#35: until you're like, "seriously?"
Welcome to issue #35 of THIS NEWSLETTER CANNOT SAVE YOU. You know, friends, we're just [opens Calculator app, runs the numbers] 65 issues away from our double-sized extra-special centennial issue, so close I can practically taste the popcorn, hear the marching band stomping across the neighbor's lawn, smell the fireworks in the sky and also in my hair, which is smoldering after a misfired rocket grazed me on its way to exploding against that weird van that's always parked on our street. The crowd in its state of heightened excitation shouts, "Speech! Speech!" Naturally I prepared no remarks, choosing instead to share my thoughts via the medium of contact improvisation. By the time I'm finished, your attention will have been being stretched to its limits for nineteen hours. It will have only been seeming like sixteen. [footnote]
A hundred issues - what a milestone!
Highlights from Scottoworld
I was asked to contribute to a new book recommendation site called Shepherd, where authors provide lists of five best books on a theme of their choosing. My list is the best SFF novels that take an improbable premise and go nuts with it until you're like, "seriously?"
In a lovely review posted over at The Quill to Live, the reviewer Alex calls my latest book WILD MASSIVE "an incredible, delightfully messy romp" and describes it as "an insane attempt to make art about both the individual process of making art, and the corporate need to usurp the process for profit and perfecting the creative process. But it’s also a fun heartwarming tale about two fugitives trying to find safety from the people trying to kill them." If you're curious to learn more, Tordotcom posted an excerpt from the opening chapter for your consideration.
Scottovision
In Brecht's historical drama The Life of Galileo, he gives these lines to the conflicted astronomer: "Should you, then, in time, discover all there is to be discovered, your progress must become a progress away from the bulk of humanity. The gulf might even grow so wide that the sound of your cheering at some new achievement would be echoed by a universal howl of horror." Not sure why that popped into my mind just now. Anyway here are some things I dug up on the internet for you to look at.
"Gremlin Foundry" (2021) - Clothing brand Brain Dead produced a set of five animated short films released in a collection called Mutant Sequencer, giving artists total creative control and then creating merch for each film. My favorite is Jordan Speer's entry, an eight-minute tour of reality's infernal machine works, revealing the proprietary secret ingredient in all your favorite product-idols.
"Nothing Left To Lose" & "Run A Red Light" (2023) - Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn have reunited as Everything But The Girl, with new album Fuse due to arrive in late April. Two music videos have surfaced so far, each one a masterfully choreographed dance video that unfolds in one or just a few shots each. The first is a kinetic group piece that's charged with anticipation, the second features a duo in a cathartic performance that feels fragile and weightless (this one will be in my year-end favorites list, I'm sure). Thorn's voice has dropped in register with age, and according to interviews, they're also liberally applying effects to her vocals, but the band's fans are almost uniformly impressed with these singles regardless.
"The Life and Death of Tommy Chaos and Stacey Danger" (2014) - This charmingly daft low-budget sci-fi love story rocketed out of the NYU Tisch Undergrad Film & TV program, winning first place in NYU's First Run Festival and screening extensively on the festival circuit after that. Written & directed by Michael Lukk Litwak with the gonzo enthusiasm of a filmmaker who is only dimly aware that he shouldn't be getting away with any of this, the film follows two awkward but eminently likeable leads through the arc of their star-crossed relationship, from their meet cute fighting a dinosaur invasion to their last stand in the molten inner core of the earth. You can find this film in several places, but I'm linking you to a cleaned-up HD release that hit the internets just recently.
"Here Be Dragons" (2023) - Musician Secret Friend captured a bunch of video with his new iPhone 14 at the most recent Taipei Lantern Festival, ran the footage through Stable Diffusion with the settings cranked every which way, edited the best live action together with the best software output, and then composed and recorded a new song to accompany the end result. He notes, "[AI] is one of those technologies which is moving so quickly that it will look extremely outdated in a year, in fact it probably already is. So enjoy it now while it's still kinda sorta novel." That might be true, or we might continue to see innovative new approaches like what we get here.
"B̸̙̽̍͐̌Ȩ̴̦͈̑ ̴̘̭͌́̏̇ N̷̢͚̎̑͐̔O̸͈̥̙̕͠T̷͕͍̣̈́̔̊͝ ̴̈ͅ A̴͓̐̓̀F̸͓̤̰̹͗̈́̂Ř̷̙̻̩͇̎Ȧ̷͍I̵̹̜̹͑͊ͅD̷̢̢̖̮̀" (2023) - If you've ever thought to yourself, "Gee, I really love all those trippy fractal animation videos, but I sure wish they were more Biblically accurate," this one's for you, pardner.
"Baby" (2008) - Described as "a never-aired segment on parenting from Orange County Public Broadcasting," this demented clip is actually a short film from LA sketch comedy group Summer of Tears, who were hot for a spell. The setup is a young couple describing how getting a dog really prepared them for eventually having a baby, which swiftly spirals into lunacy. The final moments, though, are so gloriously intense and unexpected that you could imagine the two writers, Rob Kerkovich and Todd Waldman, putting down their pens or switching off their laptops after finishing the script and just nodding silently to each other, content that they could stop now, mission on earth complete.
"Cosmohedron" (2023) - "A surreal journey through the interconnections between all things." Highly psychedelic short animated film from director/animator Duncan Hatch - conceptually psychedelic, I should say. Figure / ground reversals abound; the scale shrinks and expands unpredictably; from the smallest particles to the mightiest deities, Cosmohedron has a third eye on the entire morass of possibility.
"Plastic Hand" (2023) - Meanwhile, on another aesthetic planet altogether, David Firth offers up a new short animated film, in which a hapless man attempts to impress Plastic Hand, the plastic hand he calls his Lord and who deems him unworthy. Sadly, his efforts do not work.
"Rehousing Technosphere" (2022) - A beautiful experimental animation exploring the evolution of life on our planet in a far-future, post-Anthropocene era in which humanity's imprints are still felt on the environment. The teeming diversity of abstract entities that crawl and glide and swoop across the transformed planetary surface must remain in motion at all times, or be reclaimed as raw material. It's a captivating glimpse of a theoretical biome that excludes humans by definition. Created by Wang & Söderström, a Copenhagen-based group that seeks to "combine technological advancements with sensual qualities to activate a digital sensuousness." I'm not sure I know what that means, but I like it!
"Track 4 from 'Uncomfortable Silences. No. 4' (BBC Records, 1971)" - Self-explanatory.
And a quick bonus video: Susie sent me a silent clip that originally appeared on the Future Automation channel on YouTube in 2019, but it needed a little spice. So I've added some stock music and - crucially - I've upscaled it to 4K. With these touches in place, allow me to share "Bespoke Mirror Ball Drop Mechanism (the next level)."
We do know how to have fun around here.
Exit Music
Sending you out this issue with a piece of musical serendipity from Ólafur Arnalds, featuring singer Ella McRobb. "I found Ella on a Sunday doom-scroll, being a little curious about all the people who had used an improvised piano clip I had posted a few weeks earlier in their own content," Arnalds wrote. "Amidst all the noise I found Ella's video and her mesmerising voice over my improvisation just floored me. After I had listened to it about 30 times I decided to just get in touch. A couple of weeks later she was on a plane to Iceland where we finished the song and filmed the video." The track is called "and we'll leave it there..."
A YouTube playlist with this issue's recs can be found here.
Until next time, I remain your friendly correspondent, thinking of you,
Scotto
Scotto Moore is the author of WILD MASSIVE, BATTLE OF THE LINGUIST MAGES, and YOUR FAVORITE BAND CANNOT SAVE YOU.