Charlene Elsby Dances With The Devil

Whoops this is extremely late.  These are listed chronologically from when I finished reading them

Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

His first. Tight like an elevator cable. Noirish and unusual and slick of language, laying ground for he who would come to be recognized as a major heavyweight of American literature. I enjoyed this.

Kate Zambreno - Drifts

It's cliche to shit on autofiction. It's just as cliche to say that it's cliche to shit on autofiction. Allow me to drown in cliches. I didn't like this book. Not one bit. I've enjoyed Zambreno's other writing. But I didn't understand this. The final message felt impossibly conservative, but not deliberately so, which left me dumbfounded. What was the point of this? The book feel like a memoir that earned more cache by having the word novel attached to it. It's a well liked book according to the internet. Ok. Not my thing. 

Roberto Bolano - The Spirit of Science Fiction

I like Bolano. I like books about writers, especially young ones with heads up asses that don't know shit about the world. This was that. It was fun. Cigarettes are smoked, poetry is read, cum is spilled, shit is talked. Blind confidence. 

David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress

Far and away my favourite read of the year. Nothing comes close. I love it I love it I love it. I want to eat this book and choke on its pages.  

Richard Wright - The Man Who Lived Underground

Written in 1941, banned and shelved until now, because it depicts cops as the racist brutal killers they are. Like much of Wright's work this is a relentless gauntlet of injustice and racial violence. The only available responses to it are fury and movement. 

Susanna Clarke - Piranesi 

I found myself yawning through the second half of this book. But the first half is some of the most exciting and sublime world-creation and imagination I've seen in a while. Books about weird houses are fun.

Barry Hannah - Captain Maximus 

I hardly remember shit, details wise. But I remember enjoying this, especially the last story. Hannah is always funny and fun as hell. 

Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This

A top read this year. Lockwood does successfully what I see as a massive challenge - she wrote a novel about twitter. A fucking good one. Extreme in its tightness of prose,  LOL funny, darker than it appears when you stop to dwell on each sentence or prose chunk. Super book.

Ben Lerner - 10:04

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhh I liked it. ItS cLiChE tO tAlK sHiT AbouT aUtO FuCkTiOn. Shut up Derek. Just enjoy books and shut up. Why do I Like this? My instinct is to hate it. But I guess he writes well. Just the littlest I.V. drip of irony. He's making fun of himself while jerking off. Fine. 

Daniel Sherrell - Warmth

Did not Enjoy. Usually I like climate change books, fiction or otherwise. But this is a memoir that spends all its energy apologizing for its author's position of privilege and asking the audience for acceptance of said author's climate-disaster-induced hopelessness. I did not enjoy how much the author discussed the tears he's shed out of sadness for his perceived inability to save this dying world. This happens like 12 times. BP oil doesn't give a New York rat's taint about your tears. 

Olga Ravn - The Employees

I read this in one sitting on a night flight to Amsterdam. A very fitting read for a vessel floating through stars. I'm really getting into this whole short book thing. I recommend.   

Sara Lippmann - Jerks

Excellent collection. Here my delving into indie lit accelerates. A lot of stories about polyamory as a fun new thing married couples can explore. Alrighty. The whole collection is solid, tight, funny, all around good reading, but the closing story, The Polish Girl, is a remarkable achievement in subtext. Maybe my favourite individual short story of the year, along with something by Maggie Siebert that will be discussed later.

Yu Miri - Tokyo Ueno Station 

Heartbreaking to the point of being almost unbearable. But it's impossible to deny the lyrical exquisiteness of the prose and the emotional honesty. Don't read on a bad day waiting for a subway.

Elle Nash - Nudes 

She is one of the writers taking over the indie lit scene for good reason. Nudes is an honest, stripped down, sometimes brutal look at all kinds of shit about loving, fucking, fighting, being poor, being a woman. It had much more heart than I was expecting. Elle Nash will be a big star.

Jon Lindsey - Body High

I don't understand why everyone thinks this book is so controversial. So he fingers his cousin. Big deal. Wait, was she underage again? Shit, I can't remember. Anyways. This book is a riot, definitely recommend. 

Agustina Bazterrica - Tender is the Flesh

The razor teeth of this lethal little novel have been chewing up indie and mainstream readership circles alike. Pretty well-deserved hype. Almost too focused on world-building for its own good, but the depraved juice of a good ol' cannibal story gets me every time. Legitimately upsetting. On the nose. Blood soaked.  

Ottessa Moshfegh - Eileen 

It is one of literature's great mysteries how the transgressive gross-outs of Ottessa Moshfegh have transcended the dark corners of the field and bled well into the mainstream, onto bestseller lists. Actually I don't think it's a big mystery at all. People fucking love gross shit.  We love it. Nuns will masturbate to this book just like priests will to Dennis Cooper. Lots of this book is spent in build up, but payoff is well worth it. Wild ride.

William Faulkner - Absalom! Absalom!

You can hear the crickets, as if they live in your ear. You can smell the burning fires alongside fields of azalea. You can hear the glacial rustle of the dangling willow, swaying like Rapunzel's hair. You feel the sweat on your forehead. You feel the desire, in Quintin, in the Compson legacy. Bloodlines fraught, torn apart, made myth, like they were your own. This is Faulkner's best book. It is among the rare few, like the great works of Hurston, McCullers, Wright, Welty, an anointed artifact of the south's artistic legacy. The south, Mississippi, the unconscionable histories of these places, these are the true protagonists of this great novel.  

Bud Smith - Teenager 

This is a highly enjoyable read. I don't know what else to say about it. Something about Bonnie and Clyde in high school. Everything got said already, real fast. It's good, read it.

Chelsea Bieker - Heartbroke

Solid, wicked collection. Sometimes feels like poverty porn. But the storytelling is strong enough to subvert these tropes. A few major standout stories. Worth reading for any kind of fiction fan. 

Nick Gregorio - This Distance

I remember liking this collection well enough. I can't remember all that much in terms of detail. There was a really good werewolf story.  

Blake Butler - 300,000,000

I don't know what the hell to do with Blake Butler. I consider myself a near obsessive fan of his work, yet every time I read him I lose more hair. His writing can be so unbelievably frustrating in how it refuses to disentangle you from the mud of language that it slowly traps you in. The premise of this book sounds like it was hand picked for a reader like me. Serial killer, cult leader, a horrifying house with layers of tunnels, psychosexual death, mass nihilism, black holes of meaning; all framed by the investigations into the journals of the killer by the cop assigned to the case, and the mental breakdown that ensues. The plot to murder all of America. Sounds sexy right? About a third of the way in, any semblance of a plot has completely degraded, and the book feels like a mistreated VHS tape of blurred scenes of sex and death that you're forced to watch on repeat, as sulphuric acid is slowly poured into the TV's demon-possessed tubing. Despite my frustrations, I haven't stopped thinking about this evil thing since I closed the last agonizing page and said "what the fuck did I just read?" Blake Butler is not the best storyteller. He's not the best character writer. He's not gonna win The Nobel Prize, I don't think. But he very well may be one of the most important writers in the world, in how he confronts us with the limits of language, and the violence of meaning-making. From his own lips, his books are artworks made of words. Something like that. Everyone should read this book. No one should read this book.     

Garth Greenwell - Cleanness 

I didn't enjoy this as much as I was hoping to. I think I was expecting writing closer to that of Thomas Moore, although perhaps it's unfair of me to compare. I was probably expecting the raw, emotionally brutal bluntness that I've come to love in Moore's work. Maybe I heard someone else compare the two authors once? I can't remember shit.  This is much more polished and precise, but just felt too calculated and frankly too precious for my tastes. 

Werner Herzog - The Twilight World

This was less weird than I may have hoped for Herzog's first novel, but had much of his usual trappings. The tension between man and nature; the sublime power of that nature to shape, bend, break, or deliver us; stubborn, self-defeating obsession; war, internal and external; his signature speaking voice, which obviously will be heard by every reader as they scan the page. Decent enough. 

Maggie Siebert - Bonding 

Superb, spare, fucking sick. No word is extra. All skin and bone fragments to be removed. Cynical in all the right places. These stories are designed to hurt. The world is a horrible place, and Maggie Siebert doesn't give a fuck if you don't want to hear that. The closing story, Every Day For the Rest of Your Life, delivers such laser-guided severance of your jugular that you will not want to read another story about anything nice ever again. You will not have a choice.

Eric Larocca - Things Have gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

I read the re-release version of this, which had two extra short stories in it. The title novella does pack a real punch, but maybe doesn't quite deliver on the excessive hype. The two bonus stories did less than nothing for me. I think I deserve my eyes. Give me more of a reason not to feel that way.

Shane Jesse Christmass - Xerox Over Manhattan

My first SJXSJC. Certainly not my last. Why don't more people write like this? It's so goddamn fun. I love how the wackiness doesn't diminish the immense, constant dread. Wildly weird and wonderful. Violent and pornographic. My jam through and through. 

Tsutomo Nihei - Blame! (vol 1)

It's not clear to me why this manga is so popular in indie lit circles. It's resonance in the "liminal space-space" makes somewhat more sense. We are all obsessed with empty space now. I discovered it through Plagued By Visions' YouTube channel. And boy am I happy I did. The darkest, bleakest cyberpunk there is. Make no mistake, this is a grand, sublime work of cosmic horror, just as much as it is sci-fi. This is my first ever manga. If they're all like this I'll be hooked.

Scott McCLanahan - Crapalachia 

Strong finish. Funny dude. I made the good decision to listen to an interview with him before readings this so every line was in his voice just like with the Herzog text. Every body loves Scott McClanahan, with good reason. Hilarious and heartfelt. I sound like the fucking New York Times. 

          I had a southern literature professor that warned us about how not to read The Sound and the Fury. He said don't try to understand it. If you spend each page retracing your steps, grinding mental energy until you think you're at a level of comprehension Faulkner would approve of, you'll never finish. Just read. Read each page carefully, but don't worry about whether or not it makes sense. If it doesn't, that's fine. Take joy in the chaos.

          Without this advice I don't think I would have gotten through many books that today I consider favourites. 

          I think some people disdain tough reads because they believe that those that brag about loving Ulysses or The Waves or Gravity's Rainbow must live up inside their own ass. But I can only speak personally: I love joying in the chaos of wicked prose that I don't understand. 

          I think part of the potential magic of this chaos is that, in the hard weird texts that I love, the chaos always seems to work toward fostering a vibe, rather than telling a conventionally coherent story.  And it can be one hell of a vibe. I think about Hopscotch, an all time fave, where Julio Cortazar says at the very beginning  that there's no clear and distinct way to read this book. He doesn't set out to tell a linear story; it's hard to explain Hopscotch beyond basic logline stuff - "A book about an Argentinian poet dude in Paris with a mysterious and alluring as hell Uruguayan girlfriend that everyone wants to fuck and the band of artists and misfits that they hang out and get drunk and smoke and drink mate with." Sounds like after ten pages you'd be yawning into a postmodern abyss. The prose itself is dense as Argentine silver.  But it's a magic book. You sit with its chaos and you feel like you are there, in Paris, with The Serpent Club, and you don't speak the language but you sure as hell are having a good time at the party. 

          I recently read and loved David Markson's novel Wittgenstein's Mistress.  It's about a woman narrating her experience as the last human being on earth. We think. It's hard to tell if she's reliable. She spends the majority of the book discussing the habits and eccentricities and tragedies of famous artists. She seems to be obsessive, manic. At a certain point in my reading, near the end of the book, I got it. I figured out what Markson was doing. I was so proud of myself. Then, by the end of the book, I realized I'd made a mistake. There is no way to "get" what exactly Markson is doing with this narrative. There are interpretations, but no one answer. The joy I took from this book was not in solving it; it was in joying in the chaos. 

          Maybe my favourite challenging narrative is Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps. Every blurb online tells you it's about a group of teenage junkies roaming the Pacific Northwest that may or may not be vampires. The words in the text suggest that these barely pubescent scamps literally suck blood out of people. But the narrative constantly leans into the unreliability, the impossibility of this claim. The writing itself doubles down on the confusion, as Krilanovich uses such vivid colour to paint the otherwise pitch black tone of this story, which as you move through seems to become about the search for missing siblings, family trauma, the horror of domestic violence, the inescapability, the repetition of shared pain.

          Krilanovich leaves us with this penultimate paragraph:  

"Lump of fat, sparkling with the shock of crackling synapses. Smiling all the time. She was just crumbs when I found her: a speaking, breathing monster. She felt like nothing, pieces of her flesh hanging off here and there as she wiggled around my shoulders. ‘I’m taking you away from this place’ – I walked across the night, into the next town, and it became more difficult to make steps forward as the grade rose and fell unpredictably. She complained, our conversation veering between consolation and admonishment and back again, her broken body draped like a skinned rug on my back while she appeared to grow heavier with each hour. I suspected her body was filling with the rain that grew heavier as we entered the woods on the edge of town"  

          I've gone over this dazzling chunk of writing a billion times. I've stopped trying to figure out what exactly it's saying, what the reality of the story really is. It doesn't need solving. I go over it again and again, because I love the words. 

          My favourite band over the last decade has been Full of Hell. The things I love about them are easy to articulate, as they relate to my general taste in music. Crushing heaviness, whiplash speed, deep abysses of noise, confrontation, overwhelming bleakness, creativity, innovation, genre defiance, terror. All traits I love. Dense sound layering. Samples. Dread. Blast beats. You get the idea.

          It can't always be so easy to catalogue the elements of a favourite thing. Taste in music, in art, is subjective. Shoot me for saying that. It needn't be explained why a favourite is a favourite. But in the case of my love of a band like Full of Hell, it is easy.  Words don't tell the whole story, but they do enough, if I want to try to make the uninitiated understand. 

          But recently I've found a new musical obsession that defies explanation. This new darling is Portland's Soft Kill. I love them, but why? They're not heavy, not really. Very much different from anything I've considered a favourite. Post-punk, I've heard them called, but that feels too generic, not specific enough for their sound. "gothy, synthy." Hmm, ok, I suppose. The term doom-pop has come up. It's cute and I enjoy it, but it feels inadequate. Maybe the genre isn't important. Maybe there's a variety of bands or genres that could be drawn from to find comparisons. Interpol, Joy Division, Drab Majesty, She Past Away, Tom Petty, U2 - all reasonable comps. But none do justice to the full story.  

          Soft Kill make me feel things I can't explain. Their music is anthemic, intimate, dark, lush, deeply colourful, up beat, down beat, gloomy, hopeful, upsetting, paralyzing, larger than life, greater than the sum of its parts. One note can sound gargantuan, like the opening of the track Grandview.  Entire albums can leave you bent by their emotional complexity. I can't find the right words here, to synthesize what their music is or does. It's rock n roll. It's something.   

          Soft Kill's music and lyrics are inspired by real suffering. Addiction. Crime. Desperation. The loss of loved ones. The near losses of love ones, children. The uncertainty, the hope, the joy of seeing those loved ones survive and grow.  Does the knowledge that Soft Kill's music is informed by tragedy change the way the notes sound? Does the soft basso hum of Tobias Grave's voice touch different strings in me because I read that Savior, my favourite of their albums, was written about his wife's and son's near deaths during childbirth, and their long recoveries thereafter? Does knowledge of the source shape the way the art resonates? Dead Kids, R.I.P City, their most recent full length, deals with the opioid crisis, with the epidemic of overdose deaths in Portland and at large. Does this wrenching fragment of our current reality shape how I hear the music because I have also known those who have died young? I don't know, but I think it does. 

          One word that does feel adequate is art. Soft Kill are artists of immense talent, who craft exquisite, confounding work. The craftsmanship of their music is exceptional, even if at times it feels simple; it feels that these songs couldn't have been written, that they were placed here by a higher being. At least that's how they feel to me. I hate using the word genius because it's a bullshit word, but some may feel that's what I'm talking about. 

          This brings up larger questions about how we evaluate art if all art enjoyment is a matter of personal taste. There's friction between the personal and the universal. It's easy to agree that art is about taste, but sometimes we just know, collectively, intuitively, when we witness a great work. Is that what I'm talking about with Soft Kill? Well, I'd say yes, but this still fails to explain why.     

          All this is inadequate. This attempt to find the right words has proven impossible. There is no proper way of arguing that an artwork is universally good. There is no way of synthesizing why I find this music to be so good. But I feel it in my bones, and I want others to feel the same thing.

          The point is

          listen to Soft Kill.   

           In the finale of Parts Unknown's seventh season, Anthony Bourdain goes to Buenos Aires. Anyone familiar with the Argentine capital knows it's home to endless food and drink, an intense nightlife, and a looming air of inhibition enough to humble the wildest traveler. So, for an episode of Bourdain's most immersive show, it's reasonable to assume it would be a total bacchanal. However, the episode turns out to be somber and bizarre. Bourdain takes full advantage of the fact that Argentina is the country with the highest percentage of its population in some form of psychotherapy, as he spends much of the episode in a psychiatrist's chair, reflecting on his struggles with depression. At one point, presumably joking, he considers the existential terror of his nomadic second life:  "I will find myself in an airport, for instance, and I'll order an airport hamburger. It's an insignificant thing, it's a small thing, it's a hamburger, but it's not a good one. Suddenly I look at the hamburger and I find myself in a spiral of depression that can last for days." 

         When it aired in 2016, the episode seemed like a cheeky, philosophical departure from its usually energetic tone. Viewed today, a year and a half after Bourdain's suicide, it is haunting and heartbreaking.

         What's perhaps most fascinating about this episode of Parts Unknown is how it reflects on stigmas surrounding mental health by analyzing the state of therapy in a country where mental health is practically destigmatized. Bourdain may have been famous, but he has always represented the restaurant industry as an insider, being one of the few celebrity chefs that maintained tangible connections to all the line cooks and busboys of the world through his constant reflections on the state of industry, and on the supposed masochism it takes to work in that industry. To read the book Kitchen Confidential today is to be confronted with the same truths as when it was published twenty years ago, that to work in a restaurant is to grind your body to dust for terrible money because you love it or because you embody the punk/fuck-up spirit that Bourdain did when he was cooking. 

         Nobody talks about mental health in restaurants. I've worked in the Toronto restaurant industry for much of my life, and it's a completely elusive topic. I don't presume to think this is a problem unique to the restaurant industry, but there is a particularly prevalent issue within the industry, where we tend to blame most problems on long-established industry standards. Stigmas around mental health are fed by this dynamic within the industry. If you work in a restaurant, you are expected to grind. Grind, keep grinding, and don't stop grinding until the job is done, and then tomorrow do it all over again. Sometimes this means 18-hour days for young cooks. Sometimes this means two weeks in a row without a day off. Sometimes (all the time?) it means never taking a break that of course all workers in any industry are legally entitled to in Canada. It's not just cooks and dishwashers either. Established chefs, servers, bartenders – all endure extreme hours and potentially dangerous conditions regularly. Anthony Bourdain becomes significant here because he was one of the first lenses through which the world could  see these conditions in a modern context. But, what he said, what we all say, when asked why it's like this, is, "Hey, that’s just the industry." There is a standard of stoic suffering that allows the industry to function.   

         Much of the focus, when it comes to the grind of restaurant life, is on the physical toll it can take on the body. Rarely do you hear about the effects on the mind. This is likely because of the way that stigmas about complaining circulate within the industry. In order to survive in restaurants, you put your head down and grind, and god help you if you complain. For someone to admit that they were feeling depressed would not only betray the silence around mental health, it would also violate the stigmas of the industry. For far too long, the default response to a problem working in a restaurant has been, "Hey, that's just the industry," and this is fundamentally detrimental to the effort of de-stigmatizing and treating mental illness. 

         In 2018, a friend of mine that I'd bartended with for years committed suicide. He was someone I respected and admired deeply, yet I had no idea he suffered from depression, as he never spoke about it. I don't believe his silence about his mental illness was a result of him being a restaurant guy, but they are not entirely unrelated either. He was a consummate professional; he showed up on time every day (having cycled all the way from Oakville, rain or shine!), worked diligently and tirelessly, and never, ever complained. I don't want to suggest that if things had been different, we could have helped him more. The point is broader than that – we must, as an industry, find ways to get past these stigmas that result in silence on serious issues. As long as the stigmas exists, as long as bad industry standards go unchecked, these problems will not improve.   

         Some very good progress has been made in recent years when it comes to fighting bad restaurant industry standards in Toronto. Jen Agg, for instance, is a restaurateur who works very hard to expose and combat toxic bro culture and sexual harassment in kitchens. Taylor Clarke, known more commonly as Chef Grant Soto, became an Instagram sensation for his constant roasting of Toronto's most exploitative restaurant owners, until his death from an opioid overdose last year; Clarke himself was a long-time sufferer of depression. The passive acceptance of Hell's Kitchen-style abuse from chefs is waning, as employees are finding their voices now more than ever. People are becoming more aware of workers' rights, and the channels through which to claim those rights. But still, there is much work to be done in order to de-stigmatize mental illness in workplaces in general, let alone in restaurants, to get us to a place where, if nothing else, people feel they can talk about mental health. 

         An oyster shucker once said to me, "All oyster shuckers are crazy." When I asked him to elaborate, he confidently explained that anyone who shucks oysters for a living, including himself, suffers from mental illness. When I asked why, he shrugged, and said, "That's just the way it is." Incidentally, this shucker did suffer a severe episode related to his mental health weeks after that conversation, and only missed two days of work. We can't know the plight of every restaurant worker who suffers from a mental illness, but we can get to a place where the default is a space for more open conversation. This starts with destabilizing the harmful standards that normalizes workers suffering in silence and never complaining. Anthony Bourdain's confessions in an Argentine shrink's office may have seemed like good moody fun at the time, but to see it now is to be reminded of the real-life consequences of bad industry standards; it is to be reminded of our conditioning to not hear a restaurant person when they are calling out for help. 

          It becomes clear in the final episode of Too Old To Die Young that Nicolas Winding Refn's neon-drenched, Tarkovsky-slow, ultraviolent streaming show is a scathing indictment of modern America. This isn't too extreme a revelation, given that modern America deserves its fair share of criticism, but it does feel significant in the context of Refn's unholy devotion to style above all else. Explicit displays of politics are not typical of the Danish auteur.    

          TOTDY is one of the most confrontational works of art I have ever encountered. It forces you to sit with extended moments so intentionally challenging that it would be an easy assumption, albeit a false one, that Refn's goal is to piss off his audience. A few times, during some of the most drawn out segments of dialogue, I found myself jumping out of my seat and questioning my own sanity. It's not Lynchian, though comparisons to David Lynch may seem like a given. This doesn't have the charming breed of all-consuming weirdness that only Lynch can pull off. No, this is its own, new thing. The violence can be so brutal even seasoned Refn fans might opt to look away. It is also undeniably "problematic"; rape, pedophilia, and human sex trafficking make regular appearances as plot devices, and the treatment and development of women on the show, uh, leaves room for improvement. I put the word problematic in quotes not because I feel it's a banal or overused term, but because it feels like these elements are strategically placed in TOTDY in order to serve some kind of larger purpose. So edgy, right? These are not errors of judgement, they are intentional challenges of ethical limits. This show is a test.

          But here's the flip side to the problem - i LOVE watching this show. Almost immediately after finishing the full pulverizing 13 hours, I wanted to start again. It's aesthetically and cinematographically as beautiful as TV can get. But there's a sense of confused guilt that comes with enjoying something like this; If it is so ethically challenging, what does it say about viewers who enjoy it? Are we all just sickos?  

         Let's analyze our hero for a moment. Martin Jones, played so stone-facedly by Miles Teller that he could in fact be a replicant, is a cop who moonlights as an assassin. His emotionlessness makes it seem that he cares as much about killing as he does about choosing what color hoodie to wear. But at some point he begins to feel uncomfortable with killing people who don't deserve to die (based on his, uh, inscrutable ethical standards). He asks the gangsters he works for to assign him the worst of the worst, the most evil marks they have, and he refuses payment for these baddies. At the same time he becomes associated with Diana (Jena Malone) and Viggo (John Hawkes). Diana is a caseworker and somewhat of a self-prescribed mystic that runs her own business whereby she tracks down pedophiles, rapists, and other such scum, and assigns Viggo, a sickly ex-cop and full-time apocalyptic proselytizer, to eliminate them. Martin admires what they do; he believes in the righteousness of it. Martin also happens to be dating Janey, aged 17. Martin is 30. They began dating when she was 16. It is unclear what we are supposed to do with the fact that our hero who kills pedophiles is also ostensibly a pedophile. Janey's dad, played oh so creepily by William Baldwin, is a billionaire with an affinity for his own daughter, as he's always commenting on her beauty, and even admits that he fantasizes about her sexually. Take a wild guess who he's maybe supposed to represent. Oh, and he jerks off to the thought of her in front of Martin. Martin kills him right after. 

          So, is Martin a good guy? Is he a bad guy? Antihero? He doesn't really qualify as any of these things, but he is our protagonist, so we are forced to deal with this world through his POV, even though we get nothing from him in terms of emotion or analysis. The only moment that seems to resemble a feeling comes when he tells Viggo that he had killed a woman recently and it made him feel empty. 

          It's possible that Martin represents the complicity we all share in allowing the fucked up world in which we live to exist. But I think that's letting him off too easily. Truthfully, I think Martin is an evil character, and I think Refn is showing us that in present day America, our heroes are bad, and evil is complicated. Worshipping guns, despising talk of social justice, disdaining any notion of real equality, praising capitalism, caging the children of asylum seekers - I could go on and on about some of the less savory American values that we hear about today. "Heroes" can indeed be horrible.  

          Martin is not the only righteous killer on the show, but he is the only one that doesn't have a fully developed grasp on his identity. Viggo and Diana are confident in the righteousness of their operation. And we haven't even talked about Yaritza yet. Without spoiling the pure joy of watching Cristina Roldo play the absolutely terrifying cartel wife-cum-terminator of sex-traffickers, I will simply say that I can't remember a character in film or TV who kills with such unflinching certainty, such rigid adherence to her own invented code of ethics. Omar in The Wire you say? Don't even try to make that comparison here. Omar is merely human. Yaritza is the High Priestess of Death. In the hands of a lesser director she would feel silly and not believable. In Refn's hands she is pure terror. 

          There's something to be said about a non-American director making a work that is so specifically interested in the American heart of darkness. Refn comes from a country that regularly ranks among the happiest and most stable in the world, but he has become unabashedly fixated on the American question in recent years. Drive and The Neon Demon, like TOTDY, take place in Los Angeles, as they use the city as an entryway into various swathes of the American underbelly. TOTDY uses it as a backdrop, and L.A. factors into the story less meaniggfully than in Drive or Neon Demon; with TOTDY we feel that this could be any part of America, as the underbelly is so extensive that it doesn't seem bound by geography. Only God Forgives also focuses on Americans, but in that film they are expats, living in Thailand, and ultimately their presence in this foreign country causes a cascading frenzy of violence and depravity. It is also a film about underbellies, and about what happens when American sensibilities interfere with an underworld that they fail to properly understand or control. TOTDY has an element of this as well; the main subplot of the show deals with a Mexican drug cartel and how the convergence of the cartel's push for power in LA crashes head-first into Martin's pseudo-Punisher operation. These are worlds colliding and unfolding; underbellies becoming exposed to the light of day when they're not supposed to be. Pandora's boxes. The result is always carnage, made Refn-beautiful.  

          There's another Danish filmmaker that tends to engage with the darkest possible corners of American psyche (at least in his most recent few films). Lars Von Trier has been a constant source of controversy and a pin cushion for criticism, particularly when it comes to misogyny in his work. While TOTDY could also be read as having just as much problematic shit as many of Von Trier's works, I think there is a fundamental difference. Von Trier victimizes women in his films because his plots call for it, seemingly because he wants to push them to their limits. His latest film, The House That Jack Built, about a serial killer of women that we are somehow supposed to sympathize with (sigh) is almost impossible to read as anything but a test of the audience's endurance, and as a completely cynical take on the apathy of modern culture. With Refn, and specifically TOTDY, the violence is making a complicated point about what it means to exist in today's America. While it is also a test, it's not meant to see how horrified we can get, but rather it is test of our sense of what it an ethical spectrum looks like in 2019's America. It's not that everyone's experience as an American is the experience of TOTDY. This is a show about the underbelly, which most people don't brush up against. Those unfortunate enough to pull the sheet back and stare at the bloody mess will see the place in which they exist for all it's gory, abject misery. Refn is asking his audience if they can handle the ugliness of it, and more troublingly, what they're willing to do about it.

          There's a scene in the final episode of TOTDY where Diana monologues about the future. She is home alone, speaking to no one but herself, but she is angled mostly toward us. She speaks at length about where she believes society is headed, and it's not good. Fascism, racism, hate, greed, violence, climate catastrophe, you name it. And worst of all, she explains, the people will embrace this future-hell. It is us she is really referring to, the viewers. We are the people that will embrace the  descent into chaos toward which we appear to be heading. I don't think Refn is being cynical with this scene. I think he is doing what he does best - he is challenging his audience. He is challenging us to prove him wrong.   

          Knut Hamsun is one of my favorite authors. His 1890 debut novel, Hunger,  about a destitute, mad writer that subsists on pennies and nearly starves to death, shaped my appreciation of modernist literature. The novel was somewhat autobiographical, as Hamsun himself did endure several bouts of desperate poverty in his 20s, which made it all the more sensational when Hunger's  success catapulted him from a poor unknown to a literary star in his native Norway. He enjoyed an illustrious career and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1920.

         Though Hamsun was successful and influential, his politics weren't great. He was, you could say, somewhat of a racist. By that I mean that he was very clearly racist in his early days, writing about the dangers of miscegination and diversity in America, and evolved to become a totally batshit Nazi fanboy by the time he was an old man. During WW2 he showed ardent support for Germany and for the Nazi goal of a dominant Aryan race. He donated his Nobel Prize to Joseph Goebbels as a gift in 1943. After Hitler's death, he wrote a eulogy in which he described Hitler as "A warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations.” Though Hamsun was charged for treason for his Nazi sympathies, those charges were dropped when it was determined that he was mentally ill, a diagnosis that he denied until his death.

         I often find myself unsure of how to reflect on Hamsun as a personal influence. I will never not love Hunger, but I'm not sure if I will or should be able to separate Hamsun the author from Hamsun the Nazi cheerleader. Which brings us to the larger question of what on earth we're expected to do when the artists we love turn out to be monsters. 

         Someone that's been the subject of a heated and similar discussion since his death is Jahseh Onfroy, known more commonly as XXXTentacion. Onfroy, who was murdered earlier this year, shot in his car during a robbery, was a groundbreaking and hugely talented rapper, and was also notorious for his various violent crimes. At the time of his death, he was awaiting trial for the aggravated assault of his pregnant girlfriend. My comparison of Onfroy to Hamsun might seem silly, as their art, crimes, and roles in society are entirely different, but both represent the same thing in the context of this discussion - beloved artists with horrible conduct.

         XXXTentacion isn't unique simply because he's an artist that's done and said bad things. Of those we have plenty - Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey, Orson Scott Card, H.P. Lovecraft, Terrence Howard, Lucien Freud - the list could go on and on. But one particularly troubling element about XXXTentacion is that his art seems inextricably linked to his transgressions. His lyrics and tone are stunningly melancholic. Many of his tracks are about depression, some more obviously than others. His music is also rife with misogyny and violence, but this is not necessarily unique to him or to hip-hop or music in general. His albums 17 and ?  open with spoken word intros, both of which are chillingly honest messages about Onfroy's self-reflection and his expectations of his listeners. These intros make explicit his insistence that these records are meant to be consumed as pure exercises in reading a suffering human's soul, and that in exchange for what he's offering he expects not money or fame, but loyalty. Take that for what you will. 

         These confessionals are difficult to parse in the larger context of Onfroy's life, because they demand sympathy in such a way that suggests that he is himself entirely a victim. Onfroy certainly had a difficult early life; a staple of the narrative of his upbringing is his mostly absent mother, something he has attributed to his lifelong struggles with depression. But any physical or emotional distresses he endured as a youth become blended into his very outward expression of these struggles, not just through music, but through real violence. As a teen he was regularly in trouble, and served two sentences in juvenile detention centers. He gave a brutal beating to a cellmate for being gay, the details of which are hard to stomach. The charges against him for his assault on his pregnant girlfriend Geneva Ayala detail a horrific incident of violence and also reveal a pattern of systemic physical and emotional abuse that had been ongoing for some time.

         I find myself unsettled by the notion that his music and his violence are inextricably linked, as it suggests such an unacceptable standard for authenticity, as if his depression, and his violence and misogyny, were necessary elements to his success. Many of his fans have supported him despite his crimes, and many have accused Ayala of lying about the abuses against her, and have characterized him as an unfairly targeted victim of the media. When he was killed there was an outpouring of support from musicians such as Diplo, J.Cole, T-Pain, Travis Barker, and Kanye West, all of whom declared publicly their condolences and their praise of his work and talent. One of the common celebrated aspects of his music is the intimacy it builds with the audience, as if he made these bleak hip-hop diary entries just for you, as an outlet for your own personal struggles, and this sense of intimacy is reflected in the loyalty of his fan base. I may not like the argument about the connection between his art and his crimes, but it feels as though that connection is real and even celebrated among fans.

         In 1967, Roland Barthes wrote The Death Of The Author, the seminal work of poststructuralism that asserted that texts must be consumed without consideration of the author's biography or narrative intent, and purely for the sake of the text itself. When we apply this condition of necessary separation to artists whose biographical details might mar our approach to their work, we are afforded the space for ambivalence. I can be a huge fan of Knut Hamsun's fiction while being critical of the things he did and said later in life, taking an overall ambivalent stance toward him as an artist. With XXXTentacion, such ambivalence becomes impossible, because the work is inseparable from the man. There is only polarization. Either he is despicable or beloved. 

         Perhaps most striking aspect of the conversation about XXXTentacion is the narrative of redemption that surrounded his death and the months leading up to it. Many of his most famous supporters would draw attention to the charitable work he had been doing, and the suggestion that despite his violence, he was on a path to redemption and that he would inevitably make amends for what he had done. Whether this was a believable suggestion or not became more or less irrelevant when he died, but the redemption conversation is complicated by a narrative that ran parallel to it - that Onfroy's death was always imminent. This configuration makes his violence seem irreconcilable because he was always destined to die before he had a chance, but it also suggests an almost metaphysical component to his mythology - to live and make art with much ferocity and negativity would invite death to stalk him more hungrily than it does the rest of us. Whether Onfroy could have ever properly made amends if he hadn't died young is not a very useful question. But it is important to consider that regardless of the impact of his art, which is the impact that will be remembered, there are also impacts on his victims, the effects of which, no matter what mythological space XXXTentacion occupies in death, will be felt for a long time.       

artwork by King Jediah

Dystopic as it may be, Black Mirror is perhaps our most prescient fictional take on the future of technological progress. Its immediacy tends to make it particularly unsettling, and creator Charlie Brooker is about as maniacal and sadistic a show-runner as we've ever seen. This show is dark. Really dark. We feel it in the fabric of virtually every episode. So, among this anthology of society's potential futures, which instalment is darkest? Spoilers ahead, obvs. 

19) San Junipero 

It's easy to have assumed that the only one with a true happy ending would win in the lightness category. Happy endings aside, San Junipero is bathed in sunlight and gives viewers stunning coastal vistas during all of the non-nighttime scenes. Plus an 80s motif is always a strong ingredient for good vibes, though maybe for some that's the cocaine talking. The episode feels like sci-fi Baywatch meets Sci-fi Saved By The Bell. And the futuristic technology aspect is pretty heartwarming too. Okay, happy fun time ends now.

18) Hang The DJ

One of several installations about the future of romance, this episode does a tremendous job maintaining tension in a context that is not naturally expected to be tense. But all that work is wiped away by the cheeseball ending, and the tension that had been accumulating evaporates as the episode becomes a muted version of what you probably expected; a predictable celebration of future Tinder, but without the trademark Black Mirror sadism. And there's bad TV sex. Maybe that's the darkest part. 

17) The Entire History of You

A well-made episode with one significant flaw: it builds a story on a fascinating and realistic technology – an implanted memory recording system that allows people to PVR any experience they've had and watch it on a playback – and wastes that tech on a plot about domestic squabbles and petty jealousy. No one gets nearly as brutalized as they could have been, given what some episodes do to their heroes. The concluding message is that people fantasize about past lovers. You needed some fancy technology to tell you that? 

16) The Waldo Moment

In the Trump era, this episode is easily criticized for being less interesting and less ridiculous than our current political reality. A crass, animated comedian bear gains popularity and becomes encouraged by the powers that be to run for office. We've seen similar concepts in fiction before, but more compellingly we've seen this in real life, most notably with John Gnarr, the uneducated comedian who served, rather successfully, as mayor of Reykjavik from 2010 to 2014. Sure there is something darkly comic about the plot of The Waldo Moment, but compared to reality it's a bedtime story. 

15) Arkangel

This episode tends to lose people somewhere along the believability spectrum. Marie, An overprotective single mother, has her daughter Sara implanted with a device that allows her to monitor Sara's every move, and watch life through her eyes. I don't know if I buy the argument that no reasonable parent would do this, though the climactic scene, in which we see the normally intellectual and tempered Sara beating her mother half to death with her iPad, does feel hard to believe, even after she's discovered that her mother roofied her with morning after pills. The implications of the technology are somewhat unsettling, mostly because of the perceived intensification in helicopter parenting in real life, but the episode lets its viewers off the hook too easily. Nothing happens here that you couldn't see more vividly and less pleasantly in a Larry Clark or Harmony Korine film.  

14) USS Callister

Jesse Plemons advances the narrative that he is rock solid at playing a creep. We first saw him as Todd, a dull-eyed, disassociated nice guy that unflinchingly murders women and children in Breaking Bad. Here he plays Robert, an executive programmer for a giant online video game with some nefarious at-home behavior within that same video game. The episode's darkness stems mostly from the recent emersion of the concept of incels, which became a well-known term after a terrorist attack in Toronto left ten people dead, all in the name of misogyny. Robert's character reads very much like an incel, making his behavior particularly off-putting, now more-so than at the time of the episode's release. But outside the incel narrative, the episode is mostly a fun romp, full of comic relief and Shatner-era Star Trek imagery, so the darkness factor is somewhat mitigated.  

13) Shut Up and Dance

Black Mirror is pretty darn good at flipping the script on its viewers. Several episodes contain effective twists and turns that would make M Night Shyamalan's head spin. The so-called twist in this episode, however, is not one of the good ones. In fact it's appalling, and hard to understand as a writing decision. But without it, this episode would feel like an elaborate practical joke, which would work fine as an instalment in the Black Mirror universe. So when you do find out that the episode is hinged on the fact that the teenage protagonist enjoys jacking off to child porn, you can't help but scratch your head.

12) Playtest

This episode, in my opinion, suffers much more from the believability problem than Arkangel. A too-chill-for-his-own-good American traveler desperate for cash finds himself subject to some pretty gnarly cerebral experiments. The results are no bueno. Believability is a big deal in Black Mirror; every episode is a reflection on the potential future (or present) of how technology can royally fuck us, and this installment doesn't quite live up to the likelihood test (queue the "this shit has actually happened, man" comments). But to its credit, Playtest is legitimately scary. It's Black Mirror's most direct attempt at horror (along with maybe Metalhead, which we'll talk about later), and it's chillingly effective as a work of genre fiction.  

11) Men Against Fire

Men Against Fire doesn't take itself seriously enough for what it's trying to sell. It's laden with clichés and big chunks of exposition in the last act that give viewers the impression that it really doesn't want to commit to the grim reality that it fictionalizes. The notion that soldiers are sometimes made to kill innocent civilians for political reasons beyond their control is not confined to fiction, let alone science fiction. Had the episode been framed with more heart and less schlock it could certainly have been one of the darkest. 

10) Nosedive

Outstanding acting, writing, and directing make an episode with no killing, and no real threat of any violence, pretty goddamn ominous. Perhaps it's the juxtaposition of a setting well in the future with the ubiquity of social media that feel desperately close to our own that makes this episode so unsettling. In Nosedive, all of modern society relies on a social media platform where users are ranked based on their day-to-day interactions and the maintenance of their online profiles. Wait, isn't this supposed to be happening for real in China? It's a challenging plot because, like The Waldo episode, it doesn't sound all that shocking when compared to reality. But Rashida Jones' and Mike Schur's script is so tight, Bryce Dallas Howard's face so believably anguished despite her attempts to appear Instagram-happy, and Joe Wright's directing so lushly reflective of the impending future of social media, that it ends up being one of the series' best. And it leaves you, the viewer, in a state of crazed misery not dissimilar to the kind you might feel after an hour of relentless Instagram pleasure-cruising. 

9) Hated in the Nation

This episode could have scored higher on this list if it didn't feel so procedural. Like seriously, how often do you feel genuinely tormented by an episode of CSI? The plot does have a significant enough creep factor, in terms of what it says about how public outrage and the increasingly popular act of public shaming are becoming dangerous forms of social currency. Here that currency has fatal results. Say that last line out loud. CSI-level cheese, right? Well, that's this episode. Robotic killer bees? Really? 

8) Be Right Back

Widely considered the best episode of Black Mirror to date, Be Right Back is a haunting meta-ghost story and a sharp, dystopian reflection on love, death, and grief. Like Nosedive, it manages to get under the skin with hardly any violence or death (well, one death), but for entirely different reasons. The premise is simple and almost trite; Boy and girl are in love. Boy dies. Girl learns there is technology available that allows her to still communicate with him. And touch him, and see him, and have sex with him. Sounds great right? Charlie Brooker regularly demonstrates that he is just as adept at analyzing the nuances of modern romance as he is at predicting the most dystopic possibilities of technological progress. And that last scene is the kind of stuff Hitchcock would be proud of. 

7) The National Anthem

The first, the original, the one where the Prime Minister of England fucks a pig on live TV. Imagine having never seen the show and being introduced to it like that. It's the audacity of a TV pilot to go there that makes this episode as impressively dark as it is. If this appeared in the third season it might have meant less, and the vulgarity of the premise would not have been as impactful. Less pearls would have been clutched, but less faces would have been twisted in voyeuristic delight. 

6) Fifteen Million Merits

The most futuristic episode of Black Mirror, 15M Merits can be a difficult world-building pill to swallow. Bing, played exceptionally by Get Out's Daniel Kaluuya, lives in a sort-of digital world, where subjects earn merits in order to eventually perform in front of American Idol-style judges for a chance at greatness, and, we can only assume, digital transcendence of some kind. In this world, all is commodified and commercialized to an obscene degree, but it's so well directed that an episode with such a heavy requirement of suspension of disbelief becomes engrossing and all too immersive. The darkest part is that we may already be in that world now, repeating the endless drone of consumption and production for the corporate gods that lord over us. This is what The Singularity will actually look like, Ray. 

5) The Black Museum

Everyone loves those clip-show episodes of The Simpsons right? Right? Just me? You know, I'm surprised they didn't do clip-show episodes of The Wire or The Sopranos. Well The Sopranos kinda did, with some of Tony's more extensive dream sequences. Anyways. This episode's pretty good, and filled with the sick shit that Black Mirror fans tend to expect. The image of Daniel Lapine staring at himself in the mirror after having just extracted some of his own teeth for pleasure is particularly gruesome. This is a longer episode, with three short stories injected into a pretty slick frame narrative. And though it's not exactly a clip show, there are all kinds of fun little references to previous Black Mirror episodes. Perhaps more importantly than the content of the episode itself is the reflection that this can be read as a representation of what will happen to Black Mirror once the show's fictional technologies become real, or even obsolete; we'll be left with a wax museum of obsolescence, and lord knows wax museums aren't creepy at all. Also worth noting, if you're a fan of 90's black comedies, this episode opens with a cinematographic and musical sequence that feels nearly identical to the intro to Oliver Stone's criminally underrated U-Turn, and that flick is dark as hell. 

4) White Christmas

Like the episode that precedes it on this list, White Christmas is closer to feature length, and comprised of three short interlinked stories that are part of a larger frame narrative. Don Draper's charm is alive and well, and now he's in the future, selling digital clone versions of you that can be implanted into your head to micromanage your daily tasks from within. There are layers of darkness here, both in the frame narrative and in the individual stories. Not a fan of jealous exes killing the fathers of their former lovers? That's fine. Maybe you'll be more entertained by digital indefinite solitary confinement. If that sounds convoluted, well, it is, but it's still a pretty good episode, and remarkably bleak, especially given that it's a Christmas episode. Everyone loves Christmas. It's never a depressing time. Never.  

3) White Bear

Perhaps the episode with the most staggering moment of script-flipping in all of Black Mirror's catalogue, White Bear will leave you feeling a little less than happy about the world. For the majority of the episode, something feels amiss. A woman wakes up in a house; she can't remember anything; a flashing TV in front of her displays an enigmatic, creepy icon. She runs; she is chased; her chasers appear armed and dangerous; there are people around, watching, recording with their phones, but they refuse to interact with her. Somehow she never actually gets hurt, despite the constant threat of harm from her hunters. The whole time, you can't help but think "Dang, this whole thing kind of feels like a game." And then they hit you with something so nasty you find it hard to believe. It must be part of the gag, right? Don't watch it on a bad day. 

2) Metalhead

Ah the beautiful, terrorizing Metalhead. Odds are the terms DARPA or Boston Dynamics mean more to you now than they did three years ago, yeah? Well, if not, Google them while watching this episode. The shortest, simplest episode of Black Mirror is easily my favorite, and also happens to be the only episode where society is undeniably, completely fucked. It's a common thread these days to hear people extolling the potential dangers of robots and AI. Well, as you might have guessed, nothing is better at representing that anxiety than Black Mirror. Bella, played to her blood-soaked limits by Maxine Peake, runs across a wooded landscape, chased by a dog-sized robot that is hell-bent on killing her. Her post-apocalypse buddies had their brains blasted to bits by the little bastard early on. It made it look easy. The little robot dispatches people with such efficiency that it quickly becomes the most terrifying antagonist of the entire Black Mirror catalogue. While narratively simple, the episode is stylistically quite rich, shot in black and white and scored by the music of Kryszof Penderecki, whose compositions have appeared infamously in such films as The Exorcist and The Shining. Perhaps there's something to be said here about minimalism as a form of good storytelling. Several episodes of Black Mirror suffer from convolution, as is to be expected with a show that introduces new fictional technologies in every instalment. The simplicity here allows the audience to really focus on the terror at hand. This makes for the most intense viewing experience you could ask for. And any release from this tension, once Bella finally, agonizingly dispatches Fido the robotic grim reaper, is crushed by the revelation that there are hundreds, thousands of these death-walkers combing the remaining wasteland that earth has become. Society is, in fact, fucked. 

1) Crocodile

It would be a challenge to find anyone left un-shocked by this ghastly episode. Frankly I'm ambivalent about it, and I think that's being generous. There are some bits to celebrate: the austere vistas of a gorgeously grey and mountainous Iceland; the excellent acting of Andrea Riseborough and Kiran Sonia Sawar; the fairly prescient memory-recording technology on which the episode is hinged. But even after considering these pros, it's difficult to look at Crocodile as more than a deranged misfire. The escalation of violence and cruelty in this episode is so brutal that it becomes nearly unwatchable, even with the majority of the violence occurring off-screen. It might have been more acceptable if it made more sense in terms of character motivation. But Andrea Riseborough's Mia makes decisions that no reasonable person would make, deep dark secrets or not. We're supposed to accept that Mia's mind slowly unravels as guilt and paranoia consume her, but one episode of TV is not enough time to adequately sell this line and the violence behind it. The darkness here really has nothing to do with the technological implications of the episode; it's purely about the brutality inflicted on Mia's innocent victims, one of which is an infant. I would never expect a TV show to use trigger warnings, but this is one of those rare occasions where it feels irresponsible not to.  

They let me out to see a picture

Memories are personhood. Or so the programming of a replicant would have you believe. A wooden horse. A fire. An industrial, steel-hued, future-washed MC Escher painting. Your mother. My Mother? Snapshots. They make sense, as implants. As things at once injected, probably plucked from algorithms set by Dr. Ana Stelline. What about us, the humans? Our memories have developed through organic processes over which we have little control. But sometimes, a flicker of a memory, or a deju vu, may feel like it holds a part of the puzzle, one of the keys to that locked room, the inexplicable, transcendent real. Proust's madeleine. Child Ryan Gosling holding a wooden horse. A Unicorn running through the forest in a dream.

I seethed the moment they announced Blade Runner was getting a sequel. It was the most egregious sequel or remake that Hollywood could force down our throats, mostly because of the polarizing beauty and unique marvels of the original. Oh Denis Villeneuve is directing it? BIG DEAL. I'm supposed to give a shit you got a competent director? Wellllll, turns out they actually, finally made a sequel that was worthy of being made. 2049 is a beautiful, menacing, challenging film, one that I will watch into the future. Not only is it a thoroughly enjoyable viewing experience unto itself, but it adds new weight to the original. The plot appears to be simple; K (Ryan Gosling), a replicant Blade Runner whose job it is to retire rogue replicants (like Deckard in the original) discovers a haunting relic at the site of a mission; a box, buried near a tree, which contains the bones of a replicant woman, and her remains bear the sure signs that she had been pregnant. Fear that such a discovery could fuel another catastrophic replicant rebellion, K is tasked with finding the child born of the dead replicant and "retiring" it. Another layer - The deceased pregnant replicant was Rachel (Sean Young from the original Blade Runner, Deckard's not-so-self-aware love interest). Worlds unfold. I'll leave the rest to you.

This film is much bigger than the trajectory of its plot, which makes it better than 97% of what Hollywood pumps out. The film has its flaws, certainly. Jared Leto's blind industrialist Niander Wallace is criminally under-explored. Women feel pretty one dimensional here compared to the men. But that sense of depth that the film leaves you with, whether it's real or an implanted feeling injected into our memory systems, it makes you want to consider your own personhood. Could we all be replicants? Are my memories real? Is that one flash from my childhood holding the key to some traumatic mystery that I can't access? Any work of art that makes you contemplate the philosophies behind your existence in this dank pit is a success.       

I spent about 25 minutes analyzing the song titles on this record as I was listening to it. Scanning titles such as "I Am a Thought," "I Am Consumed," "I Am Learning," and "Who I Am & Why I Am Where I Am," rendered me confused and dumb, but upon a second listen those titles made perfect sense. A coalescence of sonic universes occurs in her left nostril, you can see it there on the album cover, where sensory barriers breakdown, and you enter her aural (ha) domain. Something like cosmic sonic warmth would be a good term to describe the tone of this album. The stars surround you as you listen. Sometimes you feel like you are in outer space. But like, not actual outer space, because there is only silence there. And your head would explode, I think. Or implode. Where's Neil DeGrasse Tyson when you need him? But more like metaphorical outer space. Like the aesthetic of outer space. Sometimes it sounds like you are in a moist indoor zoo pavilion and exotic birds are chirping above you. I listened to this five times in a row yesterday, and I am excited to listen again tomorrow. There are hidden things, sounds and otherwise, buried in every nook and cranny of this record. It's like going on a cosmic easter egg hunt, stoned as hell. Her voice is like a hypnotist that invigorates you rather than charms you to sleep. It is the voice of 2017.     

This album is from 2016, but they have forced me to review it. They play it non-stop, sometimes at an ever-so-faint, creeping volume, where I can just hear the razor-tightening of the cables in the walls; sometimes they play it so loud that my eardrums are crushed and my eyes bleed. Do you remember the first time you saw a David Lynch film? Do you remember the feeling? Do you remember the first time you saw a film by someone trying to imitate Lynch, and you learned to spot the difference between real weird and imitation weird? The difference is that real weird is beautiful; it enchants you as it mystifies you. Puce Mary's The Spiral is exactly that. You can feel yourself running from the predatory creature that stalks you down the alley in the dead of night. You can feel the bolus of saliva tighten in your throat as the razorblade approaches your eyeball. You can feel the dead beneath your feet laughing at you as you walk on their graves. That is The Spiral, a weird, beautiful act of terror forced upon your ears and your frontal lobe. Though it is a languishing slow burn, and its putrid black ambiance tingles subtly and hits you harder over time, every single note, every single strange noise has clearly been chosen with absolute intention. This is noise music, reimagined for the doomsday era. Maybe they'll stop playing it soon. I can only dread what they will switch to.