Years ago, I saw the writer Dan O’Sullivan get something called a Substack. I started thinking and saw how it could be a promotional tool. So I started a Substack and called it Kentucky Meat Shower. Once the pandemic hit, I decided doing whatever I wanted in my newsletter was a good thing. I amicably departed from the magazine I was putting stuff out for and focused on Kentucky. Kentucky Meat Shower became radically different and the defining project of this life so far. But by then, it wasn’t a newsletter but something closer to a zine I didn’t make physicals for.

A few years later, I left Substack for political reasons (it being the arbiter of a particular kind of Silicon Valley fascism). My friend Matt Keeley, producer of Rite Gud and the proprietor of Kittysneezes.com opened up the site for creatives people he knew. I moved Kentucky Meat Shower over and started a project called Apophany. 

Somewhere in there, the monkey paw I used to wish I’d actually get some motion on social media led to me getting 11k Bluesky followers. (I’m the Frank Gore of this Bluesky shit). The problem was that Substack made it easier to tap in with everything else I was doing. That became important. 

Then, this fall. I am grappling with how I’ll address what happened to me in August (if I will at all), but suddenly, I decided freelance writing more was a good idea. Other than Bluesky (where I’m posting less), though, there was no repository for my work, where someone could easily get connected if they weren’t already interested. Most people also aren’t on Bluesky, either.

That’s how Muleskinner Presser came about. Most of the writing success I’ve had since (let’s put it this way: I get paid but not so much I have to pay taxes) was generated from a newsletter, where I inflicted my personality on people’s inboxes. I think it’s time to get back to that. 

Twice a month, you’ll get one of these. I make no promises of what it’ll be, but you’ll get something. Maybe I’ll write some flash fiction. Maybe I’ll review a Dwight Yoakam album to piss off my mom. All I know is it’s gonna be short, because I can’t let length drift happen again. I have stuff coming out at Typebar, plus the monthly Apophany (I’m about to be ahead of schedule for once in my life). 

In addition, I’ll be sending you updates and links to:

• Future issues of Kentucky Meat Shower and Apophany columns, exclusively hosted at Kittysneezes. Kentucky Meat Shower is a personal ezine that allows me to do extended prose experiments. Apophany is a monthly column about culture and connections that don’t literally exist. 

• Other writing: Typebar feels like home-turf for me, where I’ve written about everything from Bluesky’s internal culture to the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight. I’m also more actively looking for freelance writing opportunities. 

• Archival posts to get you to read stuff I wrote forever ago. 

• Shout-outs to creative friends. 

Minor updates on what I’m watching, listening to, and reading. Which:

SCENE, HERD, RED

• Mini capsule reviews for four good movies. And one Maximum Overdrive. 

  • Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Saint Matthew: never send a Protestant filmmaker to do a gay atheist communist’s job. One of the 10 best films I’ve ever seen, holier than any bit of Kirk Cameron slop. The Vatican agrees with me, by the way. 

  • Les Blank’s A Poem is a Naked Person: better weird Americana hangout movie than The Last Waltz, though it’s all over the place. Found myself mixed on Leon Russell’s music. His version of “Take You There” is legitimately atrocious, like a Pigpen rap with less three day creepin’. On the other hand, he can sing the shit out of bluegrass and his Wikipedia page has nine or ten of the craziest revelations about a musician’s influence I’ve ever seen (he helped invent the first drum machine). There’s a stupid and pointless scene of a chick being killed by a boa constrictor while Jim Franklin rambles that speaks to the worst of “groovy man” filmmaker excess. Still, made me want to live in a house with musicians and drink domestic beer again. No Clapton or Joni Mitchell warbling over “Helpless”, either. 

  • Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof is the most interesting movie of his to explicate and try to figure out what’s going on internally. I’d argue (of the movies I’ve seen) it’s his most “personal” work, and it hits a Hitchcockian register most of his work doesn’t. Hard not to see Stuntman Mike McCay as an extended tantrum at the director’s ego and sadism towards his characters, which is what makes it so fascinating, especially after Uma Thurman’s accident on Kill Bill. The movie is in no way subtle about this. It also, to me, marks the moment besides Kill Bill 2 where Tarantino fell in love with the sound of his own voice, which makes it a bit needling (I genuinely wanted everybody to shut up at every diner scene) but I think the movie works because of the lack of restraint where it makes other parts of his post Death Proof films drag. And the stunts are incredible. I also can’t reiterate enough: this is the most horny movie I’ve ever seen. Basic Instinct feels like 2001: A Space Odyssey next to this. But to get real feminist for a second, it’s insane a Tarantino movie with a bunch of good female performances didn’t result in, say, Ferlito or Poitier getting work besides Blue Bloods and Madea movies. When the Zionist Gooner is giving women more shit to do than most movies, you gotta ask what’s going on Hollywood. Predictably, Tarantino hates it because he can’t have a good opinion.

  • Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans by Werner Herzog is an old saw. I’ve always been a big Herzog fan since I watched Aguirre, the Wrath of God in high school. Forget Mandy, a movie I think is largely overrated because it flatters people who grew up in the 80s. This is the big Cage we want as Lieutenant Terence McDonough, titular Bad Lieutenant. There’s a case to be solved, but the movie is about how the power invested in one police officer mostly causes a moral collapse into pure hedonism, and Cage manages to turn his uncanny personage into a sweaty nightmare. Also an absolute roll call of character actors. It’s Shea Wigham who steals the show as a violent john who purchases time with Frankie (Eva Mendes-- I realized watching this she’s a pretty good actress) and then gets robbed by Bad Lieutenant when Frankie calls for his help. The scene of him repeating “Big mistake” as he backs out of a hotel room: absolute comedy. (Punctuated with a cocky, “Oh yeah” to the teenage witness Terence is protecting, who has no idea what the hell is going on). One of the most interesting throughlines: the film is not about “police corruption”, but it’s about one man’s corruption, which is fed by the fact he’s a cop. There’s a scene near the end of the movie where everything comes together at once for Terence (barely a spoiler) that’s a nice little parody of how society rewards cops no matter what they do.

  • Maximum Overdrive is what everybody who hates Stephen King thinks every Stephen King project is like. There was probably no chance of a Stephen King directed movie being good and a roll of the dice if a King screenplay that bears his specific quirks would be worth anything. It would have taken a miracle for both to be good. So the blame squarely falls on uncle Steve here, in the middle of a cocaine and alcohol problem that would have probably killed him if it wasn’t for his family intervening. Instead, we have an obnoxious horror comedy that’s neither scary or funny and serves instead as a visible, artistic rock bottom. Probably most irritating is Stephen King’s work has always done a decent job of humanizing working class characters and here all there are a bunch of tropes to yammer on Southernly and get killed by big rigs. You can probably gather from the tone of this paragraph that Stephen King was important to me, and a figure I’ve defended over the years (I’ll even defend the ending of The Dark Tower if none of the lead up, and if you want trashy fun King, you’d be better off reading the entire 7 book series than watching this piece of shit). This movie is a nadir: so stupid and ill-conceived and mean-spirited. There’s also the fact that Stephen King being a cocaethylene addled buffoon resulted in a cinematographer losing an eye because he wanted to keep a lawnmower blade in a lawnmower in a scene that didn’t need it. Nothing of value can be extracted from this movie. As I get older, I’m less charmed by “so bad they’re good” movies because of my deep doubts you can make an entire film without any sort of exploitative labor. Speaking of: the reason the movie is set in North Carolina was so Dino De Laurentiis didn’t have to worry about hiring union crews. Heinous work. 

FROM THE TOMBS AND COMING SOON

My latest Apophany column puts down my chips: no better rap project than Sideshow’s Tigray Funk is coming out this year. A headswimming mix of street concerns, chemical struggles, and post-colonial grief. Coming up, we’ve got an essay about commentary Youtube. It may take me as long to figure out how to make a YouTube thumbnail as it will to write it.

We’ll be back in a week or so. Take care and avoid getting booked if you can.