5 February 2021

"No story ever really ends, and I think I know why."

Feb 05, 2021

This Week

Last week we launched season two of Quiet Little Horrors with an episode about a film I didn’t watch for a long time because a horror film about an overwhelmed single mother losing touch with reality seemed a little too close to home. I finally watched it for the first time last year, however, and it’s tailor-made for our podcast. So we talked about The Babadook.

Quick note to paid subscribers (or those who might want to be): I haven’t got essays out for the last couple of months, but I plan to catch up this month with 2-3 fiction pieces. Sit tight for that and, as always, thank you so much for supporting my endeavors. ❤️

Links

Scientists believe they’ve solved the mystery of the death of hikers at Dyatlov Pass.

The Marilyn Manson reckoning.

“Art asks us to be aware of the particular and the universal, both at once. And that’s why, of all the things that have the potential to unite us, none is more powerful than the communal experience of the arts.” Steven Spielberg on going back to movie theaters.

Chris Arnold @ChrisArnoldInc

I've added Wuthering Heights to this video of a panda sliding around in the snow so I can watch it every morning when I wake up and have an instant morale boost.

“Time makes misfits of us all. Even people who spent their youth feeling totally at home in the world, doing whatever people who feel at home in the world do instead of going to goth clubs (sports??), will eventually find themselves at sea as the culture of youth moves on without them. If you don’t die young, you live long enough to become embarrassing. … But in a basement somewhere in the world—or, if the clubs never open again, somewhere out of it—there will be familiar boots tracing familiar patterns on the floor. The Goth Club of Eternity has no bouncer.” Jess Zimmerman on the Goth Club of Eternity.

Buitengebieden @buitengebieden_

This is Statler.. He is a 33 year old bat and loves to go on his daily morning ‘flights’..

The shape of a story.

David Lynch dropped an important announcement.

Reading/Watching/Listening

I’m reading Stephen King’s Dance Macabre, his nonfiction exploration of the rhymes and reasons of horror fiction. Like me, it’s almost forty years old, so I find it by turns insightful and slightly outmoded. If you like genre fiction or film, and particularly if you make/want to make genre fiction or film, it’s probably worth taking a swing through.
The Criterion Channel is currently streaming a collection of short films by Jennifer Reeder. Last year, I recommended her feature, Knives + Skin, and if you liked that you would like her shorts, which feature the same elements of teenage girls, lost women, neon aesthetics and quiet epiphanies. Reeder straddles the line between experimental and narrative film, so be ready to take some journeys.
New Hold Steady is coming later this month.