The Week In Recommendations 10.25.23

Spooky season edition! Happy (almost) Halloween, besties!

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter about cultural obsessions from your Internet BFFs Emma and Claire. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Our latest podcast was about the “Love Is Blind” 5 finale and reunion! Rich Text is a completely reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

While Claire is out on maternity leave, we’ll be featuring guest recommendations from some of the coolest tastemakers we know. This week, that guest is podcast producer extraordinaire Katelyn Bogucki, who has produced a wide array of shows at Gimlet, Spotify, and Vox Media. She also happens to be the founding producer of Love To See It/Here To Make Friends (a.k.a. our OG producer and the reason we have podcast careers).

Katelyn has been reading… 📖

“Every Man for Himself and God Against All” by Werner Herzog. I got this book for work, and I’ve been reading it section by section. But he does read the audiobook, so that might be a better way to enjoy it. Each section is a story that seems made up. He believes in the concept of “ecstatic truth,” which is that truth lies beyond facts and reality. Who knows if the stories really happened, but they’re very entertaining and I appreciate how attentive and curious he is. As a fan of his films, I’ve enjoyed learning more about how his mind works by reading the memoir.

Katelyn has been watching… 📺

Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire. The creator, Rolin Jones, described the series as “Cassavetes with a lot of feelings and not a lot of edit buttons,” like “some nasty Fiona Apple album of a vampire story” but with gay vampire dads in “the toxic relationship of 2022.” If that doesn't sell you on the series, I don't know what will. It stays true to the source material, while giving it updates that make it even more interesting, and the entire cast is gorgeous.

Season 1 of Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire is available on AMC+, where you can also stream A Dark Song (also available on Tubi,etc), one of my favorite scary movies. It's a beautiful movie that's light on gore and jump scares, so I feel comfortable recommending it to just about anyone. It's about a woman who undergoes a yearlong ritual with the guidance of an occultist. They seal themselves in an old house in the Welsh countryside to perform the ritual where the majority of the movie takes place. The ritual is based on the Abramelin ritual, and the movie has been praised for its accurate depiction of ceremonial magic. If you like witchy movies and value accuracy, this is for you.

Katelyn has been listening to… 🎧

Past Perfect, a new time-traveling trivia show hosted by Simone Polanen. You might know her and her team's work from their previous show, Not Past It, which is also excellent. Guests compete in a 5-episode trivia tournament that tackles topics throughout history. The jokes and SFX are top-notch. I don’t want to endorse the podcast-to-TV pipeline (podcasts are enough!) but I do think Simone and the team deserve their own primetime game show. I highly recommend the special edition Halloween episode with Lindsey and Bobby, the hosts of Who? Weekly. 

NEW CHELSEA WOLFE. Gothic Queen Chelsea has blessed us with two new singles, and I love them both. Her first, “Dusk,” is a slow-building, beautiful song – add it to your Halloween playlist. She also released a new video for “Whispers in the Echo Chambers,” and it’s really spooky. I can’t wait for her new album to come out in February.

Katelyn has been buying… 🛍️

Perfume, incense, and candles from Fischersund, a perfumery in Reykjavik that was started by Jónsi from the band Sigur Rós. I visited the store last month and I wanted to move-in. It's in one of the oldest houses in the city, painted all black, and decorated with flowers and apothecary bottles. Thankfully, their website is a distillation of the vibe and they make it simple to buy perfume with scent descriptions, like this one:

Smoke in the air and tarred telephone poles, tall freshly mowed grass, and tobacco leaves. Dead flowers bow to the ground. In the breeze, the feminine fountain pine tickles the top of your skull. A beached whale is about to explode.

Kevin Murphy Blow.Dry Wash and Rinse. I’ve heard it’s good for your hair to avoid heat styling, but I refuse. So, I spend a lot of money on shampoo and other hair products to keep it healthy. This new shampoo and rinse has heat protection that’s made my hair look healthy even after I dry it and curl it.

A bag of rats. These lil guys are the stars of my Halloween costume this year! They’re pretty convincing from far away. Perfect gag gift.

Emma has been reading… 📖

Britney Spears’ new memoir, “The Woman In Me” has an absolute chokehold on me right now. Did the pop princess herself know that we all needed this right now? Because, I really needed a book that would grip me enough to shake me out of the fact that my attention span has been absolutely shot over the last few weeks. Well, Spears and her ghostwriters did it. I cannot stop reading this memoir. It’s compelling and deeply sad and a real indictment of the way that our culture treated young, famous women in the late ‘90s and early aughts — the culture me and my peers came of age within. (It’s also frankly an indictment of Justin Timberlake.)

This one’s absolutely worth a read — or a listen to the audiobook, which is read by actress Michelle Williams. But don’t expect a bunch of uplifting messages. Spears’ story is a thorny, depressing one. Frankly, it’s a real-life, contemporary horror story.

Emma has been watching… 📺

Every year when Halloween is approaching, I rewatch one of my favorite movies of all time: “Practical Magic.” This movie has it all: Witches! Spells! Curses! Bad men! Margaritas! Romance! Horror tropes for horror babies! Commentary on the dangers of othering people! Dreamy late-’90s fashion! Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman being peak Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman! Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest as the kooky aunts! Young Evan Rachel Wood! This 1998 gem is currently available to stream on Hulu. And remember… there’s a little witch in all of us.

“The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “The Craft” are my other two frequent Halloween rewatches. (Again — horror tropes for horror babies, because I have very low tolerance for truly scary movies or any gore.)

Emma has been listening to… 🎧

“Ghost Story,” a new podcast from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Journalist Tristan Redman digs into the history of a ghost that may or may not have shown up in his childhood bedroom over the years — even as new families occupied the home — and ends up mired in a chapter of his wife’s family history in the process. His wife’s great grandmother, Naomi Dancy, was murdered in the house next door to the one that Tristan grew up in. Could she be the “faceless woman” some residents reported seeing? And is the story that the Dancy family has held tightly to all these years the real story of how she died? This is the perfect spooky season story for people who, like me, don’t really believe in ghosts, but certainly believe in the lingering questions left by unsettled family history. (Plus, we get cameos from actor Hugh Dancy, who is Redman’s brother-in-law.)

Emma has been buying… 🛍️

A couple sets of Hawkins glassware in various colors. My partner and I have a ragtag assortment of glasses in our cabinet, including some that I bought from IKEA when I first moved to New York more than a decade ago. We decided it was time for an upgrade, and after seeing these gorgeous glasses at our friend’s home, we snagged the medium essential glassware in blue and the large essential glassware in blush. (I’m contemplating going back for another set of 4 in amber or green.) I love colored glasses, and these are both beautiful and feel great in your hand. We love a practical purchase!

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