Friday, October the 13th
ISSUE #259
Today is a very special day—it’s not every year that we get the 13th of October on a Friday, the cosmic dice falling on a goblin’s good fortune. Enjoy it! Bask a little. It’s a perfectly cloudy, drizzly day down here in Georgia, and the Plaza Theatre is showing Friday the 13th Part 3-D. Meanwhile, my partner has made Jello shots shaped like brains for a spooky cocktail party. Ah yes, this is the (after)life.
It’s the prime time to enjoy the Halloween spirit—this is the week we can actually breathe a little and stop to appreciate the cold fingers of the wind. Halloween itself usually falls on a Tuesday or something, after all, but this stretch of days between the 9th and the 22nd? This is the good stuff.
Nights like tonight are important because they allow ghosts to have fun again. Think about it from their perspective—they spend their whole (after)lives looking through a pane of existential glass at all of the living having their fun, with their Ring cameras and .mp3s and chicken bacon subs, just wishing they could jump in and slide down a waterslide or something. Well, this is the night they can finally come out and say hello. So remember: If you see a ghost tonight, be nice.
If you happen to be celebrating the holiday appropriately—that is, strolling amongst graves, raking in the leaves, or running in jeans—I made a little neo-classical mood music for your Friday the 13th adventure. There’s a little bit of pumpkin synth, a little dark ambient, and a whole lot of attitude for your hallowed eve.
This weekend, I urge you to press pause on the spooky movies for only a moment to go see Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon at your favorite theater—I want to get this baby over the $100 million mark on its opening weekend. Wouldn’t that be great? We could all save cinema, together.
If you happen to be celebrating today’s holiday appropriately—that is, strolling amongst graves, raking in the leaves, or running in jeans—I made a little neo-classical mood music for your Friday the 13th adventure. There’s a little bit of pumpkin synth, a little dark ambient, and a whole lot of attitude for your hallowed eve.
Welcome, ghouls, to another season of creeps. Grab your theremin and your howling cat, because we’re taking this train all the way to hell (the fun one, not the torture one).
Happy Halloweekend! Here's a playlist for all that—the ghost hunting, the night walking, exploring the liminal planes. Coffee in costume after midnight. A dog's bark from a dark hillside.
Allay your fears with Nightwyrms, our collection of coldwave and minimal synth. When the icy wind blows, it's best to embrace it—roll down those chilled windows and fill your lungs with the night.
It’s fitting for a holiday that celebrates death to reflect so aptly the nature of life—that there is far too much to do before we’re gone, and we will always dream it differently. But we feel our imagination as much as we see it, and thoughts change our cells as much as chemicals—
Last Wednesday night, desperate for consolation from lives shackled with chaos, I went with Elsie to go see Candlelight—a small concert series of classical music held in hidden, non-traditional venues around the city, each lit solely by hundreds of scattered candles.
I’ll meet you at the wrought iron gate—get there as close to sundown as you can because it only opens once a year. Wait for the moon to crest the roof, then dip down through the hedges to the yard.
For all my terror, I find delight in apprehending the grotesque. It’s the illness we ignore that tends to kill us, after all. So let us stare our specters in the eye—we’ll be dancing step-in-step with them for the next few weeks.
Happy Halloween, enjoy the final round of shadow songs. If you still don’t know what you're wearing this Thursday, I’ve made a list of costumes you may be able to pull off.
Halloween is all sublimation: we give our base instincts permission to emerge, we indulge in our ancient taste for spirits and specters, we put our real fears aside as we focus on the imaginary—the things that could never actually hurt us, but help us let off some screams.
It's Friday the 13th, and it's the weekend of the Harvest Moon. Those two things haven't aligned since the start of the millennium, and they won't align again until 2049. It's the night to believe in magic once again.
This week's playlist isn't really a playlist, it's more of an album showcase. It's my favorite Halloween album ever made. It's called Dead Man's Bones, by a band called Dead Man's Bones.
Hear me out—Radiohead is a Halloween band. I think this is important. This is important because, for one of the biggest rock bands in the world, I think there’s still a lot of “I don’t get Radiohead” out there. I was on that side of the fence for like 15 years.