October

If you’re in the Portland, Oregon area, I’ll be at Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills this Thursday interviewing Matt Kirkland, the creator of the enormously popular Dracula Daily, which originally serialized Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel as a Substack newsletter, creating an internet-scale book club with over 240,000 subscribers, now published as a gorgeous hardcover volume annotated with memes, fan art, and comics from the community.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an epistolary novel, told in the form of a series of diary entries and letters, and Dracula Daily delivers each one to subscribers “as-it-happens,” on the day that each message is dated, pacing it out over a period of six months from May to November.

In the parallel universe of last year’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Dr. Demento encourages a young Al Yankovic (Daniel Radcliffe) to move away from song parodies and start writing original songs of his own. During an LSD trip, Al writes “Eat It,” a 100% original song that’s definitely not based on any other song, which quickly becomes “the biggest hit by anybody, ever.”

Later, Weird Al’s enraged to learn from his manager that former Jackson 5 frontman Michael Jackson turned the tables on him, changing the words of “Eat It” to make his own parody, “Beat It.”

This got me thinking: what if every Weird Al song was the original, and every other artist was covering his songs instead? With recent advances in A.I. voice cloning, I realized that I could bring this monstrous alternate reality to life.

This was a terrible idea and I regret everything.