In the Mouth of Madness (1995), director: John Carpenter
I HAVE TO PRAISE
Few things excite me more than a well-documented creative process. And Joz Norris, high-concept UK comedian who I had on my podcast two years ago, is documenting the shit out of his process these days.
He kept an excellent diary of developing his most recent live show, Blink, and every week, he sends out updates about his recent projects that dive into the details that so many artists gloss over in their self-accounting.
Here’s a nugget from a recent newsletter he wrote about creating his BBC Radio 4 sitcom, The Dream Factory:
Steve Kaplan… in his book The Hidden Tools Of Comedy… further clarifies that “Comedy tells us the truth about people. Drama lets us dream about who we can be. Comedy helps us live with who we are.”
That one quote spun me around wondering if what I want my next show to be is comedy or drama, or if I even agree with that distinction.
Check out The Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes (the title of the newsletter, to be clear) for yourself, and browse the archives too.
THIS IS MY PODCAST, THIS IS YOUR SLASHER-LIFE
John Waters’ Serial Mom is the horror-adjacent movie up for discussion in this edition of This Is Your SLASHERLIFE, with previous guests Annie Donley and Jo Scott, cohosts of Mom Stomp, a sister podcast to This Is Your Afterlife.
Content warning: motherhood, the MNU (Mom Nutting Universe), unconditional family support, useless cops.
LEMONS AND LEMONADE
Is this you or someone you know? Get in touch!
No time is a bad time for a little prison industrial complex abolition refresher. Here’s a 101 from Dean Spade, the author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis.
MAY I PLAY YOU A SOUND?
It’s a choose-your-own-adventure week. Do you want sweet and accessible or to have your brain warped a bit?
Option 1: Katie Crutchfield, aka Waxahatchee, is in a new duo called Plains, and they just released an Aidy Bryant-directed video for a third song from their upcoming album, I Walked With You a Ways. Katie Crutchfield knows her way around a chorus, man. “Hurricane” is, simply and deeply, a pretty, country, love song.
Option 2: Whatever the hell this is. “너 땜에 맘이 맘이 맘이 맘이 괴로워요” (apparently Korean for “Because of you, my heart, my heart, my heart, my heart aches”) came on at the record store when I was shopping for horror DVDs, and it felt appropriately disconcerting.
Turns out the group, death’s dynamic shroud, is three white dudes in L.A. who make vaporwave, which honestly, makes me feel a little tricked. Not because of ethnicity. I just feel like it’s rare to hear vaporwave out in the world instead of on headphones from YouTube, so it initially reads as super disorienting. But then you process it with the context of “vaporwave,” and you’re like, “Oh yeah, of course. I hear all the usual vaporwave tricks in there.”
But I want to focus on that initial impression because it was real too! Maybe if you listen to this in public somewhere, you can have a similar experience.
Dreaming,
DM