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things have gotten worse since we last spoke by eric larocca

i read this book in early 2022. i saw it on tiktok. im admittedly not a huge reader, and books i do read seriously have to surprise me to keep me entertained. im the same with movies. i spent months trying to track down a physical copy of this book. tiktok would never reveal too much, it really just appeared in haul videos and the comments would talk about it like a secret club. i wanted in. i eventually gave up and read it on my phone. i wish i waited. things have gotten worse since we last spoke is hard to explain. its the most pathetic, entrancing, and unforeseen story i have ever read. i sincerely hope someone has read this and recommends me something even more insane because ive been chasing this high ever since i read it. the story is told over a length chatlogs shared between two women (more points for lesbians). i dont want to say much because half of the thrill of this book is discovering whats really behind those fucking emails but its a basically psychological thriller romance. dark psychological thriller romance with body horror elements but thats all im telling. my favorite sentence ever is in from book. what have you done today to deserve your eyes? i think about it once a day. its my bio for like everything. seriously, read this if your into the macabre. especially gay body horror stuff.

@drugdog

Jan 27, 2025

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Emma cline’s the guest

As someone who was unmoved by Daddy but enamoured with The Iceman, I was unsure of what to expect when I cracked open Cline’s latest novel, The Guest. Revered as the Play It As It Lays of Gen Z sex work, Uncut Gems for chicks and the “book of the summer,” the novel tells the story of a twenty-two year old named Alex who is ousted by her sugar daddy in the Hamptons and determined to drift her way through the island until Labour Day. A stressful read in which an unreliable protagonist makes nothing but bad decisions, the sentences are clean and the plot grows tense with every page.  Most piercing, however, is the precision to which Cline illustrates how whiteness and its perceived docility can permeate the gates of wealth and class at ease. Chapter by chapter, constructed episodically so the rising action mirrors the high (and inevitable crash) of a drug, we read as Alex flattens herself to become fluid, to leech, to exploit. Cline's understanding of how these spaces function, and how the right (or white) wallflower can encroach on a territory that is not theirs, undetected, is acute. As a result, Alex's powers of manipulation come not from an aptitude for obscuring her identity. It's quite the opposite. Instead of a disguise, she offers herself - a blank canvas of a girl - and allows her surrounding environment to assume how she might fit in their world. Upon completion, I thought of a new comparison: Parasite amoungst the privileged.

@brendeezyy

Jan 22, 2024

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Anatomy of a fall

I felt like I was on trial watching Anatomy of a Fall -- for my failures as a writer and the ensuing resentments misdirected at my partner. Seeing my private torments litigated in a riveting courtroom drama, spoken in clinical French, was titillating. The writing was so sharp I could’ve just listened like the blind son Daniel and been engaged. But I loved watching Daniel practice piano, the baby blue glaze over his eyes and his surprise testimony in a redrum turtleneck.  The story wastes no time. Within five minutes, the husband is found dead, bleeding out in the snow. An autopsy cannot rule out foul play and his wife, a writer, becomes the sole suspect. What unravels in court is not only the events that precipitated the death of her husband, but an ultimate tea concoction of their strained relationship, competing literary ambitions and the blame and guilt surrounding the accident that blinded their son. Entering a foreign court is a bit jarring. The rules, procedures and dress are notably different from America and seem silly when defamiliarized. The prosecutor, a bald little gremlin robed in red, was probably my favorite character. Arched, dry and eloquent, he bludgeoned the accused writer with an avalanche of incriminating evidence and was quick to undercut any counter/argument from the defense. Court rules in France appear to allow more cross-talk, making the arguments more conversational than U.S. court dramas, which glorify long-winded monologues.  Impressively, the writer/director thread the needle so well that one is never quite convinced one way or the other. I am easily persuaded and in this lawyerly tug of war, I felt myself suspended over a chasm with demons of jealousy, envy and pride snapping at my feet.  For all the talk of literary failure, this was a written masterpiece. I am drawn to such stories, like a moth to flame, for so many deep and cutting reasons. Like the husband, I deflect and blame others for my shortcomings: If only X, Y and Z were different, then I could write! The wife’s gaslighting voice lives within me too: Make the time and do it, coward! And I disdain my father for giving up sports journalism, and for withholding those ambitions from me (Had I known earlier, maybe then I’d be a staff writer!) and on himself in general.  Funny enough, when I was biking home after seeing Fallen Leaves last week, I had the high thought that my senior thesis anticipated my current condition with regards to writing. My argument was garbled -- something about the author subverting masculine forms/expectations of writing (adventure, heroism) using feminine forms (diary, domesticity) through an act of ventriloquy -- but the book I chose to write about was a book about a wannabe writer’s failure.  Called El Libro Vacio and written by Josefina Vicens, it was a novel about the shortcomings of a middle class man working in middle management and his literary shortcomings. He wanted to be a great writer, but he was tormented and uninspired by the banality of his day-to-day life as a family man. If only he didn’t have a kid and wife, he could hit the road and sail the high seas and finally have something to say! He studiously documents his failures and torments in a diary that amounts to the novel by Vicens.  In my early 20s, I was interested in what makes a good leader. I studied the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, the most winningest basketball coach Gregg Popovich and read more than a dozen presidential biographies. But now I find myself fixated on failure, my own and my fathers, and I want to learn the art of letting go.

@condor

Jan 22, 2024

Top Recs from @asher-penn

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Facebook Sober

RIP to this absolute GOAT of a sobriety meme account. I think I stopped drinking around the time that sobriety memes were in their second wave - 12-step inside jokes that were ideally harrowing, embarrassing, and hopeful in their shared hopelessness -  and while Brutal Recovery, Fucking Sober, and Dumbsoberbitch are great, no account could perform these lacerations with the expertise of a surgeon as @facebooksober. Like an elephant balancing itself on a dime, facebook sober managed to capture the divine paradox’s inherent to recovery with such aesthetic grace and poetry I was 100% convinced that the person behind the account was a hot girl (it was a dude, lol). Whatever. Hot Newcomers Are Forever.

@asher-penn

Dec 21, 2021

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Whistlegraph

From what I can tell, artist Jeffrey Scudder is the only post-internet artist to figure out Tik-Tok, with his Whistelgraph project recently hitting 2 Million followers. Whistlegraphs are tiny songs that are performed through drawing, where the sonic and visual gestures synch up poetically - kind of like a haiku that you animate in real-time - that for the past two years have been performed in videos by Scudder alongside artists Camille Klein and Alex Freundlich. Pioneers in their own experimental artform, Whistlegraph seems to be channeling a lot of things at the same time - If I were to free-associate I’d say it feels spiritually connected to Brendan Fowler and Odwalla88 and Tori Kudo, but also Josh Smith and David O’Reilly and Susan Cianciolo - not that any of their devoted fans would know or care about that stuff. Their audience is predominantly between the ages of 8-17, and the most comprehensive interview with Whistlegraph to date was done by a 13-year-old superfan named Perry. Watching Perry perform “Butterfly Cosplayer” with glee makes me wonder if the current iteration of Whistlegraph is just the beginning and that the most exciting manifestations of this art form will be found in generations to come.

@asher-penn

Dec 21, 2021

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Canon Powershot G7

When I was in art school I studied photo and found it really frustrating that the most successful photographers had all chosen a camera for themselves that they worked with almost all the time: for Ryan McGinley & Terry Richardson it was the Yashika T4, for Juergen Teller it was the Contax G2, Wolfgang Tillmans used a Leica with a 35mm lens. Something about this felt disingenuous and try as I might I could never find my version of that thing. It hasn’t been since I abandoned and rediscovered photography that I found that my first point-and-shoot digital camera - the 2005 Canon Powershot G7 - is mine. I adore this freaking thing and shoot all my portraits with it. You can get them usually for $50 on eBay, the flash is powerful, and it has a fantastic zoom. There’s also a really nice video feature that can handle low light and somehow translates colors in a way that feels “straight from the tube” - I’ve already shot a short film on it and want to make more videos with it soon.

@asher-penn

Dec 21, 2021