Is it righteous indignation or procrastination?
Cure (1997), dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997
This Vulture article, “Podcasting Is Just Radio Now,” has been stuck in my craw the past few days. I hate the idea that what we need to revitalize podcasting is a New Serial.
A huge platform of my creative life is the belief that local, DIY art is, at the very least, much more interesting than corporate monoculture. We don’t need a New Serial. We need a million podcast experiments.
Yesterday, I turned my anger productive by setting up a new newsletter, Surrounded by Blankets: An Independent Podcast Review. If you’re interested in receiving recommendations of podcasts made without corporate backing, you can subscribe here.
If I get 20 subscribers this week, I’ll start writing it. But this also might be my brain’s elaborate way of procrastinating my third one-man show, so if I don’t get those 20, I’ll take it as a sign to get back to the ample work I already have on my plate.
Hope you’re getting rest this weekend and filling your eyes with utter garbage on screens.
LET’S DO COMMUNITY
I love and welcome email replies, but if you want communal discussion, comment your responses, ideas, and tangents. I’ll join you!
Like, this week you could say, “Hey, I love this new newsletter idea, here are a bunch of my favorites,” or even, “I’d like to contribute!” or, and I’m not trying to be overly self-deprecating but it’s possible, “Dude, you’re absolutely trying to fill some hole by brainstorming new projects, maybe pick a few and stick with them.”
THIS IS MY PODCAST, THIS IS YOUR AFTERLIFE
“If you're not having fun, you’re the asshole,” is a Susan Messing joint. It’s a zen koan of a piece of comedy, art, and life advice that I took issue with back in my improv days. The hella influential improviser and teacher shares why she said it, her own issues with it, and ideas about death, learning what you actually want, a motorcycle ride with her dad, Neptune Society, and being choke fucked with love by a redwood tree.
Content warning: cancer, stroke, improv comedy.
Listen:
READ, WATCH, DO
Seems like The Great, Boring Die Hard Debate started a wave of claiming all sorts of movies are holiday movies, which is fine by me. In that spirit, I declare 2014 Iranian spaghetti-horror vampire movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night a Thanksgiving weekend movie. Why? Uh, because… it’s about eating flesh! Watched this recently, loved it, thinking of rewatching already. Style & mystery without sacrificing substance.
If you, like me, feel weird about Thanksgiving AND mostly white events starting with empty-feeling land acknowledgments, check out the Native Governance Center’s Beyond Land Acknowledgment: A Guide.
If you’d like to go further and donate to a Native organization doing good work, check out this thread from abolitionist organizer Kelly Hayes. I’m not able to donate this week, but if you do, let me know, and I’ll report our total next week.
MAY I PLAY YOU A SOUND?
We took a page out of Hanif Abdurraqib’s book this year and watched The Last Waltz while we cooked Thanksgiving dinner (squash-and-pepper enchiladas verdes, black beans, Spanish rice, Brussels sprouts, black grapes, real thin and salty tortilla chips, guac from our neighborhood market, and this incredible mac & cheese the market makes).
That version of “The Weight” is a show (or cooking) stopper.
Beautiful,
DM