Several Full Moons - Izzy Maxson
For a sizeable chunk of my childhood my family lived on the outskirts of Moriarty, New Mexico, on the far southwestern edge of the Great Plains. A flat and yellowish gray landscape with the mountains far off on the distant horizon. We lived in front of a large cow pasture. That is important.
One summer at about age 9 I discovered werewolf movies from the 1980s. There aren't very many truly great werewolf movies, there's An American Werewolf in London and The Howling and then everything else is pretty much lesser. But I watched those and Wolfen and Silver Bullet (with Corey Haim and Gary Busey, based on a minor Stephen King work). There were a lot of coyotes in the area. They never attacked people. But sometimes they attacked dogs. Especially if they were outside on metal leads to doghouses which was pretty common. They would also attack cows. Whenever a night happened when one of these events was going on my mind would immediately picture it like a werewolf movie. Like the werewolf popping up in the window to slash at Gary Busey in Silver Bullet, or the scene in An American Werewolf In London with the man in the narrow corridors of the London Subway. But especially the sequence in The Howling when Dee Wallace's husband has sex with the hippie temptress (the only survivor at the end of the film) and they both turn into werewolves during the act. I would hear the coyotes tearing into cows and the cows baying in pain, the dogs on chains fighting back. The different pitched howls from both sides. I'd picture green and yellow eyed monsters stalking the fields. Years later when I saw a different horror film, The Silence Of The Lambs, I was shaken by the sequence that explains the title, "do you still hear them Clarice? The screaming of the lambs?" And even today when I hear dogs howling at night, let alone actual coyotes, I pick up the pace, feeling solidarity for that tweed clad, almost funny British businessman, his footsteps clattering on the stone as he tried not to acknowledge that he knew the werewolf had his scent. Pressure, Billy Joel - Brodie hubbard
I wrote on this very blog a few years ago about the TV movie which unnerved me as a child. And it wasn’t beast nor boogeyman, or anything else you’d expect that scared me. It was the creepiness of a pizza cutter rolling back and forth, and the grievous bodily harm it implied.
However what my reoccurring nightmares were about involved the distortion of time, specifically everything slowing down, and human bodies seeming to melt. The closest thing to seeing this in waking life was the music video for “Pressure.” Billy Joel’s first single in 1982 to kick off the release of his eighth studio album, “The Nylon Curtain.” This four and half minute video starts off with the singer in a chair watching rapidly changing black and white images and texts on a large monitor, a less restrained version of Alex’s conversion therapy in “A Clockwork Orange.” I mean… literally, Billy Joel is not tied up with his eyelids pried open. AND YET…! He’s still jerking around in the chair and there’s a freeze frame of him gnashing his teeth. There’s a zoom into the freeze frame which is uncomfortably long. This transitions into these unsettling set pieces of barking dogs, Billy Joel waking up in a bed in a black room filling with water, a party where people start flying into walls made of water and he seems to melt into the floor! It’s too much! Some more of this is repeated with a little kid representing Billy Joel, and there’s one more creepy shot of the kid’s face pressed against a screen. But you know what? A ketchup bottle flies by, the rest of this video and song really just feel like a Pink Floyd ripoff, and dude actually sings the lyric “Sesame Street / what does it mean?” I’m not scared of you anymore, Piano Man. Phantasm - Susan Kennedy
I was 17 when I went to see Phantasm with my boyfriend. First boyfriend, first horror movie at the Odeon, Dundee, 1979. It stank of fags and desperation. Kinda like him.
Phantasm played into all of my darkest fears. Who’s beneath the bed, what’s behind the wardrobe, the dark, mausoleums but mostly, my own imagination. I left the cinema with a lifelong fear of the dark and anyone wearing a black cloak or hood. Nuns, dead highwaymen on horseback, anyone with black cloaks and hoods. Especially if they’re under 5ft. Phantasm continued to evolve and thrive at least another 4 movies. The boyfriend? Not so much. He turned out to be a serial cheater. Died in a mausoleum. Found lying next to a lone black hood. What's that on the wall? - Joey Gould
Growing up in the eighties was frightening enough on its own, especially with a brother who was five years older than me. Consequently, he would watch things that weren’t age-appropriate for me; he & my mother like to reminisce about the time he was watching Gremlins & looked over at me, crying, then told my mother “I don’t think Joey should be watching this”. Bless her heart, mum had three of us to mind- four, if you count my father, who would carry us to her & say “deal with it” if we had a dirty diaper, even as she cooked dinner.
This led to a lot of such moments of terror, many of which are lost to my mind because of my dual threat AuHD & a severe concussion at the age of six. The scariest thing about my childhood might be how little I can recall. No, that’s not true. Out of that endless fog preceding my nascent consciousness, there’s my first memory of absolute movie horror: Labyrinth (Jim Henson, 1986). It wasn’t the baby-stealing or the goblins in the bedroom, those are whatever. After verbal sparring with Jareth (David Bowie), meeting Hoggle (Brian Henson), & finding the entrance, Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) enters the labyrinth. A long corridor stretches in both directions and Hoggle jump-scares Sarah in an attempt to discourage her. Then, she sends him away. The door slams dramatically behind her. She breathes, collects herself, and walks out of the frame as… What's that on the wall? A mass of eyeballs at the end of tendrils of moss, tracking her surreptitiously? “No thx!” said Baby Joe, running screaming out of the room! I wasn’t okay for days. Check out this biblically-accurate moss:
I noped out of the wood-paneled den so fast!
The Gate - Michael
Saturday night. My buddy's place. I was 8? 9? His parents were in their bedroom on the other side of the house, you wouldn't even know they were home. My buddy's older brother shows up and says he wants to put a horror movie called The Gate on.
Now... I was a lonely, hyperactive kid with a lotta problems. I didn't handle horror well. I mean, I owned all the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, but I kept them hidden away. Wouldn't even touch them unless I had company around. So, I'm already freaked out as big brother pops in the VHS tape. The opening credits appear--red text on a black background with chillingly ambient music. Then the film opens right into a nightmare sequence that centers around the terror of alienation, blending the familiar with the uncanny. That's what this movie does so well. It wrings out phantasmagoric terror from prosaic domesticity, all from the viewpoint of children who feel, for their own unique reasons, utterly alone. There's a scene where Terry, our protagonist Glen's mourning-metalhead pal, sees his deceased mother walking through the misty front door. His tough demeanor drops as he whimpers "mommy?" (I was endeared to him at that moment. I also felt like the air had been sucked clean outta my body. Unadulterated fright. Because when his walls crumble, so do the viewers.) He runs to her, embraces her. But something is terribly wrong. The scene cuts away, leaving us to wonder for a moment about Terry's fate. When we return, he lovingly finishes the embrace, only to realize he's been clutching Glen's now-dead dog. Yeah, this ain't a lighthearted romp. In this movie there are doppelgangers and wall-demons. There are rockets and rituals. There are eyeballs where eyeballs shouldn't be, and a hole to a demonic underworld. The forced-perspective demons are unforgettable, the soundtrack rules. This movie struck a terror-nerve inside of me. It also turned out to be a gateway into my lifelong love of horror shit. I watched it at the wrong time because it deeply traumatized my already fucked-up brain. I watched it at the right time because it made me feel slightly less alone. The Adventures of Mark Twain and the Icky, 1985 - Kim
I don't know how many times my sister and I watched Will Vinton's The Adventures of Mark Twain from 1985 in the early 90s but it feels like, for a while, it was on a constant loop. I'm trying to locate the memory, if it was on Svärdvägen (Sword Street) or after my mom and stepdad moved to Stenåldersvägen (Stone Age Street), in the TV room in the basement there. At my dad's? At my grandparent's? I can't remember the VHS, holding it in my hands. All my childhood memories feel incomplete and fragmented, a blurry collection of images, but this movie remains grafted somewhere in my fundamental programming even thirty years later.
Fear doesn't feel like the right word because I kept watching it. The word that comes to mind is icky. I was en-gross-ed with it. Like that feeling of impending childhood sickness. Something in your stomach. Did anyone else, as a kid, have this feeling that would come sometimes where you became detached from your body? Your body felt suddenly different? I would lie in a bean bag and feel a change I couldn't articulate. Press my fingertips together and they felt different. I associate that feeling with this movie; maybe I was watching it when it happened. Maybe that was dissociation. There's the main terrifying scene, I think somewhere in the middle, where the children step out of the claymation story elevator portal and encounter satan ("uh-oh"), or The Mysterious Stranger, with their contorting tragedy mask face, who builds a clay civilization only to destroy it, because humans are "a worthless, greedy lot". I remember dreading this scene in particular but actually the whole movie evokes dread: Adam and Eve in the garden and the snake, naming animals, and God's wrath, the lion turning on the lamb. Adam going over the waterfall, over and over. The frog full of trash, trying to jump. Mark Twain's greying, depressed doppelganger self. The movie feels cold, like something you can't trust. There are no warm moments, no comfort. Even the 3 main kid characters, Tom, Huck and Becky, offer no real comradery. It's a lonely place. As I remember it. The feeling of being stuck, high up in the sky, on one man's suicide date with a comet. Even heaven isn't your heaven; it belongs to some other creatures, with 3 heads. I wonder how much of the feeling has to do with the claymation itself. Something that shouldn't move but does, jerkily. Uncanny valley but not, but similar. I have memories of another swedish claymation series that give similar feelings of ickiness. Many years later, I bought The Adventures of Mark Twain on DVD and watched it with my step kids, about the same age as I must have been, and passed on the trauma. by Michael Seymour Blake Carpenter’s Someone’s Watching Me! didn’t get a proper physical media release in America until 2007—a cinematic sin. It’s not as iconic as some of his other films, but this tense little character-driven thriller belongs in any fan’s library, digital or otherwise. A somewhat lonely but upbeat woman named Leigh (Lauren Hutton) moves from NY to LA. She lands a job directing live TV for a local station and makes quick friends with her new co-director, Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau). Besides having to deal with unwanted advances by a creepy co-worker named Steve, things are lookin’ up for our hero. Soon, she starts receiving strange prank calls and getting letters and packages delivered by a mysterious company called "Excursions Unlimited.” Things continue escalating after she meets an intriguing philosophy professor named Paul (David Birney) at a bar. After realizing the anonymous harasser doesn’t plan on easing up anytime soon (the opposite, actually), and learning that the police are too indifferent or misguided to help, Leigh has a decision to make: flee or fight. This movie feels like a distant relative of Spielberg’s Duel, where a faceless truck driver relentlessly follows and harasses a man (David Mann to be precise) through endless desert roads until, desperate, worn down, and angry, Mann must make a final stand. Mann, who realizes there’s no escape from the quasi-demonic force stalking him, is pushed to his ultimate limit. Will he be swallowed up by the soot-covered engine of his pursuer, or will he prove himself to be more than a match for it? Someone’s Watching Me!’s landscape is urban, and our hero is a woman who isn’t quite as alone, but it feels almost as desolate and isolating. Even after the villain is revealed, he feels like a faceless representative of all the dangerous weirdos out there living among us. Aerial shots of cities and periodic glimpses of lofty buildings reinforce this, asking us to wonder about the people behind all those windows—are they dangerous? Would they help us if it meant putting themselves in harm’s way? Would they even believe us if we said we needed help? Is there truly safety in numbers? Sometimes movie characters can feel hollow, just there to prove whatever point a writer’s trying to make. We get a poorly packaged message through preachy dialogue or forced situations which provide ample opportunity to smash us in the face with a lesson or two. Someone’s Watching Me! could have easily fallen prey to this. It doesn’t, thanks to a balanced screenplay that gives us people, not sounding boards. Of course, there’s lessons to be gleaned here—almost every movie has these—but they’re absorbed naturally rather than stuffed down our throats. Hutton was the right choice for this role. She plays one of the most relatable characters in any recent horror movie I’ve watched. Leigh is endearing from the start, with idiosyncrasies (like the frequent quips and comments she makes to herself) that read as genuine and unique to her personality—you know, like a real live person. When she comments aloud that the TV is there to assuage lonesome nights, I thought about her desire for (but—importantly—not need for) companionship. I did not think about the writer (Carpenter in this case) trying to hammer home that idea. Her amusing under-the-breath remarks had me invested in her. Her healthy aplomb throughout the first half of the movie not only helps define her, but it also makes her inevitable breakdown much more moving; ditto her inevitable regrouping and final stand. After Leigh’s frustrating experiences with creepo Steve, it was refreshing to watch her strut her flirting skills on Paul at the bar. While watching the scene, I was trying to remember the last time I saw a woman in cinema hit on a man with such goofy, effortless confidence. Her coin tricks and silly come-ons win Paul over. After a successful end to the night, Leigh takes a moment to appreciate it all. “Not bad, LA. Not bad.” (A nice jump scare follows this.) By that point I was rooting hard for her, so the movie could have collapsed, and I’d still be in. It doesn’t collapse, though. Watching Leigh’s transformation from watched to watcher is so damn cool without going too over the top. Her new pal Sophie (Carpenter’s future real life wife) is supportive, helpful, and gay. Her homosexuality isn’t made a big deal of, and as she tells Leigh, “Don’t worry, you’re not my type.” That’s all there is to it. It’s a part of who she is, it ain’t all she is. I loved how it was handled. Then there’s Paul. He’s likable, cool, and interesting. What more can we ask for? But characters aside, Someone’s Watching Me! is a tense horror/thriller with a bunch of truly noteworthy moments. I won’t go into all of them, but one of the standouts comes early on. Leigh comes home to find her door unlocked. She’s uneasy, but attributes it to a forgetful maintenance worker and calls her landlord (I think) about it. At first all seems well. Leigh stands in the foreground facing us while on the phone. Behind her, we have a partial view of the living room. Then, on an unexpected beat, a figure darts across the background. It only lasts a second, but wow is it effective. I think I even inadvertently cursed at the screen when it happened. There’s also chilling telescope POV shots, sweat-inducing walks through empty(?) apartments and laundry rooms, disheartening police interactions, and even a risky break-in or two. If that’s not enough for you, I haven’t even mentioned the crafty camerawork and overall contagious sense of dread throughout. For all its limitations (both budget and TV restrictions), Someone’s Watching Me! manages to stand alongside any of Carpenter’s theatrical releases. The closing clash could’ve been a little tighter, and at times the TVness shines through, but it plows past these obstacles with great characters, impressive tension, and memorable scares. Two weeks after filming this, Carpenter began shooting the legendary Halloween. Nice double feature idea. Watch Someone’s Watching Me! at night with some popcorn (or whatever it is you like to snack on), the lights turned down, and the curtains open wide.
Once as a child walking home I passed our house and decided to keep going. I had neglected some responsibility and didn't want to face the consequences. I left the neighborhood and walked onto a path that took me into the woods next to the lake. The water on the left glittered through the trees. Having made the decision I couldn't turn back and walked on, for an hour or so, until I reached town.
I found the song Tuesday by London based trio mary in the junkyard via a tiktok and it made me want to make a playlist. I love when the drums kick in and the intensity of the haunted vocal. The song takes you on a journey. "I feel like an alien here". Who doesn't? Other songs seemed to fit. It isn't a happy playlist but I was imagining child me walking into the woods then, in the early 90s, as I walk in the woods here, next to another body of water, more and more leaves turning and piling up on the trail:
Beirut's new single The Tern is like a prayer or spell that Zach Condon says he improvised on the spot over a simple drum machine part. The song slowly grows with layers as Condon's voice reaches for something divine. I find it really affecting and vulnerable.
Jenn Champion is back with another cheerful album, The Last Night of Sadness, and I was already hooked on the single Good News Bad News (we're all gonna die) that dropped a few days before. It's catchy and timely: "what they say is true, we are all gonna die, sometimes it doesn't feel right to be alive". It's depressing as shit but it makes you want to dance at the same time. I look forward to listening more to Champion's album and also Tre Burt's new release Traffic Fiction. The songs I've heard have been all really good but for this playlist I like All Things Right, that has alot going on, bluesy rock but at the same time something nostalgic and almost 80s in the chorus, with vocals that are loose and a groove that is addictive. Maybe not a complete fit for this playlist but I can imagine child me walking to it, kicking rocks. Sufjan Stevens will likely be my most played artist this year because I keep putting on Javelin. I love it! Will Anybody Ever Love Me? Feels fitting for emo child me. Same for Hide Behind My Disguise by Cleffy. You should definitely check out Clean Sheets, Dirty Walls. I was torn between using Hide Behind My Disguise and Meet you at the Graveyard but I also have Graves by Black Polish and two grave songs seemed too much? Typing this out now it feels totally appropriate to have two grave songs, so check that out too. And if Black Polish isn't on your radar she should be. Baby Tonight is such a fun pop punk song it will have you dancing in your despair. Graves should be on all your Halloween party playlists. Another artist that showed up on tiktok: Veviter Long. Tiktok is a good source for music recs. His deep voice is interesting and Little Red Flower is a great song. The Christian Club sounds like something demonic is going on, and sometimes that's relatable. Like King Krule's sibling they had to send away. It's an alternative band from Bruges, Belgium. Corrine Bailey Rae's Black Rainbows is one of the albums of the year and Put It Down is a 8 and a half minute masterpiece. If it went on for another 8 minutes I wouldn't complain. It felt like a perfect penultimate track on a walk through a forest. She released her self titled album featuring Put Your Records On in 2006 and Sarah Assbring released her first self titled studio album the same year as El Perro Del Mar, out of Gothenburg, Sweden. That was about the same time I left Gothenburg for the Americas. Her new single In Silence feels like a very sad Disney song: Forever in your dreams I’m bound to walk aimlessly alone And on that note, I feel like apologizing, but I found comfort in a lot of these songs, and maybe you will too. Hug your loved ones. -Kim
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 Meowmeowpowpowlit@gmail.com (Spotify or any platform, or just write the songs down)
Svalbard Summer
by Tim Jones-Yelvington
Svalbard is an Arctic archipelago located around 80 degrees north, and 600 miles from the North Pole, held by Norway through treaty. I visited in mid-May 2023, traveling along the west side of the island of Spitsbergen, and into its fjords, in a 50-something person expedition boat, with daily Zodiac raft excursions. When Kim saw my photographs of dazzling snow-covered peaks rising from the water, tessellations of sea ice, and craggy glaciers, he naturally asked whether I could make a playlist illustrated by one of these images, to dive into the seeming disjuncture between summer and snow.
When traveling, it is my practice to teach myself about the political history and current struggles of a land's indigenous people. Svalbard is so remote that no indigenous cultures settled there permanently. Its indigenous inhabitants are, in a sense, the polar bears, walruses, reindeer, arctic foxes, auks, puffins, fulmars, and kittiwakes, each of which we experienced with some intimacy, and many of whom, in various ways, have experienced the fallout from colonization. Svalbard is so remote that no indigenous cultures settled there permanently, but it's considered a credible theory that its first visitors could've been the Sámi people, who chose not to settle. On the boat, I spent some time reading about the Sámi, whose homelands and ways of living have been continually disrupted throughout history by the State-making objectives and continuously redrawn borders of Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, in various and shifting configurations. Later, when colonizer Europeans came to Svalbard, they/we settled, and in our typical form, commenced extraction—first through the whaling industry, later through coal mines, a couple of which remain open, including the Russian coal mine we were told is staffed largely by Ukrainian workers, trapped in place. How to build a playlist around this experience? I worried that my moody song choices, with their frequent references to snow, ice, avalanches, and the sea, might veer into cliche, or else just land a little too on the nose. But as I settle into this playlist, I hear a lot more variation than might be immediately apparent. Similar to how, when folks look at their photographs of Svalbard, they wonder whether they were accidentally taken in black and white. But look more closely, and the landscape lives in color. A disclaimer: For a "Svalbard Summer" playlist, the snow is actually a bit of a mislead. We visited during the spring in part in order to appreciate the snow and ice along with warming temperatures and 24 hour sun—by the time we returned to the settlement of Longyearbyen after our seven days on the boat, most of the snow that had coated the town before our departure had already melted away, and the frozen river was thawed and running. The snow would continue to melt, quickly, following our departure. By summer, many of the snow-covered mountains will be dark rock. As you sink into this playlist, I invite you to dwell inside the simultaneity of the steadfast vastness of nature, geologic time, and the near constancy of often rapid change and transformation. A change I believe we are each called in our own way to shape toward liberation, land stewardship, and all that affirms life.
by Michael Seymour Blake This is one of the only movies set in NYC that made me feel like I was heading to an unglamorous, low paying job. I worked a crappy office job in Times Square for over ten years. It’s all here: the slight filth on everything, the rumbling of engines and clamor of horns, the patter of hurried footsteps, the myriad of expressive faces and voices. You can smell the sewers, sweet pastries, and hot coffees. But there’s other factors as well—the texture, weight and general NYC vibe shine through in a way that will feel familiar to the daily grinders out there. Working with a limited budget, director Ramin Bahrani and cinematographer Michael Simmonds capture it all with an honest, simple, naturalistic style. And they depict our weary-but-determined protagonist’s struggles with just as much honesty and care. One of the reasons Man Push Cart feels so authentic is because some of the people you see, even those with speaking roles, don’t actually know they’re being recorded. Like when Ahmad (whose actual name is Ahmad Razvi) tries to sell bootleg porno DVDs to a man who turns him down because, he says, he can find them much cheaper in Brooklyn. This interaction was not in the script, and the man is not an actor. What we see here is an authentic response from a New Yorker who had no idea he was being filmed (of course they told him afterwards). Even a few of Ahmad’s (the character’s) friends are Ahmad’s (the actor’s) friends. One of his pals—a lively, confident man called Duke (Farooq “Duke” Muhammad)—bursts into a rap at a karaoke bar. Although he knows he’s on camera, what we’re watching is pretty much the actual Duke. There are scenes in a cart garage where it’s business as usual in the background, just real New Yorker’s doing their thing. Strengthening the realism even more is Ahmad’s (the actor—this is getting old now) lived experience as an actual cart vendor. Man Push Cart follows Ahmad, a Pakistani immigrant who works in a stainless steel coffee cart which he has to lug to and from a garage every day. He’s quiet, and it’s clear there’s a lot of mental/emotional turmoil whipping around his insides. He’s been scraping by for a while. Most people know him as the guy they buy their bagels from, but back home he was a rockstar. Why he ended up in a cart in NYC is left a little ambiguous. In the context of the story, it doesn’t even matter. He’s here. We’re with him now. His wife died, leaving him with a child he’s been estranged from. All that’s left, it seems, are damaged familial relationships and his cart. He sells crappy DVDs to make some extra side cash. One day, he meets Mohammad (Charles Daniel Sandoval), a successful man from a very different kind of NYC. Mohammad recognizes the former rockstar and claims he can help him get back on his feet. Ahmad also befriends a young, Hispanic newspaper vendor named Noemi (Leticia Dolera). A potential romance begins to develop between them. I won’t say more about where it all leads, but I was relieved when the movie ended with the same gritty, realistic voice it opened with. Ahmad’s cart takes on mythic qualities, looming like the carcass of some silver-scaled dragon he’s been cursed to haul around (or, more obviously, a Sisyphean boulder). It’s grueling to watch him shove, pull, and push the burden that is also his livelihood. I kept wishing I could run over to help. Even when the cart is stored at the garage, he must remove the gas tank and take it with him. There’s no escape from the burden that drains him of energy but grants him life. The expressions “Good morning” and “Have a nice day!” are printed on the cart. Albert Camus would love all of this. I was just as interested in Ahmad’s enervated face as the camera was. I think this is the first time he’s ever acted, yet he shows impressive restraint and natural talent. His character is damn exhausted, a shadow of his younger self. But like the tiny dinosaur sticker on his otherwise-unremarkable cart, an ember still burns somewhere within him. Or is it just a decaying relic? We get to travel with Ahmad into nice apartments and fancy clubs, places he navigates like they were different countries altogether. Some pretentious guy even patronizingly tells him to “fake it till you make it!” I know people like this—out of touch, smug, assuming they have all the answers for everybody’s problems. I’m not sure why, but my favorite scenes involved Ahmad organizing his cart for the day; the morning routine of stacking cups pre-filled with tea bags, placing the bagels and sweets in the display, and lighting the gas. It’s those little moments that drew me in. Maybe because I’m all too familiar with mundane morning setups. It’s refreshing to watch a movie about the working life that doesn’t romanticize, idealize, or pound our faces in with spoon-fed ideology. Many movies attempt this, and although their heart is in the right place, they often end up deflating the intended message. That’s not to say the movie doesn’t have an opinion. It’s just skillfully presented to us. We are shown the absurdity of existence and left to draw our own conclusions. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say it left me contemplating whether the physical presence/absence of the cart matters as much as what it represents—the drudgery and toils of the working life. If it ain’t one thing, it’ll be something else, eh? Ahmad has hope, otherwise he wouldn’t be pushing forward despite everything. But how deep is that hope? What is driving him to continue? Many of us carry this same question. Why bother? What’s the point? Man Push Cart might reply, “because what else is there besides nonexistence?” “Is one to die voluntarily or to hope in spite of everything?” -Albert Camus, Myth Of Sisyphus.
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 Meowmeowpowpowlit@gmail.com (Spotify or any platform, or just write the songs down)
Summer = Music + Sojourning
by: Joey Gould
When I left 17 years and 11 months of work as a produce clerk to finish my first book, The Acute Avian Heart (TAAH), the first thing I did was book a random hotel in the Berkshires for shower beers in a beige room before *ahem* Heading Into Nature. Since I’m a sorta bumbly person, I typed “mt greylock trail” into my phone & ended up on a weird dirt road on the side of the mt opposite the nature center, but randomness cuts both ways so the trail, mostly a tight set of switchbacks under tree cover, was named “Gould”. Probably not after me.
I sat in my car texting a friend in crisis (boy trouble + 30th birthday) while listening to “Bill Murray” by Phantogram:
Am I lonely?
I think of both art & astrology as avatars for our feelings. I felt & my friend felt change, unbelonging, hope, fear, movement, time, loneliness, friendship, solipsism, yearning. How could I say all that? It’s easier to send a link to the song, or the poem, or say I’m in my Pisces era.
I set out on the deserted, narrow 1.5 mile path. It was cool, even a bit dark under dense tree cover. A brutal summer mountainside downpour started when I reached the end of the trail about a half-mile from the summit. It poured the entire time as I descended. This is my luck & it makes a poet. >>> I flew on a whim to California to visit my glittershark friend July, who named it “Going West(hale)”. I wrote every afternoon in her small trailer parked in their driveway just off Telegraph in Oakland, where every night I’d fall asleep to the sounds of a restaurant on the other side of the fence. Each day served summer sun. We walked to restaurants with takeaway ice cream cones for dessert. I found a couple dark dives to daydrink my feelings in. When I remember this time fondly, I’m writing with earbuds in, t-shirt, hot sun, under a peak-season fig tree, unlearning trauma, chatting in a midnight kitchen with July, writing myself into a more whole person. When I remember realistically, I’m smoking butts outside the trailer, squinting at the sun, worried about drama & grief. Back then I identified as a man, even while I wrote a series of poems called when i was a man. Practicing poetry is learning & admitting to one’s own obliviousness, often delighting in it. July had written a poem, “American Literature”, on the occasion of my retirement--a monumental, incomparable gift, a tribute to many of the themes of TAAH: America, sojourning, desert highways, wrong turns. Brokenness yet joy. They wrote, “ you’ve gone West to find everything or me”; well shit, I found both. I love how it ends in haphazard misdirections & an em dash, as if the speaker jams on the breaks of a poemy car. I don’t fall for much of America’s propaganda, but I do love driving. Driving : summer :: cuddling by the fire : winter. July also introduced me to brat pop darlings HOLYCHILD. As huge a gift as any poem, tbh. A friend sends you a link & you end up unspooling a band’s entire catalog. It feels good to vibe on a frequency. To discover that the frequency is good. In this way, writing communities & writing partners break my heart open. When I put together a playlist of songs that would act as a soundtrack to the book, I put “Best Friends” by HOLYCHILD first because most of what I felt in the process of publishing TAAH was gratitude, gratitude that felt bottomless. For the kindnesses of July & my editor Eileen & my mother & I have the best friends
So much felt possible. I quit my stifling retail job, took the summer to travel, finished my book, & got it to print. And praised, I praised how much my friends teach me. When the sun hits you while yr swimming it’s brighter but uncomfy, like yr too close to god. Like July in July.
We made fig jam with July’s cat, too. The photo is blurry because I was too excited to calm my fragile nerves.
>>> Early-2000s: I was working 5a-2p in a produce department, often driving there straight from a concert in Boston. The first time I saw Isis live was at about 1:30 AM back when you could smoke indoors (yuck). The Middle East Upstairs was not the most cozy venue when smoke filled & I nearly passed out, but they were tremendous & 27’s Maria Christopher came out to sing her part in “Weight”. I wanted to invoke its texture like a wadi filling in the dry expanse of Maktesh Ramon, the methodical build to crescendo like the ten years it took me to write TAAH. Listen: the rising tide, the beginning of the flood. My first tattoo, interlocking hummingbirds, was the cover image from 27’s ep from the edge of the wing. On Christmas eve one year they played Upstairs & baked vegan cookies to share. “Easy Trigger” is a perfectly unhurried song. >>> In the late nineties I chipped one of my front teeth in an honestly pretty unexpected mosh pit the night Far played at Espresso Bar in Worcester, opening for Incubus on the S.C.I.E.N.C.E. tour. Jeremiah, my sister’s dreadlock-wearing, straight-edge high school boyfriend, introduced me to Tin Cans with Strings to You, featuring Jonah Matranga’s plaintive & puissant vocals, along with an indie/screamo aesthetic in both music & cover art. The crayon art relating counter-culture lyrics. None of my ivy-bound high school friends liked them. Ha! “What I’ve Wanted to Say” seemed like an obvious early playlist choice. I wish for you what I wish for me.
Yes. This gives us (both I and you) permission to appreciate & curate our own experiences. Yes. Matranga is a charismatic, lovely person, who still does house shows & will sit on the floor at the Worcester Palladium to play an acoustic aftershow. When I think about art with a loving, moral center I think of him.
>>> OKAY BUT THERE’S A BOOK & it starts in the hot summer desert, it starts in wandering like the liberated mimitzrayim Jews of the bible. “Obedear” by Purity Ring sounds like sojourning. The album Shrines rightfully appears often in the playlist. As a trans NB I have felt a spectrum of genders that my poems should honor faithfully if I’m to record any sort of poetic truth. Not that the poetry must be true, but that the speaker should inhabit the gender I felt them in at the time. I feel like I have dude poems (like the one where the speaker operates a chop saw while drinking High Life) but also gurlesque-inspired poems (like the one where the speaker watches a robin feed its chicks with their queer crush). I was an egg when I put together TAAH & a hatchling when I held my first copy. Anyway, the Young Judaea tour guide wouldn’t let us sleep on the way to Kineret, & he originally spoke a couple of the lines in “Devarim”. I equipped my headphones & put PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire? in my cassette player to help me fall asleep. The last tweak I made to TAAH was swapping the places of the first two poems. “Devarim” properly jumped to first, with its promise of agency, promise of love met with kindness, because that’s a center of poetry. Not the center, a center: like Gaiman’s Dreaming, Poetry has several hearts. The Judaean desert contains (comprises?) one of my hearts. I return to it often because of its significance to my faith that FSU Hillel Chaplain, Gary Bean, called “paradoxical Judaism”. At least one of mine is in the marshland of Broadmoor Audubon sanctuary in Natick, MA. It’s the place where I saw a blackbird fight a heron. Sanctuary. There’s a long, accessible boardwalk, a frog pond, A lot of the poems in TAAH use Broadmoor & its birds. Here’s a photo of me there:
>>>
I am asking myself whether this is a summer playlist. My defense is two things: First, that I have played all of these songs too loud with my windows down. A hurricane took out power once & all I could think to do was drive around listening to A Camp, side project of Nina Persson (The Cardigans). I assert that “Rock ‘n’ Roll Ghost” pairs well with downed trees, impromptu four-way stop intersections, & the candlelit decision to eat an entire quart of ice cream that will otherwise melt. Second, that summer moments form much of the viscera of the book: driving, birdwatching, the construction zone outside Jenn’s house when we 45’d every piece of decking, & rappelling through the back doors of a burnt out van on a 115-degree day. That van really happened. We hiked through the desert for a week with a roll of TP & heavy red jerrycans. There was a 60 degree difference between daytime & nighttime & the stars were, in the words of Chino Moreno, “much than more”. I met a scorpion & only sunburned once, but brutally, when I forgot to reapply sunscreen while swimming in Kineret. >>> September 2009: a frost warning. I nearly fell asleep in the tutoring office before speeding west on the Mass Pike to my stepfather Frank’s house. I was listening on repeat to the saddest song I had on hand, Sufjan Stevens’s “Casimir Pulaski Day”. A song about cancer, a night about cancer. My mother & I had been switching off as Frank’s night nurses for a week, & I hadn’t slept in my bed since he was lucid. The last unfragmented thing I remember him telling me was that infidelity is in many ways the deepest kind of love. “It says, I would destroy my life for you”. I didn’t argue. I could have said that the sneaking isn’t the destroying part, but once a man’s hair falls out he’s entitled to some level of deference in the time he has left. When I got to the house he was still breathing a couple times a minute, so I said hi & then I sat down on the couch to watch a sci-trash tv program about The Most Dangerous Explosions in the Universe. Number two was Long Gamma Ray Bursts. The host introduced a trained marksman to demonstrate the power of a LGRB by shooting a watermelon, then the show went to commercial. There was a moth buzzing close to the ceiling fan & I climbed over Frank’s uncomfortable beige leather couch to catch it & send it through the sunroom door out to the deck that we built together in his first summer of retirement. I went to the kitchen for a glass of water as the show came back with #1: THE BIG BANG. Obvious choice but I looked at Frank on the hospital bed & he wasn’t breathing. A succession of phone calls, hospice procedures, I collapsed in the front yard at one point while my friend Julie told me about butterflies. I called out from both jobs then went to sleep in a wave of grief mixed with intense relief, for his suffering, which radiated on all of us as his loving caretakers, was over. I got up in the morning, went for coffee in the sun that was too bright. I thought I should make a new darker one or just use the moon for a while. I turned the key, Sufjan sang, All the glory that the Lord has made RETURN OF THE CHEESE FRIES AND THE FAIRYTALE OF OLD MIXES; MY 2023 SUMMER PLAYLIST
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 meowmeowpowpowlit@gmail.com. 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 Meowmeowpowpowlit@gmail.com (Spotify or any platform, or just write the songs down)
Return of the Cheese Fries and the Fairytale of Old Mixes; My 2023 Summer Playlist
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". 1. Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? by Kara Jackson 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. 2. Soul,PRESENT by Q (or Q Marsden) 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. 3. Wait Til I Get Over by Durand Jones 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. 4. On Grace & Dignity by the GOLDEN DREGS 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. 5. 79.5 by 79.5 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! 6. That! Feels Good! by Jessie Ware 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. 7. Secret Life by Fred again..., Brian Eno 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. "They say women's intuition is strong, but a book's intuition is never wrong." 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? " Typical. Here I am trying to show how beautiful a beach in Sicily can be but you guys are gonna like Gina's stories where she whines about being bullied in high school or cries about psych ward food not being tasty enough more instead." EF(WA)M: I feel like a memoir but also a remix of a much more famous memoir. The thing that created me (Gina) likes writing memoirs about parts of her life. This is her second memoir to be published. She has a third one coming out this year. As Gina has taught in some of her classes, memoir is not the same as an autobiography. A person can write many memoirs. A memoir captures a small part of a person's life, often a moment of struggle or a learning lesson. It is not a life story. I am the least dark out of her three memoirs and I resent my two siblings for being so goth. I am the best one yet I will probably be the least liked. Typical. Here I am trying to show how beautiful a beach in Sicily can be but you guys are gonna like Gina's stories where she whines about being bullied in high school or cries about psych ward food not being tasty enough more instead. I'm a big happy American boy who wears bright clothing and complains less than them. While all of Gina's memoirs are often dark and capture moments of pain, Gina actually spends most of her time laughing. Nobody wants to read about the boring, happy times when there is no drama. Everyone loves drama. I also don't like when Gina is happy. I resent her for editing me. Gina was reading Maggie Nelson's The Red Parts while writing me. I like that memoir and I think of it as an aunt of sorts. While that book is a memoir, it touches on the American obsession with violence. I do that too. I like to show how embedded violence and trauma are in Gina and Americans in general. I am also proud to say that I reveal how America's feelings of identity are strongly linked to our productivity. Gina likes memoir that weaves in elements of journalism. She likes to write about her own life when it says something bigger about society, or at least that big-headed writer would like to think that. I hate her other memoirs because they aren't me. 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. "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: 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.
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