows no logic.
Great news about the film, I can’t wait to see it. Congrats to you and Zac. The concert was interesting, one violinist was incredibly accomplished, and the other one was sort of limping along, which kind of exposed some strange new harmonies. It wasn’t good music, but I had a great time, in a sort of diagnostic way. Plus one of my friends told me that he’s been playing a videogame with a kind of extremely mechanical fake haunted house in it (that involves running around in the mechanics and bowels of the mansion), so I’m probably going to go over and see what the fuss is about. Otherwise, love from here, cya!
Kathy Acker’s one of the authors I was pleasantly surprised to find, rummaging about in my father’s garage at some point last year. There were a lot of boxes, with a lot of books. A lot of dust. Felt terribly adventurous. It was an old book, so the pages and glue were a bit screwy, and I’ve done what I can to try and fix that. It’s plonked on my bedroom bookshelf upstairs, with most of the other American writers I’ve got. Though I’ve got your books on my desk, instead. I know nothing about adapting novels into plays. So many people go into this stuff, it’s so cool that creative collaboration is possible, at all. Transgression and sincerity go together nicely. Just noticed a slightly worrisome crack in the handle of the mug I’m drinking tea from. Oo, metanarratives are my fav. I like the costumes/outfits. Is there a difference between those two? I really like the font typescripts(?) use. What’s on stage is just so nice to look at. Theatre’s cool. Learnt my grandmother will be taking me round a costume exhibition in a few weeks, and later than that I’ll be seeing Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon too, woohoo. But Bill the Bard’s not Skelley or Foster-Soltis! I so love how that poster’s put together. Just arranging bodies in some kind of aesthetically pleasing order is nice :]
Hihi Den. My sympathies to Americans who don’t deserve to get fucked over being fucked over by their country’s health system. I consider myself pretty lucky to be a Brit because generally we seem to have healthcare kind of, under control, but I know the NHS has been in a tough spot for ages now. Just, in my personal experience things have been alright and helpful enough, I s’pose. America might yet eventually get its shit together, but, I feel like that might take a lot, a lot, a lot of time. Quite some time.
I use GIFs a fair bit in certain correspondences. It’s just easier to express my emotions, sometimes, with a moving picture of cats doing something, than to just use words or my own voice or face, which is significantly less fluffy and cute and feline. Acolyte’s a word I only know because there’s a song with that as its title, and I’m very fond of said song. I’m of the camp which pronounce GIF as jif, which might be ‘wrong’ or whatever but I just prefer that sound to gif. Harumph. All round there seems to be a generally dubious reception towards what we’ve seen of the upcoming Shrek film.
I’ve got sooo much music I want to get round to. I’ll find one artist and think okay I’m going to listen to all their stuff but then in the middle of their discography I’ll find some other artist and think wow they’re really good now I want to listen to their stuff and then it all just repeats and it’s a vicious cycle only it’s not that vicious because I just keep finding good music I like. Silverchair are another name to be tossed into this figurative hat.
Uhhh-huh. Ostensibly he’s still ‘longing’ for me, having begged for my socials on a couple of occasions and regularly telling me things which indicate attraction. Squint. I’m wary, dubious of anyone outside of my family telling me they love me. I dunno. If another teen guy wants to talk to me and like me it’s not up to me to tell him how he can or can’t feel. I find him likable. And interesting. Thinking and talking about him engages me. Shrug. I just doubt this ‘longing’ of his will last, but only time will tell. But his cats are cute -///- and I remain a virgin in the other sense, unsurprisingly. Blehhhh, boy rambles, etc. etc.
Sometimes I think discrete should be spelled as discreet, and, wait hold on are both fine – oh they’re different words, hm, okay. But I hope the time you had with said celebs was interesting. Maybe the nature of the person’s popularity and/or the implications that has for a relationship dynamic is more interesting to me than the celebrity themselves. Presumably your discreetness meant you didn’t have much of the whole, pestering paparazzi, flashing lights in your face and whatnot?
I cannot even pretend to be surprised as to the likeliness of other people suspecting my same-sex desires. Whether I confirm their ‘suspicions’ explicitly is of course up to me, but, meh, don’t feel like it since I’m not as close with some of my classmates as my chums. I’ve just noticed what may or may not be a wart beginning to form on my right thumb. I’m unsure. I used to have a lot of warts on my hands as a kid and then one day they just vanished. Maybe they’re coming back to fuck me over aesthetically again, ach. Whatever. Anyway, despite my being ‘so gay’ as my brother whisper-shouted at me yesterday, nothing stopped my mother from also suggesting that ‘someday you might have one [a girlfriend].’ Pah. Exasperating, hearing this shit from other people. I don’t want to sound like a mardy gay teenage boy even though that’s exactly what I am, but being reminded DESPITE my ostensible obvious gayness that other people, even those as close as my family, STILL have these heteronormative expectations of me is so annoying. UGH. Sometimes I just get these visions of me taking every one of these people I know by the shoulders and shaking them as I shout ‘I LIKE BOYS DAMN IT’ at their face.
Anyway 2.0, Friday was so so lovely. English had some giggles and nice moments, chats. Finally got to debut the Pikachu hat in public, which looked great on all my friends, EXCLUDING the guy who flaked last week who wasn’t in the mood for wearing a Pikachu hat (HOW?!). But the guy who flaked last time didn’t flake on us again! Hurray. There was wielding of large sticks, literally, sticks/branches that’s not a euphemism. I jumped over a little stream. But no scratches from brambles. Something went terribly wrong and I was reduced to drinking ONE WHOLE CAN OF CIDER on a swing, how AWFUL of me, how ADOLESCENT and JUVENILE, whilst my friend made the ill-judged choice to drink 3, so he threw up a bit, thankfully not on me. We sat on a grassy field in the dark and talked about things. He’s such a swell dude. In other nice news, I’ve got Tuesday off, so that’ll be a nice relaxing day. I find balancing my reading and writing really hard. I’m a reader before I’m a writer, but when I’m doing one I’m always antsy about not doing the other. How do you find the split? But you’ve said your writing gets a little obsessive, so maybe when you write you just write without getting hooked up on your not reading. I dunno, just curious. But the story is about 4,000 words already (the length of my history coursework essay, which took like, half a year to finish) after like 3 days, and I’d say it’s fun and gets me thinking. I’ve done bugger-all so far today – woke up 11ish, got the cold tap stuck so almost caused a minor flooding of the bathroom, ate an apple and lunch, dr(u/a)nk tea, typed this up, lay sprawled on a sofa in the sun like a lazy cat. And I’m home alone! Yay. So I’m going to email and then read, probably. See you Monday.
Thank you, Dennis!!! (And all commenters!!) Siena Foster Soltis’ Fear of Kathy Acker play actually ran just 1 year ago. I feel a little sheepish about the quasi-arbitrary nature of this resurrection. But I’m grateful these production assets now live on your blog! Especially the crazy videos by Elle Reck. In the play, they displayed on a giant TV-altar, upping the multi-media assault. Siena and I share a love for late Iranian-American dramatist Reza Abdoh, and some of his in-your-face spectacle is her work. Can I do a post on him one day? xoxo Jack
I will have to check out Vår, whom I have never heard. I like most stuff on Sacred Bones. I have been listening to a band who were on there called Ambersmoke, they are instrumental doom metal, sort of like Earth.
This is Hardcore is my favorite karaoke song for when I feel like going all out and completely exhausting my voice.
I saw Eraserhead in a packed movie theater. This theater is playing a Lynch film every week this month. I was surprised that the audience was so attentive and engaged and laughed in all the right places. I absolutely lose my mind when people have phones out or whisper and snicker. The worst are those smartwatches because people will take them out constantly because they don’t think of it as something that needs to be turned off or they think the screen is too small to bother but it’s effectively just a cellphone and equally distracting. It’s really fun to watch it with a bunch of people and see them squirm at the grossest images. It went well.
Hey Dennis,
Went home and watched Wayne’s World after seeing the first half with my friends at my place. Then I watched Peep Show until my dad came home and got him to watch it with me until he fell asleep on the couch. Surprised how much he liked it, considering how the rest of my family can barely stomach it!
The more I think about the magazine the more excited I get; I basically want to become the publisher and leader that pushes Cork art into the eyes of the sheltered Dublinites. Alas I cannot begin the work until college is over. I was gonna work on my dissertation today but I slept in, and then decided to play some games with my dog Jackie as I hadnt seen her in over a week. Now I’m on the bus to my friend’s birthday, though I’ve a bit of a foul taste in my throat which I’m assuming is the start of some cough…
Well done on getting the colour correcting shit done on the film. Thursday also was the release of the other magazine I work on, and the photoshoot was great, the photographer edited them to be even better, and the cover is pretty stand-out, people were complimenting it before I even mentioned that I was the director behind it.
Finished Silent Hill 2 on Thursday, was way more streamlined and easier than the first game, though not a complaint, more of an observation that i assume was intentional as the first game felt very open and confusing (again in a good way).
I saw that Zac made an instagram recently? Or maybe it only appeared recently for me!
Dennis, Yeah, I don’t know what’s going on with return to office now. So many conflicting things. We’re have a group meeting this week and then individual meetings. Sounds like we’ll have tailored schedules for each of us? Who knows? But I do know I don’t have to go in this week.
So, there are so many little things, as you might imagine, re: starting a small indie press. Probably similar to getting a movie made. The more I look into it, the more I’m confident I can do it. I’ve got a kind of stable of established authors who need more exposure lined up to start right out of the gate. I’ve got someone who can help with a website. A lot of the marketing can be done for free through social media. And then there’s funding. It actually won’t cost that much, and frankly, I’ll probably be funding it myself at first. It’s going to be a labor of love.
Also, I’ve got some people willing to help out with editing and proofreading and all that out of the gate. And I’ve got artists I can tap for things like book covers and stuff. There are low-cost ways of publishing too, including print on demand and ebooks (the latter of which are very low cost and in demand).
Things look promising, but I’m not looking at this with rose-colored glasses. It’ll be tough at first, but it’ll be something I’ve always wanted to do.
Now, I have to come up with a name, get an employer identification number, and get this thing incorporated. I’ll be looking more into those areas right away.
hey dennis, hey thread, it’s official, i’m out of a job *crowd cries*, no no don’t worry. it was planned and i didn’t like it. *crowd cheers*. so yeah, planned to live off savings for a sec, get down writing, and figure out how many licks it really does take to get to the center of a tootsie roll. today i’m realizing how many things i gotta skimp out on, i mentally flunked out of math i guess.
on that end, i realized today i should get the complete fear of kathy acker since i am queer and gen z, probably not a female, but skimping out means no new book purchases. though i should check if its floating on the downloading sites. sorry jack, i double swear i’ll buy it once i get the money for it. play seems interesting, and the pieces here are very fun.
other than that, it’s been calm with me. writing been normally frustrating. been focusing a lot more on a novel vaguely about true crime and fan communities. my ‘Internet Novel’ ™. the last scene i just wrote is inspired by how a (gay) friend only watches straight porn becuse a lot of them angle their camera right behind the male’s ass. i still giggle at that, those straight couple escorts from the second last escort post were probably on to something.
fanfic discussion that happened this week here made me think about my fanfic past, and to reread them — mainly becuse i had an unearned smug reaction of that my teenage me could write better than kitty. i didn’t. tiresomely logorrheic is on the mark for them, though it is fun seeing the very beginning of my obsessions, theme and prose wise, and it’s interesting seeing how my shipping interests morphed into my current characters, aspects remains n all. though that whole affair stopped when another fanfic writer told me to check out this book called ‘closer’ by ‘dennis cooper’, around the time i was ready to break away with fanfic writing. funny how that all works.
watched four letter words, the first movie by sean baker. description — Hook up artist Luke surprises himself when he considers becoming monogamous after meeting and dating smug and handsome Stephen, but Stephen might not be all that he seems, will Luke be disappointed? — got me incredibly interested before i realized it was not at all explaining what was going on. some vague sleuthing made me find out that the uploader had accidentally used the description for ‘a four letter word’ by casper andreas instead. the sean baker movie is not at all about gay hook up artists lmao. didn’t help that it was instead about bunch of college frat boys talking shit about and to each other.
walked past a bookstore that is way further than me but one i should get more to becuse they have more interesting english language selection, the one closer to me mostly stocks what appears to be popular booktok books in english instead. to their credit, the norwegian selecton for. both is good. they were having an sale, and there was a bunch of easton ellis books in the pile. so i guess this is the time for me to have my ellis dive. wish me luck.
that is probably not all from me, but it’s all i can think of now. hope you all have/had a nice weekend.
Got a Ko-Fi account/page, by any chance? Any timespan fulfilling the starving writer/artist stereotype is generally unpleasant. (I recently got A Real Job ™ that leaves me too tired or learning too much other stuff to focus on if I want to not starve or that even demands surprise extra effort outside of work hours—all in all a different sort of unpleasant to not get to write or paint as much as I want to, but the not-starving part and getting to sleep somewhere that keeps the weather out is a damnably tempting incentive.)
hi poe! thank you so much, but trust me that donations is my last resort. i won’t starve or not be able to pay rent, it’s more of a situation anything beyond that would be tricky. a situation where i thought beforehand that i would just need to stop buying new books or games, but i realized today that if i had to replace or repair something i would be fucked.
i’ll probably consider getting a part-time job to go alongside my savings, but at least i can take some time to look for something that wouldn’t suck my soul like my last job.
Hi Dennis!
I’m actually working on a novel about pro wrestling! My brother used to watch WWE religiously, and I absorbed his interest by proxy I guess. I mainly thought the guys were hot (80s jake the snake is my dream man lol). I read Ring of Hell by Matthew Randazzo V and was just in awe of how simultaneously silly and vile the wrestling world can be. Chris Benoit would do his little storyline and jump head first into 200 something pound men for a living, then come home and shoot his preteen son up with steroids because he thought he was too weak. And the promos! They could really talk, and really sell you on the idea that they went around in life being violent psychos, or benevolent heros. I’m especially interested in pro wrestling before the 2010s, because you had to live the life of your character. If you were beefing with someone in-ring, you better not get caught with them in the real world. Roddy Piper, another dream boyfriend, once spat at a kid who asked for his autograph because he was a heel at the time and couldn’t have stories getting out about what a nice guy he was! It’s just such an interesting world. Highly recommend ‘Pure Dynamite’, the Dynamite Kid’s story is like the quintessential wrestling experience. Are you working on anything?
And yay! I’m so glad you like Pulp too! Jarvis Cocker is such a fabulous writer, I feel like he gets overlooked in the discussions of all-time songwriters in favor of, like, easier to digest stuff.
Insomnia struck – I’m writing this at 4 AM Saturday/Sunday.
I don’t know if this guy was joking, or if he really is a “puriteen,” but during MICKEY 17 last night, he kept yelling at the characters not to have sex. (Robert Pattinson fans will be happy to know they didn’t listen.)
“Bring back the Hays Code,” phrased in a way that’s theoretically leftist but meant literally, is such an odd phenomenon. I doubt it’s as common as some people would make it out to be, but I don’t get queer people who don’t see how this would backfire upon us.
I’m reading ‘How To Stand Up to a Dictator’ by Maria Ressa right now (not now as in now because I’m typing this instead of reading) and from her position as a journalist she writes about something called “emergent behaviors”—like I want to believe in everyone’s unique idiosyncrasies and being capable of developing independent thought, but I’m sure I’m a Product Of My Time in many ways too. “Puriteens” might be a psyop or might be A Product Of Their Time because of reasons, but I just think it’s weird because I believed when older people told me as a kid that (not exact words) liberteens were the default of every generation of that age struggling to do something different. I capitalize letters because I read too many Discworld novels in middle school.
My conjecture is that…maybe more people want security far more keenly and desperately than any time before? There’s no backfire-foresight if a person or enough people are in a place in their life that they’re emotionally fragile and desperate for safety. It gets framed as a luxury to be able to think, oh, that’s different and I’m not into it but live-and-let-live. Instead, ambiguities and variances become a threat for existing whether it’s harmful or not. Everyone In The Community must be out as one of the four letters to commit to forever or they can’t be trusted, lesbians writing fiction about gay men get disqualified from lesbianism because it’s not like any of us were raised by guncles, and gods help you if your partner of half a decade comes out as binary trans and you don’t break up right away. I don’t like it in here, it’s low-key like the rainbow version of The Crucible. But so I think if there’s any cultural currency to be grabbed-for or a promise (by misguided or malicious people) that the world will make perfect sense all of the time and that everybody will do exactly what they’re predictably assigned to do, if only everybody gets sadistic about the right things, then there’s always people who will deal with the pain of marginalization or oppression by giving their all to a scheme like that. Ergo, emergent behaviors: rainbow capitalism, homonationalism, queer communities and subcultures to fascist and/or purity-cult pipelines.
Hi!!
This adaptation looks wild!
Oh, wow! “Room Temperature” is 100% finished! Congratulations!! How does it feel?
Really? I didn’t know that about “Like Cattle Towards Glow”! I need to refresh my VÅR knowledge. Haha, you’re not wrong about love’s intentions toward Elias!
Mr. Cohen. Lately words are missing from now on, Vanished in the haze of love gone wrong, There’s no future, there’s no past, In the present, nothing lasts, Lately someone’s missing from now on, Od.