Welcome to Top Shelf, Low Brow

Top Shelf, Low Brow is a steadily growing biweekly newsletter that is a celebration of all things pop culture, from Arthouse to Housewives from me, Coleman Spilde. I’ve spent my entire life fiendishly consuming every morsel of pop culture and media I could get my hands on — and, respectfully, I know my shit. I can correctly predict a Pitchfork score to the decimal point, tell when an Oscar-buzzy film will fizzle by awards season (hey, First Man), and speculate on exactly where each Gossip Girl character would be in 2020. Much of my writing revolves around queer culture, my place in it, and the gifts that being queer has given me; one of those gifts is being unafraid to do something in a nontraditional way, and I’ve been wanting to work outside of the conventional structure of the articles and freelance pitches I’ve been submitting while looking for a new job during a pandemic that has all but put the kibosh on staffed media work.

So what is this newsletter?

I’ve always had a remarkable head for tucking away facts and happenings that others have brushed past or forgotten. So, as I work on filling in the infinite puzzle of pop culture, I simply must share the best (and the best of the worst) with you while mining my endless archives to bring you things that maybe you don’t know about, forgot about, or may want to see in a different light. From the Top Shelf art to the Low-Brow culture, I want to experience all the beautiful, stupid, insane, and inexplicable things we love together through essays, reviews, lists, recommendations, curation, featured guests, absurd fancams, and maybe even a podcast if I’m feeling particularly unstable.

This is where you’ll get rankings of every 2020 Hallmark Christmas movie on a scale of one to ten candy cane lobotomies, speculative essays on things like the night Lady Gaga, Lindsay Lohan, and Ellen Von Unwerth all partied together in a room at the Chateau Marmont, a retrospective gallery of Serena’s most inappropriate-for-the-event outfits through all six seasons of Gossip Girl, a case for why Suspiria (2018) and Catwoman (2004) should be held in the same regard of brilliance, a guest dissertation on the equal chaos and charisma of Jennifer Lopez’s ads for a nondescript mobile game, and so, so much more. 

How it works:

Each Friday, every subscriber of Top Shelf, Low Brow receives a discussion of all kinds of pop culture from past, present, and future as it relates to whatever inane things my brain has decided to glom onto or unearth that week. Each edition of the standard newsletter will include some curated recommendations, but every Monday, premium subscribers will get a bonus newsletter with a breakdown of things that happened in pop culture and news over the week before, rated as either Top Shelf or Low Brow, and detailed explanations as to why. Paid subscribers will also receive exclusive first-access content to articles, reviews, and essays I publish that don’t make it into the newsletter and aren’t picked up through freelance. That doesn’t mean rejects, it just meant you get to read about the stuff that was too cool for anyone to really understand. And when they finally do? You’ll have “I-told-you-so” rights. So get ready to hope on the phone and brag to everyone you know.

Why subscribe?

Besides warming my heart and truly lifting my spirit, subscribing is the best way to support my writing while I continue to build my career. You’ll get each post sent directly to your inbox with no extra effort (although I am not responsible for the YouTube holes you fall into from external links). Whether you’re a free subscriber or a paid one, I truly love you for being here. We’re going to have a lot of fun.

Click here to find the entire archive of Top Shelf, Low Brow.