My hosting barfed. I’ll post something of substance soon.
Happy hardcore
I can’t believe I managed to remember enough about this song to find it. It’s TERRIBLE, but I was there. If only I could open Stein’s Gate and send my past self a Hellraiser red Temple of Jawnz quilted double rider and a single index card of written advice.
Filed under music
Dance Party, USA
It’s rare that I wholeheartedly love a film, but I fucking wholeheartedly love Aaron Katz’s Dance Party, USA. I saw his new movie Cold Weather which I liked and is at a completely different plateau of production value and skill, but it was the folded-Polaroid quality of his debut that pierced my heart. It’s an hour and they shot it for two grand – I can understand why people don’t like it, but presumably those morlocks never experienced young love. The DVD is out of print; here’s a blog with a download link.
Filed under film
Songs I’ve saved on YouTube recently
This is the quiet version of Steam and it’s amazing. I can’t believe I didn’t hear it until last week.
Bobb Trimble!
Helter Skelter, Paul vocal only – jesus christ, how do you go from this to Say Say Say? I love MJ but come on.
The 1977 version of my favorite 80s song.
I do the Bill Haverchuck dance while listening
Did I ever show you guys the cover for my
Modern Rock of the 90s mixtape? I like how it came out:

First song is Cop Shoot Cop $10 Dollar Bill, if you remember that. Then Dogs Of Lust by The The. Learned later that Johnny Marr played on that record…
Filed under music
Men, Women & Children by Chad Kultgen
So I read this book and had a conflicted reaction to it, but when I googled Chad Kultgen I realized something: years ago my agent had given me a draft copy of his first novel, The Average American Male. My agent is a young beautiful woman who is definitely not a sociopath, so after reading a chapter I wondered if she’d read it, and if so what a weird position she was putting herself in by giving it to me. Weird because if the message was “be more commercial, like this thing,” then she was trying to encourage me to write things that were okay for me but specifically pretty bad for people like her. What I read was like Tucker Max Jr., Seven-11 store brand energy drink pissed out and dried in 12 point Courier: the voice of a young white man figuratively butchering beautiful young women and fetishizing the parts. It was like the literary endpoint of Spike TV’s programming strategy – worse than boring, just obvious.
Had I realized this dude wrote Men, Women & Children I would have passed but I didn’t and I didn’t. There’s some grim shit in it and worse than the headlines (bulimia! suicide!) is the cataloging of the specific kinds of pornography some of the thirteen-year-old characters are aroused by, the play of that in their lives, and the accompanying social network messaging.
The sickness of division subjected on the young is a true and sad observation, as is the book’s underlining of the tension between our external Facebook-y faces and the increasingly fractured and obscenely specific things we do in private. I mean, I’m building a copy of a watch that was commissioned by CERN to withstand magnetism which is as gross and exclusively enabled by the internet as any niche porn fetish on the internet.
If I were Chad Kultgen reading this I would probably be thinking fuck you, I’m a good writer, who are you to judge me and what have you ever done? which is fair. I get the sense from the two interviews I read that he’s frustrated by critics/ex-girlfriends not understanding that just because you write about something it doesn’t mean you are that thing or sympathize with that thing. Also fair.
Filed under books
Food of Love, a short play by Greg Machlin
So my friend Greg Machlin, talented young playwright, was putting together a theater company and for a modest donation he was offering to write a short play for each microbenefactor.
SEEMED LIKE A GOOD DEAL. Instead of writing about me I gave him my dead idea file, basically a little list of ideas I liked but couldn’t develop, and asked him to write about anything that sparkled with him. Here’s the result – great job Greg!
Filed under writing
Space
View of the shuttle launch from an airplane. (found unsourced)
Update: source. Good get, George!
Filed under space
Retiring an email address
I have like six email addresses, and I’ve decided to take one offline – gsl@litwack.org. If by some astronomical chance you have that in an address book, change it to litwack@gmail.com!
Filed under current events
Recent bookmarks and purchases
Den Brooks @ Dribble: Captivating “corners” 3d series.

Project Euler: Have fun learning to code by cracking math problems, brought to my attention by this Atlantic article.
Seth’s Palookaville 20: Issue 20 of Seth’s long-running comic includes part four of his Clyde Fans story and a photoessay on the seriously great imaginary city of Dominion he built out of cardboard. Also good from Drawn & Quarterly this year is Chester Brown’s Paying For It, although I found his backmatter polemic worryingly naive.

Additive resin 3D printing: ChemShapes is trying to do an open-source printer although the blog is kind of all over the place [ed. don't throw stones, Litwack] and a comprehensive plan seems far away – more promising is Junior Veloso’s printer although it seems he will not be open-sourcing every element of it. Meanwhile dudes at the Vienna University of Technology have theirs done and say it costs €1200 although there are no plans or further details. I would buy one, Vienna University of Technology: hurry up.
Speaking of buying things:

Yeah, I bought a Neo Geo MVS 4-slot. Plus Windjammers. I don’t do things the normal way; I do things the enormous way
Filed under books, video games
Litwack.org Lifehack #1
Submitted by reader Louis G., here’s a handy lifehack for travel. On the road and living rough? Knot the legs of your jeans and stuff with laundry, neatly segregating it from your cleans. Thank you Louis G.!
Filed under current events
NOT METAL ENOUGH
I’ve been reading Sarah Vowell’s fun, occasionally somber The Wordy Shipmates just now, and although she makes a strong case that we misuse the denomination “puritanical” to mean boring and starchy because ACTUALLY the historical Puritans loved learning and Greek poetry and stuff, there is no question they also adored the New Testament, which calls for some palate-cleansing. I bring you Goya’s first version of The Witches’ Sabbath, which is basically a mockery of religious irrationality – see how bugged out and cartoonish Satan looks, like he’s about to get up and do the Mashed Potato. Goya reworked the same scene thirty years later as one of thirteen Black Paintings done on the walls of his home outside Madrid. The group is unreal and includes The Dog, one of my all-times.
Filed under art




I write screenplays, books and push software; I'm a collector and indoorsman. If you have a Masonic scepter or a copy of the Boyd Philadelphia Blue Book (any year), drop me a line.