It's Been Another Stupid Hot Summer Week…

“Do The Right Thing” - Spike Lee, 1989 ↓

Here in New York City the weather has been acting real funky, or as my roommate Josh prefers to claim, “bipolar as fuck”. Josh is not wrong. All these dog days have a low temp of 81º and a high temp of 99º––but there’s also 50% of rain drenching you anytime. Shorts versus pants, t-shirt versus jacket, hat versus umbrella––it doesn’t matter how well you try to dress accordingly. You’ll still choke on the dense air as sweat sizzles into your skin.

All these constantly shifting weather conditions make me wonder if global warming’s detrimental impact on the climate won’t necessarily be the dramatized erasure of our seasons, but rather a cyclical disruption where all sorts of conditions are jumbled together. I wonder if our future will contain just more and more surreal climate phenomena. You know like when you witness a sunshower, a.k.a the weather phenomenon where it rains while the sun is shining. It’s oddly beautiful yet just a little bit mind-bending.

The sun taking a shower ↓

In a summer full of heatwaves and high temperatures breaking records, it’s time to pencil dive into our cool refreshing pool of Bum Diary news. Even better, let’s go pencil dive in your rich friend’s kick-ass swimming pool. The one with that huge diving board, state-of-the-art slide, and gutter full of dead frogs.

Barbecue, Beats, and…YOU!?

Now that most of the Bum Diary staff are back in California, we’ve been wanting to arrange another Bum Diary event full of prints, music, and community building. So we did just that.

The Bum Diary presents GOOD TO BE HOME: a summertime celebration that revolves around cooking up beats, grillin' real low and slow, and offering all sorts of arts and crafts. I’m talking print and music exchanges, screen printing booths, and photo portraits.

Musical acts garçon d’or, zeshbb, nephew hesh, bacomartinez, and savedher. will be grilling up some juicy tunes too. We’ll provide everything that you need for a chill kickback in a park: hot dogs, burgers, and polaroids. So come hang with us at Fairmount Park in Riverside, California on July 26th!

Just come! ↓

If you live in the state of California, you gotta go check it out. If you really need an incentive to visit Riverside––besides the free food, music, and all the other simple joys in life––it is also where the Scientology headquarters are located.

Fairmont Park, California (1916) ↓

When I visited Ben’s home in Riverside in February of 2024, we drove past the Church of Scientology’s headquarters one night. The campus looks like if a middle-class cookie cutter suburb was taken over by a private military. Every house looks like an alternate version of the Bluth’s house in Arrested Development decorated in surveillance systems and indoctrination flyers. Drive past it at night and you might just catch all your iconic characters including but not limited to: armed guards, infrared cameras, spiked fences, a washed John Travolta, and contradictory member numbers.

Concept art from the first Mission: Impossible film. 1996 © Paramount Pictures. ↓

I was gonna make a joke at Tom Cruise, but he’s currently doing a lot for the film industry so I think we’ll let his eeriest flaw slide…for now. On the subject of movies, there’s a whole new weekly column I’d like to introduce.

Why You Should Watch Bad Movies In Theaters

Welcome to the Rec Room, our new weekly column written by our good friend and killer writer Aidan Barrett. Aidan writes an amazing weekly Substack that covers all the current highs and lows in Hollywood with a spin of his own writing style––fully for free.

San Francisco’s Regency Theater in 1992. Photo by Hiroshi Sugimoto. ↓

At some point or another, you’ve undoubtedly watched a movie trailer which features a pull quote from a critic that’s some variation of the sentence “THIS IS UNLIKE ANYTHING YOU’VE SEEN BEFORE.” Indeed, the most basic goal of any movie marketing campaign is to imbue audiences with the impression that their film is so special that it must be seen as soon as possible. (Don’t just wait for it to get dumped on Netflix — be one of the lucky ones to see it on the big screen! Run, don’t walk, to your local theater!) But when has such a hyperbolic statement actually applied to the movie it’s plastered over?

If you were to ask people what their most unforgettable experiences were in theaters, most will name overwhelmingly positive ones, like the time they saw Avatar in IMAX, or watched Captain America pick up Thor’s hammer on opening weekend with their buddies, or (if they’re a miserable coastal elite) attended a festival premiere for a super cool indie movie and got to see the A-list cast afterward at a Q&A.

Fans watch Captain America pick up Thor’s hammer on opening weekend circa May 2019. ↓

If you were to ask me what my most memorable theater experiences have been, you would get a chaotic list of titles. Among my favorite first-time watches are Sorry to Bother You, Parasite, Cats, Titane, Barbarian, Beau is Afraid, The Zone of Interest, Madame Web, Dune: Part Two, Megalopolis, and A Minecraft Movie. It's a healthy mix of universally acclaimed bangers, polarizing arthouse ventures, and absolutely abysmal misfires that nobody likes.

So why are these my most cherished memories? It’s simple: in each instance, I was lucky enough to witness a type of movie so unique in its existence (for better or for worse) that we are likely to never see anything like it again. In fact, I’ll go so far as to argue that even the worst movies on my list — yes, even incoherent clusterfucks like Megalopolis — are “see it now” worthy, and that all of you reading this should actively seek out more movies like them.

Nicole Kidman prefers to watch movies in theaters. Do you? ↓

Now, why would I take time out of my week to go see a movie that had a terrible trailer and has a slew of popular reviews calling it a total mess, you might ask? What’s the point of wasting my time and money on something bad, or even just mid, in theaters? I answer that question with another question: what’s the point of seeing anything in theaters?

The reason people go to watch a movie on a gigantic screen in a pitch black auditorium full of strangers is that it provides an irreplaceable experience. Everyone in the audience is (ideally) silent and respectful… until something so funny or scary or shocking or triumphant happens that it causes a ripple throughout the crowd. Everyone jumps or giggles or cheers at the same time, and then the response builds off of itself and grows. It is a purely social phenomenon: when you’re watching in a crowd, funny moments become funnier, scarier moments become scarier, and epic moments might just incite uproarious applause. This is because everyone is thinking the same thing in their heads: wow, I can’t believe I’m in a room with a hundred strangers and we’re all equally locked into this story, sharing the exact same emotions at the same time. The root of the excitement is not the quality of the film — it’s the subconscious recognition that the strong reaction the film is giving you is being felt by everyone around you too, and that if you make a loud noise or face in response to it, you will not be embarrassed, because everyone else is on the same page.

It’s because of this that watching a shockingly bad movie in theaters can be just as valuable as watching a great one. Any of you who have attended a midnight screening for guilty pleasure classics like The Room or The Rocky Horror Picture Show know the spectacular collective joy of cackling in delight at ridiculous dialogue and deliciously corny acting. Why, then, is it that this practice must be relegated to those inside ultra-niche communities of film fans? Why doesn’t the average Joe walking down the street get excited when they hear about an upcoming movie being billed by critics as a total disaster, “so bad that you won’t believe it got made”? That sure sounds like an interesting night out to me! Sitting with your jaw agape for two hours as you watch a ludicrously bad movie will give you just about everything a great movie will: a visceral reaction, a surefire conversation starter with whoever you watched it with, and a memory you will never forget.

Theater remains after a midnight showing of the Minecraft Movie: Block Party Edition (2025) ↓

Sure, many bad movies are just straight-up boring, downright wastes of time… but what about the ones that aren’t? I’m talking movies that take real, all-or-nothing risks, the ones that make or break the director’s future job prospects. With a film industry that’s so terrified of straying from formulaic projects guaranteed to return a profit, risk-taking movies — whether their gambles pay off immensely or result in a train wreck — are unicorns. And when these unicorns release in theaters, I feel the same urgency as I do to run outside to witness a solar eclipse that only happens every 80 years or so. You have to do it, because you’ll never see something like it again in your life. A movie where A-list actors depicted as uncanny cat-human hybrids sing about “the Jellicle Choice”, or one where Jack Black and Jason Momoa sixty-nine while riding a jetpack together, is just as rare as a film that transports you to Pandora or Arrakis.

The worst thing a movie can be is not bad, but boring. And if a movie is getting reviews decrying it as utterly insane, what difference does it make if it’s “good” insane, “bad” insane or “mixed bag” insane? Either way, you’re guaranteed to witness something unforgettable.

“Cinema Paradiso” directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988 ↓

Full disclosure: I am in no way an average moviegoer. I have a subscription to my local theater chain that charges me $24 a month to see as many movies as I want. I generally watch between 60-80 new movies a year. For comparison, the average American below 30 sees 3-4 movies in theaters per year. Most people have jobs, and friends, and kids, and hobbies, and chores… and when they do have time for movies, it’s usually cheaper and more convenient to watch them at home.

My argument is not that you should start seeing a million movies every year to “culture yourself”. I’m merely encouraging you to seek out any film that displays real ambition… even if it doesn’t pay off. You may very well hate it — I won’t deny that for a second — but that hatred is just as valuable of a reaction as admiration. Laugh in unison with your audience at a terrible line read. Crack jokes to your partner about how bad the VFX looked when you get home. Strike up a conversation the next day with your coworker about how bad that director’s movies have gotten in the past few years. Think back on the screening months down the line and smile as you remember how high you got beforehand. Be glad you were smart enough to seek out a movie that’s actually “UNLIKE ANYTHING YOU’VE EVER SEEN” before it left theaters.

Stop and Say Hello To Goodbye, Horses

The first issue of our print magazine Goodbye, Horses is going to be at the Riverside Art Museum on display through September 28th!

The museum has dubbed our first print mag issue an “observational force”. So if you’re one of the few that likes observing things––let alone forces––you know what to do.

If you were never able to buy a copy, but live in the state of California, we’d love for you to go check it out. Go spend a day at the museum, learn some perspective, nourish the pattern recognition side of your brain, and then dart right towards the gift shop.

The fact our first print issue is in a museum is already really cool, but what’s even cooler is if anyone goes out there and checks it out!

Goodbye, Horses ↓

If you enjoyed reading and think a friend would too, forward them this email. If you want your own weekly column, or any other fun ideas, contact us. We want to make this the best community building newsletter out there. That’s all for this week on Bum Sums. Thank you for reading and stay tuned for more stories.