(At this point, I’d already been on some shows with big studio audiences, and, believe me that’s nerve-wracking!) “What’s a dinner party without a bit of schadenfreude?”. Truthfully, there was no way I could have possibly anticipated what this novel was ultimately going to become. I’m a hardcore materialist, a hardcore bricoleur, a hardcore miscellany-ist (if there’s such a word). Better said, I began trying to produce a kind of writing the brain could dance to. The entire dispositif may be a pop culture. Ice Road Truckers and Nerval have a very intensified synergistic effect when consumed together! PK I often think of that very famous interview with you and David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, all very young, on “Charlie Rose.” Wallace is obviously dead now and Franzen, well, in a way he has had a different sort of death, and then there is you, consistent as ever. But the idea of transformation has always been something that I romanticize in a work. Reading Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit was a profoundly sublime experience for me, that involved tears pouring down my face and uproarious laughter. And I’m a solo act, a solitary predator. The three of us was a grouping that some Charlie Rose producer found somehow representative, but was completely arbitrary. ML Gaby—her avatar—is portrayed as a kind of co-author. But even with that, I’m just not a hive-minded or particularly gregarious sort of person. PK Tell us about how your daughter figured in both the making and telling of this father-daughter tale. BOMB includes a quarterly print magazine, a daily online publication, and a digital archive of its previously published content from 1981 onward. No one can possibly hate this book as much as I’ve hated it at times. That began many years of us messaging—from congratulating each other on various successes, to notes of concern about illnesses or other troubles, to messages about our shared interest in K-pop. And our cult’s slogan—our cri de guerre—is Stay Secret. Have a look at the high street must-haves, celebrities fashion and all the style secrets from the Royal family. My experience of working on a book—it’s all like the last days of Siegfried & Roy! I’m not thinking of anything else. And at some point—and this is the crucial moment—the “singularity” occurs and the material achieves its own subjectivity, its own agentic autonomy. I much prefer writing by hand to typing. Mad Monster Party Hosts the World Premiere of David Ellefson’s Dwellers, How To Replace Your Defective Scream Factory’s Friday the 13th Blu-Ray Collection Discs, [EXCLUSIVE] New Kane Hodder Project Trailer Premiers At Mad Monster Arizona, First Time Ever Jason X Photo Op at Mad Monster in Glendale, AZ, The Mandalorian Season 2 Trailer Reaction, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhEAOEsIiPE. That lovely speech. This is the wild struggle for me of making a book. My people love me. Middletown • Made-to-order breakfast, 7:30-10:30 a.m., American Legion Post 216, 450 N. 10th St. Part of my training to write this one involved reading Phillippe Descola’s beautiful ethnography of the Jivaro called The Spears of Twilight. I’m perfectly comfortable sitting there watching Ice Road Truckers while reading Nerval’s sonnets. And invariably, those turned out to be the best, the most exhilarating parts. It’s this long, drawn-out struggle. How does it feel? Once you take it from me—and I mean this in the most genuinely friendly and generous way—I don’t give a fuck. Let me take this opportunity to personally ask […], Hip Hop icon Petey Pablo takes paranormal investigations to another level in this new trailer for Haunted with Petey Pablo Haunted is a paranormal investigation documentary directed by Tony H. Cadwell (Behind The Sightings, Balsam). So, you’re right; at the beginning, all those decades ago, there was a very central youth-centric component to the way I was being put out there—this was the guy who was supposedly reinventing the novel for the MTV generation and all that kind of nonsense. PK What would your mood board for this book look like? Cracked.com, celebrating 50 years of humor. I’m impaled by vectors. But Wallace seemed particularly fritzed, and I suggested we go downstairs and have a cigarette outside. Factory has a program that will allow you to get free replacement blu-rays. The seminal humor publication will … Maxim. There’s obviously a version of I-don’t-give-a-fuck that I think is essential and exhilarating, that’s good for people, that opens people up to different worlds, to a multiplicity of universes. What is your secret? I wanted a reckless book. The life of discipline asks a lot of the four geeks. Pop culture may subtend all cultures. I was the beneficiary of a remarkable, phantasmagoric childhood growing up in Jersey City when I was a little boy, a childhood that, from the outside, would look perfectly mundane and unexceptional. I’ve always had a very embodied experience of writing. (I have NO idea what that means, actually. And the reason has to do with my way or working, my modus operandi, which I’ve stubbornly maintained all these decades and decades! Capricorns! One last weird thing on this note: the more isolated, marginalized, and cornered I feel, the more exuberant my work is. But it was my feeling that this book and this book in particular, because it was so precious to me, because it’s so fundamentally about and made out of my relationship with Gaby, required an unusually high, unadulterated level of lucidity and acuity. The film was written by, directed by, and starring Drew Fortier. ML You know, the thing I remember most vividly from that whole Charlie Rose experience was, first of all, how nervous Wallace and Franzen were. Exactly what this country is and has been since its inception. But that ended up feeling a bit too skeletal for me. You know, between pop culture and “nature.” Nor between high and low culture. This has always been my own private folktale that I’ve inhabited. Gaby, along with my wife, Mercedes, and I form a little cult. If this novel was a mood board, it would include Virginia Woolf, karaoke bars, Filipino knife fighting, Amelia Bedelia, and more. So here we are! It had nothing to do—certainly not back then—with any notion of the commensurability or conjunction of high and low culture, of working in the gap, in the interstice between the two, of otaku culture, etc. I want you to emerge from one of my books sweaty and happy. Today, BOMB is a nonprofit, multi-platform publishing house that creates, disseminates, and preserves artist-generated content from interviews to artists’ essays to new literature. You seem forever young to me! So much of his work has been part of the fabric of my past, present, and certainly future. It’s this material (this flotsam and jetsam) that I’m constantly, spontaneously, almost involuntarily generating myself. I’ve just always had this wide-eyed, open-mouthed, promiscuous interest in everything. There were so many moments writing it when I felt, Oh shit, if you do this, it’s going to just wreck the book. Dwellers is an upcoming found footage horror film produced by David Ellefson via Ellefson Films. Capitalism is the social system based on individual rights. That’s really important. There’s a passage in the book where I—my avatar—says to Gaby, “Let them say whatever they want. That had a big effect on me too. Select-A-Mad Click on an issue number to go to its page. Mademoiselle. It feels much more to me like an accumulation of scavenged material. Marine Corps Gazette. It includes everything at once—chivalric romance, polymorphic perversity, heaven, hell, ancient tropes, sci fi tropes. Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Also, being Wired, there's a great roundup of some of the technologies in use in the making of Fury Road towards the end of the article. It’s this thick impasto, this layered palimpsest. While Kane Hodder has appeared at horror conventions for many years, this is the first time ever that he has appeared in full costume as Jason X. (And, actually, one of the things I’d briefly considered very early on in the process was using some sort of simple Q&A format. And the […], If you ordered the Scream Factory and Shout! It’s always been my intention to just relentlessly continue doing my thing, completely, stubbornly on my own, self-protectively indifferent and aloof from what anyone else was doing—and this sounds sort of pugnacious, but, more than anything, it just suits my shyness—to just keep doing my thing until I drop dead. Somehow the very fabric of this book, it’s materiality, is made up of me and my dad—all of these anecdotes, jokes, and nicknames we’ve produced became central to this story—our story. Science and religion may be subsets of pop culture. In 1999, my college fiction professor was a bit frustrated by my hijinks in class and on the page—I was an “absurdist,” I had decided—and so her last resort was turning me onto a writer who was even more “over the top” than I could ever be. And recklessness—a particularly flamboyant recklessness—is such a key ethos of mine. Wired Magazine has a great interview with director George Miller, where he goes into the making of the film, and some of the history of the Mad Max franchise. To transmute the scrupulously private into the flagrantly public. It’s always seemed absolutely compatible to me. C’mon, do you want to be a vibrating strand of energy oscillating in eleven dimensions or not? Martha Stewart’s Living. It’s eroticism as ontology. I never put stickers on my computer, but I recently ordered a perfect sticker for my MacBook, which has pushed me […], It’s Genndy Tartakovsky’s birthday on the day I’m writing this. So, circling back to this notion of anxiety about reception…. Porochista, you’ve said all this much more eloquently than I ever could. Scrawling notes in this tiny script legible only to myself, and also this large, childish print on big pieces of empty white paper—my big-character posters! The good news is that Shout! This reminds me of the first time—as a boy—that I saw that famous Hans Namuth film of Jackson Pollack painting. Mad TV, a 1995–2009 American sketch comedy television series inspired by Mad magazine; Mad, a 2010–2013 television series on Cartoon Network based on the magazine; MAD TV (Greece), a Greek music channel; M.A.D. There are passages in George Eliot’s Silas Marner… And don’t even get me started on Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring—there’s so much in that movie that informs this book. But it’s also a great source of pride, I have to say—the fact that, in this advanced, grizzled state, I’m still doing this work at a pretty high level of computational performance, a pretty high petaflop level, and as relentlessly and recklessly as ever. This is, when all’s said and done, about pleasure. And I have to say I am decidedly unimpressed by what we see in this first TV Spot for next month’s Season 2 premiere. Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit is available for purchase here. Nothing at all against any of these people, it’s just that I’ve never felt part of any literary tendency or movement in any way, shape, or form. You should try it! The film follows Petey Pablo as he conducts his first paranormal investigation at an old family farm that has been […], I am going to preface this article by acknowledging that two years ago, when I saw Halloween 2018 at the world premiere, I loved the movie the first time I saw it. It’s like I’m a mathematician, and the equations all fly off the blackboard, and these swarms of numbers are chasing me around the room. This is a joy ride, with occasional detours down into the underworld, but a joy ride nonetheless. I was sent an advanced copy, and it arrived at the bleakest point of the pandemic when the only thing I needed was a good laugh. ML Every couple of months, the flasher’s trench coat is flung open and there it is. Porochista Khakpour is the author of Songs and Other Flammable Objects, The Last Illusion, Sick, and Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity. And that neon, candy-colored palette they use in the videos is to die for, right? Anyway, these are the different elements I began with, like this mad scientist on some lightning-riven night, mixing this with that, and the resultant potion somehow apparently manages to be—at least according to the people I know who’ve read it—pretty funny and touching at the same time. Sitting at a bar with Gaby and talking for hours and hours about everything under the sun is one of my great pleasures in life. So, this wasn’t going be some confessional, tell-all sort of thing. So, I’m underground with these swarming integers, with these deranged lions, and I’ve been working very, very, very hard to make something that’s unlike anything you’ve ever read before… and finally I emerge and, squinting in the sunlight, I hand you this book. But he engaged us, in a kind, amused elder way! He claims it was taken out of context (which, by the way, seemed kind of hilariously implausible to me). But it sounds absolutely correct.) But there was a problem—Gaby’s a very refined, very sophisticated self-curator, so I wasn’t about to barge into her life like some bull in a china shop. Happy sixty-five. The amazing thing I discovered is that that love, in its literary incarnation at least, can survive anything I do to it, the worst vandalism… There it is, at the end of the book, unscathed, gleaming. by Langston Cotman, Heart Beats Look, sure, this is—in its way—a father/daughter book, a book about me and Gaby, about our relationship, although “about” is particularly wobbly word when it comes to what I do. At the same time, another friend and I on Twitter began creating fancams (in the great K-pop tradition) for Leyner, and I saw the word of his work spread again—including to a new generation of Leynerites—through various pipelines of what we lovingly used to call “Weird Twitter.”. Everything that you read in Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit is also and simultaneously being read by one of the characters, even if the character’s simply reading an eye chart at the optometrist’s office! Four wildly different approaches to startup success. Not a drop of alcohol passed through these lips. My feeling was much vehement on that score actually—I wanted it be a repudiation of my last book. This is just my way of life. I’d say: photos of me and Gaby, various sorts of booze, Meet Me in St. Louis, regular bars, karaoke bars, Virginia Woolf, Lizzie McGuire, Higglytown Heroes, Elizabeth Taylor, Jefferson Airplane, Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning in War of the Worlds, supermodels, mukbang videos, Jo Malone, Momofuku, Amelia Bedelia, Below Deck, Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Hall & Oates’s “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do),” Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen,” the rudra veena music of Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, death metal, anything related to Gene Tierney—Leave Her to Heaven, Laura, etc., all Ozu, Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes for Us, I Saw the Devil, Human Centipede, Gun Woman, the manga and anime Dorohedoro, Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Luther Price, Isa Genzken, Rachel Harrison, Larry Poons, UFOs, Filipino knife fighting, Jerry Lewis, Shining Path, Meyer Lanksy, pineapple Danish and potato salad, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Raymond Roussel, Tristan Tzara, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, Elizabeth Grosz’s The Incorporeal, Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, Breanne Fahs’s biography of Valerie Solanas, etc., etc. It’s about forty-five minutes or so before we’re supposed to tape the show, and I’m reassuring them that it wasn’t going to be so bad. Metropolis. And the last thing on my mind is its reception! The story takes place in one night, between an anthropologist father, who is researching mystic mobsters, and his daughter, at a karaoke bar in Kermunkachunk. Kane Hodder has been […], This weekend at Mad Monster Party in Glendale, Arizona, horror fans will get to experience a Kane Hodder Jason X photo op. Brian Donnelly went from tagger to blue-chip artist, riding the increasingly blurry line between commercial and fine art. And read James Baldwin about all this, about who we really are. Join our newsletter for a weekly update of recent highlights and upcoming events. McCall’s Needlework & Crafts. ML When I began Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit, I, first of all, wanted it to operate in a kind of dialectical relation to my last book. But it’s the material, the material. Yes, it was true. I loved crawling on my hands and knees watching ants on the sidewalk, wandering around in department stores, in hardware stores, pharmacies, staring out the windows of buses and from the backseats of cars. You want to know what’s going on in America, read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. It’s the whole crackling subtext of your book, Brown Album. I’ve maintained a good classically haute-punk attitude; I still feel like what I do is a form of vandalism, and I still try to navigate my way through life with the moral compass of Ratso Rizzo.