HELTER SKELTER 53,978 words 14 days

Pleased to say that now that Appalachia has begun to shiver and molt mk.gee season has come back around in full force. Time to once again ruin my year-end Apple Music statistics with an album displaced between the old and the new, the warm and the frigid, lost to everything but me and my car stereo.

Earned through challenge (below) a copy of Erratum’s It’s Tough at the Top and maybe it’s the having worked in retail but I’m enjoying its depiction of middle-manager mediocrity and bureaucratic repetitiveness. It’s drudging up so many memories of empty loafers with its accuracy and it’s very funny.

Having only read House of Leaves, I went into Tom’s Crossing expecting it to be good, if a bit slow and predictable due to not only the length but the Western genre’s constraints, but I’m pleased to announce that I have been laden with a great shame for underestimating MZD. I can’t get enough of it.

Hundred pages into Infinite Jest and no one prepped me for how funny this book is. What do you mean there is wheelchair assassins????

Against no odds and to no one’s surprise I thoroughly dug the new T-Pynch. I’m glad he’s still having fun with the whole writing thing and by god it’s fun to read it. It was nice to run into Basnight again as I liked him in AtD, and I was eurekastruck by the timely (new movie) Skeet/Zoyd connection.

Congrats!

Had this neat computer-breaking idea to alphabetize every single letter of the KJV into one gigantic paragraph and self-publish the tome thru Amazon but after hours of trying and failing to finagle Notepad++ into cooperating with me, I googled it and found that that is already a piece in the SFMOMA.

Man I get on Twitter for like five minutes and I’ve got Tommy Wiseau in my feed givin me everything I don’t need from him. While he’s out of virtually nowhere on a disappointing patriotism and “bring GenZ back to God” kick I’m still hung up on my “give me Big Shark on DVD” kick. We are not the same.

Part of me is screaming PACKWATCH but then again the entirety of me has seen the video and so I’ve more or less concluded that indeed the pack has been watched. Unfortunate that the lesson taught to him wasn’t lived through to be learned from but he was never one to accept lessons, greedy and proud.

I haven’t been active: I found a toad in the bottom of a bag of Lucky Charms and it told me to beware the things which would soon grow in my throat. I had assumed it meant the coming words, but in fact it meant the more obvious warts. I’ve been warring with growths and polyps and can only now speak.

Monday Mini-movie🧵: I got a short one for this week. Pulling out another documentary that has been on my watchlist ever since the trailer went viral: Grand Theft Hamlet (2024). A film captured entirely within the virtual world, I am simply pumped to see GTA transform into medium of film.

Just saw a goth do the worm in the middle of a mosh pit. The guy’s playing bluegrass. I understand nothing. The world is an oyster and I’m one of those inflatable dudes they put outside of car dealerships. Loosely equipped and tightly strung. Life is short. Do the worm. Live hardet. Understand less.

Finally found a copy of Phenomenology of Spirit. Grail acquired for $10. And it’s annotated! Feelin the luck this day. I am not smart enough to read it but I’ll get there. Same for Tractatus. My tantalizing mistresses. I will hold these apples until I can eat them core and all with my big boy teeth.

I think I’m sufficiently depressed enough to start this. The mother of all chodes. #booksky

I have read Calvino in Rome. I have read Dante in Florence. I have read Beckett in Paris.

I’m increasingly getting into authentically logorrheic books (I’m fascinated by the internet’s creation of an eternal present with news updates making every passing second visible (and automartyrdom via bearing witness (and it creating a condition of solipsism))) and Mc Aloran may just fit the bill.

Monday Mini-movie🧵: Ozu’s final film by seasonal order: Late Autumn. A film that navigates its way through one of Ozu’s largest casts. Every character in this film plays into some significant story beat, however, the plot still revolves around daughters getting married off. #filmsky #movie #film

Not-So-Monday Mini-movie🧵: We’ve all had those weeks where work is extra taxing. I just had one. So this is a little late. An Autumn Afternoon is Ozu’s swan song. A bittersweet end to a long career, Ozu invites us into his final cinematic grappling of complicated emotions. #filmsky #movie #film

excerpt: lines 378-404 of a forthcoming work

After a number of years of staring at it in my up-next pile I finally started Hopscotch (following the long route) and haven’t been able to put it down. Joycean and constantly surprising. Lyrical and lunatic. Wrangled chaos, lightning in a chalk outline. I’m starting to think Cortázar might be him.

Monday Mini-movie🧵: With this week we near the end of this string of our Ozu marathon. The End of Summer (1961) is the penultimate movie the director helmed, which epitomizes end of natural cycles, old history becoming relevant once again, and the great muse - death. #movie #filmsky #film

Monday Mini-movie🧵: the next season in the Ozu catalogue is Early Summer. This movie is a thematic twin with Late Spring. Ozu explores his beloved themes of marriage, intergenerational communication, and another protagonist named Noriko. But does Early Summer improve upon Late Spring? #film #filmsky

Monday Mini-movie🧵: Continuing the Ozu seasonal movie streak, today I’ve watched Late Spring. This film has fissured the cinephile community more than Last Jedi did to Star Wars. After a few more rewatches, I may weigh in on *that* vase… for now, I just want to sing its praises #film #filmsky #movie

Monday Mini-movie🧵: It’s a short one today. One of the reasons Ozu has intrigued me as subject of study is how interchangeable his movie titles are. Using the seasons as a frequent movie title muse, I’m going to watch these films in calendar order starting with Early Spring.

Monday Mini-Album🧵: Normally, I talk about movies on Mondays but my favorite band - Black Country, New Roads - just dropped a new album so it’s time to amend that. Forever Howlong is an album I’ve been hotly anticipating seemingly for forever. Definitely well worth the wait. #musicsky #bcnr

Monday Mini-Movie🧵: I felt like crossing off a movie that’s been on my backlog for forever. This week I visited Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. One of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most acclaimed works, here Fassbinder experiments fast and loose with love, taboo, and melodrama. #filmsky #cinephile

Reading Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu and just got to this part, and feel like I've climbed to the top of a mountain!!

Monday Mini-Movie🧵: So I’m still thriving in my Ozu phase, so I’m going to briefly talk about his oddball comedy Good Morning (1959). The cinematic equivalent of drinking carbonated water, the film’s tone is so lightweight it could fly away despite coming from a “serious” director. #film #cinephile

Monday Mini-Movie🧵: In a late night post, my mind drifts towards Nosferatu (2024) helmed by Robert Eggers. Now with film’s hype and zeitgeist slowly coming towards a close, let us wade into the shadow of the monolith that is cinema’s greatest contribution to the vampiric lexicon. #filmsky #film

KINTSUGI Acrylic (and a little bit of blood as a treat) on 3’x4’ canvas

Monday Mini-Movie🧵: Today is the day for a double feature. Titan of Japanese cinema, Yasujiro Ozu is one of a small handful of directors to ever get a second chance at making the same movie again! We will juxtapose A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) and its remake Floating Weeds (1959). #filmsky #film

Valid

Honestly mood

Monday Movie Mini-🧵: Returning from last week’s focus on anthology films, this week we revisit Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) directed by Jim Jarmusch. With cigarettes and coffee being the titular central plot of each vignette, this plot framework becomes the best appetizer to Jarmusch’s style. #film

Maybe it makes me a bad brodernist to read Colleen Hoover. Maybe the ghost of Gass will come to me in my sleep and tell me in his weird little soft midwestern accent that I’m wasting my time. But what is time for if not laughing at our son’s big balls? Or growing aquatic over the smearing of manure?

Monday Movie Mini-🧵: We shift our gaze to the DIY cult classic: Slacker. Helmed by the modern master Richard Linklater, we undergo a raw version of the plot structure and themes that is his art’s heart. Responsible for kicking off the 90’s indie film scene, is it still relevant now? #film #cinephile

Every time Deep Vellum posts about Schattenfroh my gut wrenches and I feel like I need to crawl out of my skin. I crave that book fiercely. August is too far away. Tantalizing. I’m sure anyone who’s read the Untranslated post about it feels the same way but god what promise. Solenoid all over again.

Monday Mini-Movie 🧵: For Black History Month, we are re-experiencing the seminal Spike Lee joint - Malcolm X. Staring Denzel Washington in the titular role, this film serves as a wake up call to its audience with how it dramatizes this man’s - and a nation’s - life struggle.

Monday Movie Mini-🧵: This week, we magnify a new luminary in what I’ve personally dubbed as the “Wickian” genre of action movies: Monkey Man (2024). Featuring Dev Patel as the cinephile holy trinity - actor, director, writer - he punches the genre into surreal territory. #film #movies #cinephile

Monday Movie Mini-🧵: our first film is a recent addition to the New Korean Cinema art movement - Decision to Leave (2022) - directed by Park Chan-Wook, of cult classic Oldboy fame. For those going in blind, this Neo-Noir deftly obfuscates and subverts genre expectations. #film #cinephile #movie

Backtobacked Smile 2 and Substance last night. Elated at the thematic commonalities blending seamlessly into one ultraweird experience. The former contained an image I had seen in a nightmare many moons ago and it was like seein an old friend at a birthday party for someone I didn’t think they knew.

I have slain the great beast, the waking terror, the fourteen pound delusion. Two years of work and Bottom’s Dream is finally done. A true masterpiece. I have never crossed the line so strongly and so frequently between loving and hating a reading experience, between perceiving a genius or a madman.

I will probably never watch Flight Risk on account of I’m backlogged to hell but you gotta hand it to its marketing team: there is no better strategy than big bald head. Slip the trucker hatted clear sleeve off the dvd to reveal bald ass head? Genius. Fivehead on the poster? Give them twenty Oscars.

This book goes so hard. A third of the way into it and I already want to thrust it toward every freakwild writer or otherwise fringe person I know and yell THIS IS THE FIRE OF THE GODS. It’s a freewheeling nocturnal necromantic electric guitar flying a million miles a second over doubled kick drums.

Rest in peace to my favorite director of all time. A man of singular voice and also a man of singular voice. An icon of unpretentious creativity. Art was his life and so his life was art. Burn a cigarette unsmoked down to the filter and pour out a cup of black coffee in his honor. Blue skies forever