Chloe Cullen's Blog, page 7
October 23, 2024
Relationship Material: 3 Comedians Air Out Their Private Lives
Today, confessional comedy is king. The more raw, the more likely the audience will form a parasocial relationship with the comedian’s persona. For the comedian, who draws material from ordinary material like familial, platonic, and romantic relationships, their loved ones disappear into the vortex of the comedian’s public persona.
How thin is the line between the persona and the person?
What if the comedian reveals—or someone else reveals of the comedian—that they don’t align with the public im...
October 15, 2024
The Digest: A long-distance relationship with the library
It started with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich wrapped in foil. The light, compared to the black night framed in the windows, was fluorescent. A long table of James Baldwin books and public jigsaw puzzles stood across from the book drop-off where a stuffed Elmo appeared to wave. The first floor tables, long and wooden, had open spaces between people…
October 9, 2024
I HATE SUZIE Is The New FLEABAG
This past Sunday, I cosplayed an allergies ad and microwaved chicken noodle soup to cure my runny nose. For my foggy mind, I finished the first season of I Hate Suzie.
The last five years I’ve felt a consumerist gluttony, devouring shows and books as soon as the reviews come out. I rarely wax poetic about a show ending. Usually it’s an internal sighed “thank god there’s a light at the end of the tunnel!” (sorry, House of the Dragon) to reach the next long-awaited watchlist item (sorry, Shogun).
If...
October 6, 2024
New Article: Save the Park Slope Cat ladies!
While I’ve written a few articles for local magazine Park Slope Reader focused on coffee shops or farmer’s markets, I fell down a rabbit hole (…pun?) looking at animal shelters in South Slope. This investigation is the cover of the fall’s PSR.
I imagined that residents could step into an animal shelter to adopt or foster or volunteer in a brick-and-mortar location.
It turns out this idea of shelters is somewhat romanticized. Though there are plenty of animal nonprofits, a lot of them exist in an...
October 2, 2024
The Log: THE BEE STING's Silence Has Venom
Author: Paul Murray (Skippy Dies, An Evening of Long Goodbyes)
Paul Murray was born in Dublin in 1975 and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He has written various novels as well as the screenplay for Metal Heart (2018), which was directed by Hugh O’Conor. Murray's books have received much acclaim. An Evening of Long Gooodbyes (2003) was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and The Mark and the Void (2015) was the winner of the Bollinger Wo...
September 29, 2024
A Beginner's Guide to the 2024 International Film Festivals
September is a sweet spot in film releases. The summer blockbusters have faded. The biopics or expensive franchise expansions will pin their premieres to Thanksgiving or winter holidays. (Looking at you, Wickiator.) The international film festivals have passed out their awards and sent the guests back to their countries.
Last year, I published a list browsing the premieres of Cannes, Venice, Toronto, and Telluride film festivals. My selections included 6 of the 9 films—Anatomy of a Fall, Zone of...
September 25, 2024
The Log: Going Grotesque For Beauty In "The Substance"
Have you ever ridden a monster of a roller coaster, and at some point, because you’re upside down or moving at unhuman speed, you regain consciousness and think, “There’s no way that was sleep,” because you experienced a forcible fainting?
That was me in the movie theater seated between two strangers on a Friday night.
Cold sweats. Tingling palms.
I closed my eyes, and the amplified soundscape prolonged this verge-of-passing-out feeling.
No matter how hard you close your eyes against it, The Sub...
September 18, 2024
Let's Talk About Chloe Troast
Chloe Troast, Saturday Night Live season 49’s flashiest featured player, announced on her socials that she wouldn’t be coming back for SNL’s 50th anniversary season.
@chloetroast💛[image error]Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browserwho is Chloe Troast, & why is this a surprise?
If you stepped out of the SNL lore for a season, Troast had a few great stand-apart sketches, most notably her solo sketch opposite Timothée Chalamet as “Little Orphan Cassidy.” Context: she’s crying about ...
let's talk about Chloe Troast
Chloe Troast, Saturday Night Live season 49’s flashiest featured player, announced on her socials that she wouldn’t be coming back for SNL’s 50th anniversary season.
@chloetroast💛[image error]Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browserwho is Chloe Troast, & why is this a surprise?
If you stepped out of the SNL lore for a season, Troast had a few great stand-apart sketches, most notably her solo sketch opposite Timothée Chalamet as “Little Orphan Cassidy.” Context: she’s crying about ...
September 15, 2024
The Digest: Can you cure a mistake?
The weather, as perfection is, is contextless.
The skies are blue, the breeze cuts the heat like water in whiskey, and the sun sets are late enough to glaze evenings in a sweet laziness.
Your skin clogs on the smooth meadow of your freckled cheek. In these weeks of returning to the regularly scheduled programming, your head rests on your knuckles during…
