The new Zombie video is here

and also the Iowa Democratic Party is a joke

Hello and welcome to the media round-up, a newsletter where I talk about all the media I’m producing, watching, listening to, or reading. Today, I’m going to start with a bunch of self-promotion (The zombie video is, in fact, here), move on to a specific news story, and then I’ll do the usual media recap.

Self-promotion

As I mentioned last week, the last few days of October were pretty crazy for me, but I pulled it off. I did get three podcasts and a YouTube video released. It happened. Let’s go through those really quick.

For the Fruitless podcast, I finished up Spooky October—four episodes talking about horror films. They ended up mostly focusing on found footage films. The two main feed horror episodes from the month include an episode about WNUF Halloween Special, which I wrote about previously on this newsletter, and then a new episode featuring Jackal released over the weekend. We talk about J Horror, Noroi: the Curse (2005), and Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 01 - Operation Capture the Slit-Mouthed Woman (2012). It’s a blast.

On the Patreon (only $3 a month, by the way), Jackal, Phil Cozzi, Jake the Lawyer, and I wrapped up horror month by talking about some of our favorite horror films. It’s a good time.

The biggest announcement, however, is that I finally finished the Zombie video. If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know I’ve been working on this for a while. I actually started the project back in May, I believe, but I wasn’t writing this newsletter regularly at that point.

This was my first stab at a video essay, and the project ballooned way beyond what I was intending. Part of this is the result of some mistakes I’ve learned from while working on this. I originally chose the subject because I’ve been interested in zombies and how they’ve evolved in film and folklore since college and was already pretty familiar with their history in Haiti. I thought it would be an easy video to do while getting myself familiar with Adobe Premier.

I would write a chunk, record myself, edit it, and then move on to the next chunk. Most video essayists write the whole thing at once, record themselves, and then edit it. I knew that I was doing it “wrong,” but I didn’t realize just how much doing it that way would slow me down and make it all more exhausting. If you’re writing a draft and realizing that it is getting too long, you can go back and edit it. If you have actually edited the entire video and realize that it’s at the one hour mark and you’re still talking about the 1980s, you’re kind of stuck unless you want to redo everything from scratch. Because of this, the video is way longer than I intended.

But I did it primarily for myself, and it feels good to finally have it finished. You can find the video here. It is, unfortunately, age restricted due to the amount of bloody zombie movie footage, but if you’re interested in hearing how I could possibly talk about the evolution of zombies for an hour and forty minutes, you should check it out. Even if you’re not really interested in zombies or horror media, I think you’ll still get something out of it, since the guiding philosophy of the whole video is to look at the history and politics surrounding the films and folklore.

Last but not least, a new episode of The Good Apples is here. We talk more about the Boston Strangler. You can find that here.

A news story that pissed me off

On Wednesday, the University of Iowa Democrats (UI Dems) released a statement. I want to include it in full because there is a seemingly intentional obfuscation about the actual language of the statement.

We shamelessly and fully support Palestine. We recognize that every person has the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, just as the United States has long said they stand for. The ongoing violence against millions of innocent people is egregious and the perpetuation of it by the United States of America and other western states is even more so. We have been taught the stories of mass murders and genocides of peoples around the world, including those of the United States. We now bear witness to the same systems of oppression taking place in a nation thousands of miles from our own. No longer will we watch in silence while atrocities are committed against men, women and children. We will protest, advocate and fight for the human rights of all, for the human rights of Palestine.

May every Palestinian live long and free, from the river to the sea.

Now, a Tweet from the Iowa GOP chair, Jeff Kaufmann

There’s being liberal and there’s being insane. UIowa Dems are siding with militantly anti-LGBT Hamas terrorists - who gleefully slaughter women and children. Of course, we’ll hear nothing but crickets from Rita Hart as antisemitic loonies take over her party.

Now, let’s keep in mind that Kaufmann is chair of the Iowa GOP. His own party was attacking LGBTQ rights earlier this year. These people should never be taken seriously. Accusations of racism or homophobia are laughable coming from any Republican, especially after everything we’ve witnessed in the past few years. But, unfortunately, it seems that a good chunk of the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) has the memory of a goldfish. Rita Hart can’t have any accusation of “crickets,”after all, and so we get the following statement that evening from the party chair.

The Iowa Democratic Party was recently made aware of a statement made by University Democrats at Iowa, which included problematic anti-semitic slogans including ‘from the river to the sea Palestine will be free.’ Let's be very clear. That is a call for Jewish genocide and we wholly condemn that offensive language.

The Iowa Democratic Party stands with the innocent civilians, Israeli and Palestinian, that have had their lives ruined by the terrorist group Hamas.

The Iowa Democratic Party has requested the resignations of the student representatives who signed the letter.

This is a state party demanding the resignation of young students. They want to condemn the “problematic” language in the statement—this use of silly social justice clichés in defense of genocide is beyond reprehensible. It also deeply relies on this goldfish memory. Anyone who was read more than the first paragraph of a Wikipedia page on Israel-Palestine is fully aware that “from the river, to the sea” has been a slogan since the 1960s, and has absolutely never meant the extermination of Jews in Israel.

Anyone with a working brain knows this. This is intentional obfuscation. It’s pathetic. More and more denunciations from members of the IDP are arriving to condemn this truly inocuous statement from some young progressives.

In Ames, Iowa State University Democrats (ISU Dems) have made the decision to disaffiliate themselves from the party in light of the IDP’s cowardly attack on a group of college students for daring to have the spine they lack.

This is another example of the IDP losing touch with young progressives. Recall that this is the same IDP that made a national embarassment out of the Iowa caucus in 2020 after bungling the results. They are a national laughing stock and will continue to be if they choose to cave to every bad faith accusation by right wing assholes. This party doesn’t believe in anything.

These young college students have made the mistake of believing that the Democrats actually believe what they say they believe. That they actually want equality and democracy, that they actually want to fight against racism and violence. Their only crime is believing that the IDP actually stands for anything.

All of this tut-tutting about slogans like “from the river, to the sea” comes from a seemingly conscious attempt to muddy the waters. Let’s be entirely clear: the students are calling for a ceasefire. The IDP is calling for more dead Palestinians in a conflict that has already reached over 9,000 Palestinian deaths over the past few weeks, a huge amount being children. As a friend pointed out to me today, this is more deaths that the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in the 1990s—a massacre that had war crime trials going until a few years ago.

Anyone calling an attempt to demand a ceasefire “problematic” is not a serious person. They do not believe in anything. This is the simplest moral question of our lifetime, genuinely, and it is only made complicated by these incredibly intentional attempts to confuse the discourse. No more death. Any stance that is not predicated on that simple notion is evil.

The rest of the round-up

It’s a bit hard to shift gears here. I apologize for the tonal whiplash.

I wrapped up the month by watching a few horror films. I watched The Exorcist (1973), which is obviously a masterpiece, The Church (1989), a fantastic and weird occult horror film from deeply underrated Italian director Michele Soavi, and then The Houses That October Built (2014) which is an awesome title attached to a very mediocre film.

I think I’m going to wrap it up here. I don’t have a lot to say about the above films.

May every Palestinian live long and free, from the river to the sea.