This Not That Holiday Gift Guide 2024

Edibles, shootables, wearables, readables and more

Welcome friends to the third annual This Not That Holiday Gift Guide! Wow, it’s that time of the year already. If you’re new to the This Not That Holiday Gift Guide game or simply could use a refresh, I stand by my 2022 and 2023 gift guides, but you know I wasn’t gonna leave you hanging in 2024. As always, no spon-con (I say that as if any content would be bold enough to solicit my sponsorship), just some things you should absolutely buy this holiday season for loved ones or, if you insist, yourself. All this, PLUS an exciting new feature: a special guest recommendation! Without further ado, let’s dig in.

Chucky shooting range target

Starting off with a bang! I’m still not entirely sure what the deal with this thing is, but I am confident that at least one of you readers has a loved-one who would cherish a Chucky shooting range target, his heinous visage replicated in columns on heavy card stock. I guess you could shoot it, which would probably be a lot of fun, but it feels like an item best kept in pristine condition, professionally framed and hung on a wall. Shock your guests by positioning it so that when they open the bathroom door and flip on the light, a cascade of screaming Chuckys greets them! The part that really gets me is the mini Chucky faces… are those worth extra points or something? I’m not going to tell you how to tabulate the scores of your own Chucky shooting game. Lots of other great movie-related printed matter worth perusing at the Metrograph site too!

Kouros Maghsoudi Hug ashtray

Quick 2025 prediction: smoking cigarettes is primed for its cultural comeback! Even if not, these gorgeous ashtrays from Iranian-American designer Kouros Maghsoudi are appropriate for more wholesome behavior: a luxurious place to toss your keys or wallet, for starters. The bulbous, glossy, balloon-animal feel has me thinking Missy Elliot would’ve ashed into this back in 2001, or Ettore Sottsass in 1973. Opulent but in a cheeky way, riding that fine line between pretentious and silly. Weed is legal now, or so I hear, so if you have plans of fading backward into a white leather couch while blasting Klaus Schulze from a surround-sound hi-fi, the Hug ashtray is perfectly designed to babysit your J between puffs. I’d probably just keep the TV remote in mine, though.

Hem Check placemats

I don’t know about you, but I tend to destroy my cloth placemats - I don’t think I’m a particularly messy guy, yet they bear the wounds of a thousand dinners. That’s why I’m stepping up to these playful Hem placemats, made of laminated eucalyptus fiber and ready to be wiped clean in an instant. I’ve always been a sucker for Hem’s use of eye-popping Pantone colors, and I want to point out that this particular “butter / burgundy” combo is a dead ringer for Manuel Göttsching’s proto-techno masterwork E2-E4, surely too spot-on to be entirely coincidental. I’m not sure any backdrop would make an Amy’s bean and cheese burrito worthy of its own photoshoot, but I certainly intend to find out.

A one-off custom T-shirt from Motivate Me Apparel

Thirty years ago, I would’ve killed for the ability to dream a one-off printed T-shirt into reality - the bootleg Parasites shirt I screen- printed in high school shop class was the closest I ever got to this thrill. The DTF (“direct to film heat”) transfer era of shirts is now upon us, and while I am embarrassed to admit that I previously utilized Stickermule for this service (prior to their self-outing as bigot-fascist cheerleaders), I’m glad to have discovered Allentown, PA’s own Motivate Me Apparel company, owned and operated by a pro-wrestler whose identity I would never willingly divulge. They do great work, and you can get a single shirt with whatever you want on it for barely more coin than a corporate graphic tee at Uniqlo. This time around, I decided to make a shirt featuring the Flaming Banker logo, a record label that only existed in service of releasing the first two Feederz albums. I doubt you can top this design, but you’re welcome to try!

Almondy almond cake

To be clear, I am a dessert addict. I don’t say that in a charming way, I really mean it - you cannot leave me alone in the house with a package of cookies, half a cake, leftover Halloween candy… I will gorge upon it with a vengeance. This is why I feel qualified to tell you that the most deliciously decadent dessert I’ve enjoyed in the past couple years (save for Barbuzzo’s salted caramel budino) is the Almondy salted caramel almond cake, available nowhere but your local IKEA’s frozen food section. I can’t recall the circumstances that led me to this cake - I definitely purchased it on a whim - but as a dessert, it really does it all. It’s like a post-grad collaboration between a Snickers bar, eclair custard filling and vanilla cake, best enjoyed while in the process of thawing (if you can last that long). Looks like a single cake will run you $8.49, so fire up that IKEA family card and leave with as many Almondys as you can carry.

Original artwork from the Crowther Fine Art collection

Much like everything else, the price of art is too damn high these days, ruined by rich people treating creative work like stock-market speculation - if you don’t know how much original Misfits records cost nowadays because of this phenomenon, I’m honestly scared to tell you. For as much as the Internet has been reduced to three or four dominant websites, it’s still a vast and wild place, and I’m pleased to share that Crowther Fine Art is having an incredible sale over on their Chairish page. They’re currently asking $210.00 for this 1920s ashcan drawing by Henry George Keller, for example, and I’m certain they’d accept a lower offer! I picked up a gorgeous Larry Connatser painting from them for under two hundred bucks, but that’s big money compared to this cute Neil Meitzler drawing (a whopping twenty-eight bucks!) or this lithograph from the estate of Adrienne Anderson ($33!) that should’ve been the cover to some messed-up DIY prog record on the Nurse With Wound list. They have so, so much stuff up for sale that the most diligent diggers will surely come up with something incredible, and for an absolute steal. If you pick something up, send me a link! I’d love to see what I missed.

Schumacher Fantasy Forest wrapping paper

Now that we’ve got this sick stack of gifts, let’s get them wrapped into a paper worthy of their greatness! If you’re like me, you probably grab the cheapest / least-offensive wrapping paper at TJ Maxx or Marshall’s and call it a day, but it’s late 2024: we practice mindfulness now. I’m a big fan of this non-denominational, non-seasonal-specific design from Schumacher, who take pride in delivering the finest of printed papers - this forest mural wallpaper is absolutely bonkers! It’s got that trippy ‘70s childrens’ book feel that I find emotionally reassuring, bunnies kinda floating in a cloud of grass next to a whimsically demented tree. This paper will make the half-melted Almondy you wrapped in it taste that much sweeter.

And last but certainly not least, I’d like to present a book recommendation from my sweetheart, the poet Alina Pleskova! Poetry is kind of like techno in that they’re both vast and impenetrable bodies of work where novices benefit from trustworthy guides who direct them towards the good stuff, and I’m thankful that’s she’s led me to the work of so many fantastic poets (and steered me clear of some stinkers). Let’s see what she recommends for gifting this year:

Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy

In poetry, an elegy (from the Greek élegos, “funeral lament”) is traditionally a mournful reflection written in response to a death. Many mourn the loss of a specific person, but an elegy can also be (or contain) a broader meditation on mortality and loss. Here, Peter Gizzi’s approach to the elegy is all this and then some— more expansive in every sense.

There’s deep loss but also its spiritual counterweights, through vivid attunement to the constant mystery and bewilderment that is human existence, and the perhaps even stranger process of finding language for any of it: “Some days I sit hours to be relieved / by a word."

Gizzi’s got a gorgeous way of noticing what's happening beyond the mind's default tendencies to narrativize. Instead, we get mood, image, sensation (that is to say, VIBES)— the real textures of being alive: "To see thought, a wing / in night, the long brooding. / Take it, listen, the night is orchestral / when the power's on. / Everything disporting. / A furred wand upon nothingness."

Fierce Elegy is full of acute insight and perception, rather than epiphanies or salves or resolve — all of which a person might come to poetry for, but personally, I'd find suspect. What feels truer to me are questions left hanging, ongoing wondering and wandering.

Sounds lofty, but that’s because it is— I mean, this poetry operates on a totally other frequency. This is what great poets are here to do. Or as Gizzi more modestly put it in an interview, “As long as there have been soldiers, there have been poets: it’s a long, sad, venerable tradition. We’ve always been here just next to the story. I’m just a class of worker that’s been here for thousands of years, just a piece of this song…"

Wow, thanks, Alina! Adding it to my stack immediately. I know of Peter Gizzi from his collaborative works with Sunburned Hand Of The Man (which, real recognize real), and I can’t wait to dig in. Thanks for reading, y’all - happy holidays!