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10/22/2025 Pet Spotlight & Soundtrack: Mina
pet spotlight!
For all of autumn, MMPP is spotlighting our favorite pets: real or imaginary, yours or a wild one. We want to know your pet's artist statement AND their favorite songs. Send us all the deets so the world can get to know your brilliant buddy!
spotlight on: mina
I Don't Care Anymore - Phil Collins
Sun in My Mouth - Björk Nosferatu - Air Remix by the Flower Pistols Moody - ESG What Have You Done For Me Lately - Janet Jackson Birds - Electrelane Girl Like You - Bluphoria Endless alleyways - Zephaniah Houdini - Kate Bush Make 1,2 - Arthur Russell Sleep - Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions I Was Young When I Left Home - Bob Dylan by Kim Göransson  It's October again and a time for spooky things. In looking for new horror to watch I also browsed my letterboxd diary and wrote down some films I've enjoyed and decided to check which of those are streaming for free because art should be available to everyone. Ideally, of course, you should watch these without annoying ad breaks, but times are dire. Ideally we should have a free library streaming site available to everyone! (Kanopy is a great resource if its available to you. If not directly available there are some libraries that will let you get online cards that allow you to watch a couple of titles a month.) Until such a time, here are 31 mostly horror movies you can watch for free (as of the writing of this post) and maybe you'll spy something you haven't seen before. Happy haunty meowctober, friends!
Haunty Meowctober! Bonus watch: dragula!You can watch season 3 of The Boiler Brothers' Dragula for free on something called Xumo Play.  
Pet Spotlight!
For all of autumn, MMPP is spotlighting our favorite pets: real or imaginary, yours or a wild one. We want to know your pet's artist statement AND their favorite songs. Send us all the deets so the world can get to know your brilliant buddy!
Spotlight on: Saint Aloysius
12 SONGS FOR SAINT ALOYSIUS
by Kim Göransson  My favorite scene in Wanda, Barbara Loden's low budget feel-bad 1970 drama and only feature film, is after she meets Mr. Dennis and they're having spaghetti in a restaurant. Spaghetti with a red sauce. They're the only guests in the restaurant. The staff or owner is looking on, impatient for them to leave. Wanda is eating with an appetite while Mr. Dennis smokes his cigar. He tells her to wipe her mouth. Her beer glass is empty. She asks if he wants some bread, talking to herself because he doesn't respond: "That's the best part I like. Don't you like that - that part? Sop it up. Don't you like it? I do." For a moment she is joyful, teasing. Sopping up the sauce, her favorite part. Don't you like it? I do. *** In Splendor in the Grass (1961), directed by her husband-to-be Elia Kazan, Barbara Loden plays Ginny, Warren Beatty's character Bud's wild, doomed and ukulele playing sister, who has returned from Chicago after an annulled marriage and rumored abortion. She has flunked out of art college. She has rebelled, mainly against her father, while Bud can't stand up to him. She's a disappointment, returned home. She is doomed because she has crossed the line of what is acceptable for a woman. She sees too many men. One of them is married. She wants to drink and party. Her character functions as a cautionary warning for the main character, Deanie, played by Natalie Wood, of what going too far looks like, but also as inspiration, to refuse and to want something else, something more. Or to just want. Ginny disappears less than halfway through the film, after causing a scene at a party, having been scolded by her father. She is sexually assaulted in a car outside, Bud coming to the rescue. Men fighting. Her character has served its purpose. We are later told by Deanie’s mother that she was killed in a car accident some other night: “We all knew something like that would happen. The way she carried on.” We are left to fill in the gap. What happens to Ginny. The way she carried on.  *** Before the spaghetti scene but after she has told the judge that she has no objections, that the kids are "better off with him", her husband, and after she has inquired about work and been told that she's just too slow, Wanda walks into a bar. "Do you want something, Blondie?" She's caught off guard. She orders a beer. Rolling Rock. She has her hair curlers and a shirt with little blue flowers. She has her white purse and blue wallet. A man offers to pay for her beer as she's searching for change. There is no time for Wanda to exist here before becoming the transaction between two men, the bartender and the man. She wakes up to the man trying to sneak out of the motel room, hurries to get dressed and chases after him. She catches him but he drops her off at an ice cream parlor. Speeds off as soon as she's out of the car. She starts to run after the car but stops. The woman behind the counter hands her an ice cream cone. Plain. She’s holding the ice cream cone, looking at it and looking around. We don't see her eat it. *** The first cut of Wanda was 3 and a half hours long. How many other food scenes were cut? Is there a scene where Wanda is getting ready, rolling her hair? Does she walk along the road, eating the ice cream cone? Wander the shopping mall for hours? Do she and Dennis stop for pizza on the way, another diner, another bar. Does she tell him what her favorite part is? *** Watching Wanda after Splendor in the Grass, it feels like a continuation of the character. Both Ginny and Wanda refuse the life they’re supposed to live. On The Mike Douglas Show, Barbara says of Wanda: “She doesn't know what she wants, but she knows what she doesn't want.” The last time we see Ginny she is driving off, crying, out of the scene and out of the film. We first meet Wanda crashing on a girlfriend's couch, presumably after a night of drinking, hiding under sheets, an annoyed husband rushing past her, a baby crying. In a long faraway shot, we watch her walk through a mining quarry. A clear tiny white figure against the grey, depressed landscape. Ginny in her white dress, falling in a sea of black-suited men.  *** Wanda is eating chips in the bar where she first meets Mr. Dennis. She has surprised him mid-robbery, pushed past him for the restroom before he can stop her. Afterward she sits at the bar and eats chips. They look like plain potato chips. Mr. Dennis has tied the barman on the floor behind the bar and he is now acting in his place. She asks for a beer and Mr. Dennis gets her one from the tap while trying to get the cash register open. He slaps it down, flustered, spilling. Wanda is unfazed. She eats the chips that were already on the bar and drinks her beer. Holds up one large potato chip and bites into it. She tells him about how she lost all her money. She asks if he has a comb so that she can comb her hair. *** "The hair curlers, the handbag. The bag, that strange, oversized handbag with its mysterious contents, is an event in itself. Everything in Wanda’s life has gone, but this immaculate still life of a handbag is there to bear witness, a proof of reality, proof that there is something that remains even if there is nothing inside." - Nathalie Léger, Suite for Barbara Loden *** Mr. Dennis robs a convenience store, walks out with beer and whiskey, and they stop off the main road somewhere. A gravel road in a field, buildings and a chimney in the background. There is always some piece of civilization interrupting the landscape. Gravel heaps, reminders of where Wanda and the film started. Two dogs follow Mr. Dennis. He has beer, Piels Real Draft, in one hand and whiskey, Jack Daniels, in the other. Wanda sits on the car and eats something that looks like bread, a pickle, and later something that breaks rather than tears, a cookie? Some kind of snack. Drinking beer. It is as close to peaceful as we will get. Mr. Dennis has a tender moment, placing his suit jacket on her shoulders. Then he tells her she should do something about her hair, that it looks terrible. She says she lost all her rollers. He suggests she should cover it up. “Get a hat.” “A hat?”  *** (I send blurry photos to R. asking if she knows the whiskey label. It looks like Jack Daniels but not conclusively. Freezing on Mr. Dennis standing on the car, swinging the bottle to the sky, fighting the annoying toy airplane buzzing overhead that has ruined the moment, broken the illusion. Too grainy to make out. Ezra Brooks? Rewinding. One frame, as Mr. Dennis gets into the car holding the bottles, offers irrefutable evidence.) *** Barbara Loden wanted to adapt The Awakening but couldn’t find the funding. I am reading Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel, imagining the scenes in grainy long intimate shots, Barbara playing lead because she would be best for the part, directing herself, eating bonbons in the New Orleans heat. *** On the night they meet, in another hotel room, in the middle of the night, Mr. Dennis tells Wanda to get dressed and get him something to eat. He takes her pillow in a ridiculous show of authority and places it behind him, making her get up. There's a place open all night. He wants her to get 3 hamburgers. She can’t find her wallet, gives up looking for it: “Oh well, nothing in it anyhow.” Mr. Dennis gives her money. He is particular about his burgers: "No garbage. No onions. No butter on the bun. I want the bun toasted." When she returns he slaps her because he saw her talking to someone on the street. The order is wrong. There's onions on the burger, and “garbage”. Lettuce. He makes her take it off. She scrapes it off in the trash bin, where she finds her wallet he'd stolen and looked through while she was gone. Pictures of her family, kids. Wanda likes onions. "I don't know why you don't like onions? I do." *** In I Am Wanda, Barbara Loden talks about reconnecting with her mother in the last years of her life, while she was sick and dying. They talked and got close. Her mother told her she tried to abort her but was glad she didn't. It was the depression era. Her mother told her she wouldn't know what to do without her now. Barbara tells the camera she didn't feel bad, that she understood.  *** Wanda is sitting in another bar with another man. Uniform, eagle patch. What went down with Mr. Dennis is on the TV but she is not watching. The bomb was fake, nothing inside. She holds a cigarette. The man tries to talk to her but she ignores him. “You just sit there.” Bottles of beer on the table, white label with red and gold. He orders fresh ones. Red convertible, another off-road quarry. He pushes her down, tries to rape her. Wanda is frozen but then fights back, screams. Manages to get away, out of the car. *** Nathalie Léger: “Her bag, she doesn’t forget her bag. She escapes, running, she stumbles and falls, gets up, runs into the nearby bushes, keeps going, loses her way. It might only be a little patch of municipal woodland but it might as well be a mythical forest; she has entered the circle of forgotten antiquities and of fairy-tale coincidences, the site of indecipherable truths, all preserved there between two parking lots. Running, frantic, she vanishes, as into sleep.” *** In interviews on both The Dick Cavett Show and The Mike Douglas Show the men insinuate that Barbara Loden must have had help from her “great director” husband, “since the film’s now won a prize, you know” (Dick). She ignores the implication, responding earnestly that yes he was very helpful. On The Mike Douglas Show, appearing alongside Yoko Ono and John Lennon, she says: “Yoko and I have sort of a feeling for each other.” Finding a longer clip of the interview is nearly impossible, where at the end she takes the stage with Plastic Ono Band, performing The Elephant’s Memory. Barbara stands to the side, next to John, playing a drum, while Yoko sings. *** America loves a roadtrip movie and a heist movie, both fantasies of new beginnings, of leaving behind and starting new, from scratch, temporarily released from reality and history, if you only dream. Who doesn’t want to dream? Who doesn’t want an adventure? Don’t look back, don’t note the graves. Here, see this open road and horizon full of possibilities. They replicate an alluring image of American freedom, even if at the end you go up in a hail of bullets. Wanda, the movie, refuses to be in service of this dream. There is no dream and no escape. She is traveling but not really going anywhere, from one man to another, one quarry to another. Wanda is in survival mode. There is no space for her. She is just trying to make it from one moment to the next. Food feels like one part of this refusal. Food is material. Eating is basic survival. Repetitive. Wanda is bleak and doesn’t offer hope but these are moments of pause, of some brief enjoyment, of existing undisturbed. ***  It's night and Wanda arrives at another building. The muted sound of people inside. A woman checks on her: “Are you waiting for someone?” The final scene is a food scene. She's sitting with a group, crammed between two men, smoking and coughing and holding a beer. The woman is there also. They’ve taken her in. It’s chaotic but also a temporary respite. She gets a hotdog from a tray and eats it. Plain. The group is rowdy, talking, getting on. She's existing among them but no one is particularly focused on her yet. They're clapping along with the music. A fiddle and guitar player playing with fervor. We see them playing. It is loud. Wanda's eyes are closed. She's holding a cigarette.
 A local poet has been begging people to buy their book of poems and to also like them. The poet is Barracuda Guarisco (bærəˈkuːdə Guarisco) and the book they are begging people to read is called LIKE MY POETRY, PLEASE. The poet is known locally to publish poetry, host readings and shoot pool. According to a post on social media there were originally 25 copies but now only 3 copies of the book remain and there will never exist any more copies.        Local poet begs you to buy their book and like their poetry Local poet: 
2/3/2025 Featured: Our Will PowerOur Will Power is a project by mother and son team Janice and Brandon Will, both disabled in different ways, writing from both sides of the caregiving relationship, and participating in advocacy to address ableism, ageism, and our country’s inadequate care infrastructure. Using writing and other creative media, our mission is to create space for ourselves and those facing similar circumstances to remember the fullness of who we are and have been, beyond our roles giving and receiving care: Our many forms of grief and inspiration. Our griping, thriving, and coping. Our jubilance and joy. To create the future that’s yet to be written.  Janice: I was really doing this. Sixty-three, and for the first time in my life stepping forward to read my poems to friends and neighbors gathered in this library and eagerly looking to me. But I was embarrassed to call attention to my lack of expression! Parkinson’s was the reason. Facial masking. My family doctor had diagnosed. Then the neurologist he’d sent me to wasn’t so sure. I wasn’t certain of anything. Wasn’t myself. Didn’t talk much. Voice, weaker. I’d become dull of emotion. Aside from concern and self-consciousness. Like a painter’s palette stained from past bright colors, but with only splotches of grays and browns to work with now. When my youngest, Darren, had moved to New York, taking no books, I’d donated his childhood Paddington collection to our local library. Knowing they’d be loved. I’d wanted to go and grab his books from the stacks, I missed him so much. How to release that longing? Adult enrichment classes. At the community college. Enlivening! I made a whole new set of friends. We went to readings in Ann Arbor and downtown Detroit. But I never read my work like friends did. Always pictured I would. Once I found my voice. My professional life had been spent writing human interest stories and marketing copy. Semester by semester, I took whatever was offered. Fiction hadn’t been a fit. Sounded stilted. I was proud of some essays. One published in a local paper. But I’d always been called to poetry. The three piece band that had accompanied the readers before me began. I hoped that I’d brought the emotions to my words that I couldn’t to my face or voice while reading them. Just weeks before I’d watched my middle son, Brandon, at his MFA graduation reception, read his work with confidence and finesse, wowing the whole full room. I knew how long he’d been rehearsing. Remembered the crowd of stuffed animals lined around the Franklin Stove, getting the best seats in the house, when he was a child. If he could’ve been in my audience, I knew he would’ve understood how much I missed him, too. Brandon: Not being at Mom’s first reading—it didn’t feel right. She’d been there for mine. At the mall. When I was seven. She was proofreader for my first published work, too. Cricket Magazine. She always encouraged me. All the way to moving to Chicago for college in my twenties, where I became part of the city’s vibrant writing community, and began performing my work frequently. But aside from my MFA reading, during my two years in New York, I’d only been able to bring myself to read one other time. I hadn’t been this shy since Junior High, inexplicably overwhelmed (undiagnosed “severe” ADHD). After I returned to Michigan to intervene in her health spiral, we talked about how we’d each like to start reading again soon. To be a part of more communities, see our writing through, and to perform our work, both separately and collaboratively. But “soon” evaporated into a series of crises, a decade’s worth of traumas: The heedless progression of Parkinson’s, a betrayal by a family member that pushed us toward a new beginning in Chicagoland, the isolation of the pandemic, three major hospitalizations in six years, learning to live with disability as she lost her mobility. Despite this, these two hearts generated a quarter million words: journals, a screenplay, our joint memoir written from both sides of the caregiving relationship, and a nonfiction book for Brandon that had broken off of our collaboration. But it seemed less and less possible we’d ever perform again. read the full post here
1/1/2025 The 2024 Mix by Bex
Happy new year & happy half-birthday to two humans and one cat in my home! As usual, I'm sharing a mix of my favorite songs that were released in the last year as my January 1st party favor.
Lately I've been sharing a second sprawling playlist of other songs I loved, too, since I stick to an 80-minute limit on my favorites list as a callback to its origins as a burned CD. I hope there are some wide open spaces in your day today that might be filled with music for a while. -Becca Klaver 
Runners up playlist here
12/6/2024 Chorus Blog: Happy PhantomChorus Blog is our opportunity as the team behind Meow Meow Pow Pow to share our interpretation of the themes we ask writers to submit work for. Here is our Chorus Blog on... "Happy Phantom."
Acrylic Apparition, The Return - Krystle Griffinart by the author On a day just like this, painted gray overcasted skies that rained off and on, several canvases arrived and filled my apartment. Varying degrees of completion , styles, medium and life. The pieces of her soul left behind; her art.
One stood out. One she had barely begun to bring it to life, yet the fainted started lines stretched out and took hold. An outlined woman, reverenced in a hallway. Hands clasped. The beginning of my brushstroke was fury. Ignited inspiration that shook from my root. I dove head first right in. I felt the canvas move me. Bewitching my fingertips in rhythmic creation. It was delicious kismet. . Held frozen in the midst of this painting, a ghost of a woman who once was started on canvas then halted. A painting over top of the ghost of an unfinished painting before, this canvas living in the corner of my kitchen, haunting me. This old piece of someone else’s history. A piece from a collection of a woman now passed. Her leftovers, now housed in my apartment. A gift from her son, a stranger to me, who just a couple months ago, stood in the middle of my living room with grief soaked air around us. Complete silence. He wished them goodbye and good luck on their future lives. They were his mother’s. An artist no longer in this realm, left behind a house full of her work. Abstract to portrait, from landscape to still life, and all throughout the seasons of her existence. Married name back to maiden, from fresh student to a skilled artist. Fifty canvases filled my apartment, brimming it to its limit. I shuffled through them one by one. Connecting and dreaming up her story. With each painting, each manipulated speck of color, I witnessed a woman whose art was embedded into her fiber. It ebbed, flowed and grew as she went through life. A passed torched torture of artist block, now in this moment, has its grips on me. I was able to carry on her painting a little further. However, it stands frozen yet again. This painting on top of painting of a woman stilled. Alone. Perhaps she too is held in time where an unfinished piece stands in a corner. Matryoshka dolls of the past, present and future. I hold this painting close, intertwined with me as I try to carry her forward. For now, I wait. Wait for the spark to return. For the story to come back and carry on with me. I wait for the block to be lifted so that I can set this phantom free. . On a day just like this, I began again. As if no time had passed, like an old friend. I picked up a single paint and brush and started with the tiny thought of what if I placed a single stroke here. With a twist of my wrist, a swish and a flick, the spell was broken and intuition took me by surprise. Once again knowing exactly what to do. When truthfully, I simply allowed myself to get lost. On a Thursday night, there she and I were again, in the middle of my kitchen. As the euphoria crashed over me, I found myself deeply entrenched in gratitude for the return of inspiration. I began to type out the words to a friend when a second wave knocked me breathless; the realization that the weekend to come is Mother’s Day. The air turned dense, lungs exhumed, I burst. Her presence made known. I was to finish this today. And I did. To all mothers in every form. With love.
by Kim Goransson
Hi friends! I will be updating this playlist weekly, every Monday morning, with 4 new songs, and probably throw the old ones into a mega playlist. I'll share it in our instagram story when it's up for anyone who wants to listen. 4 songs and a playlist of about 15 min feels like an ok length for most people to listen to if they want without too much investment. I want to share new and old music I discover through out the week. I want to share music that feels inspiring and makes you want to get up and do something, make art, take a walk, or music with a lot of feeling, music to feel your feelings with, whether happy or sad. A small weekly routine to chart through whatever time we are about to live through next.
Maybe I'll do concept weeks (like Swedish Punk). If anyone wants to make one come find me, or write [email protected]. As always, I'd love for it to be collaborative. Without further words, here is the first weeks playlist: Kim |
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