From the Desk of…
Darkness falls across the land… the midnight hour is close at hand. I’m as excited as ever about the approach of October, which I consider to be the best month of the year, but let’s not let that distract from the news recently. By the way, I got boostered, and you should too. If you do it during the week, maybe your boss will let you take off some work. Me, I did it on a weekend so I could have an question to not work on the weekend. I know it’s outré to care about the ongoing debilitating pandemic and that it’s such a downer to remind people about it, but come on. Booster shots should be an easy ask, and this round of microchips has given me wireless charging capabilities. I want to keep riffing here, but there’s really some great news to cover this week. Great in the sense that it can mean terrible. I’m not even touching the new legislative maps until I’ve had time to digest them.
Ohio’s own huckster-turned-senator J.D. Vance is leading the opposition to provide further material support to Ukraine, claiming its defensive war against Russia is indefinite and would amount to a waste of American resources. Check it all out in Hillbilly Elegy 2: From the Holler to The Hill on Netflix this Christmas. Anyway, this is somehow less embarrassing than the Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons having to resign for inviting and then celebrating a Ukrainian veteran following a speaking appearance by Zelenskyy. The veteran, a 98-year-old man, had taken up arms against the Soviets to fight for Ukrainian independence during World War II and I’ve just remembered that the Soviets were our allies in World War II and it turns out he volunteered with a division of the Waffen SS. Now, of course, many people are falling over themselves to say that there were very bad people on both sides and to excuse him for… volunteering to fight with the Nazis against our allies. Starting to think that people don’t have a real grasp of history or of ideology!
Speaking of it being okay when we do it, a growing chorus of Democrats are calling for Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat out of New Jersey, to resign. Menendez, long accused of corruption and last indicted in 2015, is currently under fire for the simple accepting of gifts from friends, namely gold bars from operatives working to the benefit of the Egyptian government. Naturally, Menendez has a valid reason for all the wads of cash and gold bars hidden in his house: Fidel Castro. Let’s see how that defense works out for him! Seems like an awful lot of bad actors are dogpiling this poor little ol’ senator so close to the election, big meanies like Fetterman and Sanders and Brown and Booker… don’t they know they’re helping Trump?
Part of Hollywood’s strike is over as the WGA and AMPTP come to terms. The contract, which provides staffing requirements for writing rooms, hard limits on AI training and use, and new residual models, is seen broadly as a win for the works. SAG-AFTRA and UAW, however, continue their struggle against the bosses.
In other news, I need a business loan. Moving on…
The Brain Dump
damn this booster got me feeling like Bolsonaro
there should be a nicotine seltzer
every Teams notification that comes in after 4:30 deals 1d8+2 psychic damage to me
[experiencing the inexorable march of time] this is bs
emptying the dehumidifier into a cup and drinking it
Okay. I’m okay with this week. Brain must be healing due to overexposure of familiar movies. Speaking of…
At the Movies
A few notes for all Plex users: if you’re experiencing buffering, considering knocking down your video quality to under 10Mbps… or turning off subtitles… or pausing so my CPU can think about your movie for a bit. I think there’s a bottleneck in the wires near me. Might also just be that time of year. Furthermore, for those in the know, the October programming schedule has been set, and it will be broadcast along similar lines. All times are rough estimates, and if you don’t like it, don’t watch it.
Bottoms (2023), dir. Emma Seligman ⭐⭐⭐⭐
"ok, so like, imagine Superbad meets Heathers in a post-Riverdale and Not Another Teen Movie-esque high school send-up" "wow, that's a lot of nouns." "yeah. now make it gayer, like But I'm a Cheerleader gay." "so it's both an homage to and a parody of high school comedies using a queer lens?" "no, you're overcomplicating it, it's just a movie" "oh."
it's okay for me to not be the target for something. I respect the craft. audience dug it. both stylish and stylized.
Scream 4 (2011), dir. Wes Craven ⭐⭐⭐⭐
when hayden panettiere tells the dude that it would be a good time to make a move and then he's like "why don't you make a move" and she's like "that was the move"... anyway, the adults weren't ready for this one, but it was damn prescient about how kids are on them damn phones
Cure (1997), dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ❤️
Okay. This was a real trip to get deja vu during. At first I was like "oh this feels familiar because of its influence" which is a normal thing that happens. But then around the midway point I was like "no. I have seen this before. Have I seen this before?" which is not ideally what you're gonna be thinking during the movie about hypnotic suggestion and lost memory.
Regardless, it bangs. Think of that thing you think this is like. Okay, it's better. It's like the underpinnings of why Twin Peaks caught on in Japan coupled with the sensibilities of a late-90s psychological thriller. Like what if Se7en were good.
Get ready for a lot of horror movie logs on Letterboxd.
One Picture
For you, the noble Substack subscribers, the soft launch of the first weekend of the month. Get your masks ready… it’s almost time for the big giveaway. If you don’t quite know what these mean, well, I guess you can ask me later.
In closing,
John Carpenter, gamer musician, lays out two modalities of horror in the documentary Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: one in which the monsters are out there and they’re trying to get us, and one in which we’ve met the monsters and they are us. Much of modern conservative propaganda hinges on the overstimulation of the fear response, and it often does so in very primal ways. It operates almost exclusively in the first modality, the creation of the Other which is to be feared. We see them bang this drum throughout history, the ongoing trans panic of today, the migrant caravans on Fox News around election times, the Dolchstosslegende that promulgated during the Weimar Republic… a cheerier example would even be something as simple as the lurid and sensational American propaganda films of the 1930s and 1940s like Reefer Madness, wherein those horrible jazz musicians and dope pushers are trying to corrupt our sweet wholesome American teens. These propagandists seek to hyperbolize, and by hyperbolizing they induce fear and anxiety, and by inducing fear and anxiety they drive people seek comfort, and wouldn’t you just know it, they happen to have a simple solution to the issue they just made up, a comfortable solution that only makes sense to the irrational mind of the terrified. Sometimes a final solution. By thinking critically about our anxieties, by examining their roots, by seeking to understand the mechanisms by which feelings of horror and terror and revulsion are generated, we can better assess when that propaganda is being deployed against us. Fear is a powerful motivator. I know what I fear most in the world. Do you? Stephen King said it rather succinctly in his 1981 work Danse Macabre, that we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. We have met the monsters, and they are us.
Until next time, try to enjoy the daylight.
huh, someone ought to check the calendar more than once a year...