Angel Dust vs. Nicotine Patch
For this week, a poem about a guy named Steve.
this new yorker always has a story. every tale ends with it was the 70's, we were on angel dust laughing lapses with a button of grief.
You can read the rest here.
About two months ago I released my debut album as Ghost Down, Mr. Mist. In the whirlwind since, it barely feels like it happened this year. You can stream or buy it here, and read a track-by-track breakdown here.
Misc. Stuff I’m Into:
Movies:
The Warriors [1979, dir. Walter Hill]. Really fun, really silly, this is what it was like for my dad growing up, they shoulda fought the mimes.
Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc [2025, dir. Tatsuya Yoshihara]. I have a lot of feelings about how the anime adaptation of my favorite comic of all time holds up generally, but still, this was a near immaculate movie experience. I’d honestly even recommend it to people who haven’t seen or read any Chainsaw Man at all.
Blue Moon [2025, dir. Richard Linklater]. Another ‘just people talking’ banger from Linklater. Ethan Hawke shows us what Jesse would have become had he never met Céline. I was thinking about how good an alternate version of this movie would be, one made twenty years ago and starring Nathan Lane, then I realized that it basically already exists, as the movie musical version of The Producers.
Music:
Been revisiting Deafheaven’s latest, Lonely People With Power, and I’ve come to realize that it might be a perfect album. Trying my best to put words together about and around it, but I can’t seem to cobble anything together yet other than ‘album good.’ We’ll see if I manage any more in two weeks.
Still loving Sudan Archives’ THE BPM, and this profile of her in Hearing Things is very good too.
Chat Pile & Hayden Pedigo’s In the Earth Again. Not my favorite Chat Pile release, but very haunting and, surprisingly given their discography, magical music for the season.
Frost Children’s SISTER. Brendon put me onto this and also wrote a bit about it! Really fun record, and what feels like a surprising direction.
Whatever Magdalena Bay is cooking up, I’m ready to devour.
Games:
Rolled credits on Ball x Pit, still highly recommend.
Somehow stumbled back into The Binding of Isaac. If anyone has any tips for Tainted Cain runs, hit me up.
Kirby Air Riders is soon and I will then float through the ceiling.
Books:
I deeply loved the Miyazaki film The Boy and the Heron, so I’ve been reading Genzaburo Yoshino’s How Do You Live? to try to understand the film’s inspiration a little better. Only a few chapters in, but it’s quite clear how deep in the DNA of TBATH this book lies.
Rereading John Gardner’s Grendel, first read was a little over a decade ago. This is somehow related to my revisiting of Lonely People With Power.
Rereading Chainsaw Man as I collect the physical volumes and as Part 2 seems to be nearing its end. I will have a lot to say someday soon, I can feel the cracks forming in the dam.
Other stuff:
If you live in NYC, and haven’t voted yet, vote for Zohran today, obv. If you can, vote along Working Families Party line as well! Don’t forget to turn the ballot over and vote on the propositions too. I’ll share these really helpful ballot guides for props 1, 5, and 6 and props 2, 3, and 4 from Hell Gate, and leave the rest in your capable, educated hands. Godspeed.
In the midst of the BDS boycott of Microsoft, you don’t need to talk about Xbox.
Despite my best efforts, despite my ire of Zuckerberg and his hated ilk, I still find myself missing Instagram sometimes. Life is better without it, I guess. My brain feels more normal without constant hits of disparate chemicals and an endless influx of reels, seeing friends do cooler and less cool shit than me, and a constant need to perform or be left behind. But man, when those chemicals hit, they hit. Also, I can feel missed connections with people I’d be friends with, play shows with, have a new crush on, what feels like a whole missed destiny when someone asks ‘do you have an instagram?’ and I say ‘no.’ What could still be if I cave, if I fold, if I log back in. I’ve read and heard that people who quit smoking cigarettes never stop loving smoking cigarettes, the smell, the oral fixations, the rush, the routine, the escape into a slender cancerous room of your own.
To scratch that itch that will never really go away, to slap a freakin’ nicotine patch on my arm, here’s a “moodboard” of photos I took throughout October on my Olympus Stylus 1, and we can all just pretend. These diet cigarettes are just as good as the real thing!
Rest in piss to the war criminal Dick Cheney.
-Will