A black screen, a void, then the calming sounds of ocean waves. Keith Richards’s guitar punctures the roiling relaxation, as sea-green ocean waves brighten the screen. Merry Clayton woos over the opening riff of The Rolling Stones’ Vietnam-era anthem, “Gimme Shelter,” as a drone shot flits over a sandy beach and a pool deck with … Continue reading
I love fan fiction. While I never wrote it as a confused teen (No, I’m not covering up a secret, long-dormant account on Fanfiction.net. I’ve never been good at fiction), I love it nonetheless. Fan fiction is an art form born out of obsession, raging hormones, and pent-up wayward desire projected through favorite fictional characters … Continue reading
The 60’s and 70’s currently hold the number one spot for filmmaking in my opinion. The films of these years brought you into the hazy dreamworlds of directors like Karel Kachyňa, Ken Russell, and Robert Fuest. It was almost like all of these filmmakers took some acid and sneezed glitter and fever-dream-injected characters all over … Continue reading
Being buried under precarious, emergency-surgery-threatening heaps and heaps of snow, ice, and slush is the perfect opportunity for obsessive movie-watching. Not schlepping around to galleries, climbing over the road gritty, dog-and-human shit-covered ice mountains that collect at the edge of every sidewalk in New York, to gaze disappointingly at mostly bland art (Not to mention … Continue reading
The porch goose, or as I mistakenly called it before googling for this article, lawn duck, is the unsung hero of lawn ornament kitsch. Sure, everyone loves a pink flamingo, which proclaims its bad taste proudly with that gaudy, garish pink rammed into a browning lawn at an awkward angle. That’s not even taking into … Continue reading
Jayne Mansfield was the ultimate sex kitten-gone-berserk, the eternal starlet grasping for fame with both hands, Kenneth Anger’s cooing, squealing Hollywood Babylon made flesh. What, one might justifiably wonder, must it have been like having this outrageous creature for a mother? Considering she was only three years old when Mansfield died in her gruesome 1967 … Continue reading
After seeing Ari Aster’s newest “divisive” ride, Eddington, I returned home and put on Darryl Cooper’s three-hour marathon “Jeffrey Epstein: This was your life!” episode of Tucker Carlson. While I didn’t make it through that long haul in one night, Cooper’s deep dive into Bill Barr’s daddy and Epstein’s first employer after dropping out of … Continue reading
Does anyone love their job quite as much as Rosa, the bright-eyed and bushy-haired sex worker and l’amour de tout le monde à Paris in Paul Vecchiali’s 1986 doomed and demented romance flick, Rosa la rose, fille publique? It’s hard to imagine. She’s even working on her twentieth birthday! Currently screening at Metrograph on the … Continue reading
If I had to pick the absolute perfect song, tied up with a gun to my head, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with one better than Q Lazzarus’s “Goodbye Horses.” That sparse, sultry beat that slowly emerges as if from the clouds, combined with a strange, sci-fi keyboard do-dooing that somehow comes off as … Continue reading
I didn’t know what to write about David Lynch. Sure, I knew that I had to write something in tribute to our preeminent filth elder (tied with John Waters)—the dreams of Filthy Dreams. But…what? Scroll through this website’s archives and you’ll already find pages upon pages penned on the man, his quinoa recipe, his paintings … Continue reading