Del toro haunted mansion
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Newsletter Business/warning: This edition of Abundant Living is about Panthers, indie sleaze, NYC in the aughts, nostalgia, and how everybody gets everything wrong and has terrible taste. It is not about Justin Chearno, the guitarist who died on August 22, but it is for him. Like most, I was exceedingly fond of Justin. I considered him a friend. But I hadn’t spoken to him in years, so I purposefully kept the focus of this essay to the music. Both out of respect for the awful loss others are experiencing, and because I was—and am—a fan. For a more personal memorial, Jon Fine wrote a lovely one. There are many, many others. I instead focussed on what Chearno and I had most in common; a love for wildly (often justifiably) unpopular music and gleeful shit talking.
The purpose of this intro is to warn the reader that, In my fandom, and in honoring every single conversation I’ve ever had with Chearno over the last two decades, I have made zero effort to make even a single sentence of this essay remotely accessible to anyone without an appallingly encyclopedic knowledge As a reader, I’ve always loved the trickiness of a story within a story. Sometimes excerpts from fictional works make up the bulk of the narrative, like The Princess Bride, presented by author William Goldman as a book once read to him by his father, which he has rediscovered and is reproducing with minor edits and commentary. Sometimes, the inner narrative is only ever described or sought by the characters of the outer work. These works exist in relation to the fictional people who had a hand in their making. In Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, we learn more about puffed-up playwright Lotto, his marriage, and the state of his career by hearing about the various plays attributed to him. The ultra-racist details of the lost episodes of The Little Rascals, from Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, are left to the reader’s imagination, but cast member Hominy Jenkins’ nostalgia for them characterizes him and the environment that formed him. Other times, there’s more of a balance between
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