Laurie and I went traveling last week. Here's a few highlights:
Visiting two delightful Austin swimmin' holes, Deep Eddy and Barton Springs. It turns out that what I didn't like about swimming was clorine.
Spending time with Laurie's sister, a hilarious nurse who filled us in on the funny and dark sides of her profession. A sample: nurses call motorcycles "Donorcycles." Also, she wants her funeral music to include "Ghostbusters". That just gets funnier the more I think of it.
My return to Birmingham, Alabama, where I reconnected with some old friends, finally ate some V. Richards bread (A staple of my B'ham days which I've been pining for ever since leaving) and discovered a groovy bar, the Red Lion Lounge, a year too late to hang there regularly. Red Lion is a good quiet bar for sitting outside with a cluster of chums, or going inside to watch a fourtysomething guy in a suit chat up a goth Gen X'er ("See, I'm the last of a dying breed...")
(sidenote: there was an apartment complex near my old digs which was full of Latin American folks. Every weekend you could walk by and hear guys speaking spanish and playing Reggaetone as they worked on their custom-painted trucks. Then, one weekend, they were GONE. All of them. The building became an exhibit on the theme of broken windows and enigmatic grafitti; I was tempted to explore it but was afraid of antsy squatters. Now the building is also GONE, replaced by a tan grassy hillside.)
Driving through small towns in Texas. My notions about modern Texas have been shaped by the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, Joe Bob Briggs, and the novel Stinger by B'ham native Robert McCammon, in which aliens invade a dying Texas town. I'm happy to report that Texas lived up to my pulpy hopes... rusty trailers, shirtless country folk with sun-browned muscles, odd jury-rigged diners...
Seeing Professor Cox again. He's about to spend a year in China on a Fulbright grant, which is more that I can say, so it was our last chance to catch him.
Another interesting and mysterious sighting: a dilapidated, closed rest stop in Louisiana. I believe it's one I stopped at back in the Nineties: it stank from the moment we got out of the car, and was full of bums demanding money. The march of the moaning bums was reminiscent of a George Romero movie. Now Louisiana's rest stop is clean and bum-free. Except when I show up.
Friday, July 03, 2009
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Boogedy
I'm reading old spooky stories from The Horror Hall of Fame, Edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg.
Green Tea by Sheridan Le Fanu is as refreshing as its titular beverage because it forces this MTV Generation reader to downshift his kinetic forward-thrusting narrative expectations. The basic plot could be squeezed into a story half its length with room left over for The Cask of Amontillado, but Le Fanu wants to ground his story in the real world or something, so we get, for example, a step-by-step account of how a servant looked in on his master every hour on the hour. Some narrative compression could have whittled such sequences down, but that ain't Le Fanu's way. Check out Kevin Huizenga's witty but faithful comic book retelling in his collection Curses.
The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce is the evident inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft's semi-famous story The Dunwich Horror. Both involve huge invisible monsters; Bierce never reveals what it is, where it came from, or what ultimately comes of it, while Lovecraft gives us an origin story, a monster-slaying, all that. I am fond of Dunwich, but I have to give The Damned Thing the edge. For one thing Bierce is a better writer. Plus, the ultimate message of Damned Thing as I read it is "There is something that's going to kill you, and you can't see it coming." That's true, so that's scary. While Lovecraft tells us "There's something that's going to kill you, and it is the spawn of occult miscegenation." Are you scared of occult race-mixing? Cuz I'm not.
The Yellow Sign by Robert W. Chambers was an influence on Lovecraft (The book-within-a-book The King in Yellow is a precursor of The Necronomicon, as well as the videotape in The Ring) but I find Chambers more fun to read. He's actually interested in people, and he understood one thing better than silly old Poe: a creepy story doesn't have to be creepy every step of the way. A story with charming, witty and likable characters can be all the creepier since the reader is more likely to take a rooting interest in their not getting overtaken by horrid occult forces.
Green Tea by Sheridan Le Fanu is as refreshing as its titular beverage because it forces this MTV Generation reader to downshift his kinetic forward-thrusting narrative expectations. The basic plot could be squeezed into a story half its length with room left over for The Cask of Amontillado, but Le Fanu wants to ground his story in the real world or something, so we get, for example, a step-by-step account of how a servant looked in on his master every hour on the hour. Some narrative compression could have whittled such sequences down, but that ain't Le Fanu's way. Check out Kevin Huizenga's witty but faithful comic book retelling in his collection Curses.
The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce is the evident inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft's semi-famous story The Dunwich Horror. Both involve huge invisible monsters; Bierce never reveals what it is, where it came from, or what ultimately comes of it, while Lovecraft gives us an origin story, a monster-slaying, all that. I am fond of Dunwich, but I have to give The Damned Thing the edge. For one thing Bierce is a better writer. Plus, the ultimate message of Damned Thing as I read it is "There is something that's going to kill you, and you can't see it coming." That's true, so that's scary. While Lovecraft tells us "There's something that's going to kill you, and it is the spawn of occult miscegenation." Are you scared of occult race-mixing? Cuz I'm not.
The Yellow Sign by Robert W. Chambers was an influence on Lovecraft (The book-within-a-book The King in Yellow is a precursor of The Necronomicon, as well as the videotape in The Ring) but I find Chambers more fun to read. He's actually interested in people, and he understood one thing better than silly old Poe: a creepy story doesn't have to be creepy every step of the way. A story with charming, witty and likable characters can be all the creepier since the reader is more likely to take a rooting interest in their not getting overtaken by horrid occult forces.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Revising some previous.
I was a bit off the mark in my post about Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising series yesterday. What's really driving those books seems to be an interest in structures of mythic meaning interweaving with modern life, and while the forms of adventure narrative are there, the stories come across more like rhapsodically descriptive poetry than like storytelling.
For example (spoiler warning) IIRC in The Dark is Rising Will receives an antlered carnival mask for a Christmas gift. It comes from a brother who's stationed overseas, and the mask has a backstory about how it was a gift from a mysterious guy with mysterious knowledge about Will. Later in the story there's a flood as the evil forces of The Dark mount their final attack; Will spots the mask being carried downstream in the floodwater. Soon he travels to a park where Herne the Hunter lives; Will hopes to rouse Herne, who has the power to drive the Dark away. A human figure lurks nearby... the mask sweeps by on the current, the figure grabs and dons the mask... behold! The figure with the mask is Herne the Hunter, and he saves the day. A carnival mask and an English legend are broguht together, with a little help from family ties, Christmas traditions and the Thames flooding.
Note that Will didn't have to do anything to bring about the sequence of events. He receives the mask, and he observes the later events, but he's rarely an Active Protagonist. Cooper doesn't really construct narratives around heroic deeds or cunning problem solving; she constructs them around the interplay of modern life and the web of mythology and imagination that gives resonance to life, at least for Cooper. It's kind of like a Pirates of the Caribbean style ride, where threats loom but the point isn't the challenge of surviving the threats; there is no real challenge. The point is to enjoy the spectacle of the imaginative construction someone has prepared for you.
This drives some people nuts, and in interviews the screenwriter of the Dark is Rising film huffed and puffed about the importance of rejiggering the story to make Will an Active Protagonist. Ah, me.
* * *
Just to be fair to my new town:
someone thinks it's on the right track.
For example (spoiler warning) IIRC in The Dark is Rising Will receives an antlered carnival mask for a Christmas gift. It comes from a brother who's stationed overseas, and the mask has a backstory about how it was a gift from a mysterious guy with mysterious knowledge about Will. Later in the story there's a flood as the evil forces of The Dark mount their final attack; Will spots the mask being carried downstream in the floodwater. Soon he travels to a park where Herne the Hunter lives; Will hopes to rouse Herne, who has the power to drive the Dark away. A human figure lurks nearby... the mask sweeps by on the current, the figure grabs and dons the mask... behold! The figure with the mask is Herne the Hunter, and he saves the day. A carnival mask and an English legend are broguht together, with a little help from family ties, Christmas traditions and the Thames flooding.
Note that Will didn't have to do anything to bring about the sequence of events. He receives the mask, and he observes the later events, but he's rarely an Active Protagonist. Cooper doesn't really construct narratives around heroic deeds or cunning problem solving; she constructs them around the interplay of modern life and the web of mythology and imagination that gives resonance to life, at least for Cooper. It's kind of like a Pirates of the Caribbean style ride, where threats loom but the point isn't the challenge of surviving the threats; there is no real challenge. The point is to enjoy the spectacle of the imaginative construction someone has prepared for you.
This drives some people nuts, and in interviews the screenwriter of the Dark is Rising film huffed and puffed about the importance of rejiggering the story to make Will an Active Protagonist. Ah, me.
* * *
Just to be fair to my new town:
someone thinks it's on the right track.
Monday, June 08, 2009
An Act of Will
I'm reading The Grey King by Susan Cooper. It's the fourth in The Dark Is Rising series. What I find continually fascinating about these books is that Will, the young protagonist, never has to solve any problems. He's an Old One, one of several folks who just happen to have awesome mystical power and significance, and while he has plenty of problems he never really has to figure out a solution. Either his fellow Old Ones show up and fix things or he manages to reach down deep into his Old-Oneness and intuitively whip out an unstoppable solution to whatever's confronting him.
In most hands this would make for a ludicrous Mary Sue story, but for Susan Cooper it's thematically justified. Will is simply of a better spiritual class, and you know how Brits are with class consciousness. It would be rude of the universe to do more than tease an Old One. Will's apparent problems are simply a kind of roughhousing on existence's part; perhaps goodnatured, perhaps resentful, but always destined to back off upon a gentle well-bred rebuke (in the form of an ancient incantation, the kind Will can pull out of his pocket at will, so to speak).
In most hands this would make for a ludicrous Mary Sue story, but for Susan Cooper it's thematically justified. Will is simply of a better spiritual class, and you know how Brits are with class consciousness. It would be rude of the universe to do more than tease an Old One. Will's apparent problems are simply a kind of roughhousing on existence's part; perhaps goodnatured, perhaps resentful, but always destined to back off upon a gentle well-bred rebuke (in the form of an ancient incantation, the kind Will can pull out of his pocket at will, so to speak).
Friday, June 05, 2009
The Shadow Over Kannapolis
Some of my readers may wonder what the real spirit of my new town is like. It's like this.
Sadly freelance wife-rapist is the only employment available right now in this town (Oh boy, am I gonna get a lot of unwanted search engine hits over that). Per a TV report, the alleged rapist is black; the husband who hired the rapist is white. Think about that. Exactly what narrative was the husband trying to stage manage?
It's been said that fetishes are often the eroticization of the worst thing you can image happening to you. For some guys that could mean having one's wife raped. For some it could mean having one's wife raped by a black man. Racists are often equally repelled and fascinated by miscegenation (check out H. P. Lovecraft's story The Shadow over Innsmouth for an interesting horror-story example of this); could the recent election of a mixed-race President have indirectly inspired this crime? Is it the acting out of a Birth of a Nation notion about white men losing their position to black men? I've posted before about local honkeys getting upset about how a black man got a prominent job that has traditionally gone to white men. Some fume; others fetishize.
BTW according to some reports the police aren't sure the alleged rapist knew this was an actual rape: his ad suggested he was looking for a consensual fantasy role-play... "All limits will be respected." Some folks (Not me, ugh) get into acting out such extreme things, but here's a tip for aspiring pretend-rapists: make sure you've thoroughly talked it over with the pretend-victim beforehand, not just with her greasy hillbilly hub who keeps calling you "boy".
Speaking of stage-managing horrid fantasies, the husband was unknowingly staging one of my deep-seated (though non-erotic) fantasies: "the Horrible Hillbilly." Look, I rode the school bus with some country boys who innocently breached my comfort zone, and while I understand the problem was my youthful comfort zone rather than anything to do with them, I still have a lingering fixation on creepy white trash. I know what to do about it: watch Texas Chainsaw again. Not treat anyone badly, and not hurt anyone. Keep the fantasy on the level of fantasy. Trying to play out fantasies in a literalized and hurtful way reveals a depressing poverty of imagination.
Obviously there's a lot to be said about what this case suggests about gender relations and such, but I don't feel up to it.
Sadly freelance wife-rapist is the only employment available right now in this town (Oh boy, am I gonna get a lot of unwanted search engine hits over that). Per a TV report, the alleged rapist is black; the husband who hired the rapist is white. Think about that. Exactly what narrative was the husband trying to stage manage?
It's been said that fetishes are often the eroticization of the worst thing you can image happening to you. For some guys that could mean having one's wife raped. For some it could mean having one's wife raped by a black man. Racists are often equally repelled and fascinated by miscegenation (check out H. P. Lovecraft's story The Shadow over Innsmouth for an interesting horror-story example of this); could the recent election of a mixed-race President have indirectly inspired this crime? Is it the acting out of a Birth of a Nation notion about white men losing their position to black men? I've posted before about local honkeys getting upset about how a black man got a prominent job that has traditionally gone to white men. Some fume; others fetishize.
BTW according to some reports the police aren't sure the alleged rapist knew this was an actual rape: his ad suggested he was looking for a consensual fantasy role-play... "All limits will be respected." Some folks (Not me, ugh) get into acting out such extreme things, but here's a tip for aspiring pretend-rapists: make sure you've thoroughly talked it over with the pretend-victim beforehand, not just with her greasy hillbilly hub who keeps calling you "boy".
Speaking of stage-managing horrid fantasies, the husband was unknowingly staging one of my deep-seated (though non-erotic) fantasies: "the Horrible Hillbilly." Look, I rode the school bus with some country boys who innocently breached my comfort zone, and while I understand the problem was my youthful comfort zone rather than anything to do with them, I still have a lingering fixation on creepy white trash. I know what to do about it: watch Texas Chainsaw again. Not treat anyone badly, and not hurt anyone. Keep the fantasy on the level of fantasy. Trying to play out fantasies in a literalized and hurtful way reveals a depressing poverty of imagination.
Obviously there's a lot to be said about what this case suggests about gender relations and such, but I don't feel up to it.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Link by Link
Please note the new links: Free Music Archive (Free legal music downloads; I like Double Helix) and And Now The Screaming Starts (Horror thinkpieces, and some amusing videos).
Horror
California just turned into Utah.
And Dick "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction" Cheney seems to be enjoying a resurgence.
It's interesting, though, that these two areas in which Cons are finding traction are both related to fear and/or loathing.
Lefty that I am, I think an intellectually and morally vibrant Conservatism is important to our country, so I'm not rooting for Conservatism to go down this fear and loathing road. I sure hope they've got some more positive stuff on the shelf! Let's check in at The American Spectator, a Conservative periodical.
A fellow named Robert Stacy McCain writes:
"Any time a liberal starts jumping up and down and yelling about a "scandal" affecting a conservative, remember this reply: 'Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.'"
Chappaquiddick jokes. In 2009. That's the way forward, folks.
(Admittedly I'm going for a straw man instead of, say, closely reading rebuildtheparty.com. I wish Cons well, but by "well" I mean that they become positive players in the future, not power players for negativity and fear.)
* * *
Speaking of Cheney, I saw a horror movie the other night called Wendigo. It's the kind of thing I wish Tobe Hooper was doing; a blend of artfulness and grittiness. It's not flawless; there's a bit in which a wise Indian gives the child protagonist some Ancient Indian Wisdom, which is okay except Only The Boy Can See The Indian. That's a bit of unnecessary musty tweeness. And the film relies a bit too much on our being scared of hunters because they're hunters, and hunters are assumed to be inherently scary. I'm not a hunter myself, but I've known many, many hunters, and they're not scary per se. Maybe Director Fessenden finds them disturbing, but he doesn't sell me on his story's hunters being all that sinister at the outset. Compare to Texas Chainsaw, which DOES sell me on hillbillies being scary, despite my hillbilly-rich background. I know hillbillies are only scary on a case-by-case basis, but these movie hillbillies are specifically scary.
Other than these quibbles, the movie's dope. Lovely camerawork, and the married couple at the center of the film seem really authentic and closely observed. The expressionistic and blatantly artificial spook-show ending put some critics (like Ebert) off, but I like expressionistic, low-fi, stagecrafty artifice in fantasy films.
Anyhow, one thing I've been interested in lately is the way good horror movies, even supernatural ones, often bring the horror back to humanity. In Wendigo the Wendigo isn't the Big Bad: it's the Spirit World's Sword of Justice, coming to get the Big Bad, who's just a mean hick. In Zombie movies, like Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, the Zombies are the initial problem, but the deeper problems are caused by humans disagreeing and squabbling for survival in the face of the zombie problem. In Hellraiser the supernatural monsters are only a deadly Deus Ex Machina, and the transformed human Frank is the main villain. In Alien, The Company, which puts profit ahead of human life, is a more contemptible villain than the deadly alien itself. Even in my beloved Texas Chainsaw Massacre there's a variation on this theme, as Sally flees from the crazed hillbilly killer to the comforting arms of the nice man at the barbeque place... only to find that he's part of the same Sawney Beane-style clan.
I'm pretty bad at plot analysis, but after a while even I get it: there's no problem so terrible that one's fellow human beings can't make it worse. In counterpoint, each of these films includes fellow humans who provide aid and comfort to the good guys/gals, so these aren't nihilistic misanthropic stories. I don't have any finer-grained insights, but the insights horror films offer into problems like Iraq and Afghanistan continue to intrigue me.
And Dick "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction" Cheney seems to be enjoying a resurgence.
It's interesting, though, that these two areas in which Cons are finding traction are both related to fear and/or loathing.
Lefty that I am, I think an intellectually and morally vibrant Conservatism is important to our country, so I'm not rooting for Conservatism to go down this fear and loathing road. I sure hope they've got some more positive stuff on the shelf! Let's check in at The American Spectator, a Conservative periodical.
A fellow named Robert Stacy McCain writes:
"Any time a liberal starts jumping up and down and yelling about a "scandal" affecting a conservative, remember this reply: 'Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.'"
Chappaquiddick jokes. In 2009. That's the way forward, folks.
(Admittedly I'm going for a straw man instead of, say, closely reading rebuildtheparty.com. I wish Cons well, but by "well" I mean that they become positive players in the future, not power players for negativity and fear.)
* * *
Speaking of Cheney, I saw a horror movie the other night called Wendigo. It's the kind of thing I wish Tobe Hooper was doing; a blend of artfulness and grittiness. It's not flawless; there's a bit in which a wise Indian gives the child protagonist some Ancient Indian Wisdom, which is okay except Only The Boy Can See The Indian. That's a bit of unnecessary musty tweeness. And the film relies a bit too much on our being scared of hunters because they're hunters, and hunters are assumed to be inherently scary. I'm not a hunter myself, but I've known many, many hunters, and they're not scary per se. Maybe Director Fessenden finds them disturbing, but he doesn't sell me on his story's hunters being all that sinister at the outset. Compare to Texas Chainsaw, which DOES sell me on hillbillies being scary, despite my hillbilly-rich background. I know hillbillies are only scary on a case-by-case basis, but these movie hillbillies are specifically scary.
Other than these quibbles, the movie's dope. Lovely camerawork, and the married couple at the center of the film seem really authentic and closely observed. The expressionistic and blatantly artificial spook-show ending put some critics (like Ebert) off, but I like expressionistic, low-fi, stagecrafty artifice in fantasy films.
Anyhow, one thing I've been interested in lately is the way good horror movies, even supernatural ones, often bring the horror back to humanity. In Wendigo the Wendigo isn't the Big Bad: it's the Spirit World's Sword of Justice, coming to get the Big Bad, who's just a mean hick. In Zombie movies, like Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, the Zombies are the initial problem, but the deeper problems are caused by humans disagreeing and squabbling for survival in the face of the zombie problem. In Hellraiser the supernatural monsters are only a deadly Deus Ex Machina, and the transformed human Frank is the main villain. In Alien, The Company, which puts profit ahead of human life, is a more contemptible villain than the deadly alien itself. Even in my beloved Texas Chainsaw Massacre there's a variation on this theme, as Sally flees from the crazed hillbilly killer to the comforting arms of the nice man at the barbeque place... only to find that he's part of the same Sawney Beane-style clan.
I'm pretty bad at plot analysis, but after a while even I get it: there's no problem so terrible that one's fellow human beings can't make it worse. In counterpoint, each of these films includes fellow humans who provide aid and comfort to the good guys/gals, so these aren't nihilistic misanthropic stories. I don't have any finer-grained insights, but the insights horror films offer into problems like Iraq and Afghanistan continue to intrigue me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)