For today, re-sharing Overheard in the studio, since the instagram profile where these photos used to live no longer exists. Cannot believe it’s been two years.

You can see those photos here.

Here’s a flyer that I made quick for the upcoming Overheard show at Colony that I think the venue has mandated I not post. They can’t stop me, there are no laws in my newsletter.

If you like this newsletter, why don’t you tell a friend about it? Or you can reply to this email and say hey. Whichever feels better to you.

Misc. Stuff I’m Into:

Movies:

• Pillion [2025, dir. Harry Lighton]. Gay, tender, heartbreaking.

• The Secret Agent [2025, dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho]. More on this below.

• Dog Day Afternoon [1975, dir. Sidney Lumet]. Out of the closet and into the streets.

• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [2004, dir. Michael Gondry]. More on this below also.

Music:

Struggling to listen to new stuff lately but here are a few things I’ve liked:

• U.e. & Ulla - Hometown Girl

• Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto - Insen

• The Marías - Submarine

• Foxing - Nearer My God

And my latest CD haul:

Root Beer Round-Up:

This past weekend, I got to visit the new Darkside Records location in the city of Poughkeepsie, and was delighted to see they had a soda section! I picked up this “Earp’s Original Sarsaparilla,” hoping the Sam Elliott-lookin motherfucker on the bottle was signing me up for a western flavor adventure.

I paced the CD shelves sipping this soda and was just…bored. This incredible label was writing checks the actual contents therein couldn’t cash. It just tasted like the most inoffensive of root beers and now I have trust issues, even a Barq’s would clear this boring sugar juice. But at least I got some good CD’s.

2/10

*Spoilers for the films Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Secret Agent below.*

My friend Andrew and I have a lot of good conversations on the train. Arguments about food, breakdowns of our mutual inability to focus on the work we are paid to do, meta-conversations about whether the conversations we are having sound pretentious and annoying to our fellow subway passengers. One that keeps coming up is Andrew beating into my head that my writing about memory (which I do a whole lot of) is in its own way combatting fascism. He can't really find a way to explain it beyond telling me so, and I haven't really found a way to understand what he means. I'm mostly just writing about music, little stories about my family, recording my history for the sake of processing, I'm not totally certain of how it can counter a multi-trillion dollar effort by pathological death cultists to endanger and erase human life.

Cue: the movies. Last week I watched The Secret Agent and rewatched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, two films that circle themes of memory, ethics, community, love, and control.

Eternal Sunshine has visited me at many points throughout my life; at first half-asleep at 2 AM, then shortly after a breakup, then during COVID lockdown, and now in a theater with my partner Em. We both left our rewatch with a much clearer picture of what the film is trying to portray, that love is not exclusively compatibility, that ease is not the only path to partnership. Clem and Joel realizing the route they're right back on and laughing and saying 'okay' back and forth is a dream, just finding that person you're willing to try with again and again. Plus, I'm still humming Beck's wonderful cover of "Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime" days later, just as I was in the days leading up to the showing.

The experiences were mirrored from the jump: I was also struggling to stay awake during The Secret Agent. I had a long Sunday and decided to tack on an 8:15 PM showing of this almost three hour political drama, and without a late coffee I was doomed to lull on the brink of full consciousness for good chunks of the runtime. Because of this, I left the theater struggling to cobble together a coherent thought about the film, aside from remarking at its beauty, and especially the excellent filmmaking of its opening scene. I had gripes, but they were almost all eroded with a night of good sleep, as The Secret Agent became another of the many films I was mixed on at first but now live in my head eternally (alongside the likes of Park Chan-wook's Decision To Leave, Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, and John Cassavettes' Love Streams).

Moments like the final conversation between Fernando and Flavia, Udo Kier's Hans revealing his Holocaust scars to ignorant policemen, and Dona Sebastiana's commune laughing at the story of the severed leg have all gripped my mind and never left, almost as if I needed to be half-awake for those scenes to infiltrate my subconscious the way they did. Amidst a fascist dictatorship wantonly ruining lives, amidst the unshakable grief gripping Dona's runaways, the tapes Flavia peruses still play on a joy and smiles that can't be snuffed out, with one of them in particular ending with Wagner Moura's Armando dancing out into a Carnival crowd with a massive smile, right after recounting his final days with his late wife, Fátima. We see Hans smiling and bopping around in the same crowd in one shot, reveling in the annual party of his adopted home. Flavia's framing quest through the tapes and archives takes us through a country's unwavering spirit amidst unjustifiable bullshit, and a refusal to let misery define your life beyond acknowledging it as your own survival necessitates.

On this rewatch of Eternal Sunshine, I was particularly moved by Kirsten Dunst's role as Mary (amongst a recent realization that she is one of my favorite actors ever). She cannot suppress her misguided affection for Dr. Howard, and is devastated to learn that there was already an attempt to. We hear Howard coerce her into consenting to his procedure over a tape, trying to paper over his unethical behavior and save his marriage. We hear her recite verses from Eloisa to Abelard as the most joyful of Joel's memories are swept away. In a justified rage, Mary sends every Lacuna customer their files and tapes, a direct rebellion against the unethical repression of memory.

"Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but it's on par with a night of heavy drinking."

Ethics are a large focus of the surrounding narratives of Eternal Sunshine. The unbelievable 'nice guy' scumbag Patrick (played concerningly well by Elijah Wood) acts out all the worst impulses of the power one can wield with memory. He uses Clem's memory of her relationship with Joel to manipulate her into a new one, careless to the damage and trauma that it triggers. Stan and Mary drink, do drugs, and dance atop Joel's unconscious body as they strip away his joy and ignore his silent pleas to halt the procedure. Joel himself learns as he experiences the procedure that it's a mistake to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to burn the good times along with the bad, as they can't exist without the other.

"You remember my father better than I do."

In The Secret Agent, Fernando as a child hopes to forget about his mother to ease the grief of having lost her. Fernando as an adult realizes he doesn't remember his father at all, and attempts to maintain a house of cards of composure during the interview with Flavia. He's a victim of fascism's constant attempts to erase, to take, to obfuscate. It takes someone honoring memory, treating archives and history as sacred and worth upholding, to reach across to Fernando and shake him awake.

I love drawing connections of places to memory. I write about it pretty constantly. I don't often like when a movie holds a mirror up to my ugly-crying face. But the scene of Fernando recounting the memory of seeing Jaws, and that very theater now being the blood bank where he works, spoke to me on a spiritual level. I thought of taking Erin and Kenny on the 'Will Tour' through Manhattan, pointing out my memories at each little spot, what places are and what they used to be. What is it about these parallels between past and present that keep us grounded, wistful, content? These little coincidental connections that our minds pin above us like constellations?

I guess that living in a country where those in power are so desperate for us to forget our own realities has me clinging tighter to joy, our own experience, the way things really happened and not the way they are relayed to us by those with harmful motives. When our memories are being stripped from us, we are compelled to fight back, to find narrow ways through, to remember even harder. And yet, it's convenient to want to discard reality and escape when the world, outside or inside, stings the most.

Simultaneously, there's a terrifying power to the manipulation of memory, a crafting of a narrative that complacency cannot crack. It drives us absolutely mad, as we see happen to Clem as Patrick hammers her with perverted versions of her own experience. We also see it happen to Hans, as corrupt police goons of the fascist military dictatorship try to paint the tingling scars of his Holocaust trauma as some 'admirable' Nazi bravado, and ignore his desperate pleas to the contrary. It's only via a conscious effort, a tunneling through to recollection, a community that uplifts and supports you, a tenacious researching of archives people fought and died to preserve, and facing your own uncomfortable realities that both a truth and a love can be upheld.

Not to lampshade myself at the end here, but I haven't done all that much critical writing in a while, a lot of it is just vibes. This is the first time in a long time I have been struck by a shared thesis between films, that memory is important and should be preserved and protected against unethical actors, despite the pain, for the joy; Eternal Sunshine have grief and love, idealization and ethics so deeply intertwined; The Secret Agent has history and community as direct counters to duplicitous and selfish fascism. I finally get what Andrew means when he says that my writing combats fascism in its own way: it's so easy to forget, to let convenient narratives wash over you, to toss away smiles because of what sadness surrounds them. It's hard to remember, to sit with the discomfort and the knotting of your stomach at something so painful, to make a concerted effort against waves and waves of manufactured delusion. Like Joel reaching for Clem under the blanket, I'll keep the grief because of the love alongside it. Like Armando scrambling through files trying to find evidence of his mother, I'll reckon with the past because it keeps me grounded in the present.

- Will

P.S. shoutout Han who heard me/helped me have the epiphany of these two films being connected over the phone. Hope this didn’t make you cry.