Let the Charmed Ones keep fighting,
let the stars burn bright, you’re just
sitting there shelving books. We’re all
just sitting there shelving books.
FILM / I Waited 23 years to Watch Justin Timberlake Have Sex with a Black Woman and All I Got Was These Lousy Feelings / Ofelia Brooks
When Black women are erased from the cancellation conversation, our loss is also erased. And we stay losing. We were Janet then and are Wainwright now: mere casualties left in Timberlake’s wake.
I had anticipated, and we did get, an increase in submissions for this issue. Honestly, the Pop Culture issue is our most favorite issue, and we're always talking about it and, the minute it's published, looking forward to the next year. However, you all exceeded my expectations for submissions in both quantity and quality. We had so many.
For years to come, the rest of the night only came back to Brian in pieces. He remembered being nervous about being out so late, but Jeremy had told him not to worry. He remembered laughing so hard at one of Jeremy’s jokes he snorted Dr. Pepper out his nose. He’d later wonder if he’d heard the woman on the highway threaten to call the police, or if he only thought he had because he studied the police report like it was a bible. The last thing he remembered, without any doubt, was giving Jeremy his extra cookie as they walked outside. Then, he was momentarily blinded by the flash of red and blue lights.
Tony begins to comfort her, thinking he did something to offend or upset her. The tenderness Tony shows Jennifer in this episode seems to come from a genuine, caring place. She shies away from his hovering presence, telling him “We’ll do this, go sit over there”. Her voice is quiet. She blames her tears on her injured knee. She tells him to go on.
Six hours into my Zoom classes, my body goes upright fetal and my shoulders slouch, orphans huddled around the fake fire of the computer screen.
Remember Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave?” Remember what an apple did to Adam and Eve?
Remember the apple and Snow White?
“I ate civilization,” Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World, “and it poisoned me.”
It’s what I feel: poisoned.
I pull my spine up and back, up and back. My right side pings.
Sleep mimicked abandonment,
a voluntary act of release
into which she could not succumb without sedation.
In many ways, Discovery was an album meant for people like me, fascinated with life outside my small rural town, willing to imagine fantasy worlds and ready to taste all that music had to offer, not just rock sounds but something dancier, sexier, more animal like disco, and at the same time, more robotic and artificial.
The Vodka family grows with flavors galore
vanilla, orange, lemon, strawberry
and of all things cucumber
But in a Bloody Mary delish
You need the world of Netflix, dreamscapes, you think psychiatrists would call it. But at least dreamscapes give you some semblance of control. You can consciously or subconsciously craft your own narrative.
Stop. Pause. Start.
These days I listen to the tones more.
Some days are lovely little blurs
with sun shedding itself through the windowpane
then the curtains then the bottles then the dishes.
Sills are where the whole damn home is.
Marjean says I have a relentless optimism only a Disney could love, but she thinks I’m out of my mind for devising a scheme to rob the organ donor bank, even if it is suitable preparation for next week’s tournament.
I live most days now
with the ghosts of the Pacific.
Point Reyes opens and closes
my doors, eddies and crests
on the second floor.
Diane keeps sitting down to try to pin down that perfect book, but every time she tries, her thought process unravels and her inner self spirals. Shown through increasingly unstable, sketchy animation of herself (as in sketches on a page), her inner self is constantly bombarded by voices of her peers as she speculates them shutting down everything she says—perhaps even more so than they would in real life.
The corner bar’s air-conditioning has energized the crowd, a giddy respite from the sticky heat, everyone seems to be laughing when a loud pop marks a caesura in the din, everyone jumps and puzzles, a champagne cork? a pricked balloon? when the bartender leaps over the bar and races into the street where two cars have just smashed into each other.
boys will be what they are, hands and teeth, dead and loved,
villain and half-grown.
our matched chromosomes appreciate the silence.
i built five houses in the corner of my mind.
100 WORD FILM REVIEWS / Let Him Go
Grieving grandparents (Diane Lane and Kevin Costner) attempt to rescue their grandson and former daughter-in-law from her abusive new husband’s family in Thomas Bezucha’s modern-day Western. The film boasts accurate 1960s period detail and an introspective score by Michael Giacchino. Digital photography adeptly captures western vistas with a sense of awe, while color timing matches the character-driven narrative’s progressively darkening tone. Granted, some viewers may be irked by the inconsistent ways in which gratuitous violence interrupts the laconic pacing. See it for Costner and Lane’s performances, as well as Lesley Manville’s (Phantom Thread) devilish turn as the Weboy clan’s matriarch.
100 WORD FILM REVIEWS / The Block Island Sound
Is there anything creepier than being a fisherman on a New England island? Probably, but I always consider isolated places surrounded by large bodies of water to be horrifying. In The Block Island Sound, Harry is dealing with anger issues and his father's increasingly erratic behavior. What seems like run-of-the-mill alcoholism is something much more than that, and as things fall apart Harry begins to believe that something very sinister is afoot. With a tone similar to Dark Skies, a tense and heavy mood gives this film an unnerving aura. You'll think twice before discounting your local conspiracy theorist again.
The bloom is in the house.
You expect me tell you spring
can vanish when I smell
the jasmine from her bottom
drawer in every single room?
100 WORD FILM REVIEWS / Possessor
Possessor embodies the definition of a mind fuck movie. It thoroughly dismantles preconceived notions about genre and eradicates the boundary between “low” and “high” art. Andrea Riseborough (Mandy) plays an agent who inhabits people’s bodies via brain-implant technology to commit assassinations. However, the longer she stays in a host increases her risk of permanent brain damage. Comparisons to his father’s work is inevitable, particularly eXistenZ, but Brandon Cronenberg’s vision is equally original and assured in execution. The film is layered with meaning and contains visually arresting in-camera practical effects. Not for the squeamish, Possessor is a transgressive work of art.