And Now Your Feature Presentation…
Based on the painstakingly-embellished inspiration of an emotionally-misremembered true story, loosely adapted and edited for tone by three conflicting accounts—workshopped for chaos, formatted for SEO, and fact-checked exclusively by vibes.
Joe Tower is a creative director and cultural critic living in Colorado. He spent about 20+ agonizing years succeeding as a bartender and failing as a writer in both Chicago and Los Angeles, and just in general trying to be chill about things he absolutely could not be chill about. Nowadays, his work spans a wide range of mediums and channels, from professional to side-hustle, thematically focused on fast-food binges, prestige TV nihilism, and an unasked-for defense of Speed Racer (2008).
He’s not a critic. He’s not a historian. He’s certainly not the reason Letterboxd has a character limit—but maybe he oughta be.
No, he’s just a guy who’s watched all seven Resident Evil movies in a row to test the threshold of his cynicism.
And he does that kind of thing a lot.
DVD Commentary.
What’s a mainstream release without some bonus features? Here are some forthcoming side projects, side hustles, & sideshow attractions, presented with all the gravity of a director’s cut.
@babybackprophet
A Chili’s Instagram fan account reimagined as a doomsday cult. Each post a sermon delivered by Barb, the late-aged hostess-turned-prophet who anoints every rib platter. This feed is like your aunt’s chain email devotionals rewritten by Adult Swim interns on Ambien. With a posting cadence so sparse, this prophecy is a millennial and arriving on its “own time”. That’s @babybackprophet.
Follow, because the next post make not come for weeks. But when it does, it will feel like a scripture dipped in queso.
Pop Cult is a collection of obsessively in-depth essays written as academic syllabi on all the subjects that really count for credit: WrestleMania feud historical chronologies, DC Comics continuity mapped to comparative theology, an oral history of Nu-Metal delivered with Ivy League footnotes. These are your Cliff Notes for the corner of our culture that actually deserve rigorous study.
Coming soon to an Internet download near you—extensive coursework in zine culture, sitcom laugh tracks, or whatever other curséd subculture deserves a midterm exam next.
Pop Cult
A forthcoming film podcast built on the dumbest premise imaginable: curate a movie marathon—by franchise, by theme, by trope, by genre, by era, by any unhinged conceptual grouping—and mainline the whole goddamn thing in one sitting. Mic on. Brain leak in real time. This is endurance cinema as self-harm; it’s binge watching as sloppy performance art. It’s like a Criterion commentary running on bath salts.
Coming soon to wherever you get your podcasts—movie marathons that shouldn’t exist, programmed anyway. Every Saw trap and Nic Cage tirade, every weird Adam Sandler voice and Batman reboot, and the complete cinematic history of dogs who can play sports.
The Marathon Podcast
THE SUBTWEET INFINITY...
Special Features.
A little behind-the-scenes magic—for the dumb ideas ones that somehow got finished, funded, collected like a Criterion box set for work that still refuses to acknowledge it’s a bootleg.
Tales Of Male Folly
Live Storytelling Show & Podcast
Definitely from the “what if men roasted themselves before Twitter did it for them” era. A storytelling show produced in Los Angeles (and smuggled briefly to New York), Tales Of Male Folly started as a dumb gag about male stupidity, then morphed into an actual cultural critique on, well, you know, male stupidity.
Rooms were packed—Hollywood, West LA, Echo Park, Pasadena, Brooklyn—with comedians, actors, storytellers, musicians, just skewering themselves in public… And everyone loved it. It was loud, messy, funny, sometimes brutal. Kind of like a frat hazing ritual if the frat was genuinely ashamed of itself.
RUI: Reading(s) Under The Influence
Reading Series
Before every bar had trivia night, a few friends in Chicago were already getting hammered onstage and calling it “lit”…
Readings Under the Influence was a Chicago-born cultural monster co-created with writers Amanda Oliveira Snyder, Julia Borcherts, and Rob Duffer. What started as a gathering of a handful of liberal arts students at Sheffield’s Beer & Wine Bar grew into a massive Windy City literary institution.
Gaper’s Block chronicled the wild “baseball nights.” It was called “one of the best literary events in town” by Chicago Magazine, dubbed “the best place to see an author reading” by Newcity, and listed by CBS Chicago as one of the city’s must-see series.
When it was hauled to Dubuque, Iowa in 2007, it was staged at the Busted Lift—a basement Irish bar and music venue. Pivoting into a sort of underground variety hour, it attracted regional artists and performers.
That was almost 20 years ago and RUI Dubuque is still kicking today. Still at The Lift, still rocking lineups, themes, and crowds of their own.
What started as four Chicago writers daring each other to read drunk has become a durable piece of Midwestern lit culture.
Playing UNO With Gil & Paki-Man
Two One-Act Plays
Yes, this was a play produced about the card game. But also, it was subversively dark, drawing on themes of torment, authority, oppression, isolation (skip card, meet power dynamics).
Originally conceived as a one-man, one-act play at UCLA, this production retrofitted the piece into a slick two-hander that was as tense as it was graphic. Staged by Barker Room Rep in Los Angeles, it was adapted by Jacob Burstein-Stern from his original script, directed by Mark Sitko, and co-starred the incomparable Mike Rahhal. This claustrophobic little grenade of a show—part comedy, part torture chamber—did what few independent theater productions in LA do… It broke even.
Details still live here.