🫖 Insecure Tea is celebrating her 21st birthday by chugging a beer on the bartop! She seems to be a natural… makes me wonder if she’s been sneaking alcohol before this 🤨 Welcome readers, new and old. I’d call this a pretty Halloweeny essay, with takes on other worlds, horror miniseries, and cemetery events. Hope you like it! 🫖
world of crystal
I dreamed of a world of crystal, in those days: I didn’t dream it, I saw it, an indestructible frozen springtime of quartz. Polyhedrons grew up, tall as mountains, diaphanous: the shadow of the person beyond pierced through their thickness. (Italo Calvino, t zero)
After reading one page of a chapter titled “Crystals,” I too, dreamed of a crystalline world. My dreams are always more vivid when I read before bed. Sometimes, it only takes a few paragraphs, I’ve discovered.
I was whisked away from a crowd by a fortune teller. Ever loath to be tricked, I would have normally politely declined. But, sensing importance in this encounter, I allowed her to pull me into a small bathroom with big windows and orange-painted walls. We were blown by a strong gust of wind, even though the windows were all closed.
She began to tell me my fortune, which primarily consisted of boy troubles. Nothing she said was particularly relevant to my life, but I passively nodded in agreement. I was distracted by what I saw over her shoulder.
Outside of the window was the most outstanding and gorgeous garden, shimmering in jewel tones. Giant formations of crystal—magenta, clear and green—sprung from the earth next to plants that looked like they belonged at the bottom of the sea. Everything was alive and undulating.
The psychic thought she was doing a good job because I kept saying “uh huh,” and nodding at everything she said, all while plotting how I could get outside and walk in the garden and take pictures of the beautiful sights. Then, something snapped and the crystal world disappeared. Outside the window was an ordinary garden.
She asked me if I could already see everything, and I nodded. We exited the bathroom and she said that I was ahead of schedule for my “training,” if I was interested. If not, I was more than welcome to continue seeing her regularly for readings.
t zero is not a book that I would recommend to anyone, but I think that’s mainly because I don’t like sci-fi. Roman and I recently discussed this in a monastery-themed bar (God bless New York). He asked if there was a single science fiction book that I liked. I couldn’t even think of one that I had read cover-to-cover. All that came to mind was A Journey to the Center of the Earth, which I trudged halfway through as a preteen.
I guess it bubbles down to my interest in characters over worlds. I don’t particularly enjoy pondering the many uncanny realities that could have been but were not. Hundreds of pages of these speculations do little more than make me feel lonely and bored, which is not a winning combination for an attention span weakened by TikTok.
I wrote a note on my flight returning from Germany. I pressed my forehead against the window, surprised by what I saw below. The landscape surged in and out of the sea, in evocative shapes that would have sparked Verne’s imagination. “Descending into New York and it looks like a journey to the center of the Earth. I can’t believe any landscape could ever look so otherworldly to me in America.”
“America,” I continued, “Overdeveloped because we love it so much. We want more and more. Houses clustered hungrily around its supple curves.”
Sometimes I surprise myself with my outbursts of passion for the land that has allowed me to live on it. Contained in these fictive borders, there is more than I could discover in a lifetime. 3 million square miles is more than enough for my imagination.
Brian went to Paris and I told him that he’d be ready for a big American breakfast by the time he returned.
terror of death
Those who so greatly exalt incorruptibility, inalterability are reduced to talking this way, I believe, by their great desire to go on living, and by the terror they have of death. They do not reflect that if men were immortal, they themselves would never have come into the world. Such men really deserve to encounter a Medusa’s head which would transmute them into statues of jasper or of diamond, and thus make them more perfect than they are … Oh, there is no doubt whatever that the Earth is more perfect being alterable, changeable than it would be if it were a mass of stone or even a solid diamond. (Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems)
In the spirit of the season, I’ve been sampling some spooky content of late. Generally, I’m a horror novice. Like sci-fi, horror has a tendency to explore uncanny realities. Yet, the genre does more to pique my interest because fear is, essentially, a human thing. My latest rabbit holes—Mike Flanagan’s miniseries Midnight Mass (2021) and The Haunting of Hill House (2018). Flanagan’s fascination with big ideas—while occasionally tiresome—is what attracts me to his work.
Midnight Mass is Catholic horror at its best, exploring scary possibilities in the bible without heavy-handed exploitation of the quotidian creepiness of Catholic ceremony.
The primary fright of the show is the apparition of an angel, a flesh-colored creature with black talons and reflective eyes that looks more like a demon in the popular imagination. When it appears to the terrified congregation, Father Paul preaches: “Remember, brothers and sisters, have faith that in the bible, every time they mention an angel, when an angel appears to we humans, we are afraid.”
From 12 years of religious schooling, it strikes me how most specifics from the Book of Revelation were elided. Catholics seem to be pretty squeamish about the apocalypse. It’s fun to challenge the white-robed angels and blue-eyed Jesuses and chubby baby cherubim so comfortably common in modern Christian iconography with something darker.
The show is peppered with philosophical moments—some hit harder than others. Episode IV is bisected by two moralistic monologues that I’m certain were milked to high heaven during auditions. Two of the main characters debate their opposing worldviews of what happens after death. Generally, I don’t like to think about this question because I am young and foolish. Nonetheless, I took comfort in the speech made by Riley, our agnostic manslaughtering protagonist.
The CliffsNotes version:
“When I die, my body stops functioning … I dream bigger than I have ever dreamed before because it’s all of it. Just the last dump of DMT all at once, and my neurons are firing and I’m seeing this firework display of memories and imagination and I am just tripping … And all of the other things that make me up … they just keep on living and eating. And I’m serving a purpose. I’m feeding life.”
I have less to say about Hill House, though I also found power in its messages. It’s about a family broken apart by their summer in a haunted house that led to the death of their mother. It strikes me that the show is more about despair than fear, which is to say that it is more about death than life.
Anyone who has lost a loved one is bound to be shaken by the scenes in the funeral home when a new death gathers the family in the same room for the first time in years. Before I knew it, I was sobbing, not at the content of the show, but at the understanding that my most painful days are ahead of me, and that everyone I love will die, and that I’ll die too and that might just be it.
This sounds unpleasant, but it was honestly a welcome catharsis. We usually turn to horror for its ability to chill and thrill; less often for its capacity to explore sadness. We tend to associate sadness with genres that sit higher on the cultural hierarchy. Fear is lurid and tantalizing, but sadness is serious. Sadness is art, so sadness belongs to drama. Certifiably steeped in these hierarchies, I suppose I hadn’t realized that horror could be such a powerful way to explore the darkest realities we face. I guess I ought to step outside of my assumptions. What’s next? Reading sci-fi?
vampire bait
Josh met me at the cemetery gates.
If this was a Buffy episode, we would have been obvious goners, giggling and taking pictures and strolling along with our beer and wine in hand.
We both had few expectations of what kinds of programming would be going on at a Green-Wood Cemetery event entitled “Nightfall: Eternal Returns.” For a moment, I wondered if it was going to be anything like Knott’s Scary Farm, the fearful outdoor spookfest of my youth. We both agreed that it would be somewhat disrespectful for a clown with a chainsaw to be jumping over people’s graves.
The event was fortunately clownless, though there were some circus folks doing hula hoop performances to steampunky music sourced from Las Vegas ads circa 2014. Musically, we saw some opera, a theremin, and a sparky guitar duo. The film installations were my least favorite part. On one screen was famous footage of the construction of the Empire State Building set to ~spooky music.~ It was a little laughable. Another screen showcased an avant-garde claymation film. We walked up just in time to see a house with a vagina being penetrated by something or other. Not to be suuuuch a prude, but if I died in 1838, I wouldn’t be sooo stoked to see a claymation cunt projected over my final resting place.
Along the winding paths, we talked a lot about memory. We both have such strong nostalgia for our Berkeley days, now that they’re in the rearview mirror. Josh is thinking about leaving New York when his lease is up this spring. He already knew that his time here will be full of big feelings that he’ll only be able to feel in their fullness when he’s already gone.
5 songs for the crystalline world
“Kisscam,” Turtlenecked
I don’t know what this guy means when he says “stuck in the red and the blue and the green,” but it’s oddly touching and makes me think of my crystal dream world. My favorite song from this album is actually “I Fall Hard,” which is a downtown love song if I’ve ever heard one.
Ok, I’ll stop pretending I don’t know exactly who the guy behind Turtlenecked is: he’s the DJ called The Dare who’s neck in neck with Blaketheman1000 for attendance at every clouty substack happening these days. These two have been soldiers at the war of making horniness cool again, sex recession be damned! I’ve shown up to a few of The Dare’s sets, and he’s definitely talented. His August single Girls has been dubbed (joking or not) a musical turning point, and the way people go ham for it makes me think that there might be a grain of truth there. I was supposed to see him again at arguably the cloutiest substack event of the year, were I not bedridden from a bout of tonsillitis I probably contracted at the Broadway last week.
“Otis,” The Durutti Column
There’s a new café on Avenue B that I keep returning to for its good music and inoffensive prices ($4 for a coffee rather than $5). They played Durutti Column the other day, which teleported me to 2020 when I was studying at a café with a friend, and I got a phone call from my mom telling me that we needed to put our cat down. It’s a sad memory but a beautiful song.
“Slow Fast Hazel,” Stereolab
I saw Stereolab at Brooklyn Steel two weeks ago. We got there late because it was a Tuesday and on Tuesdays, my patience for opening bands is thin. The venue was packed, and everyone was standing their ground, hard as a rock. I was made to feel like a bit of a scoundrel for pushing in to find a little patch of standing room, which I too had paid for. I do feel that the general spirit of camaraderie at concerts has diminished lately. The show was great nonetheless, and a lot of Stereolab tunes have a sparkly quality, IMHO.
“La Jura,” Chicano Batman
Chicano Batman are spooky like the Growlers, but funkier and with gems in Spanish, like this one. This song is a sprawling noir about police violence.
“Let It Go - Demo,” Oberhofer
Nothing like a chance encounter. A few days ago, Brad released this demo of a song from last year’s album Smothered. I stumbled across it for no particular reason. Always fun to hear different variations of a single song. It reminds me that the recordings we come to know and love are just one of a thousand possibilities. It’s beautiful to consider all of the other versions we might have fallen in love with, if given the chance. Also, feel free to go be charmed by the delightfully lo-fi music video.
🫖 Fare thee well! I’m considering shifting my publishing goal to 10 am on Mondays, as Sunday mornings have been difficult to achieve. Let me know if you have any thoughts! Are Mondays a vibe killer, or would my essays be a fresh way to start your week? As usual, it helps me out immensely when you like, share, or upgrade to a paid subscription. Thanks for being here. 🫖