ALEX KAZEMI

The Vancouver-based author and screenwriter stops by to tell us what he's been into.

June 13, 2025

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Alex Kazemi is a Vancouver-based author and screenwriter. His critically acclaimed debut novel New Millennium Boyz — a dissection of Y2K masculinity and a satire of the “extreme teen” genre — is now being adapted into a feature film by Muse, the production company behind American Psycho and Spring Breakers. The book was hit with a content warning and briefly censored by his publisher, but has since been released in a new, uncensored paperback edition (check it out here). This Spring, he hosted a sold-out NYC literary event at The Strand, followed by a Kelly Cutrone-produced afterparty, which landed him on the front page of Page Six. A few summers back, Madonna read aloud a passage from his occult book Pop Magick to Steven Klein in a black-and-white video posted to her official Instagram. Even Bret Easton Ellis calls him his “favorite millennial provocateur.” He also just appeared on How Long Gone podcast, and you can listen here. Lucky for us, Alex’s here to tell us what he’s been into.

WHAT Alex Kazemi IS INTO...

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BOOK I’M CURRENTLY READING: NEW MILLENNIUM BOYZ (DIRECTOR’S CUT/PAPERBACK) BY ALEX KAZEMI

The ‘uncensored’ re-release of this book which has ‘deleted scenes’ and ‘special features’ has been something I’ve heard about in ‘literature’ spaces, I think it’s okay. It’s a bit annoying and the author is trying too hard to be like Bret Easton Ellis and clearly wants his book to be the male/Columbine era version of Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen. I do like that it’s a satire of the whole ‘edgy teen movie’ genre. I saw on Deadline it’s being produced/adapted into a feature film produced by the team who did Spring Breakers and American Psycho. Fuck him. I guess we’re living through the apocalypse.

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MY LAN LINE/HOUSE PHONE/LIVE OFFLINE

Posting is so over! Selfies? Images, videos, live updates on what you are doing? Stop. Get a house-line with call forwarding, a flip phone and only use iMessage on your desktop and build an 90s AOL simulator. Try to schedule screen time. You don’t need to exist online 24/7, if your career can allow it and if you can get an gen-z assistant to exist as a digital you for advertising purposes, do that too. It’s 2025. Instagram is what MySpace was to 2012. Time to leave the algorithm.

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Y2K ADULT ALTERNATIVE MUSIC

Bro, this is the peak of western civilization music. Where is the mature/adult, sporting a brown leather jacket in coffee bar smoking a cigarette music for millennials? Savage Garden is my favorite band, and the greatest of all time and the song “Inner Smile” by Texas makes me feel like I’m feeling and seeing the beauty of this Earth all at once, one day listening to it is going to make me explode.

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ROLLERCOASTER directed by Scott Smith (1999)

Disclaimer: I’m definitely a gatekeeper and my friends can tell you that I tell them that they are NEVER allowed to list anything I show them on Letterboxd or post to socials, or they are banned from movie nights in my building’s theatre. When I was 15, Sky Ferreira introduced me to the “extreme teen” indie film genre that shaped my artistic instincts. Blame her for everything. I learned about Bully, Kids, Nowhere, Christiane F, Tart, Freeway all from her! I have a constant craving to find movies that exist in a similar world, and during my book research I found Rollercoaster. I immediately tracked down the director out of hiding to do a screening of it at the local indie cinema here in Vancouver. Watch it now.

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Hotel Bel-Air

When I’m in California, I have a rule: I don’t leave Bel Air, Beverly Hills or West Hollywood. To my friends in Silver Lake, I just can’t do it. Due to my self destructive nature, I’m automatically a Chateau Marmont guy at heart but I feel like when I’m at the Hotel Bel-Air, i’m the closer to the person I was born to be. I’ve never felt more peace than salt water swimming, ordering 50$ chicken tenders at 2am, mindfulness breathing in my hot tub on my suite’s patio. The beautiful swans in the garden at the entrance. I don’t feel safe, and struggle with emotional dysregulation if I’m not at a 5 star hotel.

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KABBALAH RED STRING

My red string protects me from the ‘evil eye’. It’s the most important spiritual system to ever exist because all modern occultism is derived from Kabbalistic thought. . The difference between a lot of magick/modern spirituality/new age thought and Kabbalah is that it’s all about taking accountability, and responsibility. If we have a dream, it has to be service driven or for the sake of sharing. We as Kabbalists believe that we create any type of chaos that comes into our lives, and if we take the conscious effort to correct our negative qualities, the universe and the material world can mirror this beautiful alchemy and keep us connected to a transcendent state of divinity, I like to call ‘the light.’

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Blackberry Bold 9900

I write in fragments, and I’m constantly jotting down ideas all day long and what has been great is turning a Blackberry Bold into an offline word processor. I use the built in software and export my writing into a .docx and then put it on my computer via USB. Then I plug my notes into Scrivener. I’m a huge nerd about collecting offline-writing tech (shout out to Freewrite!) and it makes the rush of putting together a novel which I call the ‘incubation process’, a lot for more chaotic and fun. I consider writing to be like a scavenger hunt with your own brain and I feel like if you see your mind as a search engine, you can pull up a lot of insane ideas by just trusting your inner web browser.

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Coke Gold (Caffeine Free Diet Coke)

Bret Easton Ellis and I were at the Beverly Hills Polo lounge during my hardcover launch week in 2023 and I tried to order a 'Coke Gold', he and the waiter both looked at me like I was the dumbest Canadian. He apologized to the waiter. Apparently in America it’s called ‘caffeine free Diet Coke’, and I live off of this shit. I will die without it. I mean, Elon Musk is obsessed with it too - which I feel is a red flag about me? I haven’t had caffeine since I’ve been straight edge for over a decade, so this has been a life savour. I think about Coke gold all day. I will never ever research how bad ‘aspartame’ is for the body, or whatever because I’m not giving this one taboo in my life up.

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Region Free DVD Players

The reason I got a region free DVD player in my mid 20s was because I wanted to own a European copy of the Leonardo Dicaprio Gen X deep-cut/full of lore movie Don’s Plum. If you can sometimes save the money, you spend on vaping, events, weed, alcohol, drugs or whatever to buy rare out of print DVDs (even bootlegs sometimes) that are locked to Japan, Australia, UK, whatever isn’t North American. Do it, you’ll never regret it. The delayed gratification of waiting weeks for a DVD that is available to stream right now on some scary illegal link that has 300 pop ups to come in the mail may not make sense to a lot of people but I really appreciate the movie more, and having the association of the whole experience of having to track it down vs just getting it right now makes it so fun. I own a lot of rare TV series box sets from the 90s/2000s that never got released in North America, and are impossible to find online. Join me, you can live this lifestyle too!

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Lorde’s Lyrics

I don’t think pop music has historically ever had a moment like her “Girl, So Confusing” remix verse. It’s not a joke. It’s a triumph for literature. Everyone remembers where they were the first time they heard it. This was a serious revolution and took us out of her usual fever dreaminess of controlled poetic syntax (which I love) , to just unmasked, raw, chaotic feminine brutality and I don’t think we appreciate the prose switch-up enough. I also have said “let’s work it out on the remix?” to many people I’ve fought with since the song dropped. Sometimes I even write a verse mimicking the song taking accountability of what I’ve done and I send it to who I’m in a conflict with, it actually helps! I’m obsessed with the new singles off her upcoming album Virgin and I’m already studying the cadence of epigrams like ‘MDMA in the back garden’,. I’m someone who struggles with severe summer depression, which is taboo in the world of seasonal sadists but taking my discman for a walk by the ocean as “The Path” starts up on my (files purchased on ITunes!) burnt CD-R copy of ‘Solar Power’ is nature’s SSRI. Suck on that, Saint John’s Wort.

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ALEX KAZEMI

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