January Newsletter
Oddities, musings, updates
This month is brought to you by:
The glow of a single streetlight in the snow.
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Movie Recommendation
The House of Yes (1997)- Dir. Mark Waters
I can’t stop thinking about this movie. I watched it for the first time in November because, yes, it is that rare Thanksgiving movie, and it hasn’t left my mind for too long since.
The film follows the unwinding of a deeply codependent family over the course of one night. Parker Posey plays a woman half convinced she is Jackie O, and fully in love with her recently engaged brother. It’s very clearly adapted from a play of the same name, and although there isn’t anything too exciting going on visually or cinematically, I found it deeply fascinating.
Maybe it’s time. The movie collapses time more efficiently than a black hole. You’re watching a movie from the 1990s, that is set in the 1980s, that is contemplating the 1960s, while you sit there in the 2020s. Maybe it’s the production. I already said there wasn’t that much visually interesting about this movie, but that’s not entirely true. I thought a lot about wealth and its presentation watching this movie. Wealth in America is usually displayed through blandness, beigeness, but while this home looked bland in the 80s-by-way-of-the-90s, it looks downright opulent in our Kardashian plagued time. Maybe it’s the acting. It’s really good, and might be Posey’s best role. Maybe it’s the America of it all. The characters are as caught up in the mythology of America as they are the mythology of their own family, the lies they tell to keep it together. Both are deeply tragic lies realized too late.
To that last point, I think it’s an interesting movie to watch and reflect on during the month when our second largest satanic ritual (first is the superbowl) takes place, the inauguration. It’s strange and off putting to remember a time not that long ago where institutions like the presidency were treated as normal-to-good. While the family portrayed in the movie is deeply codependent and unwell, they are united around the delusion of Posey’s character. It reminds me of a time when America was like that, too. We’ve always been insane, but it used to be a shared mental illness.
It’s a good movie, go watch it.
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Book
The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher
I always find January to be the most haunted month of the year. It’s a month that belongs entirely to the dead, to their ghosts. There is something wrong about January, with its lack of holidays or light. This makes it the perfect time to contemplate darkness and strangeness, and The Weird and the Eerie is the perfect companion for that.
Mark Fisher was a music critic and philosopher who specialized in the idea of “hauntology.” In short, it is the idea that we are collectively haunted by futures we were promised, but that never came to pass. In this book, he explores this idea through literature, pop culture, and music. Specifically, he investigates the divide between two ideas found in horror, the weird, that which is seen as Not Normal, and thus rejected, and the eerie, that which has some degree of familiarity, but that sense of shared memory creates a feeling of unease.
Most notably, considering his recent passing this month, Fisher dives into the later films of David Lynch to pick apart what he feels are the differences between the weird and the eerie.
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Music
Sonic Jihad, Snake River Conspiracy (2000)
Starting my newsletter strong by going on a list for that album title. This is an angry, sexy, strange record that has been getting me through the last few months. Combining elements from industrial, trip-hop, and rock, it is not an easy album to categorize.
Each track feels like walking through a warehouse with many rooms, each room with a scene and sound showcasing what I thought partying as an adult would be like when I was a teenager. I’m not sure if that makes this album sad, exciting, or both, but I love it all the same. If you are a fan of trip hop and industrial music, give this a spin.
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Current Internet Oddity
I love weird YouTube videos. In the early days of the website, and the internet in general, finding strange videos from anonymous accounts unconnected to any social media presence made the world feel so big. There used to be a mysterious quality to the internet that felt wondrous, rather than bleak. You would stumble upon a weird blog, or strange video, and it would scare you, but that fear opened up so many possibilities, it made you ask questions. Who posted this? Why? Is this real? Now the internet is totally gentrified, and dead.
That’s why discovering the Kepther E videos has been so fascinating to me. In 2016 a Youtube channel called Kepther E started uploading a series of strange, often incoherent videos shot by an anonymous videographer. Many of these are simple shots of trees, streets, abandoned buildings, but some are darker, with images of rotting dead animals, ritualistic murder, and presumably the victims the channel owner was stalking. It’s a clever trick, the more boring, monotonous videos of nature lull you into a false sense of safety, before truly terrifying clips start to play. It forces you to pay attention, another thing the internet doesn’t really do anymore.
There is much debate over the subject matter of the videos, as well as the order they should be watched in. Is this evidence of a cult? The confession of a killer? Furthermore, each video is numbered, but they were uploaded out of order. In the completion linked above, they play the videos first in order of upload, then in sequential order.
I’ll be writing more on this in the months to come, but I think mystery in general needs to make a comeback. The owner of the original Kepther E account has never been identified, and I sort of hope they never will be. Watch the preserved videos here.
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Personal updates
My film, The Woods, was lucky enough to pick up some great press at the end of 2024. There is also some movement on the distribution front, but I’m not really allowed to say more than that for now.
While we wait for all of that to get sorted out, we also wait to hear back from festivals in 2025. If you program for a film festival that would like to screen The Woods, get in touch!
I am working on a screenplay for my next movie, but am superstitious about saying more about it before it is done. Hopefully that will be in February.
It’s only the start of the year, so those are all the updates for now. See you next month!
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