Most people watched Hostel (2005) when they were teenagers. I can't actually verify this statement but there are definitely certain generations of people who came of age during the torture porn boom of the 2000s and tried to watch as many of them as possible to prove how much disturbing and offensive material they could put in their brains before they lost their stomachs. I grew up as a child too young to remember 9/11 and too immature to read the cultural criticism related to the sub-genre, to sit and think about what it was implying about American culture or masculinity or the human body. It was all about affect. And that worked perfectly fine for me at the time. Eli Roth doesn't make movies for adults. You might think that the ratings and content of his films argue against this, but I've never been more convinced watching his 2015 paranoid home invasion gender crisis fable Knock Knock that this man has continually, but not consciously, cultivated an imagined teenage...
Can a piece of art be dated before it has even been released? The internet is nebulous and wide and unbelievably segmented and small. I tried to write about a small part of it in 2022 and INTERNET BRAIN ROT emerged. Not fully formed, of course. In a lot of ways, I am releasing an unfinished work. It has made me anxious to think I could not make something timeless. However, it's two years later. My life and mental state have changed dramatically. I've gone through intense periods of grief, change and depression since then. Not releasing this chapbook sooner is a regret I will have to live with. There was no time to put it out. I couldn't physically work on it most days and it just sat in my Google Drive, haunting me with its deficiencies, the way that the future kept coming and my work stopped feeling relevant. Poetry itself is a dated art form so writing a poem called ' simp ' for example and then putting it out in the world in 2024 felt...cringe. There isn't...