Our new Bible (all photos by moi) Susan Sontag may have written the most renowned and widely considered definitive consideration of camp, but let’s be honest, Susie could not be camp if her public intellectual life depended on it. Regarding the Pain of Others, Illness as Metaphor, or even, On Photography aren’t exactly laugh riots! … Continue reading
I’ve recently been suffering from a fever. No, not that kind of fever. I’ve been struck with a Thomas Kinkade fever! Yes, the less-than-esteemed painter of shopping mall schlock (before the fall of malls) and the bane of snotty critics recoiling at the satiated bad tastebuds of Americans enamored with all those little queasily quaint … Continue reading
I doubt I’ll look at a butter knife the same way ever again after reading Jamie Stewart’s Anything That Moves. That cool, silver, kind of fussy utensil will forever be etched in my brain as tossed unceremoniously into the bushes like Sally Draper’s Barbie doll after an indulgence in childhood anal fixation. Those rounded edges … Continue reading
It’s cliché to point out that people in the United States now exist in completely different realities, typically broken down by political leanings. Just hop on any social media platform and you can bear witness. For one faction, Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton are eating babies and guzzling adrenochrome in the basement of a strip … Continue reading
You may not know this, dearest Filthy Dreams fanatics, but I’ve occasionally been accused of being long-winded. Rambling. Exhausting. Draining. Just a tad wordy. In a culture where we have writers and editors tweet-advising us to make articles shorter and more palatable for readers, I tend to do the opposite. I don’t care who likes … Continue reading
“Topanga’s hot today, Manson’s in the air,” sings Lana Del Rey in the second verse of her song “Heroin” on Lust for Life. And who doesn’t sense Charles Manson, his acid-headed Family, and the echoing terror of the Tate-LaBianca murders in these sweltering and wildfire-choked days of early August? These murders that occurred from August … Continue reading
As primarily nonfiction readers, your faithful co-founder Emily Colucci and contributor Jessica Caroline have been making an effort to overcome our general reluctance to engage more in contemporary fiction. We gave Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby a whirl. However, it’s not like authors at larger publishing houses are in dire need of … Continue reading
Represented by a logo of a human eye and eyebrow, with the eye acting as a razor blade, Infinity Land Press is, by its own website’s description, “a press that provides exclusive, clandestine publications which are inoculated against the circulatory system of the established book market.” Created and founded by artists Martin Bladh and Karolina … Continue reading
If I had a favorite narrative genre, it would be what I like to call “psychological disintegration.” I’ve long been seduced by madness, the deterioration of identity. The descent into madness of the lonely civil servant Poprishchin in Gogol’s Diary of a Mad Man. The identity confusion of Trelkovsky in novelist and artist Roland Topor’s … Continue reading
Ever since the Great Toilet Paper Hoard of 2020, marking the start of quarantine, the Internet has been full of people howling into the abyss about the agonizing pain their gnawing isolation, a collective holler of loneliness that can, at times, overpower even the accounts of people suffering through COVID-19. Months later, all these lonely … Continue reading