Roy Christopher's Blog, page 3

Thoughts That Count

You don’t know the name Angela Britt, but if you were familiar with the deepest details her story—from runaway to ranch hand—you might recognize her as a dozen or so characters in the novels of Cormac McCarthy. She was the model for both the bumbly bum Gene Harrogate and the young and doomed Wanda from Suttree for instance. As I read Vincenzo Barney’s article in Vanity Fair, not only was I surprised that McCarthy didn’t have all of that horse knowledge firsthand—like all of his writing, the bits about ranching are very convincing, rife with expert detail—but also how many times the number 47 kept popping up.

Forty-Seven

I was interested in the story because of how frequently and thoroughly McCarthy had alluded to Britt in so many characters in so many of his novels. I thought the allusions to a living yet unknown person was an interesting angle on the figurative phenomenon. Britt knew McCarthy for 47 years. Coincidentally, she has 47 extant letters from him. McCarthy didn’t send her one letter a year, but she managed to keep the same number of letters.

Sometime last century students at Pamona College in California noticed the number 47 popping up around campus. For one, the college is just off exit 47 of I-10. In her article, “The Mystery of 47,” from the October 1, 2000 issue of Pomona College Magazine, Sarah Dolinar writes,

Depending on your point of view, you might call it a tradition built around trivia, or you might call it Pomona’s link to the deep structure of the universe. For instance, were you aware that the organ case in Lyman Hall has exactly 47 pipes? Or that Pomona’s traditional motto, “Pomona College: Our Tribute to Christian Civilization,” has 47 characters? Did you know that at the time of Pomona’s first graduating class in 1894 there were 47 students enrolled? And if you want to go deeper into the mystery, did you notice that the last two digits in that year equal 47 times two?

Many Pomona alumni have deliberately inserted 47 references into their work. Joe Menosky, class of 1979, a writer for Star Trek: The Next Generation, inserted 47 mentions into nearly every episode of the show. Starting on Star Trek, continuing with Menosky on TNG, and through all of J.J. Abrams’s work (e.g., Alias, Lost, Fringe, the Star Trek reboots, etc.), the number 47 has a long history on the screen. Wherever there’s a stray number in the dialog of one of these shows—a time-stamp, an evidence tag at a crime scene, an apartment number—47 does its numerical duty, threading through and connecting the pieces to a larger whole.

David Lynch’s last feature film, Inland Empire from 2006, partially takes place during the filming of a movie. The movie within the movie is called On High in Blue Tomorrows. After an unnerving disturbance during a table read on set, producer Freddie Howard (Harry Dean Stanton) and director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) confess to the two leads — Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) and Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) — that they are shooting a remake of an unfinished German production called Vier Sieben — 47, which was itself based on a cursed Polish folktale. The previous project was abandoned after the two leads were found murdered “inside the story.”

Before that revelation, we are treated to a surrealist sitcom featuring a rabbit family going about their day in their living room. Later on in the movie, after an altercation with a some sort of phantom, Nikki flees into Room 47, which, unbeknownst to her, is the living room of the rabbits from television. These allusions start out unbeknownst, but soon they seem ubiquitous. For instance, after the earth’s human population reached 2 billion people in 1928, it took 47 years for it to reach 4 billion in 1975, and another 47 years to double again in 2023.

Let’s look at another one.

Forty-Three

It started as an amount of change.

Once upon a time in the early 1980s, the father of one of the Curb Dogs—a loose-knit crew of skateboarders and BMXers in the Bay Area scene that included Maurice Meyer, Dave Vanderspek, Marc Babus, and future Bones Brigade member Tommy Guerrero—walked from the local convenience store into a house party with 43 cents jingling in his pocket: a quarter, a dime, a nickel, and 3 pennies. In a wacky accent, he said to those assembled, “How come every time I come home from the store, I always have 43 cents in my pocket?!” Everyone laughed it off, but the idea was incepted.1 For this group of skateboarders and BMXers, the number 43 was suddenly very important, and they started seeing it everywhere.

BMX nostalgia. Illustration by Roy Christopher.

Maurice “Drob” Meyer, the NorCal BMX local some call the Godfather of 43, says it was Rob “Orb” Fladen’s dad who started the 43 phenomenon. In 1986 (which Drob points out is two times 43), a bunch of those NorCal guys visited Wizard Publications in Los Angeles, the home of BMX Action, Freestylin’, and later Homeboy and Go magazines. These publications were our news networks, and they were all helmed by three hyper-creative dudes known as the Master Cluster: Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, and Spike Jonze. If skateboarding was a relatively small subculture in the mid-1980s, then BMX freestyle was even smaller. These guys documented it with an energetic blend of wisdom and whimsy that included not only the adjacent action of skateboarding but also street art, underground music, and BMX mythology.

Soon the lore spread, and the numerology followed. Forty-three started showing up in the magazines, zines, and videos. It was known as the coincidence number. We saw it in receipts and change, bank signs and temperatures, longitudes and latitudes, mile markers and measurements. In the late 1980s, skateboard pro-cum-photographer Bryce Kanights had a warehouse ramp in the Bay Area called Studio 43. Ron Wilkerson’s legendary Enchanted Ramp was just off the 5 interstate at exit 43. Though the letters D and C in DC Shoes stand for Droors Clothing, Drob points out that D and C are the fourth and third letters of the alphabet. In Eddie Roman’s 1991 video Headfirst, Mat Hoffman, who is widely considered the Michael Jordan of BMX, mentions the number, exposing a new decade of riders to the cult of 43.

By the early 1990s, the Master Cluster had moved on from BMX, into magazines for young men (Dirt) and the Beastie Boys (Grand Royal). Soon, they moved into other areas entirely. Jenkins went into skateboard art (for Girl and Chocolate Skateboards), Lewman went into advertising (for companies like Lambesis and Nemo Design), and Jonze, as a music video director (for the Beastie Boys, Weezer, Björk, and many others), was already on his way to fame and acclaim in Hollywood. In 1995 they were the subject of a one-page profile in Wired Magazine. The page number? 43.

Have you ever learned a new word and then started seeing it everywhere? This is what the literary theorist Kenneth Burke called “terministic screens.” Burke would say that the word was always there, but you were filtering it out, obscuring it with ignorance. Once it became a part of your terministic screen, only then did you start seeing it. Forty-three is a prime number. As an angel number, 43 is highly positive and gives you hope anything is possible if you believe and pursue it. Says a popular angel number website, “People who regularly see number 43 should trust their own inner voice in all things they do.” Everyone knows you can do this with any number, but when you share that number with a group of like-minded people, the power is undeniable.

“Today, you can see and hear references to 43 in movies by Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, and TV shows by Dave Chapelle,” the flatland BMX professional Dave Nourie writes. In Spike Jonze’s 1999 feature film, Being John Malkovich, Malkovich’s apartment number is 43, a nod to Jonze’s BMX roots. Nourie calls these planted 43s “acts of agriculture,” intentional allusions to an inside joke held by a few practitioners of a niche action sport, but the number has leaked into the larger world. Growing up, the novelist Rachel Kushner ran with Tommy Guerrero and others in the NorCal skateboard and BMX scene. As she writes in her essay, “The Hard Crowd,” “Forty-three was our magic number. I see it and remember that I’m in a cult for life.”

Forty-Two

Everybody knows the meaning of life is 42.

Thank you for reading and sharing,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

1

There are a few versions of this story. I dramatized the simplest one.

Dead Channel Sky

Because of their mix of hellified gangster shit and progressive compositions, I once jokingly called clipping. “Deathrow Tull.” Well, it’s not a joke anymore. While their last few projects have been record-long concepts like the classic prog rock of old, Dead Channel Sky is mixtape-like, a carefully curated collection of songs in which every track is a love letter to a possible present. Like a mashup of distinct elements, the overall concept is there, but the result is brief glimpses into a world rather than an overview of it. It sounds crisp and classic at the same time. When something strikes us as retrospective and futuristic at the same time, it’s a reminder of how slipshod our present moment truly is.

In my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019), I draw what Walter Benjamin would call correspondences between early hip-hop culture and cyberpunk literature, the binary stars of the solar system at the end of the millennium. I exploit their similarities to illustrate how the cultural practices of hip-hop have informed the cultural practices of the now. Hip-hop was borne of the post-apocalyptic scene in the South Bronx in the early 1970s. Its repurposing of outmoded technology, the hand-styled hieroglyphic screennames on every colorfast surface, and the gyrating dance moves—an entire culture forged from the freshest of what was available at hand—mirrors the post-apocalyptic techno-scrounge of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Rudy Rucker’s Software, and other early works by the contributors to Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology (Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, and Sterling himself, among others). Add the leather-clad mohawks of Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force or Rammellzee’s B-boy battle armor and a blend of the two comes further into focus.

Juxtaposing high-tech, corporate command-and-control systems (the “cyber”) with the lo-fi, D.I.Y. underground (the “punk”), cyberpunk proper starts in 1982 and ends in 1999, from Blade Runner to The Matrix. There are works before and works since that embody the visions and values of cyberpunk, but these dates act as rough parameters for their assimilation into the larger social sphere, for the time it took cyberpunk to become cyberculture. In the meantime, hip-hop matured, went through its Golden Era, then melted into further forms. Over the same decades, it went from “Planet Rock” to “Bring da Ruckus” to “Hard Knock Life,” from Fab 5 Freddy to Public Enemy to Missy Elliott, from Run-DMC to N.W.A. to Notorious B.I.G. While other genres flirted with it, hip-hop was fickle and fey. Any tryst with the odd bedfellow was a one-night stand at best. Rap and rock birthed mutant offspring maligned by most, and hip-hop’s relations with electronica rarely fared any better.

Those twin suns—hip-hop and cyberpunk—both rose in the 1970s and warmed the wider world during the 1980s and 1990s. What if someone explicitly merged them into one set and sound? Afterall, both movements are the result of hacking the haunted leftovers of a war-torn culture that’s long since moved on.

On Dead Channel Sky, clipping. texture-map the twin histories of hip-hop and cyberpunk onto an alternate present where Rammellzee and Bambaataa are the superheroes of old; where Cybotron and Mantronix are the reigning legends; where Egyptian Lover and Freestyle are debated endlessly, and Ultramag and Public Enemy are the undeniable forefathers; where the lost movements of 1980s and the 1990s are still happening: rave, trip-hop, hip-house, acid house, drum & bass, big beat—the detritus of a different timeline, the survivors of armed audio warfare. That war at thirty-three and a third, its atrocities imprinted upon yet another generation, what someone once called, “the presence of the significance of things” without a hint of ambiguity.

clipping. are very story oriented. They deal in ontology and narrative as much as beats and rhymes. They’ve been approaching making music like writing science fiction since their conception. Two of their records have been nominated for Hugo Awards. William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes both compose film scores, and Daveed Diggs is an actor, writer, and producer. As clipping., they’ve collaborated with as many of their fellow experimental noise artists (e.g., Pedestrian Deposit, Michael Esposito, Jeff Parker, et al.) as they have fellow rappers (e.g., Ed Balloon, King Tee, Gangsta Boo, Benny the Butcher, et al.). Here those co-conspirators include everyone from the guitarist Nels Cline on the outro to “Dodger” (titled “Malleus”) to their labelmates Cartel Madras on “Mirrorshades, pt. 2,” rapper/actor Tia Nomore on “Scams,” and the wordy wordsmith Aesop Rock on “Welcome Home Warrior,” among others.

Diggs is known for intricate lyrics and rapid-fire rapping, and the tracks that Snipes and Hutson build in the background are no less complex. On “Knocking in the Back,” they employ Pulsar Generator, a 1990s-era sound-particle software program developed by Alberto de Campo and Curtis Roads; on “Code,” they sample narrated memories from the Afrofuturist documentary The Last Angel of History; and on “Dominator,” they repurpose the classic Dutch track “Dominator” by Human Resource. All of the above serves to give us a glimpse of an adjacent possible present, where hip-hop and cyberpunk are one culture.

Binary stars are often perceived as one object when viewed with the naked eye. Like those twin sun systems, it’ll take some special equipment and some discerning attention to pull the stars apart on this record. As Diggs barks on the fire-starting “Change the Channel”: Listen up! Everything is very important!

The Medium Picture Cover Reveal!

My book The Medium Picture is finally coming out this fall from the University of Georgia Press. The cover, designed by Erin Kirk, features an object I made in homage to Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 Pulitzer-prize winning masterpieces, Gödel, Escher, Bach. I put together a photo essay showing how it came together.

It’s been a long path to publication for this one, so I’m especially excited about it. No less than William Gibson says, “Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.”

More on this in the meantime.

Clipping’s Dead Channel Sky drops March 14th from Sub Pop Records.

Thanks for reading, responding, and sharing,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Not a Day Goes By

To celebrate Groundhog Day (and six more weeks of winter), here is a time-loop short story called “Not a Day Goes By” that I wrote in the spirit of the best one of these by the genius that was Harold Ramis. I remember I was rewatching Happy Death Day (2017), and I was thinking how the stages of the recurring day as depicted in movies are similar to the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, only to find out that Ramis and his co-writer Danny Rubin had those in mind when they wrote Groundhog Day. I kept that in mind when I wrote this story, but I added an extra layer on top. I hope you dig it.

The video of me reading the story is from a series that The Sager Group did during the Covid-19 lockdown. You can skip that and read it yourself — or read along with me — below. You can also read it in my short-story collection, Different Waves, Different Depths (available from Impeller Press) along with eight other stories (see below).

Read on!

Not a Day Goes By

I adjusted for the wind and everything. The kite veered way too far off the southwest corner of the building anyway. The more I tried to get it out of the flight path, the more adamant it seemed on staying there, a Jolly Roger taunting me from the no-fly zone.

Its black plastic flapping was overtaken by blades chopping air. The sky is quiet from seventeen stories up, and you can hear a helicopter coming from a long way off. No matter, my pirate prey remained in harm’s way.

I cut the line at the last possible second and watched as black blades and black plastic met in a violent twisting tryst. Running for the stairs as the helicopter sat down, I heard yelling as I hit the second landing. With my hood up, I knew they couldn’t identify me later. I stopped a few floors down, shoved the hoodie in my backpack, put on a hat, and headed for the elevators.

I woke up in the night just enough to see her lying across from me. We had collided into each other avoiding a messenger while crossing at Denny Way. I was running down Olive. I’d just stolen coffee from Coffee Messiah as I do every evening. Mr. Turner and most of his employees hate me, but they’ll never know who I am. On any other night, I would’ve ducked into the alley behind Dino’s to drink my coffee and figure out what to do with the rest of my night. That night I decided to cross the street.

It was November 15, 1997. I know because the clock resets at 11:59pm every night, as it has every day since my 23rd birthday. As far as I know, everyone else moves on through the calendar. When I wake up, it’s November 15, 1997 again, and I am wherever I was at midnight the night before. In the 1,207 November 15ths since 1997, I’ve met other prisoners of the day. One was so obsessed with fixing the problem, she wasted the day over and over again. Another was so bent on revenge that she spent every day getting back at everyone who’d wronged her up to that day. Another just couldn’t take it and killed herself over and over. I couldn’t be around any of them for very long. I was pretty sure this girl was one of us, but I needed more time.

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When I crossed Denny, I didn’t see her until she almost knocked me down and nearly fell herself. I caught her and we swung out of the path of the speeding bicycle. I spilled my coffee all over both of us.

On November 15, 1997, the Leonid meteor storm was gathering force. The moon was nearly full, waning from its full phase the night before. Bill Clinton gave his weekly Presidential Radio Address. Crime was way down. It was the Day of the Imprisoned Writer. It was the 319th day of 1997. It was also a Saturday and the first America Recycles Day.

I don’t know what information is relevant, but I know the day well. Call it a time loop, a flat circle, the eternal return, recurrence, or repetition, or just Groundhog Day, it had been all the same for 24 hours over 1,200 times. Then she showed up.

I mentally retraced my steps. Had I done something wildly different today? See, the irony of the loop is that though I’m stuck in the same day, the day itself is the same for everyone except me. I can cause changes, but they all reset by midnight. Most things stay the same. All of that to say that I should’ve known she was coming across the street unless I did something earlier in the day to cause her to change her course this time. Where had I been all day?

I got up that morning and got my usual First Church breakfast. I took a 43 bus downtown and walked to the Vashon Island ferry. I wanted to go to the bookstore and have lunch at this burger place on Vashon Highway. I got caught trying to skip the ferry toll and had to sneak on with the cars. Maybe she was in one of them.

I lifted a new hardback copy of Great Apes by Will Self from the bookstore and walked to Perry’s Vashon Burgers. There I ordered a garden burger, a small order of fries, and a vanilla shake. I started the book, which is about a man who wakes up in a world of apes and thinks he’s the only human, but I was distracted by the marquee on the Vashon Theatre across the street. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was playing. One of those brief waves of déjà vu hit me, like several coincidences piling up together in the same moment. I shook it off as my food arrived.

When I got back to downtown Seattle, I walked most of the way back up the Hill and made my coffee run. I was crossing the street to go to Twice Sold Tales. That’s when I ran into her.

“I’m so sorry,” I said as we twirled back onto the sidewalk.

“Where are you going in such a hurry?” she asked.

“I was going to trade in this book,” I pulled my copy of Tibor Fischer’s The Collector Collector out of my backpack.

“Oh, that’s a good one! Why are you trading it in?”

“Good question. I thought about this earlier. When I trade this in, I’ll likely get $3. That will cover this evening’s coffee.”

“Right,” she seemed more interested than I’d expected.

“But if I saw this book for sale, for twice that, which is what they’ll put it out for, I’d probably buy it.”

“Me too.”

“So, what does that say about my relationship with this book? Shouldn’t I just keep it?”

“Maybe, but it’s like you don’t want to have it, you really just want to buy it again,” she said satisfied.

“Insightful,” I agreed, nodding, “but what does that say about me? That’s the part I’ve been trying to figure out.”

“It seems like you’re stuck. You’re hung up on the beginning, that feeling of newness.”

“Wow...”

“I can relate,” she responded quickly, as if trying to hinder an uncomfortable pause. “You can’t get it back though. It’s the entropy of experience. I want to buy the first Bad Flag record every time I see it. I know it will never give me the same feeling again, but I can’t help myself.” She looked at the book again, “Mind if I tag along?”

“So, what stage are you in?” she asked, petting a grey tabby at Twice Sold Tales. I didn’t look up from the book in my hand, “What do you mean?”

“I know your situation, and I know the stages, so which one are you in?” She insisted. I still didn’t answer. “There are five emotional stages of dealing with time-loops. Which one are you in?”

“What?” I finally acknowledged, looking at her.

“You’re in a funk. Which Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist are you?”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m Frusciante, for sure.”

“Acceptance,” she said, as if analyzing me and jotting down my answers.

“What are the others? What is Hillel Slovak, for example?”

“Slovak is Depression. Dave Navarro is Anger, obviously.”

“And the others?”

“Well, Jack Sherman, Arik Marshall, DeWayne McKnight, and Jesse Tobias are collectively Denial.”

“If they’re all taken as one, that leaves one more. Who’s the other? Who is Bargaining?”

“Josh Klinghoffer,” she said finally.

“I don’t know that one,” I said.

“You wouldn’t.”

“Whoa there, hipster lady! I know more about music I hate than you do about music you like.”

“Is that right?” She put her hands on her hips.

“Yep.”

“Well, let’s just say I’m ahead of you on this one.” Her expression suddenly turned serious as we got ready to leave, “I saw the kite.”

“What kite?” My immediate reaction.

“Well, I saw the story first. That’s how I know your situation.”

“What story?”

“The Post-Intelligencer story about the guy supposedly stuck in the same day.”

“’Supposedly’? I guess they didn’t believe me. I never got to see the story, for obvious reasons.”

“Here, I brought it back with me,” she opened her backpack and pulled out a crumpled print-out of the Sunday edition of the Post-Intelligencer from November 16, 1997. “At first we thought it was another false fire, but then we saw the kite.”

“‘His case has baffled and intrigued doctors who examined the 23-year-old’,” I read aloud, “‘who first experienced the sensation, shortly after he started at the University of Washington, because he does not exhibit any of the other neurological conditions usually associated with those who suffer from déjà vu. UW psychology professor Dr. Christina Kopinski thinks that anxiety is causing the appearance of repetition in his brain—anxiety that may have been exacerbated by the man dropping out of school. “The general theory is that there's a misfiring of neurons in the temporal lobes, which deal with recollection and familiarity. That misfiring during the process of recollection means we interpret a moment in time as something that has already been experienced,” says Kopinski.’... For over three straight years?”

“They didn’t believe you, but I do. It’s called déjà vécu, ‘already lived through’.”

“I don’t care what you call it! I want out!”

“Shhhh!” the guy behind the counter urged as we reached the door.

“A little too Navarro there,” she added.

“We don’t completely understand it yet,” she started as we walked outside, “but it usually has to do with trauma. It’s a never-ending meal. It ends up on your plate, and you have to eat it, over and over, every day. It’s a loop that won’t close. It doesn’t feel like it has happened. It feels like it’s still happening.”

“So, which is it? I want the same feeling again or I don’t?”

“You’re an extreme case. They seem to be the same thing with you.”

“How is that?”

“You’re both abortively resigned to your day and pregnant with retaliation for it,” she said solemnly. “We’ve never seen such extreme poles in one case.”

“How do I get out?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

When I finally woke up for good the next morning, she was gone, but it really was the next morning. November 16, 1997. I know I’ll never get that feeling again, but not a day goes by that I don’t wake up and wish she were still here.

I checked my watch. There was probably time to spill more coffee on my pants. Maybe even time to drink some.

Different Waves, Different Depths

This and eight other stories are included in my collection, Different Waves, Different Depths from Impeller Press, including my time-travel love story, “Fender the Fall.”

Aside from the time loops and time travel, there’s reality television and big data, consultants who can make anyone a winner, a newspaper that’s just gone online-only, a band that never existed but is all too real, mistaken identities, roadtrips, drugs, guns, murder, and a love story or three.

Dive in deep, ease in the shallows, or just let the tide lap at your toes. Different waves await.

Roy Christopher is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thanks to Mike Sager for inviting me to read the story, and to you for reading it, too.

Oh, happy birthday wishes go out to my friend John Mohr today!

More soon,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

David Lynch and the Forest of Symbols

Today would’ve been David Lynch’s 79th birthday, and there’s just no way to say what his work and spirit meant to me and so many others.

His children have invited us all to honor him today. “David Lynch, our beloved dad, was a guiding light of creativity, love, and peace,” they write. Lynch was an advocate of Transcendental Meditation and practiced it for 20 minutes every day from 1979 until his passing last week. Their statement continues: “On Monday, January 20th—what would have been his 79th birthday—we invite you all to join us in a worldwide group meditation at 12:00 NOON PST for 10 minutes.” Join in!

I’m sending you this brief bit I wrote about one of his many masterpieces, Twin Peaks. Happy birthday. Rest easy, sir.

David Lynch. Portrait by Chris Mars.

How in the hell Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks was ever a hit is one of its many mysteries. The show invaded the living rooms of America just as the Zeitgeist was shaking off the awkward, neon discomfort of the 1980s. I first watched it on appropriately scratchy old VHS tapes, recorded straight off the television. The world was “wild at heart and weird on top,” in the words of Barry Gifford, and even if everyone knew it, no one was saying it. We let Frost and Lynch make our unease explicit. Collective pre-millennium tension notwithstanding, our anxiety never really relented.

Setting the screen for shows such as Picket Fences (1992-1996), The X-Files (1994-2003), Six Feet Under (2001-2005), Veronica Mars (2004-2007), Pushing Daisies (2007-2009), The Killing (2011-2013), and games like Alan Wake (2010), Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-1991) was easily the oddest hit show in television history. Set among the trees and mountains of my once adopted home, the Pacific Northwest, the show hosted themes of dangerous dreams, reckless teens, and the paranormal, parallel, and perpendicular.

Incest and child molestation are as American as apple pie. Or should I rather say cherry pie, the dessert choice of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks? Leland Palmer is the all-American Dad if there ever was one, so it’s more than appropriate that he is the one to be possessed by the evil spirit BOB, and to rape and murder his daughter Laura. This deed is necessarily something of a ritual, the founding gesture of the American nuclear family. — Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols

Roy Christopher is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Ritual abounds in Twin Peaks. Its liminality, the “between and betwixt” of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, is evident in Laura Palmer’s double life, “none-more-purposeful” (as Daniel Neofetou describes him) Special Agent Dale Cooper’s limbo while investigating her death, the transubstantiation of BOB, and his toggling of Leland Palmer’s consciousness. The ephemeral existence of the Black Lodge is itself a flickering signifier of ritual. The coffee and doughnuts, the family dinner, even the recording and sending of messages are imbued with the gestures of ceremony.

The time of Twin Peaks wasn’t run by social media and cellphones. Secrets traveled via letters and landlines, diaries and cassette tapes. The latter of these played very important roles in the show and helped define the drama surrounding the two main characters. Laura Palmer’s secret diary and Special Agent Dale Cooper’s microcassettes respectively recorded the weaving mysteries of Laura’s short life and their postmortem unraveling. Both have been published as companions to the show. In addition, Frost and Lynch collaborated with Richard Saul Wurman to put together an Access Guide to the town of Twin Peaks. More than mere merchandising, these books prefigured the internet-enabled transmedia narrative of many 21st-century television shows.

The book Fan Phenomena: Twin Peaks, edited by Marisa C. Hayes and Franck Boulègue (Intellect Books, 2013), expands the between and betwixt of Twin Peaks-inspired writings by fans and critics alike. It’s the first such collection aimed at fans rather than academics. For instance, In his Fan Phenomena essay, Andrew Howe catalogs the cultural artifacts of the series: posters, coffee cups, dolls, sculptures, and so on, while David Griffith confronts the show’s misogynist aspects with waves of feminism, what Diana Hume George (1995) facetiously calls a “double-breasted approach.” Fran Pheasant-Kelly explores the physical spaces of Twin Peaks, and there are three Fan Appreciation interludes in between the essays.

Of course since Fan Phenomena came out, there's been a whole other season of Twin Peaks, and Mark Frost has written and compiled two more books of dossiers, documents, and backstories. Subtitled The Return, season three is just that, a return to the world of Twin Peaks, though it takes half of its 18 episodes to start feeling that way. The turning point is one of the best hours of television ever produced. Part 8, known colloquially as “Gotta Light?,” is a post-atomic fever dream. Where his co-writers, Mark Frost in this case, seem to ground him in some semblance of structure, Part 8 is Lynch at his unhinged best.

After the extant mythology is thoroughly explored and comes to a (mushroom) head, the second half of the season cleaves more closely to the drama of the original show. New characters mix with old and for the most part, it's not in that especially 21st-century way where the latter drags down the pace with the nostalgic weight of the past (cf. Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Scream, etc.). For one thing, the last episode of season two set this one up by predicting a reunion 25 years later, so the place was already holding. It has its missteps, but it'll do In lieu of a full-on cinematic feature from Lynch.

Bibliography:

Frost, Scott. (1991). The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes. New York: Pocket Books.

George, Diana Hume. (1995). Lynching Women: A Feminist Reading of Twin Peaks. In, David Lavery (Ed.), Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, pp 109-119.

Lynch, David, Frost, Mark, & Wurman, Richard Saul. (1991). Welcome to Twin Peaks: Access Guide to the Town. New York: Pocket Books/Twin Peaks Prod./Access Press.

Lynch, Jennifer. (1990). The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. New York: Pocket Books.

Neofetou, Daniel. (2012). Good Day Today: David Lynch Destabilises the Spectator. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, p. 77.

Shaviro, Steven. (1997). Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism. New York: Serpent’s Tail, p. 147.

Turner, Victor. (1967). The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Turner, Victor. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

von Gennep, Arnold. (1961). The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

We never got that full-on cinematic return, but, as Lynch always said,

“Keep your eye on the doughnut, not the hole.”

Rest in peace.

Thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Mars Kumari: Grit and Grief

When the French philosopher Jacques Derrida defined the lingering Marxism of late-Capitalist society as hauntological, mashing together the words “haunting” and “ontology,” he couldn’t have imagined what the era might sound like. Bay Area beat maestra Mars Kumari captures the grit and grief of loss we all feel now, haunted as we are by what was here and is now missing.

I met Mars Kumari at Oblivion Access in Austin in the summer of 2023, where she gave me a demo CD of her record, I Thought I Lost You (Bruiser Brigade, 2023). I already had her record for deadverse, Mars Kumari Type Beat (2021), so I was stoked for the preview. She’s moved on and on since then with collaborations in the works with legends like Del the Funky Homosapien and Dose One and a new solo record for Handsmade Collective.

Mars Kumari. Illustration by Eleanor Purcell.

Roy Christopher: How’d you get into making music in the first place?

Mars Kumari: I first started learning music theory through piano lessons from age 6 onward, but didn't start making my own music until around age 15/16 when my older brother gave me a pirated copy of Ableton. It was on version 8 at the time but 10 years later it’s still my weapon of choice. It took a lot of trial and error to learn (also YouTube tutorials). Throughout that period of time I'd absorb the music my brother listened to via these mix CDs he’d make, which is how I discovered MF DOOM, Del the Funky Homosapien, Crystal Castles, Flying Lotus, Nujabes, and Earl Sweatshirt, among so many others that ended up being core influences of mine.

I spent a year or so making beats by myself until I met my lifelong friends Keyvon and Shishan around 2015, and we all learned to produce and rap alongside one another. In 2019 and early 2020 when I was in university I performed alongside my good friends Nina Spheres and Parish as part of a dark ambient drone trio (collectively titled Nina Spheres). I learned much of what I know about sound design, layering and harmonics from that experience.

RC: More than any era of hip-hop, I hear the second wave of industrial acts (e.g, Scorn, Skinny Puppy, Justin Broadrick, Kevin Martin, the more ambient moments of Meat Beat Manifesto, Wax Trax Records output, et al.) in your work. Is that me just superimposing my own listening history, or do you find kindred sounds in there?

MK: I’ve been getting into the work of Justin Broadrick (specifically JK Flesh) since I saw him at Oblivion Access! I’m familiar with Skinny Puppy and Meat Beat Manifesto, but I need to get into their catalogs more. There are too many artists that influence me to name in one sentence, but Boards of Canada, dälek, Clams Casino, and Burial are some big ones for sure.

RC: What do you call it?

MK: My music?

RC: Yeah.

MK: I usually just say I make beats, even if that’s sort of oversimplifying it. My foundations have always been in industrial hip-hop, drone and shoegaze, but over the last 3 years that I’ve been performing for raves and nightclubs in the Bay, I’ve been listening to a lot more jungle, hard techno, dubstep, digital hardcore, things like that. I had listened to these kinds of music before but being around so much of it the last few years has had a major influence on my sound.

The context and emotions I associate with these kinds of music are consistently integral to the concepts behind my albums. For example, a lot of what I incorporated into Daybreak reminds me of some of my favorite memories of being surrounded by other trans people I love at parties and raves (places I’d be hearing the sort of music that inspired this) coupled with the comparative isolation of waking up the following morning alone in a world that hates people like us. It’s both of those feelings in equal measure behind the sound.

Given how important to the music the memories are, I guess I’d call it hauntology, but to me that feels more like a guiding philosophy and spirituality than a useful descriptor of the way it objectively sounds. There are many different sounds that the word hauntology describes; I think what unites them is more abstract.

Me and Mars at Oblivion Access in Austin in 2023. Selfie by Mars.

RC: What does hauntology mean to you?

MK: Mark Fisher defined it far better than I ever could, but in the context of music I would say it refers to sounds that evoke the distance between yourself and something you remember. The core memory is important, yes, but all music evokes memory on some level. Hauntology centers that temporal distance between you and your memories along with the feelings that may summon (usually nostalgia or a nonspecific feeling of loss). To me it’s more of a guiding set of principles.

However, as a broader philosophy of ghost-like things and temporal disjunction, it strongly informs my relationship to identity (especially gender identity). My own experience of transition has been one of constant tension between past and future selves. Early on, I felt as if the future I had chosen to seal away by transitioning was still haunting me; these days what I feel is more of a sense of having the past selves live on as revenants in my body alongside who I am now. Even the phrase “who I am now” feels relatively meaningless when the present self is never without past or future iterations.

RC: How would you chart the progression of your sound over your last five records?

MK: I put together my first album Anhedonic Mirages (2020) using beats I had made across the previous 5 years which I resampled and reshaped using a lot of distortion, reverb, and grain delay. It serves twofold as an exploration of a new sound and a reflection of where I felt I existed spiritually and temporally in my transition (and by extension the way in which past and future selves behave like revenants). It’s very washed out and bathed in noise and the song structures across this project follow a sort of dream logic. The whole thing is pretty “lo-fi” so to speak; from here I’ve tried to achieve clearer and clearer mixes with each album.

Mars Kumari Type Beat (deadverse, 2021).

I released my next project Elysian Mourning (2021) the following February. This album is a bit more sparse and dreamlike; there's less percussion than in the last album and what is there is subdued. The drones were the focus here. I used my SP-404 extensively for this one; something I like about the original model is the way that electrical noise stacks and multiplies the more you resample something.

Mars Kumari Type Beat (2021) once again re-centers the drums. Some of the oldest beats I’ve ever put out are on here; as such it’s much more varied in its sonic pallet. There are alternative versions of tracks from the previous two albums, beats I started in 2015, and lots of samples from tape reels. I originally released it for Bandcamp Friday that August, and dälek took a liking to it and offered to put that out on deadverse. I'm endlessly grateful that he took a chance on me.

I Thought I Lost You (Bruiser Brigade, 2023).

My next album I Thought I Lost You (2023) took two years to complete and release. There were often field recordings and found sound in the backgrounds of previous albums but they're much more in focus here, serving as leitmotifs. For example, the ambient passage at the beginning of the final track is lifted from a cassette I found with a recording of someone’s funeral. The atmosphere of that room comes through even in the absence of the eulogy. Even when these kinds of recordings aren't so closely tied to death, the nature of them is inherently ghost-like in their detachment from any identifiable source. All you have is the recorder's voice, the room they were in, and to a subtler extent what they were feeling. All with no semblance of an idea of who this was, what they were like, or if they’re even still alive. A voice with no name or body is a ghost in my eyes.

Anyways, I Thought I Lost You is stylistically similar to Anhedonic Mirages, but much more refined, versatile, and massive. There are elements of jungle, noise, industrial hip-hop, and plunderphonics, all texturally united with a dense veil of dark ambience. I wanted to instill a sense of immersion into a new world. Conceptually, it’s grief as a dimension. This was released via Bruiser Brigade Records and mastered by Raphy.

Daybreak (Handsmade Collective, 2024).

My latest album Daybreak (2024) is my attempt at deconstructed club, fusing hard techno and drum and bass and house with industrial hip-hop and gossamer layers of ambience. I wanted to make something that felt really crystalline and pretty that would sound great on a live soundsystem. Most of the songs here were designed for live performances, and many times I’d audition my mixes by playing them at shows and seeing how it sounded and how people responded. I try to wear my influences on my sleeve less these days, but it is very much inspired by artists like Burial, Arca, and Eartheater. I used a lot more synths and software drums here than in earlier albums (which were mostly or entirely sample-based, it’s more of a 50/50 ratio here). I'm really proud of the mix on this one. This is my first record with Handsmade Collective.

In summary, my sound has always had industrial trip-hop and dark ambient at its core, but over time has incorporated elements of deconstructed club and IDM with an increasingly glossy finish. Improving my mixing from one project to the next has always been a priority, and the results of working toward that are showing more and more in the increased clarity and scale of the sound.

RC: What’s coming up next?

MK: A full-length album with Del the Funky Homosapien has been in the works for most of the year. It’s about halfway recorded, and I’m aiming to have it out sometime midway next year. It’s tricky for me to say how it will sound given that it’s still in the works, but in a way it unites the grit of I Thought I Lost You with the gloss of Daybreak. I just started work on an LP with Dose One as well. There are other LPs and EPs planned as well, including one with my friend Q3, one with Uboa and Hook Operator, a noise EP with Lucas Abela and another solo record. Besides that, hopefully I can get a pet rabbit soon.

Follow for Now 2.1

My good friends at Impeller Press and I are working on a new edition of my second interview collection, Follow for Now 2.1, which is scheduled for release in May. The exchange above is one of the many new interviews. Others include Ian MacKaye, Jenny Toomey, DC Pierson, Josh Feit, Danika Stegeman LeMay, and James Ward Byrkit. I’ll share more on this project as it comes together.

Also, the first one is still kicking! To wit, Andrew McLuhan recently read an excerpt from Follow for Now on his radio show on 99.3 County FM. Click on the November 3rd episode and the Follow for Now part starts at around 18 minutes. Woo!

Many thanks to Marcy for her time on this. Special shout out to Suraj!

And thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

A Prayer for 2025

As I do at the beginning of every year, I’m sending you my poem “A Prayer for a New Year.” I wrote this one over 15 years ago, and it still serves as a reminder of all the things I want more and less of (I am aware of the grammatical inconsistencies in this piece, but I left them in for the sake of parallel structure. Call it “poetic license.”).

Whether you dig on poetry or not, please do take a moment with this one. And if you know someone who might dig on it, feel free to share.

“Rabbit, rabbit… White rabbit.”

More stretch, less tense.
More field, less fence.
More bliss, less worry.
More thank you, less sorry.

More nice, less mean.
More page, less screen.
More reading, less clicking.
More healing, less picking.

More writing, less typing.
More liking, less hyping.
More honey, less hive.
More pedal, less drive. 

More wind, less window.
More in action, less in-tow.
More yess, less maybes.
More orgasms, less babies.

More hair, less cuts.
More ands, less buts.
More map, less menu.
More home, less venue.

More art, less work.
More heart, less hurt.
More meaning, less words.
More humans, less herds.

More verbs, less nouns.
More funny, less clowns.
More dessert, less diet.
More noise, less quiet.

More courage, less fear.
More day, less year.
More next, less last.
More now, less past.

More Poetry:

If you do dig on poetry, the poem above and many more are collected in my book Abandoned Accounts, about which Bristol Noir says, “Perfectly balanced prose. With the subtext, gravitas, and confidence of a master wordsmith. It’s a joy to read.”

Also, if you have a gift card you need to burn, I have several other recent books available! Check them out!

Happy 2025!

Thank you for your continued interest in my work and words,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Uplift Your Gifts

Whether you’re looking for last minute Christmas gifts or you have a gift card you need to burn, I have a few recommendations.

Have you been reading this newsletter, yet still wondering about one of the books I’m always yammering on about? Now’s your chance to indulge us both.

Here’s a quick run down of all of my recent books.

Cover illustration by Jeffrey Alan Love.Different Waves, Different Depths

My debut collection of short fiction, Different Waves, Different Depths, contains nine stories, varying in style from the literarily weird to the science fiction and in length from the flash to the novella. The last story in the book, “Fender the Fall,” is about Chris Bridges, a lovelorn physics graduate student who goes back in time to return the journal of his high-school crush in order to save her life and his marriage. As you might expect, the plan doesn’t go as planned. Tagline: You don’t know what you’ve got until you get it back.

“Working the borderlands between philosophy, sci-fi, and ultra-contemporary social critique, these stories illuminate our strange cusp moment in a deeply humanistic and bracing manner. A sharp, propulsive, and canny collection.”
— David Leo Rice

“Guitar-player bullshit.” Photo and photocopy by Craig Gates.discontents

My friends Patrick Barber, Craig Gates, and I put together the pilot issue of a new zine called discontents. The content covers the usual concerns: music, movies, books, and poetry. We reached out to all of our old zine-era friends, so it includes writing by Cynthia Connolly, Peter Relic, Andy Jenkins, Spike Jonze, Fatboi Sharif, Timothy Baker, and Greg Pratt, artwork by Zak Sally and Tae Won You, as well as work by Patrick, Craig, and myself. Subjects include Ceremony, Unwound, Hsi-Chang Lin a.k.a. Still, Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, Crestone director Marnie Elizabeth Hertzler, Coherence director James Ward Byrkit, and others. Fifty full pages of stoke!

The first 100 folded-and-stapled copies went fast, but it’s now available in a perfect-bound print-on-demand version.

Gods of the Aftrofuture: Sun Ra and Rammellzee. Letters by Savage Pencil. Photocopy collage by Roy Christopher.Boogie Down Predictions

While I was writing my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (see below), I gathered up some friends, and we put together an edited collection as sort of a companion to Dead Precedents. Time was one of the aspects of both hip-hop and science fiction that I didn’t get to talk about much in that book, so I started asking around. I found many other writers, scholars, theorists, DJs, and emcees, as interested in the intersection of hip-hop and time as I was. As I continued contacting people and collecting essays, I got more and more excited about the book. Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (Strange Attractor Press) is a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture, as well as what that means for the culture at large.

“Roy Christopher’s dedication to the future is bracing. Boogie Down Predictions is a symphony of voices, beats, and bars messing with time, unsettling histories, opening portals.” — Jeff Chang, author, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

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“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne RoomEscape Philosophy

Using extreme examples from heavy metal music and science fiction and horror movies, Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body (punctum books) is a survey of all the ways we try to shuck off the shackles of our physical forms.

“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Escape Philosophy takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” — Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet

There’s a new edition of Escape Philosophy forthcoming from Repeater Books! The new expanded and updated edition, now called Post-Self, includes new additions to every chapter, a new Foreword by Mark Dery, and a new Afterword by me. More on that project in the new year!

Professor Tricia Rose. Portrait by Eleanor Purcell.Follow for Now, Vol. 2

My second interview anthology, Follow for Now, Vol. 2 (punctum books), picks up and pushes beyond the first volume with a more diverse set of interviewees and interviews. The intent of the first collection was to bring together voices from across disciplines, to cross-pollinate ideas. At the time, social media wasn’t crisscrossing all of the lines and categories held a bit more sway. Volume 2 aims not only to pick up where Follow for Now left off but also to tighten its approach with deeper subjects and more timely interviews. This one is a bit more focused and goes a bit deeper than the last. It includes several firsts, a few lasts, and is fully illustrated with portraits of every interviewee.

“Relentlessly stimulating and insight-packed, Follow for Now is the kind of book I’d like to see published every decade, and devoured every subsequent decade, from now until the end of humanity.” — Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Oh, there’s an updated version of Follow for Now, Vol. 2 coming out next year from Impeller Press! More on that soon.

Abandoned Accounts

When the lockdown started, I found it difficult to focus on the larger projects. In the months before, I’d started writing silly little poems about odd memories I had, tiny stories that didn’t fit anywhere else. I went back to those when I couldn’t think any larger. I eventually moved on to short stories and finally back to book-length writing, but not before I amassed a small pile of poems.

Abandoned Accounts (First Cut Poetry) collects those silly memories I started writing down, including reflections of walks in the woods at my parents’ house in the hinterlands of southeast Alabama, encounters with favorite bands and somewhat famous people, tales of travel and intrigue, and a few stray poems from as far back as 1990. It was an unexpected project, and I’m really proud of the results.

“Perfectly balanced prose. With the subtext, gravitas, and confidence of a master wordsmith. It’s a joy to read.” — Bristol Noir

Nature of the Threat: Ras Kass. Photo by B+.Dead Precedents

My book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books) takes in the ground-breaking work of DJs and emcees, alongside writers like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, as well as graffiti and DIY culture. It’s a counter-cultural history of the twenty-first century, showcasing hip-hop’s role in the creation of the world in which we now live. It’s really dope!

“A book with so much energy and passion in it… a lively screed.”
— Samuel R. Delany

“Written with the passion of a zine-publishing fan and the acuity of an academic.” — Dan Hancox, The Guardian

Follow for Now

My first book, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes (Well-Red Bear), is an anthology of forty-three interviews with minds of all kinds. It’s an eclectic, independently-minded snapshot of the intellectual landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It also includes an extensive bibliography, a full index, and weighs in at nearly 400 pages.

“This book is an exotic plant with roots sucking nutrients from the skulls of the most interesting people on the planet. Prepare to be pollinated.”
— Mark Frauenfelder, bOING-bOING

More!

In addition to the two new editions mentioned above, I also have two whole new books coming out next year!

The University of Georgia Press is publishing my post-punk media-theory book, The Medium Picture! No less a reader than William Gibson says, “Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.”

Also, Repeater Books are putting out my book about allusions in media, The Grand Allusion! I’m still writing that one, but here’s a bit about it:

Roy Christopher is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

So, 2025 is going to be a big year around here! I hope it’s a big one for you, too!

Thank you for your continued support!

Merry Christmas,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

DC Pierson: Time in the Box

My favorite actors tend to play minor characters. There’s something truly special about the MVPs on the sidelines who score wins for the team without much notice. They get bonus points if they’re also writers behind the scenes. DC Pierson has haunted the edges of my psyche for years. He’s popped up on Community, 2 Broke Girls, Key and Peele, Weeds, and a few Verizon commercials, among other places. Somewhere along the way, I started following his social media antics, subscribed to his newsletter, and found his books. A creator in the true Renaissance style, Pierson can do anything — and make it funny.

DC Pierson. Photo by Ari Scott.

I first saw Pierson in 2009’s Mystery Team, a collaboration between him Dominic Dierkes, Dan Eckman, Donald Glover, and the inimitable Meggie McFadden, that also features Aubrey Plaza, Ellie Kemper, Bobby Moynihan, John Daly, Neil Casey, Kay Cannon, and Matt Walsh, among others. It’s a juvenile adventure that feels like hanging out with your friends, causing mischief during a summer in middle school.

Pierson has also written for the VMAs and MTV Movie Awards. A veteran of improv comedy, his latest creations, “The Architect Who Built New York” video series and an adaptation of his first novel, The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To (Vintage, 2010), are no less silly than his first— and no less serious.

Roy Christopher: I first saw you in Mystery Team (2009), which you co-wrote. In the meantime, the cast and crew of that movie has become a who's who of modern comedy. How did that project come about?

DC Pierson: That project was the (probably? We’ll see) culminating effort of DERRICK comedy, a sketch group I was in with Donald Glover, Dominic Dierkes, Dan Eckman, and Meggie McFadden. We’d made a lot of videos that got popular at the dawn of the YouTube era and pooled any money we made from touring, merchandising, and the barest beginnings of monetization, and along with some money from friends and family were able to shoot a feature. Prior to that we’d written a feature we wanted to try and get made the traditional way, and when it became clear that wasn’t gonna happen we wrote something we could conceivably make on an indie budget, including using Meggie’s parents’ house or Dan’s uncles’ hardware store / warehouse in Manchester, NH as shooting locations.

Dominic Dierkes, D.C. Pierson, and Donald Glover in Mystery Team (2009).

Production scrappiness aside the most important part of that process was the writing. Time being money and all we knew we weren’t going to have the chance to improvise a bunch on set and do a bunch of takes. There were a few opportunities to do a little of that i.e., Matt Walsh’s scene with Jon Lutz at the office party late in the movie or Bobby Moynihan’s scenes in the supermarket, but at that point it’s not like you’re rolling for ten minutes hoping somebody will find what’s funny about the scene. You already have something serviceable written and are just watching a couple genius actor-improvisers make it even better like five times in a row and then you get to pick the best one. Going into it with a script where the story, characters, and especially jokes were all solid on the page was key. A lot of that was down to Dan and Meggie’s sense of what was feasible and achievable on a production level — and it deserves to be said, Dan’s ambition and visual sense really kind of made the videos and movie what they were in many ways, and Meggie figuring out how we could actually do stuff in a professional way really none of us were qualified to do in our late teens and early, early 20s — combined with Donald‘s experiences writing for 30 Rock that very much set the tone and the bar for the writing process.

And as for the casting, as you mentioned, we were really just pulling from people in the UCB community in New York that we were part of at that time. It was an incredibly cool scene to be a part of, and I’m still super grateful for it.

RC: That was right at the beginning of the social-media age, and you've leveraged several platforms for comedic purposes. Have you had a plan for those or do you just improvise as needed?

DCP: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, no. It’s more like just keep swimming and try to stay visible. I think I took to Twitter because for better or for worse, I like wordplay and obscure pop culture references, and those both happened to be things that were valuable in that medium. It’s been a slower time adjusting to things like Instagram and TikTok, but I think I’m getting there now especially since I’ve decided to embrace making essentially short short solo sketch videos. It’s a combination of where the technology’s at, that I can just make them and edit them on my phone and the computer and don’t have to be terrifically skilled, with the fact that I come from a sketch background. And even though I don’t think it will become as bigger universal as Twitter was in a day, I am having a lot of fun on Bluesky, which is largely a text based platform like Twitter. We’ll see how it plays out, but at the moment it has a good community vibe.

I also have to say I share a certain weariness. A lot of people who are freelancers of various stripes, be they visual artists or actors or journalists or Drag performers of constantly having to schlep our wares from platform to platform, most of which seem Paternally hostile to promotion of any kind, even though we’re told that’s what we have to do and to be honest it is what we have to do. I guess in my case, maybe it karmically balances out because what we were making in DERRICK really did come along exactly the right time for how small YouTube was but that it existed at all. Granted, none of these things were as developed or capricious or even pernicious as they are these days and maybe that’s part of what was so lucky.

RC: You've been very prolific, and your newsletter is especially erudite and hilarious. Do you publish or perform everything you come up with, or do you save some things for longer or  larger releases?

DCP: Thank you! I have fun doing it, but haven’t done it as much in the last year for various scarcity of bandwidth reasons. I would say in all forms I probably execute like 10% of the ideas I come up with, but that might be a very generous definition of the word idea. I also think — and here I’m quoting Tom Scharpling, author and host of The Best Show who I think is quoting someone else from his life: The execution is really all that matters, ideas are cheap. Of things I actually execute, like write a draft or shoot some of, most of those get out there. I’m not sitting on like a giant archive of unpublished work, though weirdly network effects and internet attention spans being what they are, it’s kind of like anyone who makes things is sitting on a giant archive of unpublished work because it seems like if you’re not constantly surfacing your own stuff, the kind of attention span Eye of Sauron immediately moves off of them. That said, I do have a an essay about going to see the Postal Service and Death Cab like a year ago that I wrote around that time and just never sent out for whatever reason, so thanks for the reminder.

Oh also, even as I say that I have a rough draft of a new book completed, and I need to like lower myself into the whale carcass of that at some point and finish it. More than anything it’s just a debt of honor I owe myself at this point.

RC: “ Execution over ideas.” Did you find that as hard to hear as I did?

DCP: Oh, for sure! And if you’re like me — which we all are, in this way — you’re getting older. So if you think about it for two seconds, or stop trying not to think about it, you realize that the horizon for doing all the ideas is getting smaller. That’s a panicky feeling but there’s also something freeing about it. Less time for doing things that seem like a generically good idea rather than the most You idea, the thing that you’re the most excited about.

RC: Your books were the next thing I was going to ask about. I don’t agree with them, but writers always seem to talk about how hard and thankless it is. Do you enjoy the practice of writing?

DCP: I do! I think I’ve even gotten quasi defensive of it in the post ChatGPT era — like, as long as we’ve been putting pen to paper or pushing the cursor forward writers have been complaining about the drudgery and the solitude of writing, and now all the sudden all these tech bros are coming out of the woodwork claiming to have “solved” it and it’s like, hold on — that’s our solitude and drudgery! It’s like the line from some 90s kids movie — “nobody hits my brother but me!”

There was a line in Top Gun: Maverick that resonated with me (a lot actually! I loved that movie!) about how even with all this modern war-fighting technology, success or failure in one of these insane dogfights those Top Gun rascals are always getting themselves into still comes down to "the man in the box," i.e., the human being in the really expensive fighter plane. The movie is a really thinly veiled metaphor for Cruise’s own feelings about old-fashioned movie craftsmanship and exhibition vs. the new degraded and rapidly diminishing versions of those things, feelings I happen to strongly share, so that helped. But also, the phrase immediately resonated with me as a good way to explain that ineffable and sometimes frustrating feeling of being a writer who is actually sitting down and writing.

I also have done a fair amount of writing for award shows and things, and when I got to the point where I was head-writing the shows, I realized what a lot of people who've done something long enough to ascend into a quasi-management position learn: You get separated from the thing you love that got you there in the first place. I would spend 99% of my time delegating or fielding emails from other people in charge of other parts of the show or in meetings or on calls. I'd be desperate to have time to just sit down and bang out drafts of things we needed for the show but wouldn't really be able to. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I think I’m pretty good at all that other stuff too, but it’s way less specialized. A gajillion people can type “circling back” in an email window. Not everybody can be (or wants to be) the proverbial Man in the Box. Also the world will intercede in infinite ways to keep you from being that (hu)Man. That line in the Top Gun sequel was a good reminder to try and maximize my time in the box.

RC: My parents were never into music and subsequently have never really understood my life-long love and interest in it. You had a very different experience. Can you tell me a little about that?

DCP: Dang!! Well I'm sorry it wasn't something you grew up with in the house very much but it doesn't seem to have stopped you getting immersed in it — maybe because it was something you had to actively seek out or used to define yourself as a separate entity. (That unsolicited uncredentialed faux-therapy will be $125, please). I didn't grow up in a musical household the same way many friends of mine who themselves are way more “musical,” as in, playing instruments or singing, did — like, it wasn't a thing where my mom played piano or my dad and uncle would get guitars out and jam at family gatherings. But my parents were both pretty typical boomers (complimentary, in this instance) in that they both had really close relationships to the music they grew up on (The Beatles in my mom’s case and 70s rock in my dad’s) and my dad maintained an active interest in new music his whole life (my mom probably would've as well but she died when I was 12 — you can actually just repay me in some therapy about that). 

The times I’m most grateful for now, as I wrote about in this essay, are evenings when I’d be visiting home as an adult and some combination of me, my dad, and my brothers would hang out on the couch in the living room in front of my dad and stepmom's state-of-the-art-at-the-time home entertainment system and switch off playing songs from our laptops. It was a lucky collision of where the technology was at — the peak iPod / iTunes era — and where we were at in our lives as father and adult / college / older teenage sons, and a lot of emotional conversations that might not have happened otherwise were had. Those are the times I most value and the thing I’d most like to have back, though my dad's gone now too. ROY, MAKE WITH THE THERAPY, PLEASE!!

It’s funny, I've been realizing recently that some music has gone from “this reminds me of my dad” — like, folky, quasi-ambient Windham Hill records or cool jazz played by white dorks who looked like NASA engineers — to “this is just music I like and actively want to seek out.” They say you become your parents and if this a form it takes for me, great. I will be listening to some of the mellowest shit of all time.

RC: What else is coming up in the DC Universe?

DCP: So much, I hope! Continuing to work on a feature script adaptation of my first book The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep And Never Had To with my pals Dan Eckman and Meggie McFadden. It’s a process that’s had various fits, starts, and tantalizing near-misses with fruition over the years — and along we made this proof of concept short that still rules imo — and it’s at a phase where it’s the most exciting it’s been a long time .

I’m working on a live show with my very talented writer, actor friend Robbie Sublett that I’m also super excited about. It kind of ties in with exactly where we are in our lives and careers while also — hopefully — having a hook that gets people in the door. To be announced on that front.

I’ve also been posting a lot more short comedy videos to Instagram and TikTok and such, particularly a series where I play “The Architect Who Designed New York,” basically an excuse to walk around and make short, silly, one-liners I can then cut together based around stuff I see. Been really enjoying that. Every time I set out to shoot one I end up with enough material for almost two, so it keeps rolling.

UNF Filmmaking Club Introduction

If you’re not interviewed out, Aidan Fridman and the Filmmaking Club at the University of North Florida sat me down for a short video about writing and teaching. Check it out!

Many thanks to DC Pierson for his time and thorough responses, and thank you for reading, subscribing, and sharing,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Torn Together

I first experienced Eli Pariser’s fabled filter bubble twenty years ago, before scrolling the fevered feeds of social media had such a hold on us. I didn’t have a television, but my ex-girlfriend had one stored in our garage. I pulled it out specifically to watch the 2004 election coverage on the news. George W. Bush was up for reelection against challenger John Kerry. For the two years leading up to this election, I had been in graduate school in San Diego. So, no, I didn’t know anyone who liked Bush, no one who didn’t make fun of him, not a single person who had nice things to say. To be fair, I didn’t really know anyone who liked Kerry either, but…

I sat there, by myself, in front of that small cathode-ray television tube, wondering what the hell I was seeing. How could this many people be voting for the guy I was sure didn’t have a single fan on the continent?

That’s what it looks like when your bubble bursts, and you’re exposed to the cold light of consensus reality. That’s when you realize you were duped, but by whom?

One of the first non-children books I read was a biography of P. T. Barnum. My middle-school mind was fascinated by his brash persona and his blatant sloganeering. “There’s a sucker born every minute,” he supposedly once said as he curated freak shows and curiosities and co-created the Barnum and Bailey Circus, “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Thankfully as a young impressionable mind, I didn’t internalize his con-man values. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t need side jobs.

But the silver lining isn’t cynicism, nor are koans like that lost on the tricksters and trolls gatekeeping the path. Everybody knows everything yet fails to notice how far they have left to go and how little air they have left to breathe. That’s one of the defining features of a bubble: It’s sealed. Airtight.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

But we don’t need the internet to be blind to the blight around us, stuck not seeing the things about the world we find too disturbing to know, too annoying to think about, or just plain too inconvenient to consider. We do a lot of it on our own. We all wander through the world with blurry lenses, what the literary theorist Kenneth Burke called “terministic screens.” Have you ever learned a new word and then started seeing it everywhere? Burke would say that it was always there, but you were filtering it out, obscuring it with ignorance. Once it became a part of your terministic screen, then you started seeing it.

Outside the circus, Barnum’s resonant ideas rang much louder than simply hawking curiosities for cash. He served two terms as a Republican in the Connecticut legislature, as well as serving as mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Arguing for the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, the abolitionist Barnum said, “A human soul, ‘that God has created and Christ died for,’ is not to be trifled with. It may tenant the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab, or a Hottentot—it is still an immortal spirit.” In spite of his outdated nomenclature, the man most known as a 19th-century huckster had more progressive ideas than many of the current lot.

Now the terministic screens are actual screens, shiny rectangles, radiant with outrage. Now the most lucrative approach to news is anything that foments fear, anger, and resentment: any reaction is great, but rage is preferred and more profitable. Now the bubbles are smaller, stronger, and finding one’s way out is a lot more difficult. Any semblance of distortion your reality may have been teasing you with, easing your mind with a blur on the lens, a national election will quickly clear up for you. Your brain left broken, your shelter shattered.

Thanks for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

What’s Your Favorite Scary Movie?

In the stray fourth installment of the Scream franchise, cinema club president Charlie Walker (played by Rory Culkin) describes the Stab movie in the making, as well as the aims of the killers in Scream 4 itself, saying they’re making “less of a shrequel and more of a screamake.”

Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown) explains the rules in 5CREAM (2022).

Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown) explains in Scream 5, “It sounds like our killer’s writing his own version of Stab 8, but doing it as a requel.” She adds, “Or a legacy-quel. Fans are torn on the terminology,” self-referentially explaining the existence of Scream 5 in the process. She continues:

See, you can't just reboot a franchise from scratch anymore. The fans won’t stand for it. Black Christmas, Child's Play, Flatliners, that shit doesn't work. But you can’t just do a straight sequel, either. You need to build something new. But not too new or the Internet goes bug-fucking-nuts. It has to be part of an ongoing storyline, even if that story should never have been going on in the first place. New main characters, yes, but supported by, and related to, legacy characters. Not quite a reboot, not quite a sequel, like the new Halloween, Saw, Terminator, Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters, fuck, even Star Wars. It always, always goes back to the original!

In addition to one of the Meeks laying out the rules, in all of the Scream movies, the killer asks the famous question, “What’s your favorite scary movie?” In Scream 4, when the live-streaming vlogger Robbie Mercer (Erik Knudsen) asks Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere), she answers, “Bambi.”

“How do you understand a thing by its shadow
when you don’t even know how shadows are thrown?”
– M. John Harrison, Wish I Was Here

I was three-years old when went to see my first movie in the theater, and the movie was Bambi. Like the titular fawn in Disney’s cartoon, I spent most of my time as a child with my mom. As soon as Bambi’s mom was killed on the screen, mine had to drag me out of the theater, wailing my head off. My disdain for Disney has never relented.

In his 2022 book Cinema Speculation, Quentin Tarantino waxes nostalgic about the many adult movies he watched as a child. He accompanied his mom and stepdad to everything from Dirty Harry and Deliverance to Hardcore and Taxi Driver. Aside from a few autobiographical essays and a couple of critical homage, each chapter of the book is about a different movie, save the two chapters deservedly devoted to Taxi Driver, making Cinema Speculation a sort of memoir through movies.

In the introductory chapter, “Little Q Watching Big Movies,” Tarantino talks about being a grom in a grown-up world:

When a child reads an adult book, there’s going to be words they don’t understand. But depending on the context, and the paragraph surrounding the sentence, sometimes they can figure it out. Same thing when a kid watches an adult movie.

Now obviously, some things that go over your head, your parents want to go over your head. But some things, even if I didn’t exactly know what they meant, I got the gist.

It was fucking thrilling to be the only child in a packed room of adults watching an adult movie and hearing the room laugh at (usually) something I knew was probably naughty. And sometimes even when I didn’t get it, I got it.

Bambi, Flower, and Thumper in Walt Disney’s Bambi (1942)

Eventually he addresses the reader’s concern with his young mind consuming the mature nature of such films, writing:

Was there any movie back then I couldn’t handle?

Yes.

Bambi.

Bambi getting lost from his mother, her being shot by the hunter, and that horrifying forest fire upset me like nothing else I saw in the movies. It wasn’t until 1974 when I saw Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left that anything came close. Now those sequences in Bambi have been fucking up children for decades. But I’m pretty sure I know the reason why Bambi affected me so traumatically. Of course, Bambi losing his mother hits every kid right where they live. But I think even more than the psychological dynamics of the story, it was the shock that the film turned so unexpectedly tragic that hit me so hard. The TV spots really didn’t emphasize the film’s true nature. Instead they concentrated on the cute Bambi and Thumper antics. Nothing prepared me for the harrowing turn of events to come. I remember my little brain screaming the five-year-old version of “What the fuck’s happening?” If I had been more prepared for what I was going to see, I think I might have processed it differently.

Reading Tarantino’s account was definitely validating, even vindicating. I mean, I like scary movies, but not like that.

Knowing the rules helps shape our expectations. Knowing the rules might not take the scare out completely, but not knowing them can be devastating. Not even my in-depth study of the rules in the meantime has made me feel comfortable enough to see Bambi again.

What’s your favorite scary movie?

Happy Halloween!

Thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com