What else has Gena been watching, reading or what have you?

A brief list featuring possible actual alien Neil Breen.

Artist’s rendition of me enjoying some literature

These past couple of weeks have been a lethal combination of busy, and bad brain stuff, so I haven’t been able to do as much writing as I would like to (though of course I’m never able to do as much writing as I would like to, that would require a very large bag of money to fall out of the sky). So to fill in some space here, I offer a brief roundup of everything else that’s been occupying some corner of my brain lately.

The most important thing is, of course, that I saw Neil Breen’s latest something or other (because calling it a “movie” is both too generous and not generous enough) Cade: The Tortured Crossing. If you’ve never seen anything from Breen’s now-six feature filmography, I’m reluctant to recommend that you do so, only because you will be sucked into trying to figure out what in the hell he’s trying to say with it. You will be like Charlie Day in front of that conspiracy board, chain-smoking and going without sleep to make any sense of it.

I don’t know if he qualifies as an outsider artist, exactly, but I’m fascinated by Breen’s evident refusal to learn anything about filmmaking, except perhaps how to turn on a camera and turn it off when he’s done using it¹. If anything, on a technical level his movies actually seem to get worse with every new release. Cade is a surreal mishmosh of green screen, stock footage and recorded-via-telephone ADR, cobbled together into some semblance of a “plot” involving superhuman beings, human trafficking, and genetic experimentation. It’s impossible not to watch anything he does without cackling like Sam Neill at the theater in In the Mouth of Madness. It’s not just an amused cackling, but a desperate, hysterical “what the fuck is happening here?” cackling, not unlike when watching Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid, but at a microfraction of the budget.

Anyway, it’s great.

Over at Kill by Kill we’ve been working our way through anthology horror, covering segments from the original Tales From the Crypt, the unfortunate Creepshow 2, and the forgotten Nightmares. We also went long with writer April Wolfe on Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse, and held our noses through every godawful minute of The Final Destination, a movie that dares to ask “What if a bunch of dumb shit happened to some horrible assholes.”

On White Ladies in Crisis, my side project with Horror Queers’ Joe Lipsett and The Losers Club’s Jenn Adams, we’re doing episode recaps of the final season of Apple TV’s Physical, a show I’m pretty sure very nearly no one but us is watching. That’s a shame, because while it’s a frustrating, often difficult watch, it’s also fascinating, and a stark reminder that Hollywood is not giving Rose Byrne enough to do. Well, right now it’s not giving anyone anything to do because there seems to be some baffling ongoing dispute over whether or not people should be paid what they’re worth², but you get what I’m saying.

We’re more than halfway into the fifth season of What We Do in the Shadows, and it remains the best sitcom of the decade³. The highlight episode so far has been, of course, “Pride Parade,” not just for the parade, but also for the sequence in which Laszlo, using sunblock made from Guillermo’s sweat, enjoys a day at the beach by drawing a dick in the sand.

On a completely different note (because I do so love a good jarring juxtaposition⁴), I watched the HBO true crime documentary Last Call, based on Elon Green’s very excellent book about a serial killer preying on gay men in early 90s New York City. Focusing almost entirely on the victims, it’s also an infuriating expose on the indifferent treatment the LGBTQ community received from police even when regularly threatened with violence. Gonna take a wild guess that when the inevitable documentary about recently captured alleged Long Island serial killer Rex Heuermann comes out, it’ll also be revealed how long the case dragged because the police were indifferent to his victims because they were predominantly sex workers, like the Green River Killer, the Grim Sleeper, and “Torso Killer” Richard Cottingham. Funny how that keeps happening!!!!!

Yes, well, anyway. On a more cheerful note, I’ve been off the sauce (the sauce=Twitter) since the beginning of July, and honestly, as much lamenting about it as I did initially, it feels great and I don’t miss it at all. Did I lose a good portion of my audience? Absolutely! Have my promotional numbers taken a hit? For sure! Is Bluesky kind of a boring disappointment? Without question! But on the upside, my soul is cleansed, I find myself psychotically furious⁵ at strangers less often, and, best of all, the time I used to spend scrolling just the dumbest, most awful opinions I’ve ever been subjected to in my entire life, I’m actually reading books again.

I used to be one of those obnoxious “reading is my superpower” people, who thought that liking to read made me a very special (and definitely much smarter than everyone else) person. Then God punished me for my insufferable hubris by taking away my ability to absorb any more information than could be gleaned from a magazine article (or, y’know, a tweet). This was due mostly to COVID-19 at first, but even when things began settling down I still would find myself incapable of reading more than perhaps one book every couple of months, and even then I would often reread the same paragraphs, my brain treating them like Magic Eye puzzles in which perhaps a single word that meant anything might appear.

Dumping Twitter seems to have done the trick, though (and doctors hate it!): In just over six weeks, I’ve managed to read eight! whole! books! That’s right. The kid is back, baby! I’m ready to buy a t-shirt that proclaims me to be a “Bookstrovert.” Possibly in the same way that Jell-O tastes delicious after you haven’t been able to keep anything down for several days, everything I’ve read so far has been a winner, but some standouts include Jamie Loftus’s Raw Dog, a cultural history of hot dogs that manages to be insanely funny, fascinating and poignant all at the same time, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad and its follow-up The Candy House, which makes me regret all the time I’ve wasted not writing, so maybe reading is actually bad for me?

Anyway, what have you been reading? Share with me in the comments. I can’t guarantee I’ll read them too, but I’ll definitely look up their plots on Amazon.

1. I’m guessing, though it’s entirely possible he just keeps using it until the battery runs out.

2. And also whether or not studios should be allowed to “own” other human beings’ images for unpaid use, and whether or not it should be okay to replace writers with computer programs.

3. Full disclosure: I don’t watch any other sitcoms currently. But I feel in my heart that I am correct.

4. I once saw a double feature of Home Alone and Misery.

5. Instead it’s just the regular kind of furious.