Happy first friday of gemini season pups and tragic angels. Do you have a summer playlist or would like to make one and write a few words to go with it? We want it and would love to feature it here on the blog! Get in touch [email protected]. We're friendly!

You also have plenty of time to submit to our current theme: CAT*S OUT OF THE BAG! Submissions are open until June 28th. 

Something has been revealed. What was the cat and why was the bag and now it's out and it can't return to what it was. Was it a detective story with a twist ending? Did the detective suffer from insomnia and flashbacks? What is the shape of a secret? Dig it out from between the tender cushions with the old candy wrappers smelling sour and lay it by the window like a brand new feeling. Maybe cool embarrassment, a lump of coal the size of a fingernail and stuck. Right there. Watch it. Maybe being able to breathe again after a long, long time. The new cat in the old apartment running. Give it a name and fill the gaps. Write it down. 

Submission Guidelines 

Meanwhile, this is what we're listening to while reading submissions and basking in warm weekend sunlight. Please enjoy this judiciously curated summer playlist for our queen, Vanderpump Rules' capricorn mvp Katie Maloney:

We're digging ourselves out of the blue and making summer playlists to share with each other. If you have one, or want to make one, and write a little about it, send them to [email protected] (Spotify or any platform, or just write the songs down)

by: Jane-Rebecca Cannarella

​A decade ago, I was laid off from the Canadian Yellow Pages’ outsourced US office, located in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. We had gotten the notice regarding the layoff six months earlier and several days before Thanksgiving. The obscenely early heads-up was due to our severance package and benefits. By giving so much notice, our severance and unemployment benefits were contingent upon the notification of the layoff and not the end date. This also meant that we stopped accruing hours for PTO, vacation, and sick time.
 
In the tepid blue grey office, padded from floor to ceiling like a cell, my coworkers and I spent the remaining six months training our replacements in Canada. Or, if you were me, you spent six months throwing away bundles of work orders for complex publishing, watching Netflix, and stealing everything that wasn’t nailed to the ground.
 
Summers have always been a time of renewal in my life. Moving, quitting jobs, getting laid off from jobs, starting school, graduating school: all of these have come during the summer months. When June arrived and my unemployment began, with framed office-place inspirational posters tucked under my arm, one of my best friends who worked at YPG (a Ms. Liz Bergland, otherwise known as the art editor for MMPP), one of our coworkers, and I went to the Cork Tavern in Glenside, Pennsylvania. The Cork was a small tucked away little house converted into a green-carpeted bar with wood paneled walls, a more-plastic-than-TV big screen TV mounted in a corner, and “don’t drink and drive” posters from 1985 framed on the walls (including one of Stevie Wonder that I think of often). The whole bar smelled of smoke, a blissful nicotine holdout from cigarette bans, and the only food available were dusty mini bags of chips and pretzels. Three bodies in a row at the bar, we were “allowed” to leave YPG at noon, and the afternoon sun broke through the smudged small windows in oily prisms. Liz, my coworker, and I all in dresses and illuminated by the defiant rays, drank cheap pitchers of golden beer, smoked Camel blues, and crushed gin and tonics. Progressively getting louder and drunker, the hours moved in speeding currents as curious regulars filtered in and out of the bar around us.  
 
By the time the sunshine swapped to slate blue night, a dense fog of smoke shadowed the atmosphere above our heads. And as blast-assed drunk folks will do, in between gossiping and chain smoking, my coworkers and I commandeered the lime green glowing jukebox at the end of the bar. We played Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl,” three times in a row, “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” by Stevie Wonder (in honor of his poster), “If I Should Fall from Grace with God” by the Pogues, and, when the alcohol was hitting harder shortly before the drunken crying would begin, Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.” I remembered the sweat pouring down the back of my peter pan collared dress, the thick fringe of my bangs sticking to my forehead, every pore smelling of smoke, and our three bodies huddled around the orb of the digital jukebox. The click of nails against the screen tried to tap in whatever song jumped into our addled minds. Someone was laughing loudly; it might have been me.

***

The next morning, my cheeks the texture of cotton and head several sizes too big for my neck, I was unemployed and would be homeless within three months. Buoyed by the confidence of my wanning twenties and the sweet summer child assurance that things would work out alright, I committed to having a weird summer. With my cats, Liono and Easy Mac, beside me in the bed, I took some Tylenol and put my “chill playlist” made years earlier on Windows Media Player. The ancient silver Dell computer whirred with effort from its reachable position on the thrift store desk nudged up against the bed. The solar lines from the Media Player danced lazily to “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters.”

***

​The years before YPG, and graduate school before that, I would celebrate summers with themed playlists burned, and decorated, and distributed to friends. During summers back home in San Diego, the chronically bugged family desktop would dolefully bleat out mix CDs struggling under the invasion of whatever was plaguing the computer as a result of LimeWire and Kazaa before that. Following graduating college before I moved back to the East Coast, and in between shifts at the Michael’s Arts & Crafts off Midway Boulevard, I would burn copies of CDs to mail to my friends in Glenside, often including Dizzy Rascal, Ben Folds, the Libertines, and Arthur Conley.
 
“3 Small Words,” from the Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack, “Under 21” by Save Ferris, “Ball and Chain” by Social Distortion, and “Anything Anything” by Dramarama were standards from the San Diego summers in between my undergraduate years. A mix called “Cowboy Fuck Fuck” included the Groovy Ghoulies, Pinback, The Black Heart Procession, Jurassic 5, and De La Soul and was compiled with help from my friends Schwarzey and Tim the summer between Freshman year and Sophomore year, and to this day it makes me feel SO COOL to listen to it. And even years before *that*, there was the mix CD that Kelly made our friend group, Loser Hill, after senior year of high school and the summer before we all left to go our separate ways across the country. I have carried these summer mixes with me throughout moves and major life changes, they live in cobwebby corners of my apartment, but they are never lost to time, space, or memory.

***

​Then there was moving back East, and quitting my office job, and graduate school, and YPG, and the antiquating of Walkmans, and the shuffle of Apple products, and the consumption of time that comes with adulthood.

***

***

I am a year, and some months, shy of a new decade. I have a job, apartment, cats, and stacks of gem cases filled with old CDs, many of them burned and the bottoms filled with scratches. I have no time. I have the bodies of old Apple products that were used just for music, now plastic shells of their former selves. They will not wake up. I live in a home filled with ghosts. I have a phone that is a computer, that is a crutch, which has an app that has more music than I will ever listen to queued and played at random in the background of my life. I have a framed painting in my living room that used to hang in the women’s bathroom of YPG that I stole off the wall the last day of my employment there. I have regrets that I call “life experiences.” I have a longing for summers spent making mixes, or the three hot months spent as a degenerate wearing hot pants and drinking Bloody Marys and listening to a mix with NKoTB songs threaded all throughout and eating hydrogenated oils in a baseball field.

***

​Sometimes it hurts my heart when a song from carefree times comes up randomly on the Shuffle of Spotify. I used to skip those songs, songs that hurt. I decided this summer to stop doing that. One time, years ago, my friend Melody told me that they had “to forgive the music,” from bad times. I am taking this summer to forgive the songs from a decade lost, and sometimes lost to very bad times.

***

​A week ago, I made a playlist on Spotify titled “Summer 2023: a return to cheese fries.” It’s not a burned CD made off a dinosaur Dell, or a mixtape made with friends sitting on a bed in San Diego, or the sweltering intensity of the last summer of my twenties spent with as much free time and summer-themed playlists as I could compile. It is a playlist made up of songs that I’ve forgiven from certain years of my life, and the joy of past summers, and the recollection of dirty feet moving in dance during 90-degree days, and concerts I’ve attended, and songs that were once played at a house transmuted into a bar where three young women bullied the jukebox.
 
I made the playlist in a fever, adding as much as I could, eager to go on a walk to the park so I could get lost in the summertime songs. When I finished, I ambled around my neighborhood, so different from Glenside but with the same abundance of flowers and smudgy sunlight.
 
By the time I made it to the park by my apartment, “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” by Stevie Wonder was playing. It reminded me of the day spent in the Cork that turned into night. In between the songs we put on, I had pulled out a stamp and stamp pad I filched from YPG’s office on the way out the door. It was the stamp to indicate which orders were to take daily priority, a stamp that stamped the word “HOT” At the bar, sticky with indulgence, and freedom, and the fear that comes with that freedom, I stamped the word “HOT” on my bare arms and legs and then on my coworkers’ arms. I tried to convince my coworker to let me stamp her forehead as we giggled like maniacs around smoky coughs.
 
The Stevie Wonder song that sparked the memory played and rattled my eardrums with the volume up too high. Someone was laughing loudly at the memory; I think it was me.

What makes a good summer album? Last summer I had It's Almost Dry by Pusha T on heavy rotation and it felt like a perfect summer album. My sister and brother inlaw visited and I remember that playing while we sat outside in the sun having drinks and talking. In some ways I think of summer music as happy, as hopeful, after a long winter. Listening to while outside, cooking, hanging out with friends or family. Harry Styles album fit into that too last summer but I don't think they have to be happy-sounding or upbeat. In 2019 I listened to Jesca Hoop's Stonechild while laying in a hammock in late summer and had an almost religious experience. It was more private than communal. I don't know what will become the summer albums for 2023 for me but here are some contenders, some albums I'm listening to now and feel "summery".

I started this album the other day while walking home and the first two tracks felt different and interesting so I kept listening while doing some chores, not paying close attention, but loving it. Now it might be my favorite album of the year so far. It's so intimate and spare in places but also so big, symphonic. Every song feels like a captured moment, not necessarily perfected, but real. The vocals never phone it in but keep surprising. It's not a happy album but it feels like summer. All the little sounds. Play the first track, which feels like a one take bedroom demo, while walking somewhere in the sunshine. I'm not sure how to define the type of music. It's folk, maybe, "singer-songwriter", even country in places, but feels like its own thing. I didn't know anything about her when I started listening, that she's a poet, but the lyrics are fascinating, and I'm only beginning to really listen to all the words. The almost 8 minute song Rat is absolutely stunning and you need to listen to it right now. I'm in love with this whole album.

This is more of a happy summer album with a retro 80s dance pop sound. Is this guy known? He should be a superstar. I've been wondering if there would be an album since I found the single Stereo Driver last year which should be a SMASH HIT. It feels like a timeless song that's always been around. If you're working on a teen show and you need a song for the school dance scene this is it. There are other songs on here that should be hits too, like SOW and LUV (I KNOW I WANT THIS FOR REAL). I just love his sound and this album is full of bangers. 

It's friday and the skies are blue and cloudless but you've been feeling kind of low and you don't know what you're doing, how to get out of it. Put on Wait Til I Get Over, Durand Jones (of Durand Jones & The Indications)'s first solo album, on full volume in your living room and open the windows, and it might get you out of it. I guess I'm on a retro kick. This is Black southern roots music: gospel, soul, rock, and it already feels like the kind of album I will keep playing because it just makes me feel good. The first song, Gerri Marie, will cut you into pieces. So good! We're having a small gathering for mother's day and I'll definitely be playing this. 

If you're looking for a more melancholy summer experience this might be for you. This album was released back in February but I keep returning to it and Benjamin Wood's deep baritone vocal musings. He's from Cornwall and I know nothing about Cornwall but if this is how it sounds I want to go. Sad indie cornish pop? It's an album to curl up with on one of those summer thunderstorm evenings after a hot humid day when large drops of rain starts beating on the window. Not a lot of music has stuck with me this year but this is one and I'll keep playing it this summer.

More retro sounds and this time disco. I don't know how I found the song Club Level but it's such a good song. It had me follow this band and I was excited to find out they released an album last week. Their spotify bio starts: "Far from the predictable center of the radio dial lies 79.5, a station that may or may not be entirely real. The soundtrack shifts smoothly, from '70s underground disco to addictive adult contemporary to sugary sweet girl pop." It's a fun album and a cool vibe! More saxophones in songs people! 

This isn't a small album by a lesser known artist but I just love Jessie Ware! This album is a full party, and I guess retro. What the fuck does retro even mean? This is timeless. Try playing That! Feels Good! and Free Yourself or Pearls without feeling like like you're on your way to somewhere. This whole album. It's summer. 

I was only going to do 4 or 5 of these but now I'm up to 7 because I want to add this quiet ambient album by Fred Again... and Brian Eno. I'm not sure what the collaboration is here but I take daily walks in the woods and I've been playing this a couple of times. It makes you want to lie down in the grass somewhere. Secret Life is borrowed from Leonard Cohen's In My Secret Life and Fred samples sounds and words and creates dreamy soundscapes. His singing sounds a bit like James Blake. I'm into it. It is definitely a more private than communal experience and I expect to return to it this summer when I want calm. 

That's it for now. Hope there's some stuff here you'll dig here! Let me know about your summer albums. 

​-Kim 

Welcome to Beach Reads. This is a feature based on the Date This Book feature that Janie originated on this blog back in 2018. Instead of dating a book that will inevitably break our heart, we will, at a safe distance, ask a book some questions to find out if it's a good Beach Read. Look, we know that's a big cliché. Maybe we're a big cliché. In the words of Logan Roy: You are not serious people. Fuck off. We will look at the cover to see if it would work well on a beach. Do we want to take a beach selfie with this book and post it to our 7 Instagram followers? Do we want to ponder the mysteries while reading this book drinking a cool refreshing beverage and eating pistachios with sand in our hair?

First up, Gina Tron's memoir Eat, Fuck, (Write About) Murder. It is now available for pre-order from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press and will exist in the world later this month, which is perfect timing for the beach. It's important to have enough time to coordinate your beach outfit with the cover of the book you're reading. This is what Eat, Fuck, (Write About) Murder's cover looks like:

​It's a pretty cool cover. It reminds us of the Hellraiser labyrinth but everything reminds us of the Hellraiser labyrinth. We don't know if that in the foreground with the title is a pool of blood or a plate of blood. Or a plate of heavily sauced pasta. And a neon sign with the writer's name in pink. The sign feels out of place. This feels like an eerie dream where there's a party in a dungeon somewhere and it's a bad idea but you go anyway, hypnotized by a strange underground beat.

This is what it says about the book on the site: "Gina Tron takes you to a perfect world cushioned with safety and sweetness like a plump Gusher. In Eat, Pray, Love, the protagonist travels around the world following her divorce to find purpose, meaning, and then love again. Eat, Fuck, (Write About) Murder is a much bleaker version of that story. In the midst of breakups with a serious boyfriend and a literary agent, Gina does some traveling, some eating, and writes about murder for work, but — spoiler — she does not fall in love again."

We don't know what that means ("like a plump Gusher"?) but we think if you were reading this book, holding this cover in your hands, on the beach, you would look pretty cool. People would be like, "Eat, Fuck (Write About) Murder? What in the hell kind of a book is that?" and be intrigued. Maybe they would even ask about the book and allow you to reply mysteriously and vaguely, wearing your book-cover coordinated beach outfit of serious greys and pink, peering behind dark, large sunglasses and a wide sun hat like an Italian actress: "Oh it's impossible to explain! Really... you have to read it yourself." Other people would probably be more like: "Hey! You in the dollar store hat! There are children here. This is a family beach! A family beach!"

We're undecided but think we're going to give it a pretty high beach cover score. It's ominous. It has pow factor. It has weird factor. It will upset fathers. If it makes you friends those friends will probably have issues that lead to unnecessary clusterfuck drama and misery.

MMPPL: Hi Gina. Your memoir Eat, Fuck, (Write About) Murder is coming out soon. Please let your book answer because we're trying to Separate the Art from the Artist and be objective. Firstly, Book (not Author), what the heck is going on in Vanderpumps Rules? If you were a cast member on Vanderpump Rules who would you be and why? Send a photo of a VPR cast member that encapsulates you.

EF(WA)M: Well, the annoying person who wrote me is obsessed with that show, and she created a lot of me while watching it. So I would like to think that I'm pretty well-versed in the drama. Right now, on the show, some of the cast members are starting to suspect that Tom Sandoval is sleeping with Raquel Leviss. And he is. They say women's intuition is strong, but a book's intuition is never wrong. Gina is eagerly awaiting the next episode and the reunion. I'm ready to watch the episodes of Jersey Shore again, where the cast visits Italy. They look stupid there and out of place, just like Gina.

I bet that Gina would like to think I'm like Ariana Madix because I was written in the midst of a breakup. But the breakup at the core of me does not involve betrayal. Ariana did deal with the breakup shortly after the loss of her beloved dog and grandmother. Gina was coping with body image issues after cancer surgery in addition to the breakup. So there's some extra pain involved, but Ariana is very beloved, and her breakup was groundbreaking. Gina is not that beloved (I'm sick of her because she keeps editing me and I want her to stop as I think I'm perfect now) and her breakup was pretty unremarkable. I'd say I'm more like Katie Maloney because Katie is also going through a breakup and she is out in Europe right now, sitting on a beach in Spain. Like Gina, she is rebounding. Katie found a younger man named Satchel; I doubt they will last. I won't even comment on Gina's ridiculous dating choices she made within my beautiful pages.

MMPPL: Wait there is a man named Satchel? Like the bag? Incidentally our new MMPPL theme is The Cat's Out of the BAG (please submit!)! It's a small lit world. We hope it works out for them, or not. It sounds like Gina went through a lot and if this interview was about her we would follow up on that. But back to the premade questions: Imagine that you'd get murdered soon and could only eat ONE egg meal before you die, what would you eat? How would you eat those eggs book??

EF(WA)M: I am an American big boy of a book, and yet I am set in Sicily. Do you understand how difficult it is to find a traditional egg meal for breakfast there? There are cafes on every corner, and yet all you will find are delicious pastries. Some of the best pastries you'll ever have in your life. Cannolis and cassata and things crammed with sweet ricotta. But no eggs for us big American boys who want a healthy four plates of bacon and eggs with an extra large, creamy iced coffee for breakfast. And all the eggs at the store are not in the fridge. So I'd ask my deranged creator to please smush a warm-temperature egg in between each one of my pages until I am satisfied and full. I hate her, and I wish she would stop editing me.

MMPPL: We think you should do that, with the eggs. Or your writer. As a promotion stunt. Like the book promotion stunts people used to do back in 2012 when they had energy and believed in things. It occurs to us now that it might be hard to Separate the Art from the Artist if the Art in question is a memoir so maybe this interview will be a failure, but that's fine. We're fine with failure. Why memoir? Do you feel like a memoir? How many memoirs is Gina going to write? Like there should be a limit. Are you the best one? Are there any memoirs you look up to? Or hate with a passion?

MMPPL: Ooh tell us more about the beaches of Sicily. How do the beaches compare to other beaches?  This is a Beach feature. We've been to Italy but not Sicily and it was... fine. Why did you end up there anyway? I guess that's in the book. Gina seems to move around a lot. We're also interested in the American obsession with violence. How do you touch on that?

EF(WA)M: Gina spent a lot of time looking at the Tyrrhenian Sea. One of the Airbnbs she stayed at was just blocks away from the water. She'd walk down and enjoy its turquoise beauty, daily. She also took a small boat out to the Tyrrhenian Islands, some of which are active volcanoes. One of the beaches on the island of Vulcano was full of black sand. Unfortunately, (honestly, I am laughing at her for this) she didn't lay out on the beach too much because it was winter. The weather was in the 50s and 60s when she was there. That space cadet even wore sandals a few times when true Scilians were wearing coats and scarves. Because it was off-season, Gina ended up being the only tourist on some islands and the isolation triggered her own experiences with violence. Between trying to overcome fear from an attack and writing about men attacking women all day for her day job, I try to make a lot of commentary on how hard and scary it can be to maneuver in the world as a woman. Especially when alone. Gina wrote true crime for a living and as we all know, women are usually not the perpetrators. This did not help Gina feel safe when walking down alleys alone to get to her temporary apartments.

She chose Sicily because her mom's side is Sicilian and it seemed like a beautiful place to visit. Gina felt bad that her mom and grandma had never made it to Sicily, despite talking about wanting to go. After undergoing cancer surgery, Gina's sense of mortality changed. She wanted to travel more than ever, especially since her job was remote and allowed her to do so. Living in Sicily was less expensive than living in New York City. It was quite affordable and also delicious. After Gina went through a breakup in 2018, she decided it would be wise to rebound somewhere far away. She had been planning on settling down in Vermont before that breakup. Ironically, she has now settled down in Vermont and with the character she longs to connect with the most in me. Gina is so pathetic, she was longing to see this man, her decades-long crush even when she is visiting Tunisia. It's like, Gina, get a life. They are married now and he designed my sexy cover. They are pretty cute together so I guess her longing had some root in reality. Anyway, I hope you read my pages.  

MMPPL:  That's all very... cute. We're just trying to find out if we will look cool reading this book or if we'll be made fun of. We're thinking about the beach and being less depressed, for our heads to be empty and our toes buried in hot sand. We want a very cold beverage. We know that Gina is a libra (obviously) but what sign are you? Or do you think astrology is just a big waste of time?

EF(WA)M: Gina's libra ass likes to see the good in everyone and that's partly why I look down on her. I am an adventurous and tactless Sagittarius. I am an independent and sexy big boy of a book. I do not put much stock in zodiac signs. That being said, do not place me on the shelf next to any Virgos or Scorpio books. They are jealous of the thiccness of my spine.

MMPPL: Did your writer always want to be a writer? It seems like such a terrible and self-obsessed profession. We are imagining a serious child wanting to be a writer using big words, being insufferable. Does she collect a lot of weird things? What posters did she have on her walls as a serious writer child?

EF(WA)M: Gina has wanted to be a writer since she was a weird young bud. She has a lot of Slimer and egg things, mostly gifts from people because they know how much she likes things that don't matter. I for one dated Slimer and he's nothing to write home about. When she was a pre-teen she had a lot of posters of dogs on the wall when her peers had posters of male actors. To make herself seem more normal, she put up posters of Devon Sawa but she really had no interest in him. Then as she aged a bit, she began cutting out magazine ads of clothing she liked and stuck them all over her ugly bedroom walls. The walls were not as beautiful as the pages inside of me. 

MMPPL: We liked Devon Sawa in SLC! Punk. That was good acting. And one of our friends has a Devon Sawa fan club. Do you dream of being made into a movie? Who would be in EF(WA)M if it was a movie and what kind of a movie would it be? A romantic comedy or a horror movie?

EF(WA)M: I would like to be a movie. The stories behind Gina's two other memoirs have already been optioned. One was funded and a full feature-length script was written. But in the end, it didn't make it to the big screen. The other was recently turned into a pilot and it is a quarterfinalist for a screenplay contest. But I don't think those two books got what it takes. I'm a big boy that knows that if I was optioned, I would be turned into a movie within a week. And Danny Devito would play Gina. In fact, he would play all the characters. I should be a one-man play of a movie. It would be a romantic comedy, except for the lack of romance and comedy. 

MMPPL: Seems like the other memoirs are doing pretty well for themselves. We're bored now and hungry so we think we'd like to conclude this interview and go for lunch. Does the book have any lunch suggestions or any final words for why EF(WA)M would be a good book to read on a beach? This is your last chance to make your case before we make our final decision. In truth, we mostly read fast paced detective stories with miserable sad protagonists and erotic thrillers so we're not thrilled about Memoirs. We're torn, we're discombobulated, but the cover looks like it could be a fast paced erotic detective thriller. 
​
EF(WA)M: Yes. Grab a slide of lo sfincione, aka Sicilian pizza. This chonky boy square of tomato sauce and anchovies will make you a hit on a hot, windy beach.

I'm a great book to read on a beach because, despite my dark parts, I am very funny. You can laugh at Gina as she tries to communicate with men on Tinder in a different country. She already had trouble talking to men in America. She also gets very uncomfortable when one man tried to put some "romantic" moves on her, so I laugh at that a lot. If you are perfect, like me, you can laugh at how awkward Gina is from your elegant and non-awkward beach towel. 

Final decision: REJECTED.