So little difference between
a voice from the com on his chest
and his own voice, answering.
Captain, Captain. Please acknowledge
but the bottles were misplaced
they were shelved until a forensic scientist
unpinned them from legend
A cop as underwitted as an egg stares us down. Like he's never seen two imaginary robot friends who often get mistaken for puppets. I point a finger gun at the cop but he doesn't seem to react.
you thought
he had a heart but that was just
my body he morphed into music
His single-minded determination to find someone who shares his Defining Characteristic represents one of the main problems in reducing a human being to words on a screen: it leads to a focus on superficial things that ultimately mean nothing.
Alex Schumacher's latest Mr. Butterchips explores some infamous "lost episodes", as part of our April Pop Culture Issue.
Your dad is curious about the beer, but your brother and uncle and cousin look at it and put it back down—more for me you say to yourself. Fuck those fuckers.
Kailey Tedesco’s visually stunning debut collection shapeshifts. Whether musing over mermaids or lamenting death, its mythical & modern turns are riveting, meaning fascinating but also fastening. Her keen detailing, language, & pacing rivet poems that feel perennial like flowers or recurring nightmares. Shirley Jackson would approve--Tedesco throws us in dark water, walks us around dusty attics. Gaze into crystal while she draws tarot in her burlesque opium den. However, though magic carries these poems, they scrutinize suicide, puberty, misogyny & math(!). It’s not heavy handed but intimate as walking alongside a friend. Sojourn in this “sap-stained forest” but don’t expect to walk through unscathed.
PODCASTOrdinary GraceWilliam Lemon
A podcast on spirituality & religion, hosted by the Founding Editor of Drunk Monkeys. This episode features an interview with Alex Schumacher, independent comics artist, and creator of the comic strip Mr. Butterchips. Alex speaks about his Jewish upbringing, falling away from the faith, and the spirituality inherent in the creative process.
“The back of the house still smelled like death,” Jette Harris (author of COLOSSUS/Run Rabbit Run Book 1) writes, opening Two Guns with clear intent. Harris fully intends to plunge us deeper into madness than Book 1 ever dreamed of achieving. In a story that continues what she started with the very good COLOSSUS: Run Rabbit Run Book 1, Harris shows a wealth of improvement from one already-exceptional book to the next. Two Guns expands brilliantly and powerfully on Avery Rhodes. At the same time, Two Guns also gives us new characters, while expanding the universe established one book prior. Two Guns is a near-flawless continuation of Harris’ ongoing story. Optimize your enjoyment of this title by checking out the previous installment.
This book doesn’t celebrate the fact that like the rest of us, Mallory Smart doesn’t have a lot of actual answers. Art doesn’t guarantee that, no matter how good you are. I Want to Feel Happy is a very good body of work from a very good writer. Part of that is because Smart is both attracted to and repelled by concrete answers---or conclusions that may be traumatic, even fatal, but are at least conclusions nonetheless. She decimates her life with a level of honesty that could chew other people’s teeth. She then rebuilds, and starts over. That path could take her anywhere, and I am pleased that she is taking us along for the decimation.
Available from Cheeseburger Nebula Press, Do$e from William S. Bonnie is a stark, almost madden travelogue. This isn’t just because Bonnie’s latest poetry collection references travel at great length, with the distance achieved by chemical means, and/or through a hyper-focused desire for freedom. It is also because the book drinks deep from Bonnie’s memories, anxieties, and ambitions, and then spits them out, creating a miraculously careful mess. Bon’ Voyage is just one example of Bonnie making us equal parts uncomfortable and captivated, as he breathes his own unique, vital brand of life into the familiar roads he describes. Seward might be exhausted, but his writing is dangerously alert.
Ava DuVernay's A Wrinkle in Time was slammed by the critics, well, the critics are WRONG. The Filmcast crew really dug it, and we spend this episode talking about that movie and other times the critics got it wrong on this episode of the Drunk Monkeys Radio Filmcast.
An old tagline for the website you’re visiting was “leave you snark at the doorstep”, and I can give you no better advice in approaching Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time. DuVernay and Disney give the classic children’s novel a modern polish, and shift the book’s heavily Christian imagery into a more, let’s say, “Oprah-esque” spirituality (it helps to have a 50-foot version of Winfrey hanging around). It’s far from a perfect film, but something does not have to be perfect to be beautiful, which, in case you're not paying attention, is the message the movie is offering you.
If you have ever stood in front of a painting hoping you could step into that world, you now can. The world’s first fully oil - painted movie, Loving Vincent (Van Gogh) allows us to inhabit this world in his chosen medium. Through flashbacks, Van Gogh's contemporaries and painted subjects come to terms with their personal responsibility in his life and somewhat mysterious death. Van Gogh’s life was passionate but distorted both emotionally and by his perception of light and color. At the end, we can ask ourselves if would we have treated Vincent any differently.
I would tell you not to go see this movie, which is a very disappointing and unnecessary sequel to a very amazing original film, but by the time you read this it probably won't be in theaters anymore. The only thing saving it from an F is the pool scene and that's only because of the use of a Jim steinman song. Don't waste your money. Not even worth 100 words to be honest.
Writer/director Cory Finley's impressive debut strikes me as an exploitation film in search of a soul. But that's a good thing. His script and direction perfectly mimic the sociopathic tendencies of his lead characters, who are portrayed precisely by Anya Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke, respectively. Anton Yelchin also joins in on the fun in full scene-stealing mode, as he did so often. Thoroughbreds is being compared to other films, but Finley's style doesn't strike me as derivative; especially when it comes to his pitch-black sense of humor and his wonderful use of short-sided cinematography. For better or worse, this 28-year old playwright could be our next Martin McDonagh.
Hannah Cohen’s Bad Anatomy puts its viscera on the table—this is today’s chapbook for punk rock girls, pulling the reader through starlight, road trips, and the gynecologist’s office. Cohen’s concise lyrical precision is a poet wielding a rusty scalpel as she imagines she is a television, finds herself down a gory Google rabbit hole, and menstruates for the loss of the America we’d hoped for. As she says in Sad Girl’s Drinking Ghazal she “[likes] things both false and true.” And such are these poems: Stories that have gathered here to eat you whole and fill you up.
Aharon put down his gun and walked towards her. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes, trying to convince her to carry on. This is justice, he thought, and he wondered how to help Ariel see it as she should.
PODCASTOrdinary GraceAlex Schumacher
A podcast on spirituality & religion, hosted by the Founding Editor of Drunk Monkeys. This episode features an interview with Alex Schumacher, independent comics artist, and creator of the comic strip Mr. Butterchips. Alex speaks about his Jewish upbringing, falling away from the faith, and the spirituality inherent in the creative process.