Category: Recommendations

Recommended Consideration: Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast

These aren’t always great and I don’t agree with everyone he features (in fact, I super-duper disagree with ever listening to some of these nutbags). But Rubin is a always a wonderful and honest interviewer, so the episodes are often quite revelatory about art and human thinking (at the very least). 

This one with  Rory Sutherland is quite good and worth your time (even at 3 hours!)

I also really like the two-parter with Tyler Cowen. The first half is also on YouTube (embedded below) while the second isn’t (maybe because of copyright? It’s dedicated to Cowen talking about and offering samples of music he finds interesting and is available here):

VERDICT: Extremely interesting, and honestly worth the time, despite extreme length. 

“re: Thesis defense issue…”

I loved this story, “RE: Thesis defense issue – kalirush 🐍” —and only later learned that it was a riff on an old McSweeney’s piece that, yeah, is fun but suffers from the baked-in McSweeney’s problem (i.e., that it “approaches humor with a lab coat and tweezers.”)

Anyway, this amateur fan-fic riff is better, because it is actually funny, not just theoretically funny and basically funny shaped.

[the image above is an XKCD comic]

Recommended Read: “What It Feels Like To Die” by Warren Benedetto

“What It Feels Like To Die” by Warren Benedetto

I’m usually against drabble[1]; I’m not against this. Go read it now.

[1] short version: the constraint is uninterestingly arbitrary, and very few authors are up to the limitation; much as “five-minute horror film” almost always translates to “one dumb jump scare,” “drabble” almost always translates to “squandered half-an-idea.”

Recommended Listening: Mayfair Watchers Society

I often bounce from a fiction Podcast because I’m a “monster-of-the-week” guy (in the X-Files sense of “Monster-of-the-week” vs “Mythology”), and far too many “serial drama”-style podcasts 1) fall in love with their Mythology arc and 2) the writers (in my humble) just cannot sustain those long, heavy arcs. Listening becomes a chore and strain; I have enough chores, and if I wanted homework I’d go to grad school.

Thus far, Mayfair Watchers Society is delivering the thing I desperately wanted: a monster-a-week, no cast of 1000s to keep track of over years-long lightly scripted arcs. You can pick it up anywhere; Autopsy happened to have been the episode where I resoundingly felt “This is for me!“

Also, love the art!

Enjoy!

Mayfair Watchers Society: “The Autopsy” (Season 1, Ep. 3)

cover art for "The Autopsy" shows a chicken-footed smile monster in the doorway

RECOMMENDED READ “Mister Ice Cold” by Gahan Wilson

RECOMMENDED READ “Mister Ice Cold” by Gahan Wilson

I first read this when I was 12—already an avid reader of OMNI, the 100% perfect magazine for my adolescent Mysteries of the Unknown pre-X-Files brain—and it changed my world:

The chant-like repetition!

The onomatopoeia!

The unheimlich at its core, the disconcerting flesh it shows peeking through the drowsy mundane skin of the midwestern suburbs (where I myself lived)–stumbling across this story was like like bitting into an orange that turns out to be full of blood-moist teeth and a Chinese fortune.

The goddamned art!!! 

Art from "Mister Ice Cold" by Gahan Wilson (originally published in Omni magazine #139, April, 1990) caption reads: Mister Ice Cold never opens the bottom right door in the back of his truck.

The second person?!

In many ways it was exactly the sort of story I’d always want to write forever after.  “In the Sharing Place” is warped by the enormous gravity of this story–and especially its art–forever looming large just below the horizon of my brain. 

(Incidentally, if you wanna read “In the Sharing Place” right now, $3 Patreon Patrons get instant access to the story, audiobook, and 40-minute analog horror film versions.)

And, predictably, it was Ellen Datlow (esteemed editor of the Best Horror of the Year anthologies) who commissioned “Mister Ice Cold” and put it in OMNI—and thus into the hands of a 12-year-old kid outside Detroit who really should have been practicing his Torah portion, not up late reading a slick from the drugstore.

GahanWilson-MisterIceCold-OMNI-139-Apr1990Download

Recommended Read/Listen: “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism” by Jon Padgett

PseudoPod 433: “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism”

I absolutely guarantee the last couple twists are ones you ain’t gonna see coming, dummy. 

[photo credit: “Photo booth portrait of two clowns and a ventriloquist dummy” by oakenroad is licensed under CC BY 2.0. ]