Hi. What is this? Why am I doing it? I don’t know.
I’ve seen some people do this before, and I like the idea of doing a little weekly round-up of content I’ve put out, stuff I want to recommend that I’ve recently been reading/watching/listening to, and some thoughts that don’t quite fit into a full Substack piece on my main feed — which I’ve been neglecting anyway.
This year, I’ve been bad at keeping up with stuff I want to do. I haven’t really been writing, and I’ve had a hard time keeping up with my personal podcast, Fruitless. I think the peer pressure of having co-hosts on Mammonburg has kept me actively producing that. Anyway, I thought throwing together a list every week could just get me in the habit of producing content and stuff. So, let’s get started.
New from me
I haven’t put out any podcasts this week, however since this is my first list I can cheat and pull from previous weeks. We didn’t record Mammonburg because of the holiday, but the episode from the prior week which you can find here included some nice discussions about politics and religion in horror films.
I have a Fruitless interview with my friend Chris Barker that I’ve been sitting on and not editing for a while (partially because of some audio issues that take work to fix), so look forward for that sometime here soon. It’s on the 1848 revolutions and it was a blast to record… just not to edit. The previous Fruitless episode I did was with my Mammonburg co-host, Phil Cozzi. We talked about mid-twenties angst and struggling with the concept of ‘giving up your dreams’. You can find that here.
Aside from that, I haven’t really been producing much. I wrote some short stories at the beginning of the month, and then I wasted about seventy hours on Victoria 3. So no real world gains, but I have tanked several 19th century economies, including but no limited to the United States, Chile, Russia, Brazil, Belgium, and Sweden. So there’s that.
Film
In a previous Substack, I talked about how film is a medium I gravitate toward when I’m depressed or struggling to keep up with life because it feels more passive. Reading requires more engagement, but film kind of just passively leads you to the images and emotions it wants to produce in you.
EasternEuropeanMovies.com—a website I love—had a Black Friday deal and I finally pulled the trigger and purchased a lifetime pass. I’ve been meaning to do this for a bit because a lot of my favorite directors are Eastern European, and because of that it’s hard to find a lot of their films streaming anywhere. So alongside that purchase, I decided to begin my journey into the ten-part Polish film series Dekalog (1988). This is that meticulous, slow, and depressing feeling that I love from late Soviet film. Each film is about an hour. I watched the first one a few days ago, and I’m excited to work through more.
I also began my journey into Béla Tarr. Previously, the only film of his I’d seen was Damnation (1988). I haven’t worked up the courage to watch his seven-and-a-half-hour epic Sátántangó (1994), so I decided to watch his first film, Family Nest (1979), and his TV adaptation of Macbeth. Both were very different from the more slow and deliberate Béla I grew to know from Damnation, but you can see the beginning of it. Macbeth is shot in two takes (one five minute take, and then the rest of the film is an hour long single take). Family Nest has more of that cinéma vérité quality of the Budapest School—a style it sounds like he slowly abandoned.
Speaking of the documentarian style, over the past few weeks I’ve begun watching Peter Wadkins’ films (due in part to a recent episode of the Important Cinema Club on him) and immediately fell in love. I cannot recommend The War Game (1966) and Punishment Park (1971) enough—two mockumentaries regarding nuclear war and the carceral state punishing anti-war protestors. They are both pretty short, and incredibly harrowing.
Lastly with regard to film, I’ve been working slowly on a list of “Christploitation” films. I got the term from Important Cinema Club (bringing them up again already) when they used it to talk about the director Ron Ormond, but I wanted to branch it out a bit and use it to prefer to a certain vibe of low-budget, exploitation-y films that come out of the fundamentalist evangelical world. I, of course, watched some of Ron Ormond’s films—If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971), The Burning Hell (1974), The Grim Reaper (1976), and The Believer’s Heaven (1977). These are all surreal, dreamlike fundamentalist films about how hell is very, very real and it can take you at any second. Also communists are making kids have sex. It rocks.
Another honorable mention was a movie that ended up not really fitting the list as well as I thought, but enjoyed quite a bit and decided to leave, was The Blood of Jesus (1941). This is all all African-American cast film about a woman on her deathbed fighting against the temptations of the devil. It is not just good in an ironic sense or because I read something different than the author’s intent: it is just legitimately good. Like, very good. Go watch it. Especially if you’re religiously inclined.
I also went ahead and watched through all four of the A Thief in the Night films, which were like a psychic weapon to attack me specifically. I didn’t realize until watching them that the first three are all filmed in and around my hometown, Des Moines, IA. They are a joyous little bit of 1970s fundamentalism, capturing all the little paranoias and regionalism of that specific movement. They’re all available on YouTube. Here’s a link to the first film, which starts with an awesome little rendition of Larry Norman’s rapture song, I Wish We’d All Been Ready.
Lastly, I capped off this most recent Christploitation binge with the incredibly low-budget Six Hundred and Sixty-Six (1972). You can find it on YouTube as well, although it is unfortunately a pretty awful scan.
I can actually bring a few threads together with this strange assortment of films. First. Six Hundred and Sixty-Six is a film about a bunch of smart guys in suits who watch computers and monitor the state of the world in order to preserve human art and thought in light of a nuclear war. When the nuclear war breaks out and as their oxygen begins to run out in their little bunker, they begin to muse on end times prophecies in the Bible and—in true Christploitation and Rapturesploitation fashion—realize the book of Revelation is all true and it is happening to them. This theme of the last of civilization musing on what humanity was and resorting to various forms of religious thinking, magical thinking, cynicism, etc. was incredibly reminiscent of Soviet films coming out in the last Soviet period as well. I’m thinking of Dead Man’s Letters (1986) and O-bi O-ba the End of Civilization (1985), as well as most of Tarkovsky’s filmography after Solaris (1972). It made me make another little list that I want to grow. In general, I’m incredibly interested in this apocalyptic style that was so prevalent in the Cold War and the End of History in the decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
If you want to dip your toe into some of this, you can find a few great Eastern European films in this genre here, uploaded by Exmilitary. Two of the films here, I listed above.
Last movie I wanted to mention doesn’t really relate to anything above, so I’m just sticking it at the end. I saw The Menu (2022) in theaters a few days ago. Very good. Highly recommend.
Reading
As I mentioned at the beginning of the film section, I haven’t been reading a lot because of some mental health struggles.
That being said, I started Post-liberalism: Recovering a Shared World by Fred Dallmayr. I can’t speak to the rest of the book yet, but the introduction is good!
I’ve been enjoying John Ganz’s Substack lately. His piece regarding the midterms was pretty solid, and his most recent piece today was also rather good.
I have a number of books that I’m about half-way through and need to pick back up and finish. The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe is one. I’ve been working on that forever. I’ve also been reading The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham, which a fantastic tome about the “dark ages,” and Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud because I have decided to make myself more annoying.
Music
I had a bit of a crisis recently. When I was younger, my Dad would always be listening to mix CDs he’d make. The songs on them were mostly stuff that my Dad had discovered in the 1970s and 1980s when he was a teenager or in his early twenties. I always wondered how you could get stuck only listening to stuff from that time in your life and never branch out (to his credit, he did branch out, but he just returned to stuff he was familiar with).
Well, I’m 25 now, and I’m starting to do it. I realized recently that the only stuff I listened to was bands I discovered between the ages of 16 and about 23. I decided to nip this bud now while I still have something resembling youthful vigor, and I asked for a bunch of music recommendations from friends on the internet.
Nevertheless, I did still return to my wheelhouse of punk, indie, folk, and emo from the Aughts, but I did discover some new stuff. Specifically, some more alt-country stuff like Justin Townes Earle, Old Crow Medicine Show, Wilco, Deer Tick, etc. which I hadn’t listened to much before. I’ve been enjoying that. Here’s some tracks I specifically recommend:
Methamphetamine - Old Crow Medicine Show
Jesus, Etc. - Wilco
Baltimore Blues No. 1 - Deer Tick
Harlem River Blues - Justin Townes Earle
They Killed John Henry - Justin Townes Earle
I also feel like I should mention that I put out an album a few years back. A lot of people who know me from my online presence don’t know that I was a musician. I say “was” because I don’t really write much music anymore, but my work is out there. Specifically, an album called We Were Kids. It’s an acoustic, folk-punk-adjacent project I worked on while I was processing stuff during a very specific period of my life—my divorce, my loss and slow return of faith, and an early twenties lack of identity. I wrote all the songs between 2014 - 2019, and by the time I was recording the album in 2020 I already felt like they were songs written by a different person. By now, they feel very alien to me and serve as more of a time capsule. Nevertheless, it’s out there. You can find it here. It’s also on Spotify and everything else.
Wrapping it up
I think that’s about it for this week. This thing is definitely and experiment, and we’ll see if I keep doing it. Typing this up first thing on Monday morning did feel pretty good, so maybe I’ll do this again in the future. Subscribe if you’re interested in more little ramblings on media and stuff like this.