This past Friday I was featured on Brendon Bigley’s show Wavelengths, where he and I went through our respective top ten lists of 2025 albums and movies! It’s a hefty 3.5-hour podcast episode, and you can listen to it here.

You can also read a little blog post about that and my relationship with podcasting here.

Overheard is recording again! And! We have a show at The Local in Saugerties on Saturday May 9th. You can buy tickets for that here.

Hello to the new folks! Let me just run through what this is again:

Every other Tuesday (god willing), I’ll pop into your inbox with a new post to my website ghostdown.online, upcoming events of mine or a friend’s, a bunch of media recommendations, some news I think is relevant, and a big blog post about whatever is on my mind in a particular week. I hope you stick around!

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.

Also, congrats to my good friend Dan McKeon on being the Ghost Down Newsletter’s hundredth subscriber. “Now get out!”

Misc. Stuff I’m Into:

Movies:

I watched a lot of movies since the last newsletter. Here are some of them:

• Lost Highway [1997, dir. David Lynch] - My very first Lynch film. More on that below.

• Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair [2006, dir. Quentin Tarantino]. Wrote a big ol’ review for this one.

• When Harry Met Sally… [1989, dir. Rob Reiner] - Rewatched one of my all-time favorites (and a New Year’s Eve classic) with Em. This film hit them like a freight train in the moments where they weren’t drooling over 80’s Billy Crystal. Rest in peace to the absolutely legendary Rob Reiner, and thank you for all the perfect works you left us.

• 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple [2026, dir. Nia DaCosta] - got to watch this at an advance screening with a live Q&A with DaCosta and Jack O’Connell after, which was awesome. Ralph Fiennes alone made this movie worth the price of admission…even though the ticket was free? Thank you letterboxd! What a silly, gory, freaky, wild ride for my first new film of 2026.

• Sorcerer [1977, dir. William Friedkin] - William “The Freak” Friedkin makes one of the most stressful motion pictures ever conceived in the form of a scumbag Mission Impossible. They legally cannot make ‘em like they used to.

• Resurrection [2025, dir. Bi Gan] - An esoteric masterwork of a movie about movies. All kinds of sensations, I sat through the credits completely stunned.

• The Virgin Suicides [1999, dir. Sofia Coppola] - you can’t accuse this nepo baby of not having the juice. I bought this Criterion 4k/blu-ray because Lost In Translation is not (yet) in the Collection, but I still wanted to own one of Sofia’s works. I’m glad I did, because I’m going to be revisiting this as a study in perfectly capturing wealthy, detached suburbia on camera.

• It Was Just An Accident [2025, dir. Jafar Panahi] - Jafar Panahi has an amount of courage that no regime on earth could snuff out.

Music:

• The new Robyn singles have me extremely amped for her upcoming record.

• I made a record.club account and you can follow me there if you so choose!

• It has been pretty inspiring to see tons of folks leapfrog my Spotify hatred and ditch streaming entirely in favor of physical media, personal digital music libraries, and getting back into mp3 players! I am now in possession of a PSP and am going to see how I can mold that into a niche little walkman. Wish me luck.

• I have been writing and playing a lot more hardcore punk music with my friends Marco and Idris and am very excited to, someday soon, have something to show for it.

Books:

• Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification. An infuriating read that promises the salve of hope and ideas for a better technological world at its end.

• César J. Ayala and Rafael Bernabe’s Puerto Rico in the American Century, speaking of deeply infuriating reads. But I intend to continue learning about my island and the myriad ways the United States’ colonial, eugenicist projects fucked it.

• For some comic relief, I intend to finally complete a read of Gravity’s Rainbow this year. I have been trying since my friend Andrew gave me a copy for Christmas in 2015…but 2026 is the year, I can feel it.

In other news…

• Solidarity with the NYC nurses who are currently on strike, including my good friend Addie!

• ICE murdered Renee Good in the street last week for the “crime” of making a K-turn, this is not the first time they have done so, and it will not be the last. However, good to know they’re a bunch of cowards who can’t stand confrontation with a crowd.

• Keep boycotting Target.

• Zohran is officially mayor! I’ve been loving Hell Gate’s First 100 Days series on Mamdani’s new mayorship, and that they aren’t afraid to hold him to account when he seems to backpedal. Regardless of the bumps at the start, it’s been a bright spot seeing an elected official who appears to earnestly give a shit.

• It’s not too late to get your flu shot!

SPOILERS for the 1997 film Lost Highway below.

When I texted friends that I was about to watch my very first David Lynch film on Saturday, they reacted with shock; not only for the fact that I had never really engaged with Lynch’s work outside of a few episodes of Twin Peaks and its music, but that my first Lynch film was going to be Lost Highway. “Holy shit really?” “Wait what?!!?” “Jumping straight into the deep end.” But after literal decades of hearing about the guy, and watching Detective Dale Cooper throw rocks at a bottle to solve the mystery of the dead prom queen, it always felt like his entire filmography was one big deep end.

I sat down at Nitehawk Cinema in time for the pre-show, and watched as Angelo Badalamenti played “Laura Palmer’s Theme” and recounted writing it with Lynch. As he made the iconic climb up the piano and parroted Lynch’s praise with such intense emotion, I found myself choked up. Both of these legends were gone now, and even though I had rarely, if ever, interfaced directly with their work, I have been feeling its ripples for most of my life.

Basically every weird freak director, musician, or artist I love has some deference to or has even collaborated with Lynch. Flying Lotus, one of my favorite electronic musicians, featured a distinctively nasally monologue from Lynch in the track “Fire Is Coming” from the album Flamagra (which I’m not crazy about, but that’s neither here nor there). Trent Reznor is one of my favorite musicians period, and he produced the soundtrack for Lost Highway. I watched him perform the soundtrack song “The Perfect Drug” with Nine Inch Nails in September of last year, flinging his guitar across the stage at the end, in what I interpreted as a wild act of honor in the wake of Lynch’s recent passing. Xiu Xiu, my original introduction to anxiety-inducing, experimental fugue music, released an album of their interpretations of the music of Twin Peaks that I own on two formats! This rendition of the soundtrack was my first formal exposure to Lynch’s work. As I type this, I’m listening to it through my cassette player’s tinny little speaker, and it’s playing a little too fast. It feels apt.

All this to say, Lynch never really felt like some inaccessible auteur to me. He always felt more like a weird uncle that I’d always hear stories about and see family photos of, but never actually met. I’d only see the impact he had on my music elders and moviegoing friends, with dinnertime conversations about him spilling into raucous laughter or heated arguments in equal measure. In a way, even though this was my first Lynch movie, I feel like I’ve known him my whole life.

“I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.”

he just like me fr

There’s a more sappy element to feeling familiar with a director I’ve scantly seen the work of, with Lost Highway’s beautiful and claustrophobic closeup cinematography and the Reznor-produced Badalamenti soundtrack feeling like coming home. But it’s downright helpful too: with years of people talking about Lynch basically being the godfather of American film surrealism and dream sequences, my disbelief was left at the door of the theater. I was along for the ride, cruising comfortably (most of the time) through the ‘Möbius strip’ as some have called it, laughing at the bits of comedy amidst the fugue. I nodded sagely when Fred’s brain implodes and he becomes Pete, because of course he did. I felt more seen than ever before when Mr. Eddy beat up and pulled a gun on a tailgater to scream highway death statistics and safe car length practice at him, a kind of humor tailored specifically for me like the holes in Amigara Fault. And when the browless mystery man appeared and had Fred call him to speak to him from two locations, I got the exact freak shit I went to that 35mm showing to see.

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about Patricia Arquette’s dual role as Renee and Alice in the film, and not just because she is among the most beautiful a woman has ever looked on screen in the history of cinema. The way she was filmed and directed, appearing ethereal, unintelligible, simultaneously a physical presence and a ghost, a mouth on the phone and a corpse on the bed, lent well to her own interpretations of the film as discussed in this interview for W Magazine. Arquette breaks down how Lynch gave her the agency to act out Renee and Alice’s intentions as she saw them, as something of a human prism reflecting the violently misogynistic paranoia of Fred, Pete, Mr. Eddy, and Dick. She also discussed feeling safe and cared for on set, both via upholding her own boundaries and with David Lynch paying special attention to Arquette’s discomfort and reservedness around revealing her body. These days nude scenes feel like a constant battle between opposing puritanical sex-negative social pressure and acknowledging inherent exploitation of women’s bodies, and the best we can do is what Lynch did, respecting his own vision but still having his actors feel safe while they work. I think of Rosie Perez crying while filming the nude scenes for Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, a fact that still makes me feel a tinge sour on that film (even though Perez eventually went on to forgive Lee). Lost Highway feels like a happy medium. Yes, there are boobs on screen. Yes, the sex scenes are sexy (except when they very intentionally aren’t). No, they don’t feel exploitative! Lost Highway wouldn’t be what it is without them.

“So I say to the crew, “Okay, guys. They say ‘action.’ I say, ‘Okay, everybody I’m about to take this robe off.’ When I turn around, if I look at you and I know you’re not supposed to be there, I’m going to come and punch you in the f—ing face.”

So I’m like, “Ready.” And 25 people run off into the desert.”

This movie is fucking gross. A human head bends inside out. A lopped off leg sits bleeding on a bed. A man dives across a room and his forehead is horizontally bisected by a glass table. The second-act main character walks around with a giant welt on his forehead. Marilyn Manson appears. And yet (except for that last part), I loved every bit of grotesquerie. I love the way Lynch films gore, artfully yet with no reservations about the nastiness of a corpse. Growing up on the torture-porn Saw movies and splatterfest Final Destination films, I spent a long time averse to horror in my adult life and didn’t even realize the capacity a director could have for the artistic presentation of gore until I watched Ari Aster’s Midsommar for the first time in 2020; I was welcomed back into the genre with a butterflied corpse and a meticulously smashed face. From a princess wrapped in plastic to a human forehead looking like Pac-Man, Lynch has again elevated my desire to seek out more freaky gore-as-artwork. (Funnily enough, another recent film that scratched this itch was my first Cronenberg, Videodrome, in which Debbie Harry is another instance of “the most beautiful a woman has ever looked on screen in the history of cinema.” I’m feeling like these things are related.)

Not enough can really be said about the music of this film, even though I entered this showing with the understanding that I already had a deep reverence, direct and indirect, to the work of Angelo Badalamenti. Synths are searing, saxophones screech, the drum machines pound out 808s and amen breaks in manners both ominous and danceable. I found myself bopping back and forth in my theater seat when I wasn’t borderline plugging my ears at the wails of string section noise. Billy Corgan jumpscare. Iggy Pop jumpscare. David Bowie jumpscare. Every alt/industrial lizard-like freak of the 90’s is on this thing except…weirdly no Trent Reznor? If I recall correctly, I don’t think we actually hear his voice in the film despite his production work and writing two songs on the soundtrack, but his presence is felt deeply. It feels like the score of this film couldn’t have existed in its way without his work pioneering the industrial music genre, and I’m grateful.

That sentiment sums up my feelings on David Lynch, his impact on those I admire, and the ripples his work made that I finally granted myself the privilege to feel directly. I left the theater feeling grateful, and I’m so glad that despite his passing, he left me so many big and little worlds to dive into, from a wonky filmography to an entire television series to an NYC Sanitation commercial.

Rest in power, king. Onto Wild at Heart.

- Will