[Pete and Alice are having sex]
Pete: “I want you!”
Alice: [whispers in his ear] “You'll never have me.”
- Lost Highway
Of all the terrifyingly true things David Lynch has said, this rings the loudest bells for me: “Sex is a doorway to something so powerful and mystical, but movies usually depict it in a completely flat way…” He’s dead right. Despite the ubiquity of sexual imagery and objectified women,
Friend of the Toast Sara Cantor (she's single,
ladies
) just guest starred in her first-ever music video, describing it to me thusly: a "disco witch sex coven commits femme-on-femme glitter bondage." Reader, I watched it.
Previously in this series: If Julian of Norwich Were Your Professor
If Stephen Colbert were your dad, you would have a lot of strange memories from your childhood. For instance, you’d remember taking fishing trips when you didn’t pack any fishing rods or tackle. Instead, you stood side by side at the water’s edge, as Stephen Colbert proclaimed to the fish that becoming someone’s dinner was just their job, and what were they,
She parted her full lips and smiled. "My name is Shahliha." The mysterious, shapely maiden in the pearl-gray cloak who had shadowed his steps ever since he had alighted from Corsair's Breakwater had been his sister all along, then! The lass he had not seen in eighteen years, since the night of the red doors – kin to him, and his last link to a family he thought lost forever. "Thank goodness none of our…
Previously in this series: Songs from a Bruce Springsteen Album in Which No One Exorcises Their Personal Demons or Takes the New Jersey Turnpike "I Couldn't Be Your Friend Because No One Does That After a Breakup" "My Therapist Says That Seeing You 10-12 Times A Day Is Not The Best Idea And Yours Agrees" "I Want Your Lungs To Function Quite Normally (They Are Also Man Lungs)" "Walking With a Corporeal Human Being…
Okay, now that I've read it, TNC is back on the top of the roundup: I have a friend who has a kid who was caught with drugs at school. The kid is white. The administrators wanted to kick the kid out of school. They were trying to put the kid into one of these schools for kids who get kicked out of schools. The parents went to those hearings, did everything in their…
There’s no running from worldbuilding anymore. A tidbit of information about The Hunger Games films or "Game of Thrones" leaks, provoking fans and news outlets alike into a frenzy. Entire wikis are meticulously curated for each series, every line and scene analyzed for maximum informative potential. The ability to craft an expansive fictional sandbox for readers to immerse themselves in has become as important as plot lines or characters in determining the enduring popularity…
Previously: The PC Culture Bible. Deuteronomy 4:44-45 Now these are the hot takes which Moses set before the children of Israel. These are the testimonies, the takes, and the content which Moses delivered to the children of Israel after they came out of Egypt." Deuteronomy 9:9-11 When I had gone up into the mount to receive the tablets of the takes the Lord gave to you, then I abode on the mount forty days…
Waking from a dream you don’t remember but that nevertheless was powerful enough to leave you with a sense of of having been with people who are somehow both friends and strangers, as well as—you suspect—your ex + complete empty space in the part of your brain where today's day of the week should be + encroaching dread that it might, after all, still be a weekday + rueful…
HROTHGAR: ah, Beowulf welcome to Heorot and the land of my people we have heard of your deeds from across the sea BEOWULF: yeah it's no big deal I pretty much swam here UNFERTH: Is't so? I heard you were bested by Breca in a swimming contest not three w– BEOWULF: yeah actually I once held my breath for like a million hours it was crazy my friends weren't even worried because I fight guys…
Ta-Nehisi Coates' MAJESTERIAL piece on mass incarceration in America is out, and I am highly confident it is brilliant, but I am going to bed before I can read it, so I'm linking pre-emptively and we can talk about it in the morning!
*
The Awl has a very long and good thing about the rise of adblockers, and how they will murder and destroy my beautiful website that I cherish…
The pilot has abruptly and completely forgotten how to fly, and is desperate to figure out what's happening to him before anyone else on board notices. "Get me a coffee while you're stretching your legs, will you, Jim?" he bellows tonelessly as his copilot unbuckles himself. His hands tremble as he stretches them over the sickeningly alien panel of flashing lights and impenetrable signals. Nothing, he thinks to himself. I remember nothing. And with this he…
