003: Robert Stack, Rip Van Winkle, Russian satire, etc.
Happy spooky season! 🎃 I move to cancel November and December this year, replacing them with two more months of October. What say you? 👻
🐮 Music: SPELLLING – Mazy Fly (2019, Sacred Bones)
I fucking love this album. SPELLLING’s music is genuinely fresh. Ethereal R&B crooning alongside hypnotic electronic music; gauzy, ghostly disco soul that sounds at various times like the Fantastic Planet soundtrack, Broadcast, ELO, the cheesy side of Nite Flights in a good way, and so much more. My favorite song is the sublime “Haunted Water,” which is about “the memories of colonial violence that haunt the historical slave ship routes of the Middle Passage.” In short, as intellectually deep and emotionally rich as it is aesthetically gorgeous.
This album is perfect in every way.
Plus, that cover art. My God!
Where: Bandcamp
🧥 Music: Miracle Cross – Robert Stack EP (2020)
At one sonic pole of October music, the pleasing hypnotism of Mazy Fly swirls around us. At the other, the gruesome brilliance of the Robert Stack EP bludgeons us. Fourteen enraged hosannas to true crime, most of these tracks clock in under a minute, compressing the show’s psychic traumas into an even more assaulting experience. It’s really the perfect sonic tribute to Unsolved Mysteries, even if you can’t hang with extreme music. That’s just the power of Robert Stack.
Where: Bandcamp
🇷🇺 Book: The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya (2000)
I read this back in March at the very beginning of quarantine; it suited the post-apocalyptic mood at the time. The book is a Soviet-flavored satire that brought to mind numerous elements from A Clockwork Orange, 1984, and Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s also admittedly way more enjoyable if you have some knowledge of Russian history and literature. Tolstaya’s manic prose reminds me of a lot of Gogol, who might be my favorite comic Russian author. (Dostoevsky is my favorite serious one.)
A lot of people can’t understand: How come it’s called the October Holiday if it’s in November? They just don’t understand the governmental approach! It’s in November because in October the weather is usually good, there’s no snow either. The air is strong, it smells of fallen leaves, the sun shines late, the sky is so blue. The Golubchiks, whichever ones can walk on two feet, go outside on their own without any Decrees. Some go off to gather rusht, some bring in brushwood from the forest, some dig up the last turnips. It’s just beautiful. Nature is clear.
Where: Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore
This is a book you can pretty much actually judge by its cover, though it is funnier than this bleakness lets on!
⛰ Viewing Material: Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre Presents Rip Van Winkle
I love the story of Rip Van Winkle because the idea of waking up one day in an entirely changed world really resonates with me but it turns out that the full tale is actually BATSHIT CRAZY. The reason Rip falls asleep in the first place is more or less because he got far too 🍻 lit with a bunch of weird dudes dressed as old Dutchmen, who were bowling inside the mountains. OH.
Plus, Rip Van Winkle is played by HARRY DEAN STANTON. 😍
Where: YouTube
🍂 Viewing Material: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)
The ‘70s Horror Collection on Criterion has been oddly comforting this month. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death has, I think, been my personal favorite yet. Suffused with feminine paranoia in the mode of High Priestess Shirley Jackson, it’s got everything: a woman freshly recovering from a nervous breakdown in a large spooky house in a rural area, unfriendly locals who are all bandaged up for some reason, an unexpected guest who resembles a long-ago resident, an atmosphere of menacing dreaminess, and a shitload of gaslighting.
This is by no means a great film. One writer even says it was initially meant to be a parody. But the film has a beautifully unsteady art-house spirit, whether it was intended to or not, and it pulses with an increasingly hysterical creepiness. Zohra Lampert, the actress who plays Jessica, has a singular presence too, disarming us with an ever-present smile even as we know that she, or the situation, or both, are quietly unraveling.
Where: Criterion Channel
🎙️ Podcast: American Hysteria – “Monsters”
I first became aware of American Hysteria when they did a crossover episode with You’re Wrong About on the subject of killer clowns, which made an instant fan of me. I’m not as drawn to American Hysteria’s format, which is slightly more produced than I like, but I do love the topics and overall project of investigating the bizarre ways that American society expresses sublimations of its collective unconscious.
From the outset, host Chelsey Weber-Smith (whose tenor falls somewhere between YWA’s Sarah Marshall and In the Dark’s Madeleine Baran) acknowledged that she initially chose this episode’s topic as a fun breather to focus on the likes of Bigfoot and the Chupacabra. What she found instead was that when viewed through a societal lens rather than an individual one, the language of monsters is a lot less about telling fun stories and a lot more about facilitating otherness… and we all know what happens then. (Spoiler alert: Lynchings. Police brutality. The list of horrors that racism has perpetuated goes on and on and on.)
Where: Stitcher and other podcast places
The secret link at the bottom is not supposed to be related to anything else in the email, but this one was too fun not to include.