Recently: 10 August
10 August 2022
Hello, friends and enemies. It’s time for my August Twitter break, so I plan to spend more time writing for my website and newsletter.
I’ve had a couple of film essays kicking around in my head for a while and I believe this is the time to get at least one of them out. If you like weird horror films, then you’ll be in luck. If you don’t like weird horror films, maybe you’ll like reading about one anyway.
This past summer I took up semi-serious photography (i.e., taking photos with a real camera and not just my phone), so watch for more photos hitting the site as I continue to practice. I even devised a new mobile workflow so I can post photos at my website during my upcoming vacation. (Despite the fact that it sounds like I’m doing extra work over vacation, please rest assured this is a fun thing for me.)
You can get all the writings and photos by subscribing to my RSS feed, or, if you’re old-fashioned, slap up a bookmark to this here website and come back periodically for a stroll. It’s the digital equivalent of chasing a wooden hoop around with a stick or whatever. Refreshing.
Or you can subscribe to my newsletter and I’ll just send you links to everything. I’ve neglected the monthly newsletter for the past couple of months, but I will return at the end of August, so if you’re into getting a digest of things I’ve posted/done/photographed/mused (including my podcast), sign up for the newsletter now.
Speaking of the podcast, we’re also taking a break over there during August. Look for new episodes in September.
While I was growing up, I lived in a very rural area and went to a school that customarily began only after the farmers had exhibited at the large county fair on Labor Day weekend. My daughter’s school has been creeping its start date earlier and earlier the past two years, but years before that it also began only after Labor Day. In my mind, summer still lasts until the very end of August. I’ll never truly be convinced that August is not for one last deep dive into whatever brings you pleasure before September, school and schedules come for you. And so that is what I will be doing.
Links
- “Under the right circumstances, regression can nourish. It can be a form of progression, a form of experimentation and creative play. It can pave the way for new ways of thinking and living. It can spawn new trends and identities and lifestyles. These become essential tools for navigating the strange new frontiers of modern life – and, as we adopt them, they transform our definition of what it means to lead healthy ‘adult’ lives.” The great regression
- Farewell to the incomparable Nichelle Nichols
- 10 underappreciated American neo-noirs of the early 1970s
- 11 great Black horror films off of the beaten path
- New research suggests that we’re briefly aware of our death after we’ve died, which might be fascinating, horrifying, some combination of both or something else altogether, depending on how you want to approach it.
- What a letter captures and preserves in the age of social media
Reading/Watching/Listening
- Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth is super worth getting wrapped up in.
- I’m of the strong opinion that Ken Greenhall is a 1970-80s horror writer too often overlooked, and his Childgrave is another piece of solid evidence for that.
- I have never seen a Predator movie in my life and yet I dug Prey a lot. Tip: Watch the Comanche dub version.
- I felt ambivalent about Nope immediately after seeing it, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. That’s all I got on it right now.
- I really liked Not Okay and feel its points are more subtle than it seems like a lot of folks are giving it credit for.
- The Criterion Channel’s color noir collection has a couple of gems I hadn’t seen before; notably, The River’s Edge, half noir and half survival adventure film with strong character arcs throughout. Debra Paget was made for Technicolor.
- I stumbled across a horror/thriller from 2009 called Triangle that I enjoyed hugely. I waxed poetic about it a bit on Letterboxd.
- Ashley Nicole Black telling the story of Nichelle Nichols on Drunk History (a storytelling that Nichols herself approved of) seems a fitting send-off: