Do you mark time?
Or are you practicing a similar philosophy to that of Mariah Carey? I would normally, but its hard to resist the tides. And if I am being honest, I like to mark time. With astrology, for example, and I love my birthday, and observing the light, even examining cultural touchstones, fractals and all.
At this time of year
I am in darkness more than not. I’m talking about: Spending Whole Evenings in Complete Dark. I’m talking about: stepping on my dogs, bumping into walls, washing dishes in the dark, finding dried food between the frongs of the forks the next day. It just feels right; it stirs up my instinct to gather around light. And since we’re not all around a fire pit singing and dancing, it is a really accessible choice to gather round our century’s proverbial fire pit: the combination Paramount-Warner-Brothers-TikTokUS
I watch TV all the time but I have a hard time with it too. I Am An Empath, with bloodlines in the spanish and anglo cultures, so when I watch TV, I can literally feel the transition from immaculate conception to 21st century relativity. It is very rough, someone tell the DJ!
Call me dramatic but what I mean is that I can feel the tension between free will and dogma underlying too much.
Its intense. Motion pictures gives a chance to create and destroy.
The mass production of tv, film, media and its ever quickening advancement is My Roman Empire.
TV was the entire universe to me as a child though, so I crave it. I crave seeing something shift, feeling some kind of transformation, or just a place to be entranced. These days, TV is Film, Film is TV, right?
I will write soon about the month I double fisted the last season of The Sopranos and all of And Just Like That (hot take, I loved it). The findings were uncanny… But to summarize quickly, it was actually a near perfect metaphor for that tension between free will and dogma, or really the experience of being a human being.
In September I watched Nathanial Dorskey’s Hours for Jerome. He made it over ten years with and for his lover, Jerome Hiler, another video artist. It is on YouTube in two parts. His frames are like tiny devotions to time and fascinating to the eye. I couldn’t help but wonder (obligatory): Where would the medium be if it weren’t expected to commodify human experiences? Did the force of innovation bring us somewhere I am excited about as an artist or human being? Do you think we would still have oners?
These questions are examples of why Scorpio season felt like the perfect time to come back to the QFC newsletter. Now I’m trying to put that energy into words and action in Sagitarrius season – my season darling! For those new, I’m Toni, I’m behind Queer Film Club. I have been doing events since 2022 but over this last year its been under reconstruction as I reimagine.
QFC newsletter will be serving you some melodramatic diatribes and ironic dissertations, always film but also pop and sub cultures, the Taboo, death and the spiritual realm, criticism, innovation, conspiracy theories, etc. The tone is Crone meets Jester – serious and unserious. (Shout out The Moon Studio for constructive help finding that tone! Take their courses!)
As for Upcoming Events
The fact is, be it overt or subvert, in the imperial core, religion is a main player in the political theatre. For the most part, religiosity and queerness have long been, at least in the dominant forms of information intake, presented as diametrically opposed. I’m no historian but I personally think the link is illogical. Regardless, much of contemporary queer life, I can only speak for in the U.S., has been lived pushing against ‘deceny’ and moralism. Naturally, we obfuscate the bounds and create our own mythologies. ITS MY RELIGION, taking its title from a line in “New York” by Addison Rae (yes), is of course a double meaning: a rebeliously simplified raison d’etre, and a tongue-in-cheek battle cry that calls out the individualism holding up the power structure.
ITS MY RELIGION
MULTIPLE MANIACS (1994) - U.S.
DAYS OF THE PENTECOST (1995) - U.S.
THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988) - U.S.
And one more to be announced
Who is interested in a provocative gaze at the archetypes of the catholic and christian pantheon? This will offend, be forewarned!
Please subscribe paid or free and share and tag and rsvp and respond to these missives. Send me a few lemon emojis if you read this! Send me a few doves if you’re like me and are excited about this!
P.S.: Who is interested in a rowdy screening? I love when people are talking at the screen, saying obscenities, writing IRL letterboxd reviews, cackling, and even an MC potentially.
Lets end with a cackle and begin a new ritual for the first New Moon with Pluto stationed direct (last week I think). The newsletter will rotate diatribes and critqués: overt and ridiculous complaints and praises about pop culture moments. This week will be a diatribe and the gag is to stick as closely to the definition - a forceful and bitter verbal attack against someone or something
TIME TO DIATRIBE
FRANKENSTEIN THE MOVIE IS EMO NOT GOTH
Frankenstein the movie is not gothic enough. Mary Shelley is Goth. This is not goth, this is emo. Del Toro is emo and the worst kind of emo- the kind that cannot help but center itself. I just get so annoyed with his camera movements that I can only refer to as childlike wonder, on everything. Ken Burns iMovie but slowed way, way down. Anyone else? I liked the production design but I wanted more. I liked the gore and body horror but I wanted more. I liked the wardrobe but I wanted more. The set and the costumes could have felt like more if the camera movements were inspiring me to feel anything. There are a few scenes that feel like swelling, swallowing, and inflaming, and then back to flat composition and movement. There’s this medical tone that doesn’t feel earned, like in order to invoke Shelley, its more of a fast quick cheap show and tell with only the selected highlights of the story. But Goth is romance, in literature, in architechture. There is no romance in that composition.
Frankenstein is goth. The Creature is goth. Writing a novel about the horrors of war and unmitigated ego and the novel technology to cause irreparable harm and an uncertain future is goth as f*ck. Instead this empty gawk fest for two hot guys to not even kiss on screen and STOLE my attention for two hours! That is the most emo thing.
To think Mary Shelley wrote that novel in 1818 for Del Toro to chop it up and center Victor’s trauma is, frankly, an abomination! No wonder this cursed production happened in 2025, the era with a similar astrological map as the period of major revolutions around the world that predated the novel…..…Too meta, even for me
And, Jacob Elordi as The Creature is offensive. I am against hot monsters. Let monsters be ugly, that is the point.
Was I bitter enough? Let me know in a reply
Love,
