Team, I’m going to say something controversial yet brave. I really like this show. And it often annoys me when people automatically dismiss it. Listen, I get it. It’s crazy, it’s confusing, and it’s weirdly sexual. (It’s honestly astonishing how Tim Currey never played the Rum Tum Tugger.) I am now going to explain the show, the mythology, and how it all works using a combination of the poems, the music, various YouTube documentaries, and an absurdly long Google doc I’ve had sitting around forever about the death and afterlife ideologies that span from Prufrock to Practical Cats. (If you’ve ever wondered why I didn’t get invited to any parties in high school, there you go.)

The musical Cats was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and opened in 1981 in New York. It’s (mostly) based on T.S. Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats from 1932. I’m going to get into first the book, then the show, then my defense of “Memory” specifically, because this is a music column. But if you read all of that and still have questions about the mythology, you can message me and I’ll explain. I’m kind of an expert on this stuff.

The book

Webber grew up with Practical Cats and eventually had the idea to set the poems to music. The book is significantly more confusing in its absurdity than a lot of Eliot’s other work. Which, for a guy who wrote The Wasteland, is pretty impressive. Most of the confusion here is just about why and how Eliot wrote these poems (and introduced a whole new set of thoughts about death and the afterlife) at the very end of his life after Prufrock, The Wasteland, and The Hollow Men? The man spent decades thinking and writing about how everyone is basically dead inside, living lives without any meaning, only to end his whole body of work with the question “what would a cat be like if he wanted to die?” and give that cat a way to get to paradise.

But that’s exactly why the poems themselves don’t have to be that confusing: the cats are just like the characters from the first half of Eliot’s poetic works. All of their lives fucking suck. The proposed Heavyside layer is presented as an escape for them after their lives on the street and getting abandoned.

With that being said, half of the poems that the show is based on aren’t even in Practical Cats. So, where the fuck did the show even come from?

The show

It’s actually pretty simple. The show is a combination of Practical Cats, the poems that were rejected and ultimately not published in the final edition of Practical Cats, but remain available to read online, and a couple of Eliot’s earlier poems that don’t actually have anything to do with the cats at all; they just lend some of their lines to the in-between moments. Unsurprisingly, the idea for the show was hard to get off the ground due to the fact that no one besides Webber really got the vision.

One of the main criticisms of the show is its lack of plot. But I argue that it doesn’t lack a plot, it just uses a different type of plot than most theater bros were used to. Cats uses more of an operatic or balletic plot structure, by which I mean that it spends almost the entire first act introducing each cat one by one, with each having their own song and dance number. It later becomes clear in the second act that they are all introducing themselves to be considered to ascend into the Heavyside layer: the aforementioned paradise afterlife. The decision for who will ascend is made by a cat named Old Deuteronomy at the end of the Jellicle Ball: a sacrificial ball for all of the local junkyard cats, of course. (The junkyard being The Wasteland for cats.)

Because of its structure, it can’t be said that the show has a main character in the traditional sense, but the character who might have the strongest argument is Grizabella because of her ballad “Memory.” “Memory” doesn’t come directly from any poem. It was added to the show to gain that emotional power-ballad Broadway moment in between all of the jokes and made-up words. It was meant to sell tickets. And, goddammit, it worked. Even with all of the people who hate the song, it kept people coming back to the show for decades and we all still know it, even if you’ve never purposefully listened to it.

Now that you know all of that, let’s get into “Memory.”

Memory

“Memory” is Grizabella’s plea to ascend to the Heavyside layer. She isn’t much of a character in the first act of the show because it’s understood that she’s not accepted by her fellow Jellicles. It’s never fully explained why this is other than maybe she previously abandoned them and is looking for forgiveness.

It’s also a subtle part of the musical’s mythology that in order to be accepted, a cat must be touched by another cat. If you read any in-depth material on the show, this is one of its very established aspects, but if you’ve only seen it in person or over a screen (and I am of course talking about 1998 and not 2019), it’s mainly established by the way all of the characters are weirdly sexual with each other the whole time and shy away from Grizabella while she holds her hands (paws?) out to them begging for acceptance. After almost all of Grizabella’s big lines, she reaches out in case that time it worked to thaw any other cats’ hearts.

After her gut-wrenching plea, a kitten approaches Grizabella, takes her hand, and it is unanimously decided that she will ascend into the Heavyside layer. She then walks up into the sky. It’s not very ambiguous. They’ve all been competing to die the whole time. But that’s what makes Grizabella’s number so impactful. She’s painting the picture of her idealized past and desolate future in order to literally beg to be put out of her misery. When she says things about “what happiness is” and “a new day,” she’s not talking about the junkyard, she’s talking about looking forward to being reborn into a new and better life. The track is tragic on its own, but I think knowing all of the lore behind it makes it that much better.

And now that you’ve heard my whole explanation and defense of the musical Cats, let’s all hear Molly try to tear me to shreds.

Yeah. I don’t like Cats (the musical). I’m a lesbian, I love real cats. I just prefer my felines to not be dressed in skin-tight fursuits. I’m not saying that Cats is the worst thing Andy Lloyd Fascist ever did, but it’s definitely up there. There’s so many 11 O’clock numbers that are better than “Memory.” Even in the Andrew Lloyd Horndog category. “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina,” “Gesthemene,” “Phantom of The Opera,” and “Any Dream Will Do” are all better songs. I’m not saying “Memory” is bad, but it’s very dependent on who’s singing it. It’s certainly better than every other song in Cats. Cats is one of those shows that’s inexplicably popular. There’s no reason this show should still be a thing, but thank god it was because we got two awesome pieces of musical theater from its bones.

The first show I’m going to discuss is on Broadway RIGHT NOW. Cats: The Jellicle Ball is a reimagining of Cats through the language of Ballroom. It has the most Transgender cast members out of any show in Broadway history and it slaps. OG Cats was queer-adjacent, but refused to be explicit about it. This version of Cats is so gay that it walks faster than the L train. I also happened to do summer stock with the assistant conductor once upon a time and she rocks. Go Lindsey!

Up next is Ride The Cyclone. Like Cats, this is a review style show where a group competes to be resurrected. Unlike Cats, the competitors are children who just died on a roller coaster. Ride The Cyclone is a show that seems unable to decide if its purpose is saving musical theater or mocking it to death. It lands somewhere in the middle and restores your faith in humanity along the way. The 11 O’clocker in Ride The Cyclone is “The Ballad of Jane Doe” a song that kicks huge amounts of ass.

I’m realizing that I don’t actually have much to say about Cats beyond my general dislike of the show. I could discuss how its source material was written by a colonizer-loving monarchist, but TS. Eliot hate is kind of played out. I could make fun of Taylor Swift and that terrible movie, but like…come on. Cats itself is kind of played out, ultimately being saved by better versions of itself. Like Grizabella resurrecting, this old, tired out piece of theater has found its next life. May this one be better than the last.

Final Verdicts:

Steph: People say this show is too weird, but it’s theater, baby!!! People say that it’s too confusing, but it suggests further thoughts and research, which is the same as all of your favorite movies and musicals. Really, I think you’re all just mostly weirded out by the outfits. Get over it.

Molly: I’m sorry…Cats kinda blows hairballs. Go check out the Jellicle Ball version though, that’s actually revolutionary.

thank you for reading!!! as an apology for making you read so much about cats (and what i think might be our longest haterade column ever) we made you one of the most annoying playlists ever. enjoy!!

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Since the last time we’ve talked about movies, much has happened. I’ve seen 33 films since then. Some of these have become new favorites (Virgin Suicides, Last Night in Soho, Waiting for Guffman), some Zac suggestions (The Usual Suspects, Inglorious Bastards, Memories of Murder), and some that are completely ridiculous and a new weird part of my personality (Clue, Best in Show, Ed Wood).

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At the end of this month, we’re celebrating two years of Meantoast on Substack!!! When I made my first post on here, it was because I was crashing out and needing to overshare. I had just moved out of my house with my ex. UPS lost all of my clothes and sent me a check for $100 to buy a new wardrobe. I had about 30 cents in my bank account. I dyed my hair pink and put the charge on my credit card just to feel something. And I was in trauma therapy twice a week for my past relationship.

At first, I didn’t know what I was doing on here. I wrote poems, made playlists, and mostly wrote essays vaguely exposing my trauma and the various people I was going out with at the time. When I got my first few subscribers, it made me really scared that people actually knew about my venting and some of what I was going through. And when the first person I knew in real life found out about my Substack, I was terrified. I’m happy I moved away from the trauma-dumping-on-main approach over here.

I stopped writing about my shitty life at first because I was embarrassed, and then because my life genuinely got a lot better. In the past two years, I’ve written so many things that people have actually read and liked. Things in actual magazines and interviews with so many of my heroes. And I’ve slowly shown less and less of my non-work life online, which I think is a good choice for me right now. It’s been a great two years of my life. And Zac is here now: a big improvement.

While I am still by no means Substack famous, this platform has been my place to completely do my own thing. All of my awful relationship stories and my music history essays have helped me find out so much about who I am and what I want to do with my life. Basically, I know Substack has been getting really popular and people think it’s cringe now, but this platform has really done so much good for me over the past couple years, so I want to thank all of you for being here and supporting me. And cheers to another year of nerding out on the stack!!

Now onto some updates:

As I said in my note yesterday, I have so many cool things coming up! I had two big interviews this past week, one for The Indie Scene, and one with another one of my fave punk bands that I’m really excited to share. (Place your bets now as to who it is.) Those will both be out in the next couple of weeks.

I also have a very cool announcement coming to your inbox later this month, so stay tuuuuned! I don’t want to spoil anything about it yet, but it is another punk-centric project, and I think it’s going to be so so so fun. I also ~might~ have new music and publications happening over the next few months that I will definitely announce on here later.

And, if you missed it and you still want one, you can order the second print issue of The Indie Scene here, where I interview Leroy Clampitt, producer for Sabrina Carpenter, Madison Beer, and Lily Allen: Pre-order: The Indie Scene Magazine (Issue 2) — THE INDIE SCENE

Lastly, I started a weekly writing group!! and it’s open to everyone, so if you want to join, just message me :)))

thank you for reading!! and thank you for your continued support over my two years on substack. i really would not have gotten to do so much of what i’ve done in the past two years without this platform. i appreciate all of you so so much <333 i’ll be back on your screens tomorrow with a members’ post and next week with more music history stuff. see you then!!! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

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Around this time last year, my friend Ace very kindly gifted me a copy of King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes. The book ended up being my sole companion on a tattoo appointment excursion to Rhode Island and one of my favorite books of last year. Despentes’ commentary on women in porn and sex work was directly in line with the research that I’m always looking to dive more into. The different ways in which we view women with or without any type of logical backing is something I am constantly trying to understand.

This past week was Independent Bookstore Week. But in Richmond, where independent shops abound, it’s actually independent bookstore month. And because I fancy myself a nomadic microcelebrity and fuck off up the east coast every few weeks, we got started a little late. My haul from our first round of shopping included local zines from the 80s, an essay collection, Soft Core (which you will undoubtedly hear me talking about in the next few weeks), and Despentes’ newest book, Dear Dickhead.

The book first came onto my radar a month or so ago when my aunt pulled it off of a shelf at another bookstore to show off its absurd title. I recognized the author’s name immediately and put it on my list of books to look more into and eventually come back for. During our weekend bookshop sprint, I discovered that the book is somewhat of a commentary on fading celebrity and social media, and upon my reading of the first chapter, I was immensely intrigued by the way that the main character, a semi-successful author, talks to and about his sister’s childhood friend, a has-been movie star.

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I’m getting a PhD in punk history and wrote extensively about Husker Du in my undergrad thesis, so needless to say this was a pretty exciting one for me, and luckily, I managed not to completely make a fool of myself.

Also, I am writing a short review of the album for Earmilk that will be up in the next few days, so if you want to read about the music more in depth, I’ll link it here once it’s published. Now onto the interview!

What does Ultrabomb mean?

When the band first got together and we were kicking around ideas, a friend of our original drummer suggested the name Ultrabomb and we all liked it. The name works either way: if we were great, we’re bomb, and if we weren’t any good, we were the ultra-bomb. Now I like to say we’re the only bomb that matters.

How did this group (Greg, Derek O’Brian, and Ryan Smith) start working together?

Ultrabomb started in 2021 with Finny McConnell and Jamie Oliver. I met those guys in Berlin, [and] we recorded our first record Time to Burn. That iteration of the band lasted through early 2024. That’s where Derek O’Brian joined the band. Fast forward to January of 2025, the band was about to do a short midwestern run in February, and Finny and I just kind of had a falling out over what the band needed to do. So, I was lucky enough to find Ryan Smith [who] I’ve known for a long time. His band was on a bill we were supposed to play in St. Paul, and I just took a chance and asked him if he could fill in for that show. He learned the Ultrabomb set, we had a couple of rehearsals, and he was great. So, we offered Ryan the spot, and lucky for all of us, Ryan said yes. This record would not have turned out as well as it did without Ryan as my songwriting partner, so I couldn’t be happier.

You recently released a single off of your new album, “No Cap.” Can you talk about what that song means and why you wanted to release it as a single?

“No Cap” is the fourth single we’ve released from the new record. We released a song, “Artificial Stars” on January 2nd. Three weeks after that, we released a song called “Checked Out,” which was a riff on life on the road as a touring musician. In mid-February, we released “Look Forward in Anger,” which is a take on how the media pushes to keep everybody divided. The fourth single, “No Cap,” came out at the beginning of March. “No Cap” can mean “that’s a lie,” but it’s sort of just being fed up with all the BS that you get fed.

What has been the process for creating this album? Are you mostly working with a label or are you just doing whatever you want?

First off, we’re a punk rock band. I feel that punk needs to have a certain urgency and energy to it. Plus, I like that high energy and quick tempo. Live, that just makes it a lot easier to jump around on stage. Ultrabomb has never been a nostalgia act. We’re not trying to recreate something that any of us did in the past. But true to our own identities and style of playing, there are bits of that in our DNA. But we want the music to be fresh. We’re not trying to recreate the past; we’re trying to look forward into the future.

Can you give us an idea of what the rest of the album might entail?

There’s a lot of diversity in the rest of the album. Every song is not the same. It kind of jumps around with different sounds [and] genres. The lyrics for the record were all written, for the most part, last summer. It’s a direct response of what’s happening in the U.S. and around the world, so I think it’s relevant. It’s one of those things where you write songs [and] you don’t necessarily want them to be as relevant in what’s happening because you want all of that stuff to go away and stop, but it’s not going to. Music is a really great thing to make people think and, at the same time, bring them some joy.

Myself, as well as so many other people, are very familiar with your previous work. How would you describe yourself as a musician now? Has the way you approach your music changed?

I’m definitely still punk and angry as I’ve always been. As far as music, I’m also a lot older now. I’ve had the opportunity to play with a lot of different people doing a lot of different things, and I think every time you have an opportunity to do that, it expands your vocabulary. It’s more experience to draw from. In a way, that’s also a very punk rock thing: to continue to evolve as a musician and an artist and not getting stuck in the past.

What bands are you inspired by right now?

There are a whole bunch of younger bands that I feel people should be giving their attention to. Boss’s Daughter out of Reno, Nevada. They’re an amazing trio; their bass player is such an inspiration to me. Billy Batts and the Made Men out of Georgia. They’re all twenty and twenty-one years old, but man, those guys are good live. Locally, Gully Boys and Surly Grrrly. I love seeing younger bands and their interpretation of what punk is. It’s that evolution in the sound, but the spirit is still there, you know? It still has that urgency and energy.

What’s been the highlight of working with Ultrabomb so far? What’s something you’re looking forward to continuing to work with them?

Definitely recording this album was a real highlight. Ryan, Derek, and I have only done a couple of short tours, and those were mostly playing the songs off of the first two Ultrabomb albums, so writing this record and getting that done has definitely been a highlight. Now, we’re excited at the end of May to start touring the record. We’ve got a bunch of short runs spread out through the rest of the year. If everything comes to fruition, we’ll be on the west coast, the east coast, Canada, the midwest. [I’m also excited for] the three of us to start writing new material. I would love to be back in the studio before the end of the year to record our next record.

Is there anything that you want to do in your career that you haven’t done yet? Do you think you still will?

Yeah, actually. I would like to be a full-time working musician again. Husker Du was together for nine years, and that was all I did. Since that time, I had a twenty-year career as a chef, working in restaurants, and once I got back working in music, it’s a necessity to have a job in order to live. But I would love to get back to a point where Ultrabomb is playing enough shows to pay us a living wage, so I can ride off into the sunset as a full-time musician.

The record is available on May 1st. To be honest with you, I think it’s the best record I’ve ever been involved in. I love how it sounds, I love the flow of the record, and I’m really excited for everybody to hear it.

Stream the new album here:

Thank you for reading and a huge thank you to Greg for sitting down and talking with me. Please make sure to check out my review of the album on Earmilk later this week. I’ll link it in this post and promote it on my socials so you don’t miss it.

I am off to a belated independent bookstore week excursion, so next week’s post will likely be a book review. See you then! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

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i also have a ton of other pieces stemming off of this one that i will probably post throughout the summer, so if you want more like this, let me know! let’s dive in!

A lucky few of us might know the top-of-the-world feeling of seeing their favorite musician in concert, and an even luckier few have even made eye contact. But the thrill of turning on the family desktop to check on your favorite band’s MySpace page and finding that you are in their top eight is a feeling that I can only imagine rivals that of accepting your dream job or landing on the moon. Similarly, for the lucky early fans, one might send them a message about how the band’s music changed their life and actually get a response back. All of these things, though great stories, can lead to relationships, or ideas of relationships, that are too close for comfort. Today, scrolling through the social media feed of one’s favorite celebrities can foster a feeling of closeness, like we know so much about their lives because it’s all right in front of us. We understand them so well because we connect with their music so deeply, but being involved in an online environment in which you and a few other people are actually interacting with the band and getting noticed creates a recipe for enmeshing a fan’s life with that of a singer or musician maybe thousands of miles away who doesn’t even know their last name.

Today, we would call these parasocial relationships. Musicians looking to gain a following on social media quickly connected with users hungry to find new, underground art. Posting online could help foster connections between these groups, creating a false sense of intimacy. A trend that has been evolving through the time of Liszt, The Beatles, and with emo boy bands like My Chemical Romance, the relationships between male musicians and their female fans is often complex and confusing in its intimacy. These relationships change based on the technologies of the time but always contain a level of devotion from the fans that can be considered obsessive or even concerning from the outside, and has developed numerous times into the privacy of the musician being threatened.

For bands like Dashboard Confessional, one of the founding groups of the MySpace music scene and later the emo scene, this issue of privacy was, and for many famous musicians continues to be, a double-edged sword. The more people following an artist’s social media, the more listeners they have, the more shows they can book, and the more money they can make, but the more people there are who know any level of detail about the artist’s life also means an increasing chance of the line between life and media presence evaporating, and boundaries of privacy being crossed.

From the time of its conception, MySpace was centered around music. With its completely customizable profiles, users could include a song that described them, post status updates for which song lyrics quickly became popular go-tos, and edit their top eight. In response to fans promoting their favorite bands on their profiles, bands would often return the favor and add fans to their top eight. The top eight was a series of friends, followers, and idols, and served as an opportunity for users to display their current romantic interest, best friends, and favorite bands. This quickly became complicated, as bands would receive hate for removing fans from their profiles when they needed to promote new collaborations with other artists, or wanted to keep time in the spotlight equal among their top supporters. MySpace powerhouse band Thursday received hate for electing not to put their fans into their top eight at all. This attention from small artists who became big stars has bled into more recent forms of social media: die-hard fans tend to think their devotion gives them a right to be included in their favorite artist’s inner circle.

In the early days of MySpace, musicians were just beginning to realize that they could build a following on social media and use it to further the reach of their music. Since many of these artists had yet to hit it big, it was fairly common for musicians to see who was interacting with them the most online and who had them in their top eight. Fans would actually get to talk to these up-and-coming bands before their following became too big to handle. This possibility of being noticed solidified a mentality that still plagues the world of social media and parasocial relationships: if you believe or try hard enough, you will get noticed.

The rise of emo was often interconnected with this behavior, as the music itself can largely be connected to a feeling of belonging and community. Dashboard Confessional and MCR were connecting with young people, many of whom were struggling with bullying and depression. When someone, especially a teenager, feels connected to and healed by an artist, it is sometimes inevitable that they feel known and are inclined to feel like they know the artist in return. The artist seems to be a reflection of themself.

I’m going to leave it here for now. Again, more soon (probably).

thank you for reading!!! For more information in this topic, I would recommend Michael Tedder’s book Top Eight: How MySpace Changed Music. I’ll be back tomorrow with a members’ only column and with a free music column next thursday and the thursday after that and the thursday after that and the thursday after that. xoxoxoxoxoxoxo

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but inspiration struck a couple of weeks ago. zac took me to my second dropkick murphys show, and i was reminded of my one true enemy. the one song that i can firmly, genuinely say i hate: sweet caroline. what follows is my history with the song, why and how it became so popular, and why i think it sucks so bad.

The first time I remember hating “Sweet Caroline” was when I was a freshman in high school. I was on my school’s dance team, and whenever there was a home football game, they made us learn cheers and dance sideline with the cheerleaders, who I’m pretty certain hated us. We also weren’t allowed to move while we weren’t cheering. So I would stand there for four hours with my pom-poms behind my back (the required position) and zone out until I heard that band count us in. During this whole experience, I probably heard “Sweet Caroline” about 65 billion times. Hearing an entire set of bleachers filled with drunk high schoolers scream the same song week after week combined with my internal monologue of OH MY GOD COULD YOU POSSIBLY STOP THE CLOCK FOR ANY FUCKING LONGER??? is enough to deter anyone for life.

“Sweet Caroline” to me is the Stockholm Syndrome of songs. As far as I can tell, there’s no reason to like it other than the fact that it’s always there, and maybe some people aren’t as scarred by it as I am and have fond family memories singing it at games and blahblahblahblahblah. But when I started looking into it, I found that I wasn’t the only one totally confused by why this song is everywhere. One of the first things that come up when you Google why it’s played at sporting events is a long Reddit thread of a bunch of people agreeing that its inclusion makes no sense.

The simple reason as to why it’s so popular is because it’s well-known and easy to sing along to. Written and performed by Neil Diamond, the song reached immediate success upon its release in 1969. It has a simple and predictable progression, it’s in an easy shouting range, not requiring any particular singing skill from anyone involved, and the bulk of it is extremely easy to memorize upon first listen. So, you hear it once, then you can scream it at sportsballs games forever. These reasons make sense, but they’re the same as so many other songs. Our go-to sports jam could just as easily have been “Yellow Submarine” or “All the Small Things.” “Sweet Caroline” also has literally nothing to do with sports. So why did we choose it as the anthem for all American sporting events?

In addition to my high school being a boiling cesspool of Neil Diamond fans, I also lived for four years in a building in Boston a couple blocks away from Fenway Park, where the song maybe has its biggest impact. In a video posted by ESPN last year, the former Fenway scoreboard operator claims that they started playing the song when he would bring his daughter Caroline along for games. As Caroline got older, some people in the audience had come to expect that song be played, so it made its way onto the regular roster.

The regular playing of the song at Fenway then translated and spread into the song being a staple at basically every stadium in the United States, and some in England (that makes even less sense. You’re not forced to claim bad American songs; you have the power to pick something better.)

The reasons why “Sweet Caroline” is a blatantly bad song are also some of the reasons why it’s so successful. The first of which being that, as I mentioned before, anyone can sing it. When I said “anyone can sing it,” I really meant that there’s no actual singing in this song. It’s all yelling, and Neil can’t even yell for that long. In the track’s official recording, you can hear him straining to hold onto every other note. If ever a track was made for singing over, it’s this one. I’m also going to give Neil the benefit of the doubt and say that he wrote this entire thing, mostly because I’ve already ranted about him so much, I don’t really want to blame anyone else for the line “Warm/ Touchin’ warm.” Neil. I’m sorry. What the fuck does that even mean?

Sorry, gang. I may have gotten a little heated there. I may need to cool down and let Molly take the wheel for a while. Hopefully she’s more chill.

Yeah I’m from Massachusetts originally, unlike Toasty who was a transplant, and I kinda like this song. It’s not my favorite Niel diamond tune, but there are so many other songs you can hate on. Plus, I grew singing this at Red Sox games and for that reason alone it’s totally worth it. When it comes to most cringey love songs, I like to perform a little test. How would I feel if someone wrote this for me? In this case, I think I’d melt. It’s so earnest. (You can’t be serious. -Toast) And yeah Toasty Niel can’t really sing it, but WHO FLIPPIN CARES. This song is a treasure to so many (white) people. Why would we take it from them? I’ve been on a journey about beloved songs that I don’t like recently. It all started with Dani California…(insert whimsical melody.)

Last week, I was at my local Bar (where I taught Steph how to shoot whiskey) hanging out with my pals and blowing off steam. This is one of those hipster joints where music selection is a very important covenant. Most of the time there’s vinyl DJs providing music. Because fate decided that it would smile on us all, there was no DJ on this night and, thus, no one to cultivate tunes. A group of non-regulars asked if they could sing karaoke and the bartender let them. What came next was, well, fucking awesome. The one rule of karaoke selection is “pick a song that people will sing along to” and everyone understood the assignment. And some of these songs were badddddd. Every time someone would pick a bad song, a bunch of hipsters would go “ughhhhh” and then five seconds later would be singing along as loud as they could. If there’s a hook and people like it, why do we care? Dani California is a song I alternate between disliking and actively hating, but when someone got up to do it at karaoke, I was singing about bandanas and sweet louisiana along with everyone else.

While the owner of the bar has forbidden any future karaoke sessions, I think we all learned a valuable lesson. When someone’s having fun, it’s way better if you join in. Toasty, I love you. But you gotta come off of this cross, we can make way better use of the wood burning songs that deserve it. Here’s a short list of songs that deserve your ire more than “Sweet Caroline”

You’re Having My Baby

Woman Child

Queen of The Supermarket

Everything Kanye’s released since 2020 (and probably some of the stuff before)

There’s so much more to hate that is so much more hateable. Let us sing some “Ba ba bas” every once in a while.

Verdict:

Molly: Let us live a little

Steph: Molly, I let you rant about so much shit. I will not be insulted in my own home (and by home i do mean substack). let me have this.

thank you so much for reading!! subscribe to steph here and molly here. also, stay tuned for another (maybe reverse?) haterade on molly’s page in may. k bye xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

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today, i wanted to continue a series that i started a while ago: meantoast revisited! if you didn’t see that original post, basically, i’m on a mission to make my substack a thing that i’m really proud of. while i do feel like most of my recent posts fall under that category, i’ve been on substack for almost two years now, and some of my older posts could use some edits. so today, i thought i’d bring back the post that i originally had in mind while making this series: i’m on the guest list.

i hope you enjoy, and you can check out the meantoast revisited announcement here, as well as my first re-edited column here. let’s get into it!

I first had the idea for this column last fall, when an artist named Olivia invited me to her album release show in Rhode Island. I had interviewed her a few months prior for a magazine, and she remembered our interview and my shining personality enough to directly reach out and offer me a spot on her guest list. I wrote about this a year ago, but it still doesn’t feel real to me every day when I get emails asking me to cover big releases or interview artists that I’ve literally written papers about. Every single time I get an email asking me to write about something or inviting me to an event just because they like my work, it’s thrilling and confusing. I want to blush and kick my feet and email them back “OMG YOU THINK I’M A GOOD WRITER??? AWWWWWW THANK YOU!!!!!!”

I’ve talked about this before, but I’m so fascinated by a-list social events, and even the smallest of concerts tend to take on that feeling. I want to be a socialite just as much as I want to be a musicologist. My greatest dream is to spend all day doing research and writing and interviewing musicians and spend my nights getting dolled up in designer clothes, having reservations at the most lavish restaurants in a major city, going backstage at concerts, and being on the list for the most exclusive parties. (This comes directly from the original version of this column, but it’s still accurate, so I’m keeping it.)

All of this is to say that being on the guest list is one of my greatest joys in this mortal life. And that’s not exclusively for expensive or exclusive events. This may be the years and years of social exclusion and traumatic relationships with musicians talking, but it makes me feel like social royalty just not paying to see a house show.

I’ve been lucky enough in the year and a half since writing this original column to not have to pay for many of the shows I go to because of my super hot amazing talented boyfriend, but we must remember that, for a long time, this wasn’t the case. One of my most notable (and by that I do mean worst) guest list stories was when I was 19. I had started dating a musician who was 24 and had pleaded to be able to attend one of their shows. (I was going to get more into this dynamic in this post, but I can’t think of a way to do it that’s not depressing. Stay tuned for my book.)

After a reluctant acceptance, we also had to figure out a way for me to walk into a bar without looking suspicious (again, all clearly signs of a good relationship). They handed me a bag of drum gear so that I could walk in with them without raising eyebrows. We were hoping whoever was working would just assume I was with the band and leave us alone, but almost as soon as we unloaded all of our stuff, I heard a man’s voice from behind me saying “IDs please.” My ex and I looked at each other. Then they said “You stay here. I’ll handle this.” So, I stood awkwardly, like a person very clearly not 21, beside the pile of gear while they went over to the front kiosk and asked, already angrily, something along the lines of “SHE’S WITH ME. WHAT, YOU DON’T HAVE A FUCKING GUEST POLICY OR SOMETHING?”

I pulled them outside by their sleeve, saying in my best Michelle Duggar voice “it’s fine. I’ll go to the next one. You don’t have to scream.” We then stood outside for a few minutes while I waited for them to calm down, pacing back and forth and saying things like “I can’t fucking believe this. This is so fucking stupid. They know who the fuck I am I play here all the fucking time.” And eventually I walked home.

There was also the season I worked merch for Indigo. Once, we showed up to open a show, then got told ten minutes beforehand that they had decided to switch openers. They let us stick around for free, though. And the time a singer who shall not be named ran up to the merch table at [REDACTED], a pretty big and well-known Boston venue and said “oh, thank god someone is here! Can you set this up for me? Thank you so much! You’re the best!” She was asking me to work a second merch table. And price all of her merch because she didn’t leave me a list of prices. And ask the bartender for a money box because she didn’t leave me with any change. And she didn’t even offer me any compensation for any of this. So many great stories come from being on somebody’s guest list.

I don’t say these things just to complain into the void; I genuinely think that a lot of my old guest list stories are funny now. I would love to hear some of your best and worst guest list stories, and maybe do a part two of this post with more of the positive highlights, since I think I got a bit carried away with the bad stories this time around.

thank you so much for reading! i’ll be back on your screens tomorrow with haterade and a regular music history column next thursday. see you then!!!! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

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Let me take you back to 2020. I know none of us want to go back there, but it’s where I first encountered the school that I will soon call home. Everyone had their random quarantine skills and interests. People I knew were taking up collage-making, finally learning how to play the piano that’s been in their house for forever, or marathoning classic movies, but my main isolation habit of choice was reading a book a day for about nine months. Everyone I’ve told this to seems to think it’s very impressive, but It’s really not a difficult feat when you literally have endless time on your hands.

Quarantine started in my second semester of my junior year of high school, so everyone had been asking me for months what I wanted to do after graduation. Everyone knew that I loved books and theater and poetry. A lot of people who knew me from choir asked me if I wanted to study music and I said absolutely not. (And then I bet you can’t guess what happened.) But I’ve always been a pretty open book (I literally didn’t even mean for that to be a pun oh my god). My change in interest from theater and dance towards literature was obvious to everyone, to the point that I dropped all of the Zoom theater endeavors to focus on reading, submitting short stories, and looking into English programs instead.

In my research, I came across a video that only had about 2,000 views at the time. It was from a girl named Emma who was explaining everything that she’s had to read during her English degree at a Canadian university. She also didn’t directly disclose the name of her school in her videos, but within a few days, I had watched almost all of her vlogs studying around every courtyard and library on her gorgeous campus. I thought that she was one of the most eloquent young people I had ever come across on the internet and thought that wherever she went must be pretty elite to teach such insanely intelligent students. (Not to toot my own horn since I am now one of them.)

Fast forward to four years later. My college search was over, and I was now at a similar stage in life: everyone asking me what I was planning to do now that my time at BU was almost at an end. (If you’re wondering, I decided on BU because of the movie Gifted and an interview I watched with Howardena Pindell. I was a big believer in signs at the time.) I was taking a career development class, and one of our assignments was to reach out to three different people who were doing the careers that we wanted to eventually pursue and ask them all of our questions about the field/ get some good networking going.

I decided to combine this assignment with a piece of advice that I had heard all over the place when I started expressing interest in getting a PhD after undergrad: look back at the things I’ve read over the course of my degree that have inspired my studies the most and Google those people. The first thing that came to mind was my directed study: the extra research credits I put in my sophomore year completely on a topic of my choosing. I spent that time reading and watching everything that I could find about dynamics between musical artists and their fans, and how those have changed over time, particularly in rock music.

Some of the main sources that I used were written by the same person. Her work was clear and funny and incredibly insightful. It’s cheesy to say, but I was drawn to her style and her research interests almost immediately. I read all of her work that I could get my hands on, even if it had nothing to do with my research at the time. So, when I was asked to think back to other writers and scholars I admire, I decided to Google her. It came up that she was still working and listed the name of her university in Canada.

When I searched the school, the pictures that came up seemed very familiar. As you can probably guess now, even though it took me a minute to connect the dots at the time, I recognized the campus from all of those vlogs I watched during quarantine. We had our Zoom call, and she told me that if I wanted to apply to work with her for my PhD, she would accept my application. The nameless school that I thought must be insanely impressive and encapsulate the kind of stress and rigor I tend to thrive on could now be my school.

In case you don’t already know this about me, I tend to run almost entirely on vibes. I think I have a pretty good immediate sense of when fate is intervening/ when something is going to end up being really important for me. When I Googled that campus for the first time, I basically knew right away that I wanted to at least apply there for my PhD. I thought this seemed like the kind of coincidence that was too good to pass up. I guess maybe I’m still a little bit into signs.

Also just wanted to throw in that yes, I’m moving to Canada in case you didn’t already know and I’m literally sooooooooooo excited to be in Canada I think it’s going to be the most fun ever. As of right now, I’m very excited about the cold and the snow, but I guess ask me again in a year when the winter has been going on since Halloween.

thank you so so much for reading and for sticking around!! usually i write my personal essays about parties and drinking, but i hope this was a fun change of pace. if you missed it, the column i posted last week is an interview that was so cool and you should definitely read it if you like my punk-centric content. okay, i’ll see you all maybe next thursday and friday love you as a friend xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

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enjoy!

Part I- Punk Mag Origins

Tell me about how you first came to New York and working with music. Did you know anyone in the scene? How did you start creating Punk Mag?

I came to New York in ‘72 to go to School of Visual Arts. The Dolls were the biggest thing. I was a rock n’ roll fan and some of the other students were into rock n’ roll stuff. I’m from Connecticut originally; there were no local clubs. I would go to see bands at the Arena; you know, big places. We didn’t have any small clubs yet. So, I went to see the Dolls, and this girl says, “let’s go to the afterparty.”

I had never been backstage or around rockstars, and I’m at this weird afterparty. She was telling me about this place CBGB, and this is like April ‘75. And I picked up the Village Voice and there’s a story about some rock festival, and James Wolcott wrote about the Ramones, and Lisa Robinson wrote about them for CREEM in her fashion column.

I didn’t like glam rock because they all dressed in these expensive clothes I couldn’t afford. I was just a t-shirt, sneakers, and jeans, and I see this band in CREEM who wears t-shirts and sneakers and jeans. I was like “I gotta check them out.” I go to see them and I was blown away. They only played 20 minutes, but it was the best 20 minutes ever.

That summer I had been hanging out with my friend Ged. He was running a house painting business, and he had a place in the center of my hometown. So, we’d paint houses during the day. And Legs, known as Eddie back then, was making a movie. And Ged was like “we should work together some day.” He was bored with school, so we said, “let’s start a company.”

[The first step was to] find an office. I was looking around there weren’t many places. We found this place at 30th and 10th. It was a storefront and only $200 a month. They had furniture, and enough space for everybody to live and do everything, so we paid them the money, Ged came down, and everything fell into place.

When the magazine came out, people were blown away. It’s at CBGB, it’s about the Ramones. It was almost a joke; no one really liked that Ramones at that time, but to me they were the greatest band of all time, like the new Beatles. Then people wanted to be in the magazine.

Part II- Artistic Influence

Who are some of the most influential artists you’ve worked with throughout your career since then?

Working with Ki Smith has been great. Every show he does is great, so I’d say to anybody, just go to the Ki Smith Gallery and see what he’s doing. I go back there all the time when there’s a new show happening, a new opening.

(John recently held his 50 years of Punk Magazine event at the Ki Smith. There several other current and upcoming 50-year punk celebrations happening this year, including 50 years of Ramones and 50 years of Manic Panic.)

The whole year I spent [as] a student of Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner was just the biggest influence of all time. I had a big idea of what I wanted to get into, but learning from the guy who created MAD Magazine and the guy who’s considered the greatest comic strip artist of all time. The comic book awards are called the Eisner awards. Working with those two guys was amazing.

And Harvey would bring in a working artist every other week. So, I met all these artists whose work I admired and get to ask them questions, they’d do a drawing demonstration of how they worked; that was a big influence. We interviewed the Ramones the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and that year, I had Thanksgiving at Harvey Kurtzman’s house with R. Crumb, who was my idol.

Part III- Cartoonists Cont.

Was visual art and graphic design something that you always wanted to do? Or was that something you developed through making magazines?

My father was an artist, so I grew up in a house that really encouraged creativity and art, with books about how to draw in our bookshelves. My father would be working at home all the time, so it seemed like a normal thing to do. I did terrible in art class. I would draw Spiderman, and my teachers all thought comic books were garbage, so they’d give me a failing grade. When I went to School of Visual Arts, I took it very seriously. I spent all of my time working and learning. A lot of people go to college and goof off, get drunk, get high, party. I was there to learn and work.

That’s why, after my year of working with Harvey and Will, they both hired me. I was Will’s apprentice for a few months, and I would do a couple freelance things for Harvey. He got me my first job. He suggested I go to Scholastic when they were looking for cartoonists. I ended up working with Bob Stein, who started a magazine called Bananas, and I worked there for ten years. It was great; they were paying $300 a page back then. That’s a lot! I could pay my rent, and that’s how I was able to put out Punk.

Then my editor went to the dark side (I must have looked shocked and confused, because he quickly followed up) R.L. Stein, Goosebumps. I got really lucky. I ended up working with a lot of people who became big names.

thank you all so much reading and thank you to john for chatting with me!

check out john’s substack here

visit the punk magazine site (which currently includes all of issue 24 for free) here

i’ll see you all next thursday with my march reflective!!! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

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My beautiful boyfriend Zac has a knack for finding books that literally could not be more up my alley, and gang, he did it again. (He also bought me The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, which I already have a review on.) The First Collection of Criticism is, as the title suggests, an accumulation of album reviews, live reviews, interviews, and history pieces by Jessica Hopper, all surrounding rock music of mainly the 2000s and 2010s. I was already excited to read more work by people doing similar things in a similar capacity that I am, but I became even more excited to read it when I looked at the author bio and realized Jessica Hopper used to write for my beloved Rookie Magazine.

If you’re new around here, some of my earliest posts were about just how much of my personality in late middle and early high school revolved around my love of Rookie.

To be totally honest, I don’t read nearly as much music journalism as I probably should for someone who works in the field. Usually, I write reviews and conduct interviews every day, but most of my reading consists of music history books rather than reading articles and columns from my fellow journalists. So, I think this book was really beneficial in getting my ass into gear on how I can be making my own work better. I tend to have an overwhelming number of ideas on projects I want to do at work, but it takes seeing someone else, even if it’s a much more established person than me, doing a similar project really well to give me the burst of motivation needed to actually do the thing.

I read a ton. Like, for multiple years of my life, I read 150+ books in a 12-month span. I started doing this when I decided that I wanted to go into writing around my freshman year of high school because one of the pieces of writing advice I heard from multiple people was that in order to be a good writer, you have to first be a good reader. So I read all. the. time. I read everything I thought was vaguely popular or interesting. And I’ve read some really amazing books in my life, but I didn’t necessarily feel like the books that I was reading were making me a better writer.

But reading something that contained so much of what I love to do and want to continue learning how to do better made me feel like reading it really was making me a better writer. And I think that makes this book extremely valuable to me, even if it’s not a universal recommendation. I would recommend this book to anyone who has any place in recent rock or pop music history/ journalism. You will probably find at least a few articles in here that will also help you become a better writer.

The book is also blurbed by Sara of Tegan and Sara and St. Vincent, which I think just makes it undeniably cool. As a person who initially wanted Lori Barbero to do my PhD recommendation before everyone told me that was a terrible idea, I always appreciate a good review from an unexpected source.

Honorable mentions- Some of my favorite articles include the one on The Raincoats (page 123) which I quoted in my recent post of love song covers, and the complete chronicle of the making of Hole’s Live Through This (page 315).

Favorite quotes- She covered so much of what I love in this book and in her work in general, so I highlighted kind of a lot in this one. Usually, I just give you one favorite quote at the end, but this book had a few, so I’m going to write out all of them if that’s okay (no worries if not):

“At a basement show, though, where all the bands aren’t whisked to the stage by gold carts to make a thousand dollars a minute, people are gonna get pissed if you leave your chewed-up corn cobs and beer cups lying around. You can smell the band. You can give them seven bucks for a t-shirt and know that the money is going to get them a tenth of the way to Iowa City. In the basement, you can feel the band’s humanity as well as your own.” (page 218)

“There is still the possibility for exposure to radical notions, for punk rock to match up to what many kids dream, or hope, for punk DIY to mean. But much of that hinges on the continual presence of radicalized women within the leagues, and those women being encouraged and given reasons to stay, rather than diminished by the music which glues the community together. The girls deserve more than one song. We deserve more than one pledge of solidarity. We deserve better songs than any boy will ever write about us.” (page 264)

thank you for reading!! i love substack so much so thank you to all of you who stick around here. i’ll be back next week with another really exciting interview and maybe another members’ post soon too so don’t you fucking miss it!! xoxoxxoxoxoxoxoxo

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before we begin, i want to say thank you so much to tish, snooky, and everyone over at manic panic for working with me on this post. the entire company is so friendly and genuine (and, as their instagram bio says, punk since forever), so they’re a company i’m always happy to support. i’ve also been using their products since i was twelve, so this is kind of a huge deal for me.

okay, now let’s talk about the best day of my life-

Firstly, what were both of your origin stories finding punk and deciding to work with hair dye?

Tish: We were part of the glam scene first. We started taking the subway down from where we lived in the Bronx, and we were just fascinated by the New York underground scene. We’d be going down to Max’s and be putting on our makeup on the subway on the way down. We had these flat shoes that we would be wearing, we’d call them our subway shoes. And then when we’d get half a block away from Max’s, we’d take off our subway shoes and put on our beautiful spike-heeled shoes. [We’d] pretend we got out of a cab or lived in the neighborhood.

We just loved that whole scene; all these colorful characters that became our friends. Then, some of them got us into this wacky show at the Bouwerie Lane Theater, right across from CBGB. It was called the Palm Casino Revue. So, we went to some of the first shows they ever had at CBGB. There were bands people had never heard of like Magic Tramps with Eric Emerson, [who was] part of the Warhol crowd. And he loved us. He’d always ask us to do a little bit in his show, so we’d run across the Bouwerie from Palm Casino Revue between our shows and do a little thing with him, then run back.

The Stilettoes were playing there too, before we were in Blondie. Debby [Harry] and Chris [Stein] came over and saw us in the Palm Casino Revue and asked us to be part of Blondie. Once we opened our store, Russell from Sic F*cks came by and said, “I started a band called Sic F*cks and we’re going to play at Wednesday audition night at CBGB.” We said “Okay, great! When do we start?”

Snooky: We’d be on the same bill as the Ramones a lot; they liked us. I think we were the first female fans of the Ramones. There’d be nobody in the crowd, but we’d be right up front.

Sometimes it’s hard to find information now about female fans, what they were wearing, and their inclusion in the scene in general. Do you have any other specific memories of what you were wearing?

Tish: There were a few friends of our who just had this fashion sense like no one else did. Tomata du Plenty and Arturo Vega were our friends, and Debby had a great fashion sense. A lot of the fashion came from the transition from typical glam with a lot of glitter and flash into something a little darker and trashier: ripped up things. A lot of stuff looked like you got it out of the garbage, which you did.

Snooky: I remember getting stuff out of the garbage with Tomata and we’d go thrift shopping with Debby. It was a lot of leather and a lot of black, fishnets and miniskirts. Nobody could tell the difference between us and the hookers.

Most girls didn’t cut their hair short like they did in England. Girls still liked more of a Shangri-Las look: teased up or more 50s/60s. Really old vintage t-shirts. Ripped and stupid. Johnny Ramone used to wear his Micky Mouse shirt; stuff like that. In the beginning, The Ramones had those Danskin tops. So, it was different. It wasn’t like the British punk scene. It was more trash fashion.

Is there something that you remember as being a favorite of yours?

Snooky: We had been to London, I guess in ‘74. I got this shirt that said “True Love” on it with turquoise glitter. [To Tish] you got yours in London too.

Tish: Yeah, it was this leopard face that I think Iggy had on the back of his jacket. He must have bought it at the same place. I have it somewhere. That was my staple, with black leather pants, platforms shoes, and a long, glittery scarf.

Snooky: Oh yeah, we got these glittery scarves at Woolworth’s in London, and I got these purple, glittery platform shoes. I still have those shoes somewhere; they were my favorite.

Tish: My favorite were my silver platforms. They were about six inches high or so. Then we transitioned into punk.

Snooky: I had a great leather jacket that belonged to Johnny Thunders. I got it in a trade with a friend [who] liked this brown bomber jacket that my boyfriend had given me. [The boyfriend] Robert Gordon, he was a rockabilly singer. He was so mad at me. I wore that jacket all the time with a pair of ripped, black jeans. I’d also wear this leopard smock that I got at a thrift store. I wore it to death.

When we were in Blondie, I’d always wear the same multi-colored go-go dress with fringe, and I added extra fringe on it. When Gorilla [Rose] and Tomata would come and see us in Blondie, they’d say “you’re wearing that old thing again?” I just loved it so much.

Tish: We wore a lot of cocktail dresses and 60s go-go looking outfits. I think my favorite outfit was normally a black leather miniskirt with fishnets and my spike-heeled shoes, this skull top that I made, and guy’s jackets with cool pins. We both still have tons of our stuff from back then.

Who was the first artist you met that influenced you the most?

Tish: Well, first it was our mother who was an artist. Still my favorite artist. She was amazing and always supported us. Her paints and glitter were toys for us growing up. That’s how we got started in our art career.

Snooky: And then Captain Beefheart, who was this amazing musician and artist. He was our favorite and [he’s] inspirational to this day. We found him from Zapped, this compilation album that Frank Zappa put out with all these bands from his label. I saw an ad on the back of The Village Voice: “Send in a dollar and get this compilation album.” So, I sent in the dollar, and that’s how we were introduced to Captain Beefheart. He really changed our lives. We started going out with two of the members of the band, then ended up going on tour with them.

What’s the story behind one of your favorite projects you’ve ever done?

Tish: When we put out our own EP with The Sic F*cks. We recorded five sings in seven and a half minutes or something like that with John Cale; he produced it. And it was never released because he didn’t have enough money. But a few years later, we released our own record, produced by Andy Shernoff of the Dictators. And that was just a really fun project because we did it ourselves.

Harry, our drummer, brought his daughter and her friends so they could do backup on “Chop Up Your Mother.” They were these ten-year-old kids singing “Chop! Chop! Chop up your mother!” So that was probably our most fun recording.

We’ve done backup on a lot of albums, and it’s all been nice, but serious.

Is there something that a lot of people don’t know you worked on?

Snooky: We sang on RuPaul’s record, Starrbooty. There’s a lot of things people don’t know about us. Sic F*cks was in a movie called Alone in the Dark with Jack Palance and Martin Landau. It was right after Texas Chainsaw. I think Alone in the Dark is a masterpiece movie.

What do you think is the mark of a cool person and a good artist?

Snooky: Somebody who’s comfortable in their own skin and doesn’t care what anybody else thinks. They just do their own thing and if you like it, great, and if you don’t, fuck you.

Tish: If you’re going to be an artist, you have to be comfortable in your own skin and you have to be able to not care what people think. So many of our friends who made it really big, they were humiliated so many times, as were we. We opened for Twisted Sister once and we were hated by so many people. I think artists have to have that kind of attitude, like “this is what I do and if you don’t like it, fuck you.”

What’s a piece of life advice you live by?

Tish: Never say never, don’t take no for an answer, and question everything.

Snooky: And live fast and dye your hair.

The MP team was also kind enough to give me a tour of their New York headquarters, which acts as an archive of everything Blondie, CBGB, Sic F*cks, and, of course, all of the past iterations of the Manic Panic brand. Every wall is decorated with memorabilia from every stage in their career. I’ve attached photos of some of the highlights below.

Getting a tour through all of this is like going through a personal art exhibition, and I treated it as such, listening to descriptions and stories behind every poster and flyer, and taking out my phone to get a picture of each one. Past the shelves of current products and offices of their coworkers, they took me through the museum of retired MP store fronts from their original location in Manhattan that they keep right beside their private music rehearsal space. (The photo used at the end is from one of these store fronts.)

Eventually, maybe more people will enjoy all of these things in a proper museum, but seeing them via one-on-one invitation is something I’ll never complain about.

thank you so much for reading!!! this was literally the biggest honor and the coolest fucking day of my life. thank you so much again to tish and snooky for telling me all of your incredible stories and to the manic panic team for giving me a tour of the hq, letting me take all these pictures, and overall, just being so amazing to work with. i’ll see all of you readers with a haterade this weekend and another thursday music column next week !! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

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This month, I am writing to you from a house in the snowy Catskills. I’ve never been here before, but I like it. Getting out here was a slight ordeal that I would prefer to leave behind me. The train ride itself was maybe my favorite I’ve ever had. It’s now a dream of mine to ride the Empire line all the way up to Canada so I can stare at those views the whole way. But nobody told me that there are no Ubers and no service here. I can’t remember the last time I was in a place without service. I think it must have been when I was a small child and had never even thought about cell service.

But eventually I did make my way to last night’s function: a photoshoot in which my main job was to sit in a lavishly decorated vintage bar, drink glass after glass of wine, and chat with all of my new friends: maybe almost the entire population of the town we were in. I also don’t know the last time I was in a real small town with real small-town dynamics. Everyone in that room knew each other, and half of them were employed at the same place, but they opened their spaces and their conversations to the cast of visitors passing through happily.

After my few glasses of wine, my conversations with a former Broadway dancer turned philosophical. I said how happy I was to be there and how cool the area was and the people were. I said that I love modeling and I’m constantly trying to do it more. The dancer then reminded me of what I had tipsily said to him just a few minutes before: “life’s not over til it’s over, and sometimes not even then.” Meaning that I had found my way into the random last-minute photoshoot in the middle of nowhere with people I didn’t know, I was having a great time, and I don’t need to stress about making more things like this happen to me.

You may be wondering how I got myself into this photoshoot in the first place. And the answer is, I don’t really know. I got an email and I said yes. I’ve been trying to do that while I’ve been away from home for extended periods of time. Being in the same place for a while, especially if it’s a calmer place, gets very lonely very quickly. It’s much easier to say no to things when you’re in a place that feels too comfortable or when you’re, as I often am, in between bigger and more exciting ventures. I’ve been saying yes in my home city a lot more often too, but there will almost always be a slight sense of lacking from being in a place I know well.

My last few days in NYC, I said yes to a concert for an artist I had never listened to before. Without that, I would have just gone back to the apartment and went to bed at 10 pm. I said yes to yoga, even though I’m weirdly anxious about working out with other people around. I said yes to multiple work opportunities because I knew that being really nervous and doing it anyway is a sign that I really care about my work. (More on these over the next few weeks.) I feel like this is something I’ve talked about a few times before, the whole “say yes to things and live your life” sentiment, but I also think a lot of my Substack and my internet presence in general is being able to say when I’m proud of myself for things. So there you go. I’ve been having a really good week this week. Now, I’m going to finish editing my book.

thank you for reading!!! i have some really exciting (and probably longer) posts to share with you over the next few weeks, so stay tuuuuuuuuuuuuned!!! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

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Covering someone else’s song has been happening forever. A song gets popular, people know it, people like it, it gets played in public and everyone can sing along. But anyone covering a song has some choices to make. They aren’t necessarily under any obligation to keep the song the exact same in any particular way: lyrics, solos, order of choruses and verses. As long as people can tell what you’re playing and can sing and dance along, you won’t usually have a problem.

Songwriters have a tendency to write about other people, and this is where a singer has to decide how they want to alter the story that the song is telling. They can alter it to better fit their lives or the feelings of their fanbase, and in the world of love songs, they can make it gay or keep it straight. When a singer decides to cover a song by someone of the opposite sex and keep intact all of it lyrics, including the pronouns of the love interest, they are opening themselves up to some listeners not being happy with the choice to make a straight love song into a queer one.

Generally speaking, men do this a lot more than women do: Numerous people have covered “Jolene” with no pronoun changes, and then there’s tracks like Childish Gambino’s rendition of “So into You,” and Orville Peck’s “Maybe This Time” cover. It’s much rarer, in my experience, to find a woman covering a love song by a male artist with no lyric changes. This could be for the fairly obvious reason that a female artist may be more at risk for sparking angry conversations over speculations of queerness. But let’s look at some times that women have performed gay covers and how they talked about that choice and how the public responded to it.

If we’re going to talk about this topic, I feel like I should start out with the classic of the genre: “Gloria” by Patti Smith. This is a fascinating song to have as the most famous case study for this concept, because Smith’s covers are often extremely loose, inserting verses and verses of her own poetry, with merely a chorus or two from another track. And even when she borrows from other people, she adds screeching guitars and usually changes a lot of the lyrics anyway. This presents the question: if she’s already changing so much, why keep the pronouns.

At first listen, the song might be heard as a purposeful “queer anthem,” with the choice of pronouns seemingly done to embrace female/female love, but Smith’s reasoning for this is somewhat of a letdown for these listeners. She later stated that she thinks of the song as being from a male perspective and was singing from a male perspective and doesn’t identify herself as queer at all.

The trouble when covering a famous song is that every change you make will be noticed, and in the world of love songs, this often comes in the form of changing pronouns or changing a line to fit with the singer’s other discography. A singer may decide to change pronouns in a cover in order to avoid confusion or talk about their sexuality, or to keep consistent with their past songs and the songs that their usual fanbase relates to.

But when the song being covered is so well-known, like “Yesterday” or “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” it can cause more controversy to change the lyrics than it does to keep them. The true power of a cover can come when an artist changes the song in ways that reflect what exactly that song means for them and why they love it, but changes to famous songs will also inevitably make some listeners upset, like the source material gets tainted every time a famous performer covers it.

Here, it seems like there’s no good choice for the female artist. She can keep the pronouns in a cover and get comments about her sexuality and unoriginality, or she can change the pronouns and get criticized for changing an already near-perfect song. It seems like she can’t win; she’ll get criticized either way.

The other classic of the genre, but in a slightly different way, is The Raincoats’ cover of The Kinks’ “Lola.” The band manages to keep an extremely similar sound to the original while being completely distinctive, and eventually iconic. The song is originally from the point of view of a man having a romantic encounter with either a trans woman or a drag queen (unclear which) at a club. This subject matter makes the track different from other ones that get covered because not only is it not a traditional “love song,” but it’s also queer to begin with.

The song didn’t receive as much backlash as you might expect for a track that contains lyrics like “I can’t understand why she walks like a woman and talks like a man” and “I’m glad I’m a man and so is Lola” released in 1970. It ended up as one of the most popular songs in the country at the time. And only nine years later, English all-girl punk band The Raincoats released their rendition on their self-titled album.

The Raincoats version of the track has the same effect on almost everyone who hears it: when you listen to the track for the first time, it’s a whole new experience, and you immediately know you’ve heard something legendary. Somehow, the rough screaming voice combined with the haphazard instrumentation that always sounds like it’s about to collapse in on itself is a universally acknowledged folk-punk masterpiece. In this case, they keep the song queer and are very loud about it. I will leave you today with a quote from Jessica Hopper’s Portland Mercury article (full book review coming soon):

thank you for reading!!! if you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to my free or paid tier. i post music history stuff every thursday and members posts and collab posts a couple times per month. i’ll see you next thursday with a february reflective xoxoxoxoxoxoxo

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God was a girl
The devil wore a t-shirt
Love is a game and they
Were kissing in the bleachers

So begins the epic collaboration of the white boy rapper formerly known as Machine Gun Kelly and early-2000s emo loverboy icon Kellin Quinn. If you were anything like me growing up, you secretly had pictures of Kellin Quinn and his band, Sleeping with Sirens, taped to your walls and the inside of your door and maybe you were in the top 1% of Machine Gun Kelly listeners on Spotify in 2020. What’s that? None of you did that? Ya…. me neither…..

For those of you who didn’t have bad influences as a child, Sleeping with Sirens was a band that gained a following primarily with teenage girls who considered themselves a part of the online “scene” and “emo” communities. This following was mainly due to the success of their album with ears to see and eyes to hear in 2009. (That’s not a typo; the album title is all lowercase. What a time to be alive.)

In 2019, Machine Gun Kelly, Travis Barker of Blink fame, and SWS frontman Kellin Quinn teamed up to record “Love Race,” which would later be featured on MGK’s deluxe version of his sixth studio album, Tickets to My Downfall, in 2020. The song was written and produced with the goal of bringing back the sound of Quinn and Barker’s earlier careers: late-90s and early-2000s pop punk. The track didn’t have the massive impact that I think they were hoping it was going to have, especially considering the importance of this collaboration for so many early-2000s emo bbs. So, let’s figure out why.

The initial reason why a song like this might flop is that it’s kind of, as many would categorize it, not very good. MGK freestyled most of the song’s lyrics, which makes it mostly seen as a love letter to Megan Fox. He simplifies a love story into lyrics about a teenage romance, presumably to connect to that older style when all of the artists were much younger, with lines like “they were kissing in the bleachers.” I don’t think going back to the simpler lyrics of a younger artist necessarily aid in bringing back the old musical style, it just makes the song feel a little off to a lot of people, which I totally get.

But as I mentioned, I have a history as a former MGK stan. It’s not my proudest moment. I was a top fan during quarantine, and that was a dark time for all of us. We all had different ways of coping, okay? But the point is, I was highly invested around the point when this track came out. I remember seeing the announcement on Instagram and freaking out. It felt like a legendary moment. I think a lot of that, at least for me, comes down to Quinn’s voice. It’s so nostalgic for me. It brings me right back to my childhood when I used to lay in the backyard and play SWS out loud from my iPod Nano.

I think the bulk of the value of this track lies in Quinn’s sound and the amount of people, much like myself, who may have been casual fans of MGK and massive nostalgics for Sleeping with Sirens. Even if this song came out today, having Kellin Quinn on a track is a huge deal and so many people would listen multiple times just to hear his voice and some semblance of his old sound.

This song is simple and repetitive, and the lyrics are straightforward to the point of being overly simplistic. It wasn’t MGK’s typical style at all at the time (but it’s a sound he would embrace in that next album), and I don’t think that the following for this song has really stuck around. It was released ahead of Tickets to my Downfall and didn’t even appear on the original cut. It’s a really confusing choice. The things that make this track make sense are the way it fits into the rest of the eventual album and MGK’s tendency of working with his friends to do whatever the hell they want (the other prime example being Good Mourning, a movie made by MGK and friends, starring Megan Fox, and featuring no real plot, just a ton of celebrity cameos).

It’s dumb, it’s stupid, and it makes me feel like I’m a try-hard scene girl wannabe listening to “If I’m James Dean, You’re Audrey Hepburn” on the family computer when my parents weren’t home. As much as I know this track doesn’t convey any sort of music or lyrical genius, I don’t think I’ve skipped it a single time in the past seven years. Somehow, though my fan status for MGK has long faded, the sound of Kellin Quinn’s voice and the sheer magnitude that this three-way collaboration had at the time makes this song an instant classic in my book.

I know that Molly is going to hate this. But this column is on my page, and I will talk about Sleeping with Sirens if I want to, goddammit. Molly, take it away:

Miss Steph…I’m going to be charitable and say that I think you had COVID when you wrote the first half of this column. Because you have clearly lost your sense of taste. This song BLOWS. Every MGK song blows, so this isn’t a novel concept. It’s also not like this one blows any more and less than the others. I’m honestly not sure what made this one stand out. “Kellin Quinn” contributes some backing vocals that The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus should honestly sue over. In fact, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus should honestly sue over this whole song.

Like all MGK songs, this is someone else’s pop punk song reheated in the microwave on low voltage mode. Like every hot dog that has suffered this same fate, it’s bad. I think “Face Down” by Red Jumpsuit is the main inspiration here, that song is a righteous screed against domestic violence.

This song is the last thing you hear before your boyfriend gets a hernia trying to move a couch. “I’m hyping myself up babe,” he says. If 2000s pop punk is red bull, this song is liquid death. This makes sense because MGK is invested in Liquid Death. Also, Travis Barker plays with the energy of a Magnesium supplement.

So, does “Love Race” deserve the hate?

Steph: I think that knowing it was made to more-or-less mimic a Sleeping with Sirens track makes it more fun and tongue-in-cheek and just slightly exempt from some of the slander it receives. And again, just the collaboration of Quinn, Baker (MGK), and Barker is cool as hell. I feel like if it was a more complex track, it could have stuck around in pop culture a lot longer than it did.

Molly: What is a “Kellin Quinn?” (Hi; Steph here: If you won’t bother to do your research on the discography of my iPod Nano, then I will take your whole review of this song with a grain of salt. Also, I would hate to inform you, dear sister, of the music that was likely on YOUR iPod.)

thank you for reading haterade!! subscribe to molly here and steph here. and, if you’re feeling particularly generous, we both have paid tiers!! solo meantoast content will resume here on thursday and haterade will be back in march!! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

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Some of my favorite memories of college took place in the Northeastern radio studio: playing the Clairo albums all the way through at 2 am and hearing Jared say “oh shit, am I going to get in trouble for that?” or “do you think I’m allowed to say that?” or “oh shit, I forgot to turn our mics on.” I am of the opinion that talking and playing music on the radio is so much better in the middle of the night. Quite literally no one is listening, so you can mess up and queue whatever playlist you need to hear in the moment and it’s just you in your quiet studio with the dark city night all around you. It’s unequivocally peaceful.

Over time, as students have begun to listen through their airpods to music on streaming platforms, college radio has become significantly less important for trends and political movements on campuses. If you ask a student in recent years, they will probably tell you that they’ve never listened to their school’s radio station, or if they participate in it, they’ll tell you no one is listening. As a result, these radio stations are finding their value less in their impact on listeners, and more in continuing to exist as a comforting home for the students who run them. As is pretty predictable, this is an aspect of campuses that used to thrive before the era of smartphones and unified students against inequalities on campus.

This is true across so many campuses and multiple decades, but I’ve chosen a couple to detail for you today. I may revisit this topic eventually because there are so many cities that have such cool histories with college radio, but for now, let’s talk about LA and Boston.

There are multiple answers as to who actually had the first college radio station. There are arguments for a small college in Philadelphia, who started their station around 1922, when the technology was still new enough that there weren’t any laws surrounding it other than that public radio was to be “educational or essential.” Yaaaaaaa we kind of gave up on that one. A school in New York managed to snag the initial Google search result for the question, and Brown self-proclaim themselves as trailblazers, despite only having founded their station in the 1940s.

While many stations started in the 30s and 40s, college radio as we know it today didn’t fully come into fruition until the 1970s, when they were able to join the larger system of FM radio to gain funding. This funding, however, usually meant some restriction on what could be played and talked about. And despite being owned by universities, most of these early stations consisted largely of full-time employees who weren’t students, playing classical or top 40 during the day. Eventually, however, students were permitted to play lesser-known rock artists at night, a practice which quickly developed into the college rock radio stations that would prove extremely influential in the late-70s and throughout the 80s.

Through the massive onslaught of radio stations on campus, their new tendency to allow student workers longer time slots, and the lifting on some of the major laws surrounding radio restriction, a “new” “genre” took form in the late 1970s, allowing individual campuses to highlight their own artists and define their own sound. Thus, college rock, as a sound, was born. When radio was become more casual, the public stations that focused on music rather than news were limited to current hits. Because of this, college students that were too cool for the hits began broadcasting niche underground music for their friends and classmates.

Always having to have their finger on the pulse of the underground scenes, when an artist became too popular, like in the case of REM who initially made a name for themselves on the college radio stations of Georgia, their music transitioned from broadcasts on college radio to those on public, popular radio. It became rather deliberate from college DJs that the two never overlap. “College rock” isn’t really a sound or a genre. Generally, it just refers to the alternative or underground music that gets played on college radio. At first, the term mainly referred to local punk, but it has continually evolved to include whatever the preferred genre of music is at any given time.

Katherine Rye Jewell wrote the bible for college radio history in 2023: Live from the Underground. She begins the book with a backstory of UCLA radio in the 70s, explaining that college rock branched off of pre-existing subgenres like punk and glam rock. She also details the ways in which college rock managed to bring together a local community beyond campus, saying:

The late 70s saw the initial wave of major change among college radios as a whole, with the opportunity for them to expand into FM stations, reach wider audiences, and build their own studios. The began the legacy of college radio stations being a source of unity on campuses: educating on current issues and promoting local artists and events. When a station developed its own regular line-up of DJs and embraced their local sound, they managed to give passionate students something to connect with and a community to be a part of.

Music scenes are constantly evolving alongside technology. Now, promoting a show is largely the job of Instagram. But for decades, radio was a massive part of that. Stations would promote local shows, announcing who was touring and who was playing at local venues that night.

I want to end by turning our attention to Massachusetts. Unsurprisingly, I’ve done a lot of research into this one, and it’s one of my favorites to talk about. Curry College in Milton also has its name in the game of earliest adopters of radio on campus, adding a radio and broadcasting program in 1932. Boston is one of the biggest names in the prevalence of college radio and rock music, with MIT’s WTBS being cited as the “nation’s first punk radio show.” WMBR at MIT interviewed U2 on their first album in 1980, and WTBS was the first radio station to ever interview the Ramones on their first show in Boston in ‘76.

As the music on Boston radio shifted, so did the conversation. DJs became students eager to spread the messages that their local rock communities were based on; namely gay rights and anti-war messages. WBCN, although not owned by a college, maintained a rotation of college DJs, who were crucial in developing the punk community of my former home, Kenmore Square. BU students began flocking to The Rat (now the Hotel Commonwealth) to see local bands and the newly established Newbury Comics to stock up on zines. WBCN also credits themselves as having the first female rock DJ and station that gave Springsteen his first radio interview in 1973.

Bill Lichtenstein directed a documentary about WBCN in 2019, saying the station “[pioneered] the idea of having a conversation with your listeners.” While stations may not be encouraging students to go out and protest like they used to, and even if they did, we don’t think anyone is really listening, the history of the radio as something invisible yet unifying is one worth emphasizing, with the evolution of radio being heavily tied to the function of a city’s music scene, from the inclusivity of its venues to who the celebrated local artists are.

Nowadays, college radio is still allowing students to discover new music and express their ever-changing tastes and interests. If you get the opportunity to talk on the radio, do it. It’s fun. Try to remember not to curse.

thank you for reading!!! if you’re going to look into this topic, i would recommend you start with the bible: Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio by Katherine Rye Jewell. Every source you look at on this topic will site this book and with good reason; it’s fantastic. give this post a like and smash that subscribe button!! thank you for being here; i had soooooo much fun with this one, so i hope you dug it. see you next week xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

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i just finished one of my favorite books i’ve read in a long fucking time: a collection of henry james short stories featuring the aspern papers, the private life, the middle years, and death of the lion. i’ll detail the plots of all of them for you today and talk about why they’re all so cool. i will be spoiling all of these stories, so if any of them start to sound interesting to you, you can read them all online for free (i’ll even put links at the end) and then come back and read my column. okay, let’s get into it!

In the middle of James’ career, he was trying and failing to make a name for himself as a playwriter and sparingly published short stories all following the same theme: writers, how they’re celebrated, and how it pisses him off.

The first story of the collection, “The Aspern Papers,” follows a nameless narrator as he tracks down the only remaining confidants of his favorite writer, Jeffrey Aspern, and tries to swindle them for their archive of the author’s files. The owners of these files are Juliana, Aspern’s longtime muse, and her niece, Tina. They keep these files and themselves locked away in a Venetian palace. Our narrator enlists the help of one Mrs. Prest to track down this villa, and develops a plan to knock on their door and feign needing lodging for a couple of months. The two agree to let him stay and he proceeds to woo Miss Tina and convince her to all but steal the papers out of her aunt’s grasp. (This is where you need to leave if you don’t want to be spoiled.)

Throughout this collection, James plays with the idea of having a story revolve around something that’s not actually physically present. I talked about this idea in my Roxy Carmichael review, and it featured in the other best book I’ve read in 2026: Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince. Our main character spends 100 pages constantly talking and thinking about these mysterious papers, but not only does he never actually get his hands on them, but we never find out what exactly these papers contain.

By the end of the story, he has snuck into Juliana’s private chambers, run away from Tina’s eventual reciprocation of his advances causing her to ultimately burn the papers, and Juliana gets so stressed by this whole ordeal that she literally dies from overwhelm. When the story ends and Tina informs us that there are no more papers left, we are led to wonder if there were even extensive files in the first place, or if the whole thing was a myth made up by Aspern’s fans and carried out by Tina and Juliana at the narrator’s expense.

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i also just did a paid post in which i do a run-down of most of the movies i’ve watched this year so far, so if that intrigues you, it’s here.

My month of January was evenly split between classy nights out and spending more money than I probably should and getting back into an unhinged nightlife that I have historically found hard to maintain in my hometown. I started the month with a chicly early small plates dinner (4 pm meals are an obsession of mine) and movie night in an old theater. A week later, I found myself at a hardcore show in a venue in the city that everyone I know claims to have outgrown, and the only person I knew there this particular night was my own brother. The month is ending for me, as I’m sure it is for all of you, with me mostly stuck in my house for days and days as the streets refuse the thaw.

Right before the first bout of snow and ice hit the ground, Brodi left for France again. This happens twice a year, and every time it does, I feel a slight panic to expand my social circle so the gaping hole of bi-weekly coffee dates and bar crawls in my schedule doesn’t hit me like a truck. The night before he left, he took me a party with the assignment of stealing all of his friends away from him by the end of the night. I did my eyeliner and re-dyed my pink hair to hype myself up for the occasion.

Towards the end of the night, after bonding with one of the aforementioned friends over our matching Kuromi tattoos, I was in the living room, talking over a dj set with a girl who seemed to be a little bit younger and even more of a lightweight than me. She was a delightful drunk; kissing my cheek and telling me she loved me despite having just met. She handed me one of the worst canned drinks I’ve ever had before a guy came up behind her, whom she screamed in my ear she had just met a few days earlier. She had purple hair and a face that looked almost exactly like a friend of mine from college. After a few more songs spent scream-talking into each other’s ears, she pulled me out the front door and onto the sidewalk, where the guy that she was there with handed her three different cigarettes and she dropped all three of them on the ground.

I didn’t catch the guy’s name, but that girl sent me an Instagram message the next day telling me I’m pretty.

While my nights were spent at parties, my usual rotation of dinner spots, and Edgar Allan Poe’s “Edge of 217” themed birthday bash, my days were largely spent working on reviews, interviews, publication edits, and scholarship applications. All of these things made this month characteristic of the balance that I often need in order to feel sane. I didn’t anticipate that living in the city where I’m from half the time would leave me feeling like I’m only living half a life here. Meaning, connecting with people and solidifying the list of places that feel like mine has taken longer than I was initially expecting. But January felt like having my own life here and being very happy with it.

I’ve been wanting to talk more about loving the place where you’re from. As I find myself living here part-time and prepping to move away again, I’ve been thinking about one of my favorite movies, Meet Me in St. Louis, when a six-year-old Margaret O’Brien tells a neighbor “Wasn’t I lucky to be born in my favorite city?” A lot of people feel like it’s inherent to hate the place you’re from; to want to get away from it as soon as possible. But after I left my senior year of college, feeling like Boston wasn’t “my place” and London wasn’t “my place” and still no closer to finding where that mythical place might be, I kept rotating back around to this thought. Aren’t I so lucky to have a home waiting for me in my favorite city in the world?

thank you for reading!! i’m pretty superstitious about having a good first few days and first month of the year, so i feel very relieved and comforted that january turned out so well. thank you all for being here; see you next thursday with a music column. i love you as a friend xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

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About six months ago, I committed myself to the goal of watching at least one movie every week that’s new to me. Before then, I would go months and months without watching a single film and hadn’t really seen any famous or culturally important movies. I eventually just got frustrated with this and decided that in order to feel smarter, I needed to watch more movies, goddammit! Part of the problem was also that I couldn’t focus on a movie by myself for longer than about five minutes. If it wasn’t in a theater, there was no hope of me paying any attention.

I do think that this phenomenon had something to do with my scrolling habits, but I am proof that you will get better at something if you just keep trying. Now, six months into my film bro journey, sitting down to watch an entire movie without taking out my phone is easy for me.

I’ve also started setting myself a secondary goal with this: to form at least one opinion or discussion point about every movie I watch. This is embarrassing to admit, but, when I was a kid, I used to force myself to come up with an opinion on small, random things. I did this because I was constantly hearing people talk about their opinions, but I never had any of my own. It’s scary, even as a child, to realize that you don’t have any original thoughts on anything around you. I do think that this was a side effect of the way I was raised. Discussion, critical thinking, and asking questions weren’t really things that anyone ever did in our house. Asking questions got you yelled at around here.

But in my adulthood, I am trying to rectify that. I am still trying to make myself think about all of the long-form content I choose to read and watch, because I know it’s good for me and I want to keep my brain as sharp as possible before the robots take over. So, here is my list of some of the movies I’ve watched in the past six months. If you have any recommendations for me, let me know!

(I also do have two movie reviews already up. Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael is one of my favorite films I’ve watched on this journey so far and I wrote all about it. I also forced my boyfriend to rewatch one of my favorite movies from my childhood with me, Spectacular! So go read those columns if you haven’t!)

(Also also this is not a rundown of every single movie I’ve watched in the past six months; just the highlights.)

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I’ve been on Substack for a long time now (around a year and a half to be exact) and in that time, I’ve thrown a lot of pasta at the wall. I’ve already gone through numerous times to delete old posts that I don’t like anymore, or I don’t think represent what I’ve ultimately decided to write on here, but there’s still a lot of embarrassing shit. Multiple posts from my first year on this platform are concepts that I still like, but my execution of them was rushed, or at least not nearly as well-written as they could have been. That’s where this series comes in. Every once in a while, I’m going to go back and rework older pieces in an attempt to solidify my Substack as a body of work that I can be proud of.

We’re starting out with a post that’s actually pretty recent: my photobooth tour. I only posted this about six months ago, but from the day it was published, I wasn’t fully happy with it. I thought it was too short and lacked substance, but I wanted to do something with that idea. Since this is a recent post, I edited the column itself, which you can read here. Going forward, however, the reworked posts will be a part of the usual Thursday line-up, breaking up the history posts and reflectives about once every month or every other month.

I’m really excited to revisit these older pieces, reflect on how much this column has grown, and show how much I’ve grown as a writer in the past year and a half. I hope you enjoy these, and I’m excited for some of you who are newer around here to read a version of a column that you may have missed before! I already have a few ideas of pieces I want to share, but if you are a long-time subscriber and have something you want to see updated as a part of this series, feel free to let me know!

thank you all for your continued support around here! i will see you tomorrow with a members post and next thursday with another history column! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo