I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation about disastrous American imperial adventurism, and I just wanted to ask: do you also have those quiet moments in the night when terror washes in like an oil slick on the tide, dousing tarry and thick the flickering soul? Do you quake with grief and rage until the meek sun limps into view, casting bleary light on a new day already full with horrors beyond reckoning? You do? Me too! Wow! Well. Have a good one, then.

Acting Updates

It’s me, your friend, the actor. Since we last spoke I booked and shot a short film directed by Charles Murphy where I played Woody Allen and then the ghost of Woody Allen. In the process, I learned two things: the more you find out about the guy the worse he gets, and the level of ambient misogyny in films from the ‘70s is truly astonishing.

As for my other endeavours…

Art Workers is Back, Baby!

The podcast returns. Episode 10 is up now, featuring friend and colleague Michael Landes! He and I have made several projects of varying size over the years, and we talk about some of that, but also other stuff.

This one is specially air-aged for 10 months, in the sense that I recorded it in May of last year and it’s taken this long for me to stop hiding from the world and return to my obligations. Things are great.

We’ll have Episode 11 up soon, and then who knows, maybe even Episode 12!

Dr. Fennell, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Like and Subscribe

I might get back on Instagram. It feels silly to have made a hullabaloo about deleting it only to log back on and make another account a year-or-so later, but the facts of the matter are a) who actually gives a shit and b) it remains a load-bearing piece of infrastructure in the New York City arts community and, unfortunately, I ought to know what’s going on with my peeps. The moral revenue I earn from abstention is perhaps not worth the cost of missing a major source of business development friendship and comity. Should I follow this impulse, though, I do want to emphasize that my feelings won’t have changed; I still nevertheless believe the platform to be extremely bad for me, for you, for society, and for the world. And yet, here I am once again on the precipice.

Is this… maturity? Realizing that the zealot is a bore, to himself most of all? That compromise indicates integrity, not weakness? Or maybe I’m just rationalizing some marketing-induced FOMO. Man is a giddy thing.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I saw ”Wuthering Heights” (2026) and found it disconcerting how irrelevant the film’s images, words, and choices seemed to be from those that preceded or followed them, like fuzzy objects emerging from the moor-fog then receding back into the formless mass after some amount of time dictated by the vagaries of the wind. The thing had an uncanny nothing-ness to it, a resistance to substance, as if they forgot that a mood board isn’t a movie, as if they forgot that most people don’t remember the graffiti they see on the street, or more aptly, the post they just scrolled past, or even more aptly, the ad between the posts they just scrolled past as they walk into traffic.

The algorithmic effect of being shown disconnected, high-impact images at semi-random in the hope that I’ll engage is so strong that I want to read it as deliberate, but the movie has so little control over its symbols and its overt efforts are so adolescent and so simple and so self-satisfied, that I simply cannot imagine the same filmmakers titillated by the erection of a hanged man but afraid to let us see bare ass are running a deliberate campaign of thematic subterfuge against themselves. And like, I’ve never read Wuthering Heights. I have no interest in the movie’s choices as an adaptation, just as its own thing. While its thing would undeniably be a great series of Instagram reels, movies do have to be interesting for more than 30 seconds at a time.

Although I will grant that some of those 30 second snippets are pretty interesting! My favourite, despite being laden with the same puerility and spirit of vandalism as the rest of it, is the marriage between Heathcliff and Isabella. These scenes work for me because they are, like almost nothing else in the project, well-observed. The undeniable fact of Jacob Elordi overwhelms the movie’s nested limitations and invites us to ask and answer a simple question: Who among us would not be this man’s dog?

Our work reveals us, and what ”Wuthering Heights” (2026) reveals is an artistic sensibility captured by the scroll. Its slack-jawed gaze emerges from a mind whose boundary is the blank screen, attuned to a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of the world, whose grasp is of things glossily fragmented, whose notion of the good is of numbers growing in inverse proportion to their basis in reality, forever. The movie’s milieu is one in which no desire exists that cannot be fulfilled with one-click free shipping, or at worst a discount flight to Turkey.

Vainly, I want more than this. I do not want my work or my life to reflect or be reflected in the scroll. It bores me. It terrifies me. This is the crux of my hesitation to return to Instagram; it is an invasive species in the ecosystem of my soul. My first, second, and third instinct toward it is fire. But it’s all kind of silly, isn’t it? Things are porous. What’s in the world is in the world.

By giving so much power to Instagram as metonymous for every inscrutable system and digitally mediated ill in my life, by being so anxious of its influence on me, I’ve managed to get so caught up in a fantasy of purity of process that I’ve forgotten that processes ought to lead somewhere. Like, I’m able to operate on projects that are about slotting in and fulfilling the visions of other artists (and do please keep casting me, friends!), but it’s been too long that I haven’t made any god damn work for nobody but myself.

Don’t get me wrong, Instagram is a problem. But the thing stopping me from making what I want to make is in me, not in Silicon Valley. If I can take back some agency for myself and my craft, maybe I can encounter the ambivalent proposition of moving through a world comprised of compromised systems with a clearer sense of the balance of power, whether that’s auditions, algorithms, or immigration proceedings (which are increasingly the same thing). Because at the end of the day, despite it all, Emerald Fennell has ”Wuthering Heights” (2026), and I do not.

So, friends, let me share here that I am determined to fix this, and make some fucking work that reflects my values and interests rather than making nothing under the guise of defending them. Let it be hereby known that I am producing an adaption of Macbeth as well as writing a play about the ideological capture of a television network (I owe you pages, Padraic), and I’m working on two other sneaky projects with some other folks that I don’t want to spill the beans on quite yet but will soon. As well as, you know, auditioning relentlessly. And keeping up the house for my wife who continues to be an iconic genius and the crown and comfort of my life.

Maybe you’ll see me on the ‘Gram about all of that. But hey, maybe not.

On the Situation in America, and a Question That Has an Answer

How are we supposed to share a world with these people and their works? How are we supposed to live and be free while they live, while they are free? What is to be done? By God, what is to be done about the monsters?

With love,

Carl

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