She Who Lurks By Day

On destroying a boogeyman

2013-05-14T23:59:36Z

I dunno, maybe everybody knows about this by now? I certainly didn't, and it's knocking me for a loop. In a good way.

Angelina Jolie discusses cancer and her personal choices; an NPR commentary on Jolie's op-ed piece.

There's a high incidence of cancer among the women on both sides of my family. On the plus side, lots of them lived through a mastectomy, ovarian cancer operation, major skin cancer removal, or what have you, and got on with their lives for another thirty to fifty years, so I don't feel doomed. On the other hand, I've resigned myself to the fact that I probably won't make it through an average lifespan with all my body parts.

I remember that when I was a child, the world was noticeably different: cancer was shameful. If you asked a woman why she'd been in the hospital, there'd be gasps and harrumphs and people snapping at you and pushing their opened hands towards your mouth like they wanted to gag you. Cancer was the boogeyman, even more so than today. There was a superstitious dread: if you talk about it, it will get you. People were one step away from equating it with AIDS or syphilis and thinking that it could be contagious if you talked about it too loudly. No one acknowledged any of these things, but it was written all over human behavior. And I'm not talking about some isolated hicksville town--in hospitals, in the city, in the country, among strangers or family, everybody who had to discuss cancer in any way got an embarrassed and shifty look as though they thought a saber-toothed tiger was coming to get them.

All that still happens, just less frequently. If you drag a bugbear out into the sunlight and take a good look, it's much less scary. Angelina Jolie, of all goddamn people, is helping to make people less scared and ashamed, and using her powers for good.

Don't expect it to tango

2013-05-13T00:38:45Z

Signal boost: to benefit the One Fund, there will be a screening of HERBERT WEST: REANIMATOR at the Somerville Theatre on Wednesday, May 15, at 7:30 p.m.

*ahem* GODDAMN REANIMATOR ON THE BIG SCREEN, Y'ALL, LET'S DO THIS *ahem*

Just back from three excellent days at a LARP in the Connecticut woods with purplegryphon, so I may still be slightly over-the-top. I owe everybody comments and replies and I love you all.

And featuring Viggo Mortensen as Basement Cat!

2013-05-07T05:36:56Z

Life's intense (the life of a Repo Man is always intense) so it's that time again. SILLY FILM REVIEWS GO.

So I watched The Prophecy at last.

--Grungy angels! Yes! You make me so happy, morally grey angels slouching around in Matrix-coats with tattoos and bloody wounds! rushthatspeaks has spoken of having a fascination with blind angels. This taught me I'm interested in dirty angels. Broken ones, morally strange ones, ambiguous and menacing angels. Warrior angels, soldiers, tools of God in every possible sense of the word "tool". Bring them on: any recommendations are welcome. (Sadly, Angels with Dirty Faces isn't literal. But then I was also disappointed by Of Human Bondage.) This was a big part of what hooked me on the Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis all those years ago. The planets' tutelary spirits are angels as well as gods for all intents and purposes, and when one of them arrives as a messenger it scares the bejesus out of fictionalized C.S. Lewis. He's filled with the dread that comes from knowing these things are alien and unknowable and frightening, and yet also on our side. You expect the demons and forces of evil to be fearsome, but if the Big Good is all the more dreadful, where are you going to run to? (All on that day.)

--My obsession with angels is not something I discuss much in person, because I don't want to give strangers the wrong idea about me. People who are prone to premature conclusions already tend to assume I'm a Christian fundamentalist. I have really long hair, "Duggar hair" as the_termagant once said, and this is enough to make people invent a whole Evangelical background for me. In fact I was raised as a very smug atheist and I just like long hair. Once I made the mistake of telling a new acquaintance that I liked stories about angels, and she gave me this revolted look like I was a messed-up Jehovah's Witness in a polyester frock and had just forced a pamphlet into her hands. We never did become friends. Annoying as evangelists can be, quite as obnoxious are some of my fellow heathen.

--My heart belongs to Christopher Walken. At least, he has a timeshare in my heart along with a dozen other strange-looking dudes with piercing eyes and unusual voices. Character actors are the best. More than that: Walken, beyond any other actor, makes me think, "This person is humanoid in general outline, yet not human by a long chalk." I've liked him since Sleepy Hollow. (Itself a nonstop feast of cool old character actors. I love you, Richard Griffiths!) Ray Park, the stuntman who played most of the Headless Horseman, was one of the best parts of the movie, and Walken as the Hessian Formerly Known As Headless was the other best part. All this despite having two minutes of screen time and only one line ("YAAAARRRRGHHH!"). Also see: this video from about 6:50 onward, for the drive-through sequence. Don't ask, just watch it. Also I understand he was in quite a good adaptation of The Dead Zone, which I need to track down. (Really far back in the day, he looked like a cross between leather-pants Draco Malfoy and one of the Children of the Damned. You're welcome.)

--So Walken as the Archangel Gabriel is an odd creation: he's an anti-vampire.In a lotta ways this is a vampire movie turned inside out and ironed. You got these human-shaped entities with strangely empowered bodies and ambiguous sexuality. They have human slaves. They have a constant running commentary of meta-jokes that we, the audience, get, but the human characters don't. Vampires are always referring to drinking, blood, teeth, life. Angels play more blatant games: see, for example, the little kid blowing Gabriel's horn so loudly that glass shatters. And they're so powerful that your only hope is to cut a deal with one of them to fight against the others (see also: Spike vs. Angel and Drusilla). The difference is marked in massive self-righteousness. Dracula seems to know he's an old monster. Gabriel is an angel, almost by definition smug and insufferably convinced of his own virtues. But they both have the same ego that lets them conclude It's OK for me to slaughter these humans, because I can, therefore who would even hesitate? Vampires can't function well by day. Angels in The Prophecy don't seem to work at night. They just perch like vultures staring at your window. Finally, you can use all kinds of Christian symbols against a vampire as though they were Kryptonite, without regard for their greater meaning, and if you hide in a church you're usually safe. Angels, OTOH, are part and parcel of that same set of symbols, and lap it up, and can barge in absolutely anywhere uninvited. Your only hope is the Devil and blasphemy.

--In that vein (SEE WAT I DID THAR?) there is, in this film, a guy named Jerry. He is to Gabriel as Renfield is to Dracula. We first meet Jerry cringing in his room, surrounded by ugly porn and leftover food crawling with vermin, and he is so obviously the Renfield of the piece that I expected him to start eating maggots for the hell of it. Gabriel is keeping him alive on the verge of death (hanging himself? an accidental overdose?) so that Jerry is aligned with those decrepit, suffering characters in Greek myth who can't die but can't recover. One of the minor victories of the story comes when Jerry manages to get himself shot full of holes and re-killed by the good guys. He gives his killer a rather sweet smile, croaks out, "Thanks, buddy, you're a sport," and bites it for the last time. Gabriel goes around for most of the film in an old-fashioned black coat, white shirt, black pants and heavy boots. (A sharp-dressed man.) The ultimate evil minister, worse than Robert Mitchum as the knuckle tattoo guy. He's such a right-to-lifer that you will never be permitted death on any terms but his. Even more disturbing than Jerry's sorry existence is the fact that when Gabriel needs a new lackey/driver to listen to him expound, he invades the nearest hospital and grabs someone else on the verge of death. There is no reason he wouldn't keep doing this over and over, so he's probably been at it throughout history. " 'Deteriorating, critical'! My FAAAvorite!" he cries, bounding into the hospice care wing. And then he hauls this poor jerk of a woman back to life as she's about to die peacefully in bed, and she has to get up and drive him around, and she's crying and broken and dressed only in a hospital johnny, and Gabriel alternately bullies her ("I can make this last forever") and comforts her as he would a child. This, more than anything else, gave me the sense of alienation: your good is so far from my good that you can steamroller me and still feel good about yourself afterwards.

--Speaking of good, there was Simon, the angel with the incongruous human name. There's no angel called "Simon" in any tradition that I know. Was there some reason the writers wouldn't make him Michael or Raphael or invent another angel-name? The -el part of angels' names means "God" or "of God," as my mother explained to me when I was small. I felt very clever for knowing that. Gabriel = "strong man of God" or "God is my strength." Anyway, I just thought of Simon as the Copper Angel. You can tell he's the nice angel because he's so goddamned pretty. It's those big eyes; he's like a spaniel puppy with a mortal wound. Waitaminute, he was the douchey heroin dealer from Pulp Fiction? I reject your unwholesome revelation, and let us never speak of this again.

--So we like the Copper Angel because he has a nice face, because he presents himself as a conflicted do-gooder, and because he has a tough time. He has to kill another humanoid angel and gets hurt in the process, so he walks around putting pressure on his chest wound for the rest of his short earthly life. He has to go find the dead body of a Korean War veteran and give the body a French kiss to extract its soul, because reasons. Afterwards he looks about as sick as you or I would, and he limps off like a woobie and spends the night hiding in the disused wing of the local grade school. And then a little girl appears (Moriah Shining Dove Snyder: 99.44% less annoying than most child actors) and the Copper Angel... starts flirting with her. Not even in a menacing way--he's all big appealing eyes and gentle smiles, and you can see why a kid would instinctively trust him--but this was where I started saying, "No! Don't you dare! Oh shit, no!" to the screen. Yeah. They went there. The Copper Angel uses the little girl as a host for the disembodied soul. That's right: Gabriel and company all show up looking for the soul, so Copper Angel hides it by... kissing it into the mouth of a twelve-year-old girl. Who has no idea what he's doing to her and is scared and sickened. It looks exactly as pedophilic as you'd imagine. Then she spends the rest of the movie under, basically, demon possession, because Copper thought she would make a good hiding-place. You couldn't even pick on someone your own size, Copper Angel? Screw you and all your works!

--On a brighter note, slash is everywhere. Angels are hermaphroditic. Supposedly they can't or don't have sex ("impotent and frigid"), but I'm pretty sure that's hooey. Judging by their body language every one of them has jumped into a big fluffy cloud with at least one of the others. Copper Angel blows campy little kisses to his enemies and friends alike. Lucifer is the king of bad touch and says hello by appearing behind humans and cuddling them. And Gabriel and Copper Angel evidently have A History. Just before Gabriel destroys Copper, they whisper together and Copper touches Gabriel's face and speaks gently; Gabriel kisses the palm of his hand. I'm surprised this ship doesn't have an army of fangirls and a set of fics on AO3 (well, there are a few).

--Everybody who's ever enthused about Viggo Mortensen as Lucifer: you were right. He really is all that, down to the last burst of crows.

--There's more, but I gotta sleep sometime. See you in the morrow lands.

Liar, liar, with your pants on fire, drink a little poison fore you die

2013-04-17T05:59:33Z

From his brimstone bed at break of day,
A walking the Devil is gone,
To visit his snug little farm the earth,
And see how his stock goes on.
Over the hill and over the dale,
And he went over the plain,
And backward and forward he switched his long tail
As a gentleman switches a cane.

I watched Angel Heart the other week with Kestrell and Alexx. It's taken me this long to write about it, because I want the entry where I discuss it to be crafted of pure awesome. Then I thought, screw it, better a lopsided gushing entry than none at all. So, Angel Heart. It has great, gross, dirty noir-ness, private detection with its cliches explored, a fetish for the Fifties and for electric window fans and screen-sided elevators (damn, does this movie love elevators), filthy New York City streets and back alleys, moldy New Orleans hotels, lots of horrible deaths, several awesome musical numbers that feed right back into the plot, guns, drugs, sex, violence, nightmare sequences that actually have the internal logic and anxiety of real nightmares, and Mickey Rourke back when he looked young and vulnerable. Also, crucially, it has Robert De Niro overunderacting. SPOILER which isn't really a spoiler for anyone who read the title and sought out the film in the first place: this film has Robert De Niro as the Devil, and he is great. With only a twinkly-eyed little smile, he does more than other actors could achieve in an hour of maniacal yelling. (I'm contrasting his performance with Al Pacino's as, er, the devil in The Devil's Advocate, which is like the hilariously stupid cousin of Angel Heart.)

Have I mentioned I love deal-with-the-Devil stories? Well, I do. And I love the Devil as a character--have done, ever since I read The Devil's Storybook and The Devil's Other Storybook by Natalie Babbitt as a small child. The Devil there is a winsome, childish, venial fellow, with curly hair and a long whippy tail, and he's not that bad a guy. He just likes screwing with people and causing low-grade trouble and strife. Half the time he's not even the villain, just the authority who has to teach obnoxious humans a lesson. When he sets himself to really cause trouble, he wins about half the time. This is a good success rate for the Devil, I've found. The whole point of folktales about humans pitting themselves against the Devil is for the plucky human to beat the big guy. Think The Devil and Daniel Webster, and Devil's Donkey, another kids' book I loved, and any number of stories where a human puts down his soul as a poker chip in a bet with Satan. It's reassuring. The Devil isn't even a trickster or deceiver all that often. Humanity is the wily little rogue who can wriggle out of any tight spot, and the Devil is the dumbass brute who walks right into a double bind.

Angel Heart is the horrible flip side of all these Devil folktales. The chief humans concerned look pretty awful, even in comparison with the hosts of Hell. There is no hope anywhere and you can't trust anyone. Except Satan. This film veers into the territory that I enjoy exploring, where Satan is God's hangman, an instrument of justice. In this interpretation, Satan is "the Adversary" only because that's his job, to tempt and test humanity and to punish people who break God's laws. That's how I used to think of the Devil when I was a heathen small child, and I like knowing it's occurred to other people over the centuries. There's a quote from Good Omens where Crowley reflects: "Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind." Not that the Devil has to hate his job. Angel Heart is full of Satanists and crooked ministers, all slimy and all headed for the circle of hell reserved for hypocrites, and the Devil just loves them. The voodoo practitioners, by contrast, have refreshingly direct needs (cathartic music and dancing, loa-sexy times) and they look especially good in contrast to believers in the Christian pantheon.

Such deep thoughts. Now it's time for a

LUST-IN

This may only tangentially relate to the film.

Damn, but Mickey Rourke was a pretty young man. I'm a huge fan of gnarly middle-aged Mickey Rourke who looks like he's been using his face to drive tent stakes, mind you, and I wouldn't have Whiplash any other way. (It's the copper teeth. It's an edge look, but he totally pulls it off. If he caps his lower incisors with zinc, he can fuel his power armor by biting into limes!) But I had no idea he used to be a bishonen till I saw Angel Heart. This album cover for the movie soundtrack: making a silly kissy-face as he smokes. He looks goofy, flirtatious and shy, all at once. For that matter, I'd had no idea Robert De Niro could be seductive. Up to now I'd only seen him as an old guy, kind of like Jack Nicholson: this actor who plays a lot of angry old shouty dudes, and who mysteriously has a reputation as a sex god among people who came to like him in his prime. Well, I see it now. It doesn't even come across that well in still photos; you have to be there. I like this series of stills of Louis Cyphre and Harry Angel slouching together at the foot of a staircase, looking shifty and avoiding touching each other even though they're three inches apart. Together, they look like a forgotten classic: The Forbidden Love of Al Capone and Dutch Schultz. This one is more hierarchical, the wise fool at the feet of the demon king. Sadly, though there are a lot of naked women, these guys keep their clothes on most of the time. Harry Angel is a ~~living ganglion of irreconcilable antagonisms~~ bundle of contradictions. He's old and young at once: a shell-shocked veteran who flirts expertly with every woman he sees, but whenever things get bad he runs to his employer like a kid to his dad. He behaves like a lovable sex fiend, but even when he's in bed with a naked babe trying to undress him, he sits slumped with a thousand-yard stare and thinks about the bad old days.

[Damn, it's the middle of the night and I'm only just getting started. To be continued as soon as I have a chance]

END OF LUST-IN, FOR NOW

Why has not the barranfield been gone over a second time with the pruning snoot?

2013-04-11T05:19:26Z

Five-sentence book reviews. I've received masses of loaners and gift books lately from kestrell, alexx_kay, and lignota, for which much thanks.

Raising Stony Mayhall, Daryl Gregory. The Romero zombie movies were documentaries of an outbreak which ravaged the US in 1968. A Midwestern mother and daughters find an undead baby, and in their care he grows to adulthood. This is Stony Mayhall, the politest zombie ever and a Chosen One as far as the undead underworld is concerned. Every undead trope I've ever loved comes into play, especially "Undead characters learn to game the system and exploit their own rules." Frigging hilarious, touching, sarcastic about its own tragedy, and heartbreaking inside the irony inside the sadness inside the funny.

Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov. In a format retroactively familiar to fans of House of Leaves, one possibly fictional character has written a long and deeply personal poem, and another character who might be a figment of the first one's imagination has written endnotes that have nothing to do with the poem and everything to do with his own hangups. John Shade is a famed poet who sounds like late-career Robert Frost, and Charles Kinbote is an ambiguously foreign academic who latches onto Shade in a manner somewhere between a vampire and Annie Wilkes. Kinbote sounds like Humbert Humbert, with the same smarmy wordplay that makes me want to reach through the page and punch him. I wonder if Nabokov (a) was capable of writing in any other style, and (b) realized that audiences would equate him with these characters. Despite my misgivings, I did enjoy the comedy, but my favorite part of the book is Shade's poem.

All Heads Turn When The Hunt Goes By, John Parris. In 1942, a young soldier draws his sword and murders his bride at their wedding, then his father, and maims some bystanders before stabbing himself and leaping out the window. His brother, who narrated these gripping scenes, is shipped off to the Pacific theater of war to be further traumatized, and then we switch protagonists and the writing gets sloppy. Lessons taught by this book: every American of African descent knows all about voodoo and can spout exposition like a champ, Rappacini's Daughter just needs a good man to keep her out of trouble, snake-handling and voodoo are the same, bad people are kinky-to-repugnant in bed, good people have good sex, and even if evil isn't heritable it's contagious within a family like tuberculosis being passed by droplet infection. The beginning of this book set up vast expectations it could never satisfy, and the second half was a mass of progressively sillier loose ends. Speaking of loose ends, what the hell was up with the series of dead bodies turning up with their junk blown off?

Falling Angel, William Hjortsberg. Like the foregoing, a period piece, this one written in 1978 and set in 1950s Manhattan. Noir/religious horror where mysterious man of wealth and taste Louis Cyphre hires burnt-out war vet and detective Harry Angel to track down loathsome former celebrity Johnny Favorite. You or I would probably realize something was up in the first scene, where "McIntosh, Winesap, & Spy" are the lawyers for Mr. Cyphre, but Harry is a city boy. He gives good hard-boiled angst. The final set of horrible revelations explain just enough to make the story satisfying but not enough to insult our intelligence.

Come on, Mister Bubbles!

2013-03-08T23:21:27Z

I spent the day playing Bioshock 2 with my housemate, the Hemulen, guiding me through the learning process. I loved it. As I said on the Book of Face:

Snow day! My housemates have introduced me to Bioshock 2. In a drippy oozy
poorly-lit undersea city of Depression-era doom, I was a huge hulking
monster in a diving suit, lumbering around shooting strangers on sight
and helping the cutest little girl in the world drain the life-essence
out of bodies. If this is wrong, I don't want to be right.

The penny just dropped: alexx_kay worked on Bioshock. I'd never consciously taken that in till now, because I was Not A Gamer and never paid attention to that sort of thing. My hat is off to you, sir, it's a fantastic world and it may be enough to make a gamer out of me.

The Hemulen tried to introduce me to gaming with Lord of the Rings: The War in the North, which had witless sub-Tolkien dialogue and characters who all looked like wax mannequins. I think the Hemulen expected me to require a female character, but that option wasn't enough to attract me. With Bioshock, I'd never seen any other media in the franchise, so I had no expectations in any direction and was constantly surprised. Also, one of my favorite tropes ever, as many of you know, is A Girl And Her Monster. Imagine if Frankenstein's monster had teamed up with little Maria and they'd gone off to kill together, and also she was armed with a giant hypodermic and had glowing yellow eyes. That's Bioshock 2. The funny thing is that the Hemulen, guiding me, was a lot like a Little Sister. Some days you're the monster, other days you're the cute kid.

Fabulous photos: cosplayers as Big Daddy and Little Sister, inside an aquarium.

Uh, hindsight, as they say, is, is twenty-twenty

2013-03-07T06:17:07Z

Shit, that was disturbing. So so disturbing. I have a mind full of vampires, and this disturbed me. Go and be disturbed in turn. There isn't even any violence. All it is is a PowerPoint presentation with a prissy male voice talking into an echoing mike in a lecture hall. It lasts about forty minutes.

Fizerpharm: Taming Yesterday's Nightmares For A Better Tomorrow.

Recommended a few entries ago by alexx_kay, who obviously knows me by now, and I've been waiting for a free evening to watch it.

No lion shall him fright/ He'll with a giant fight

2013-03-04T07:10:35Z

Speaking of monster hunters, I've just watched the brilliant Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon with kestrell and alexx_kay. Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and their ilk were all real people, and this film follows Leslie, a rising young serial killer bent on his own career. He's a trained acrobat and sleight-of-hand artist, he does a lot of cardio so he can run his victims down while apparently strolling after them, he's a master manipulator, and he's expert with Photoshop and as agile as a lemur. (Trailer here.)

In the world of the professional murderer, you know you have arrived when you get your own Ahab. An Ahab is a force of good who opposes you, personally, and will hunt you down with no regard to personal welfare. The man devoted to stamping out Leslie and all his evil is Doc Halloran:

I believe I'm in love. (Who would have thought Robert Englund was cute? Not me, till now.)

Undead comedy, arms dealers, friendly pigeons, designated hero, burly detective, decapitated king

2013-03-04T06:02:51Z

I like rysmiel's style of many short book reviews in one post. Here, in an effort to be concise: books I've read in the last few months. Five reviewing sentences apiece. Under cuts out of courtesy; only minor spoilers.

Mogworld, Yahtzee Croshaw. Fantasy/satire where the NPCs in an online game that is certainly not World of Warcraft have become self-aware AI. Much black comedy with zombie protagonists (no wonder I like it), and the narrator is a decent trickster on occasion. In this as in the first Johannes Cabal book by Jonathan Howard, there's an annoying amount of intentionally-overwritten simile and metaphor, which is meant to be funny but which drops out of my mind like a badger off a billiard cue. Just because Douglas Adams did it doesn't mean you should too. Flawed but fun and occasionally moving.

Usher's Passing, Robert R. McCammon. Reread of a pulp-horror/supernatural thriller/Southern gothic/who the hell knows, which I encountered the first time as a young teen. It holds up wonderfully well in its batshit insanity. The Ushers of Poe fame were real people, and the current dynasty are Southern gentry who run a multibillion-dollar armaments business and suffer from a degenerative disease. Also there are cannibals, incestuous twins, telekinetics, Satanists, evil buildings, a black demon panther named Greediguts, and a murdering urban-legend called the Pumpkin Man, and at one point someone bites off someone else's tongue. Moral dissonance that I didn't notice last time: the narrative tells us that a minor villain is evil because he is the recruiting agent for "a freakshow," but on the other hand he beats his wife and holds her prisoner and no one in the story cares.

Wizard of the Pigeons, Megan Lindholm. A Vietnam vet currently called Wizard roams the streets of Seattle and battles evil in the form of criminals, human misery, and his own previous personality. Annoying inconsistencies between highfaluting fantasy-speak and plain-bread writing style get better as the book goes on. When it gets realistic it doesn't mess about, much like the last scenes of Life of Pi. The only book I can remember reading where the happy ending is for a character to return to his magical alternate personality and stay there; almost everywhere else the message has been, "Be a big boy and grow up and get used to facing the hard cold cruel world." A refreshing change of pace.

A Princess Of Roumania, Paul Park. Oh my god this was boring. The author has a cool secondary-world premise (we're the secondary world, made up by a witch in the Real World to hide the True Heir of the Kingdom) but throws it away on characters who bumble around with no motivation and a bloated style. The villain is the only intriguing character, and she wants to be Mrs. Coulter from His Dark Materials even though Mrs. Coulter is already Mrs. Coulter. The Chosen One lives in an unnamed WMass town, recognizable as Williamstown; this would be interesting if the Chosen One weren't a numbskull. Once they enter the Real World, the Chosen One's best female friend turns into a big dog, and her best male friend into a fighter with a giant Hellboy-style hand of power, and no one says much about either of these things.

Joe Golem and the Drowning City, Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden. Parts of Manhattan have been below water level for decades, but New Yorkers are dealing with this and with organized crime, tentacle monsters, mad scientists, evil trees, and humanoid eels. A clockwork cyborg who is most definitely not Sherlock Holmes with the serial numbers filed off, and a big stoic guy named Joe whose past is a mystery, help spunky teenager Molly McHugh track down her kidnapped mentor and defeat Not-Doctor-Moreau. I was tickled to see a hint that this takes place in the same reality as Baltimore, by the same authors. Baltimore is a tough act to follow, and Joe Golem is a lot simpler, its world less explored. Lots of pulp-action fun.

The Children of Llyr, Evangeline Walton. Retread of the branch of the Mabinogion where Branwen marries some godawful Irish guy. By far the most gruesome, tragic, and death-heavy story of the four branches: everyone in Ireland dies toward the end, except for the Welsh protagonists and a handful of Irish women who hid in a cave before the ~~nuclear holocaust~~ ~~zombie apocalypse~~ war for the Cauldron. Walton has developed a readable style, with beautiful and poetic turns of phrase but without too much "it is probable that" phrasing, or Duchess mode ("And the moral of that is..."). The redemptive moments from the original legend are explored and expanded without losing their otherworldliness. Manawyddan mab Llyr, the gentle, depressive, intelligent warrior-poet, is the author's favorite character, and mine as well.

Hobgoblin nor foul fiend shall daunt his spirit

2013-02-28T04:33:30Z

Monster hunters.

I want to assemble a list of characters who can be classified, however generally, as monster hunters. It is borne in upon me that there is a distinct type of hunter character who have begun to bear each other a lot of resemblance in modern pop culture. I want to describe it more thoroughly. Help me out here. Check out this list, see who I'm forgetting, find connections between the characters if you can.

I'm trying to describe rather than define; someone at Boskone, I forget who, quoted Samuel Delany on the subject and said that defining usually leads to a quagmire of it-isn't-this, it-isn't-that, drawing meaningless borders, whereas describing is more actively useful. (They said it better than that.)

Here's what I've got so far. Lots of help from this TV Tropes page: The Hunter.

Films and TV:
Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. Haven't seen this one.
Van Helsing (2004). Have seen this one. I loved every cheesy minute, and I'm a classic horror fan. Hating on this movie would be kind of like hating on Ghostbusters for its historical inaccuracy.
The Brothers Grimm. Enjoyed even though I realize it was stupid.
Blade, apparently. Haven't seen this series.
Brides of Dracula et sequii. Hammer films with Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. I'm devoted to him.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series and comics). Seen, loved.
Supernatural (TV series). Seen, couldn't really get into it, but get the general concept.
Sleepy Hollow (the Tim Burton film). Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane hits a lot of monster-hunter hot points; see below.
The Last Man on Earth (the Vincent Price movie; I know it's also a book which I haven't read). I loved the twist.
Ghostbusters. Duh, forgot this one.
Trollhunter (2010). The funniest monster-hunter movie I know.

Books and print media:
Baltimore; Or, the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire. (book and comics) Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden. I've raved about this one before. Sprawling, complex horror novel of nested stories. (Instead of the Spanish Influenza, the WWI-era world got a plague of vampires. One man will attempt to end it: a one-legged Englishman with a furious grudge and a harpoon.)
"The Dunwich Horror," by H.P. Lovecraft: Professor Armitage, plus Profs. Rice and Morgan, are the best-defined examples of monster hunters in Lovecraft, to my mind.
Classical mythology: Theseus. He's young and Chaotic Good, and he treks around Greece killing monsters. So does Hercules, come to think of it.
Dracula, Bram Stoker. Van Helsing (original flavor), plus Harker, Morris, Godalming, Mina Murray, and the whole slaying crew.
Any number of paranormal detective or paranormal romance characters. I don't read these genres much; who are the most clear-cut examples?
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. I haven't seen or watched.
Solomon Kane (series), Robert E. Howard. Apparently this is also a film now, but it never played in this part of the States, damn it. I've also read comics based on the books, which were a lot of cheesy fun.

A lot of common threads here. kestrell, alexx_kay and I discussed some of them the other day.

--A heritage. Last of a long line of monster-hunters, all descending from Moses or Alexander the Great or Thomas a Didymus or somebody cool in antiquity.
--It's Personal. The Zombie King killed the father of Arabella Leatherchick, Monster Slayer, and she has but one objective now.
--A badass coat and a personal arsenal. Astonishing numbers of these characters have fantastic outfits: a long leather or military coat is common, with hammerspace pockets or Bags of Holding or something inside the lining to hold a huge array of swords, guns, knives, throwing stars, etc. These hunters never go *clang* when they fall over, because they're too cool for that.
--A lair. Your savvy monster hunter knows she will need a bolt-hole with food, drink, weapons and a change of clothes. Lofts, forgotten cellars, the sealed platform at Scollay Square... when a noob has to take shelter there, he usually finds tragic family photos and gris-gris and body parts in jars, and Arabella Leatherchick notices him messing about just in time to shout, "Don't touch that, you fool!"
--A queasy, disturbing gray area between monster and hunter, usually with a token good monster and a scalding hot love affair with a friendly vampire. Ordinary humans might as well not exist, aside from being redshirts. Arabella finds it easy to forgive Count Joris von Blutzenkriemer for being a man-killing fiend, because he said sorry in a really sincere way and also he's a stud.
--Amnesia. Nightmares. Traumatic flashbacks. The notion that Arabella may actually be two sandwiches short of a picnic and the monsters aren't real. See also: Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow with his mommy issues, his recurring nightmares, his fainting, and his hand scars. Speaking of which:
--Scars and missing body parts. Because scars are hot, and also they're a fantastic shorthand for backstory and characterization. Give somebody three long claw marks down their face and you've got the audience asking questions which you can answer at your leisure.
--A good-natured Muggle sidekick, who unlike the monster hunter can have a sense of humor, and who is also totally ignorant and exists to be the audience surrogate and have things explained step by step. Though admittedly most fantasy contains at least one such character. A love interest, a spunky girl sidekick, an obnoxious reporter, a wide-eyed child.

That's all I got for the moment. Anyone else wanna throw in some characters or unifying factors?

Hey! Bonehead!

2013-02-26T05:48:47Z

So I just watched Ghost Rider with Nicholas Cage. This movie is better than it has any right to be, and I love it more than is seemly.

Random wonderful things:

--Have I mentioned that I love deal-with-the-Devil stories? I do. Here, the Devil--or maybe just a devil, we're not sure if this is generic Mephistopheles-equals-Satan thinking--strikes a bargain rather than conducting a direct sale. Johnny Blaze needs a Satanic favor as a teenager, and offers his soul; the contract actually states that he has to be the Devil's hitman whenever the Devil wants him. It transpires that if he can sort out one particularly nasty rival for the Devil, he'll get his soul back. Unusually smart thinking for the Devil, there. If I thought I was bound to Hell no matter what I did, then I'd just sit down and despair or end my life in debauched indulgence, but if I had some slight hope of getting my soul back, I'd work like a dog to do so. You get a lot more work out of your damnees if you let them turn into big badass fiery skeletons on motorcycles wielding chainflails, that's my motto.

--Nicholas Cage can even overact when his face is replaced with a CGI skull. He is the true heir of Vincent Price. I love him as Johnny Blaze because he does exactly the same thing I'd do in his position: pulls faces in a mirror trying to turn into a skeleton on purpose rather than by accident, wiggles his fingers trying to make flame shoot out, abuses his powers shamelessly just for fun.

--Skulls look cool. It's funny how my tastes have changed. When I was seven, I had a babysitter who liked Black Flag and had a poster on her bedroom door showing Breugel's "The Triumph of Death" with a battlefield covered in ambulatory corpses and skeletons, and Death on a pale horse leaping over the battle swinging his scythe. This picture terrified me so much I couldn't look at it. I used to walk past it with my hand up to the side of my face like a horse's blinker. Now, of course, I've lost all my squicks and think it's fabulous. Here it is.

--This film discusses but never quite articulates the odd thing about the Devil's role in Christianity: if you look at it from the right angle, the Devil is working directly for God by being the designated torturer and executioner of the judged. (Cf. Mr. Beaver referring to the White Witch as "the Emperor's hangman.") Note that this is mostly after-the-fact accreted Christian teaching, as there isn't actually a lot of emphasis on the Devil, Hell, or the afterlife in the New Testament, as I recall. The Devil here is also much like the Nome King, who fulfills the deal-with-Satan plot in Ozma of Oz. The Nome King is technically honest and fair. He made a deal with the King of Ev, who sold the Nome King his family as slaves in exchange for "a long life" but then felt so badly about it afterwards that he jumped into the sea and drowned himself. Dorothy says that it wasn't a fair deal as the King of Ev didn't get that long life after all, and the Nome King asks her if it would be his fault if he gave her a pretty doll and she smashed it to bits on a rock. Definite point. Yes, I go to Marvel comic-book movies and Oz books for thorny debates on theology, why do you ask?

--CREEPY CARNIVAL: check. The Devil walks down the midway and all the lightbulbs die as he passes by. So beautiful. Team Evil has the best possible fashion sense, with long flowing coats, androgynous eyeliner, and big black boots. The fact that you can see all the plot points in this movie coming ten miles away with your eyes shut doesn't detract from the fun in any way.

--The interview.
Goth girl: He was tall, broad shoulders, and thin, really thin, like bony. He had this rad chopper, it was all flames and stuff. Oh, and his face was a skull and it was on fire.
Interviewer: On fire?
Goth girl: Yeah, like... [indicates huge halo of flames] Like that much fire. And I know it sounds weird but it looked good on him. I mean, it was an edge look but he totally pulled it off.

--This movie needs a hard-bitten old mentor character to steady the good guys. Preferably someone who chews and spits tobacco and has a twinkle in his eye and a voice like an old blues singer YES thank you Caretaker is the boss of all cool old men. Why does he look so familiar, aside from the fact that I instantly want to adopt him as my grandpa? Oh. Yes. He was Lee Scoresby, the only decent part of that otherwise godforsaken Golden Compass movie.

--So Seneca Crane is also secretly the son of Satan. This explains so many things, like why his eyes are scary even in repose and he has a raging sense of entitlement.

--This movie hit most of the monster-centric horror tropes, even though I'd call it a Satanic superhero movie rather than straight-up monster horror. You've got your monstrous form based on a human body (because actors are humans), painful transformation, struggles for control over the transformation, shame, secrecy, hitting the scary occult books, id-tastic violent rampaging, and worrying that someone may find out you're a hellfiend. It even paid brief service to the monster-horror conversation where Monster Guy struggles to tell Trusted Person his shameful secret. You know the one. It always ends when Trusted Person decides that Monster Guy must be delusional or lying, and either walks away angry or tries to have him committed to an institution for his own safety or does something else well-meaning and horribly misguided. (Think of Sir John Talbot helpfully tying Larry to a chair and leaving him there to face the rising full moon.) Whenever I reach this moment in a movie, I always think, "If a friend who is in trouble comes to me for help, please, God, let me not screw up as badly as Sir John is doing here." Actually, Ghost Rider is also awesome because it ends with the Larry Talbot-analogue character deciding to live. It's like watching Larry turn around in the depths of his depression and say, "Screw it, I'm not killing myself, I'm going to learn to live as a werewolf and be the best damn werewolf ever."

--Most appropriate use of "Ghost Riders in the Sky" in anything ever. (Flashing on the Far Side cartoon: "Hurry or you're going to miss it--ghost riders in the kitchen!")

SQUEAK

2013-02-25T03:36:24Z

A new thread on Making Light arose from the fact that dead mice are going to be dropped on Guam from helicopters. This is a measure to control the brown tree snake population, which is apparently getting out of hand. The dead mice will be shot up with lethal-to-snakes doses of painkillers, attached to little parachutes, and flung out of helicopters over Guam. The snakes, it is hoped, will eat the mice and perish as well.

Highlights of the thread: a filksong, a higgledy-piggledy, and Abi's answer to Ken Brown's question, "What could possibly go wrong?":

Two words: zombie mice.

On Day Three they'll chew through their little parachute harnesses and drop down with soft plopping sounds as they hit the understory. Those that are still ambulatory when they reach ground level will sweep through the forest in a cheeping, chittering horde, searching for ankles and toes to bite.

I'm the kind of human wreckage that you love

2013-02-24T00:08:50Z

Your Blood
is
Extra Special!

That's what it says at the top of the letter I just received from Mass. General Hospital. You may now address me as Delicious Tastyblood, Esq.

Backstory: I tried to donate blood at Arisia and failed. It was a great experience otherwise--the Sexy Nurses and the real nurses were professional, and gyzki and the_termagant came with me for moral support. However, when the real nurses took a one-drop blood sample, they found my iron levels were too low to allow me to donate. ("Does that mean I'm anemic?" I quavered. "No, it just means you need more iron," said the weary nurse. "Go home and eat some spinach.") I've been diligently getting more iron in my diet since then, so I can go over to MGH and donate there.

The letter says that, based off the miniscule sample they took, I have no HLA antibodies in my blood. See here for a Wikipedia page, mostly impenetrable to me. The gist of it is that lots of people have HLA-positive blood, which can cause lung injury in the transfusion recipient and, I guess, also cause graft failure/rejection in transplants. HLA-positive blood is still useful in a lot of cases, but if you have HLA antibodies you can't donate platelets, which are useful for leukemia patients and transplant patients. That is Where I Come In.

They're requesting that I come in and donate platelets through a process called apheresis, which my spell checker doesn't acknowledge is a real word. Apheresis involves spending an hour with a needle in my arm, which sucks out about a pint, removes its platelets, and cycles the rest of the fluid (plasma, red and white cells) back into my body. Sounds uncomfortable and boring, but what the hell, I'll bring a book.

Really, they had me at "Your Blood is Extra Special!" Who wouldn't love to be told that? I've been smug ever since. Of course,the vampire story writes itself: an old, frail, wise vampire who is good at passing for human is on the staff at MGH, and he uses the ceiling cameras on board the Bloodmobile to pick out chicks. Then he gets their paperwork out, drafts flattering letters on the Donor Center stationery, and waits for the tasty women to come hurrying over to MGH. I will soon be among their number, because that's one hell of a pickup line.

The day after I received the letter, I encountered this My Chemical Romance song and its accompanying cute fanvid. I like how the central character has the least reassuring smile ever. Question: why do vampirettes travel in threes? It's not a riddle or the setup for a joke, I'm just wondering whether it's a hunting technique or an efficient defense against Peter Cushing or a polyamorous relationship or a religious observance. Whenever you have sexy female vampires, which is all the time, there's usually a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead, from Stoker by way of Universal Pictures. In their nighties with their hair down and perfect lipstick.

My icon is from Hammer Horror's Brides of Dracula. OK, there are only two brides and they're both brunettes, but still. (Three of my five new icons are vampires. Apparently I'm on a horror binge again.)

Well, they encourage your complete cooperation
Bring you roses when they think you need to smile
I can't control myself because I don't know how
And they love me for it, honestly, I'll be here for a while.

All I had wrought I abandoned to the faith of the faithless years

2013-02-22T07:08:18Z

Images of beautiful decay: 30+ pictures of places on Earth where manmade construction is being reclaimed by the natural world. They resemble my dreams and nightmares (the statue underwater is outright disturbing).

Rudyard Kipling, "The Palace"

with its feets as soft as mices

2013-02-20T20:37:56Z

Smeagol and Gollum have all the feels.

baggle aggle aggle

2013-02-12T03:31:02Z

I'm now addicted to Zero Punctuation. It's a web-series-comic-game-review-mishmash-thing, you can get it on Youtube, the art is little thick-line stick figures on a yellow background, and the audio is one Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw ranting about whatever game he's tried and hated lately. Mind you, a lot of the reviews are actually positive, it's just that people tune in to hear him complain. He has this fantastic rapid-fire sarcastic British voice--I realize it's edited to take out all the pauses for breath, but it's still impressive. I don't do online gaming bar the occasional adventure-game episode of Homestuck; I just like listening to Croshaw gripe and sneer and be juvenile. The visual humor is also rapid and fantastic, and Croshaw obviously loves the same things about Terry Gilliam's animation that I do.

The characters remind me of the Goops from Gelett Burgess's work: childishly huge heads with goggle eyes and bodies essentially made out of popsicle sticks, placed in bizarre contexts with overstated body language and engaged in wish fulfillment like greedy toddlers. Yahtzee's trilby-hatted avatar tromps around murdering and plundering in gameworld with the enthusiasm of one of the Goops eating pie with both hands.

The series is not without its crappy elements, like a pinata full of uncut diamonds and seagull poo. You know what I'm going to call out? "Girl" as an insult comes up a ton. It isn't like Croshaw is the worst offender I've heard in this realm, but Zero Punctuation is the first time a comedian's been up in my grill about it since I realized that whole swaths of the Internet are still in the grade school of the soul and think women are enemy mutants. (--Censorship! --No, damn it, I don't want to censor anybody. Jerks, if they wish, may go on comparing men to gi-i-irls like that's some kind of ultimate sick burn. I just want the power to make them realize what asses they look to the rest of us.)

I just watched two particularly good episodes. Cute cartoons, world-weary disdain, cynicism, self-deprecation, juvenile humor that's actually funny. Check these out if you want a sense of the series:

Black Knight Sword & Hotline Miami
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Oh, and Croshaw published a book called Mogworld which I liked. It has zombies in it, of course I liked it. I should do a book roundup, I've been reading some good stuff lately.

I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form

2013-02-08T06:56:39Z

Warm Bodies was cute and lovable and everything I could ask from a zombie apocalypse Romeo and Juliet. I like zombie movies and Shakespearean pastiches and Beauty and the Beast plots, and this film is three great tastes that taste great together. (The world still needs a film version of "A Plague On Both Your Houses," which had the idea of R&J w/Z first and best. But this is great fun too.)

The entire show depends on Nicholas Hoult's facial expressions. R. the zombie can crank out a few words, but he's mostly confined to body language and wide eyes. (Yet another element I love: mute or mostly voiceless characters.) Fortunately he's more than just a pretty face, and even has a few silent-film-worthy moments. A goofy, gawping expression, a guilty puppy look. Rotting pallid undead puppy, but still. This is R. talking about the Boneys, really old dehumanized zombies: "They'll eat anything with a pulse. I mean, so will I, but at least I'm conflicted about it." They didn't do much with the whole humans-are-food, oh-cherry-cheesecake-you-are-my-life-now idea inherent in any undead/human romance, but fair enough, you can't really show horror hunger pangs and keep the tone light and silly. Still, Hoult plays against his good looks with everything he's got, eating brains with his mouth wide open and slouching around in filthy sweats with his nose quivering at the scent of human flesh. ("I don't remember what I used to do for a living, but my hoodie suggests I was unemployed.") There is a shirtless scene which would be fanservice except that he's covered in unhealed wounds that leak gross old blood. He's the gentlest possible satire on the whole school of post-Twilight fiction where one's boyfriend is a supernatural hottie of choice.

Teresa Palmer as Julie managed the difficult trick of being both the only reasonably sane character in the show and the one who falls in love with an undead abomination. In Beauty and the Beast narratives, it's always easy for me to see why Beauty loves the Beast--I like monsters and grotesque characters, or else I wouldn't be in the audience--but often hard for me to see why the Beast would love Beauty, who in the hands of lazy writers is solely defined by her looks. No problem here: Julie had enough characterization to seem like she actually would be tough and witty enough to survive the zombie apocalypse. There was a split-second that summed up the movie: Julie first sees R. eating a friend of hers, and she throws a knife which chunks into the left side of his chest. R. gives her a bugeyed admiring stare, obviously thinking, "What a woman!" The hunting knife is the equivalent of a little cartoon Cupid showing up and shooting arrows into your heart.

Also, I like Rob Corddry. I may have a new character actor whose Career I will Follow, as they say, with Interest.* Corddry as M. is R.'s best undead buddy, there to be a little older and wiser and more cynical. The moment I knew I was going to like this movie was when R. joined M. at a deserted airport lounge and they sat at the bar and held a friendly conversation by going, "Hrrrrgh." "...Grrrrrrrah!" "Rrrrrr," at each other with their teeth bared. R. and M. both spend plenty of time in wistful yearning for the people they used to be, and though R's internal monologue drives the plot (excellent use of private-eye-voice-over, as his articulate inner voice speaks for his grunting exterior) it's M who carries off the saddest moment, staring into a darkened picture window and smiling slightly as he recalls something wonderful we don't see. He's trying to act human, after that, but never quite gets the details right. When he pats his friend on the shoulder in solidarity, he rocks R. back and forth as though shaking apples from a tree.

This film wins the Better than the Book Prize. It's a ton lighter and fluffier than the novel, which is all to the good as the bloated parts of the novel were the most grimdark passages. It also has the best-placed use of "Shelter from the Storm" I've ever seen. And that's all I'm going to say. Go see it yourselves. Recommended for hopelessly romantic horror fans, or anyone who could use a good-natured laugh.

*(I like character actors and will seek out any film that has a lot of screen time for Timothy Spall, Danny Trejo, Mackenzie Crook, Richard Griffiths, John Lithgow, and that guy who played the Kurgan. There are no women on this list because movies are crap at creating female roles most of the time, and also I am biased in favor of unconventionally handsome men.)

Old Tommy Morton's come to Merrymount again

2013-02-04T19:10:12Z

you guys
you guys
holy shit you guys
get this

I live near Ma-re-mount! It never occurred to me to think Thomas Morton might have lived and reveled down here on the Neponset River, because somehow I got the idea it was on the North Shore or in what's now Chelsea, and thought no more about it. But I live a short drive or bike ride from the site of Morton's hijinks. I'm going to drive or bike out there tomorrow after work and see it for myself. There'll probably be a suburb on top of it, but I feel the need to see the site.

Briefly, then: Thomas Morton was an early English colonist in what became known as Massachusetts. In the 1620s there were the Plymouth colonists, led by Governor William Bradford and captain of militia Myles "Captain Shrimp" Standish, and up here there were trading post entrepreneurs Wollaston and Morton. Wollaston was an authoritarian douchebag who sold his indentured servants into slavery. Morton led an uprising against him and Wollaston had to flee to Virginia. *woot*

After that, Morton declared himself the "host" of the new settlement, which he punned as Ma-re-mount, hill by the sea, or Merrymount. And the party was on. Morton's vision for the future was that his colonists would be good buddies and intermarry with the Algonquians, that the Algonquians would settle down and turn into land-tilling Christians, and everybody would enjoy themselves together in an open-minded non-judgmental sexually-liberated way.

We only have his adversaries' word for what happened next. Governor Bradford claimed later that "They ... set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together (like so many fairies, or furies rather) and worse practices. As if they had anew revived & celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddess Flora, or ye beastly practices of ye mad Bacchanalians."

You will find people out there today claiming that Thomas Morton was a Pagan the way we use the word, following the pre-Christian rites of the May and casting off his Christianity altogether. Tempting as that idea is, remember what negothick has pointed out before: the Puritans used "Pagan" as a slur meaning "Catholic," because as far as they were concerned the Papists were evil slutty idolaters who worshiped Popes and Communion wafers. (Welcome to hundreds of years of confusion, sometimes deliberate, of the Morris dance dating from "Pagan days.") Puritans, here or in England, saw or pretended to see no difference between the Church of Rome and ancient polytheists. Morton was doing his part to muddy the waters of our research, because he did invoke Pagan gods--which to him meant the ancient Roman pantheon. Flora, Hymen, Bacchus, and Priapus (of course) among others made their appearances.

Anyway, Morton was attracting followers like mad, and the other colonists were jealous. He was prospering fast, because the local Indian trappers liked him and sought him out to deal furs. There seems to have been a permanent truce and fellowship between white colonists and tribespeople at Morton's place. Lonely colonists who hadn't managed to bring a wife to the New World were marrying Algonquian women with Morton's blessing. I dunno, I love this guy. He's like the reverse of an evil cult leader: you go to Morton's place to be yourself and do your own thing. I can't even find anything to disapprove in him, try as I may. In Plymouth they talked of his evils, but all he seems to have done is to throw huge parties, encourage consensual adults to sex each other up, be fantastically successful as a fur-dealer-gentleman-farmer-colonist, and enjoy the fruits of his success by goofing off in an erudite way that went right over the heads of the other Puritans.

It's hard for me not to identify with him. Reading Morton versus Bradford is like... it's as thought I exclaimed, "By Jupiter, I could eat a horse!" and having the nearest person stare at me in horror and go, "Really?!" and then that person goes around telling people that I worship the Roman god Jupiter and eat horses.

The end is soon told. Morton gave a princely entertainment for Mayday 1628 called the Revels of New Canaan, involving (again according to the disapproving moral censors) an eighty-foot maypole with deer antlers on the top, a massive keg party, and hymns to Hymen. In Morton's own words (from his later satire The New English Canaan):

"There was likewise a merry song made, which (to make their revels more fashionable) was sung with a chorus, every man bearing his part; which they performed in a dance, hand in hand about the May-pole, whilst one of the company sung, and filled out the good liquor like Gammedes and Jupiter."

	THE SONG.

	Drink and be merry, merry, merry, boys;
	Let all your delight be in Hymen’s joys;
	Io to Hymen now the day is come,
	About the merry May-pole take a room.
	Make green garlons, bring bottles out;
	And fill sweet Nectar, freely about.
	Uncover thy head, and fear no harm,
	For here ’s good liquor to keep it warm.
	Then drink and be merry, etc.
	Io to Hymen, etc.

By the way, Morton's book is full of classical allusion and elaborate, sneering references to myth and legend in its satire on the other colonists. It does back up my hypothesis that he was the only well-educated man around and regarded the rest of the white colonists as know-nothing bigots. Captain Myles Standish showed up to spoil the fun in June of that year, chopped down the maypole, and arrested Morton for selling guns to the Indians. Morton's men tried to defend him but were too drunk to stand upright, and one of them stabbed himself in the nose with his own sword tip.

That was about it for the revels at Ma-re-mount. Morton was set in stocks at Plymouth and given a kangaroo trial by the "Sons of Limbo" as he called the other colonists. They marooned him on the Isles of Shoals, "till a ship could take him back to England," at least in theory. In fact, he was simply left out there to starve. Some Indian well-wishers brought him food and looked after him, and eventually he escaped back to England. Meanwhile, during the winter of 1629, the remaining colonists at Ma-re-mount had their houses trashed and their food raided by hostile New Salem colonists calling it "Mount Dagon." They eventually decided, "Screw this, it's not worth freezing or starving," and left. Morton came back to find it a ghost town, and was promptly rearrested, tried, banished again, and shipped back to England. And that was the woeful end of fun in Puritan New England.

Morton lived on and continued to be a self-serving go-getter. He sued the Massachusetts Bay Company, and succeeded in getting their Colonial charter revoked. He very probably hung out with Ben Jonson and other writers at the Mermaid Tavern while writing his self-serving memoirs in New Canaan. Then he became a colonial agent for Maine, and in some kind of misguided attempt to make the joyless buttheads of Massachusetts Bay respect him, he made a triumphant return to Plymouth and was promptly arrested AGAIN, this time as the %&(#@ Royalist agitator who had ruined their lovely charter, and spent the winter freezing his backside off in jail in Boston awaiting trial. They eventually had to let him go as there was no evidence in the case and his health was frail. He lived out the rest of his days in Maine and died in 1647.

I have a pagan urge myself to make a role model of Thomas Morton. Since moving to Boston, the one thing I've missed consistently is wild natural beauty. I love having lots of friends around, I love the ease of transport, I love having a job. But there's nowhere I can go on a daily basis and walk in the woods, or by fresh running water or a part of the sea that doesn't have houses built solidly right up to the edge. At least, till yesterday. Yesterday, I walked in a small wood by the river and heard the sound of light snow pattering on oak leaves in an otherwise still ravine. It was something I had long missed. There was a sense of peace. My imagination can only grow and stretch its limbs when I have plenty of natural beauty around. Remember that I lived in Mountain House during much of 2011, out in the woods above the Connecticut River, and I wrote a ton of poetry there, even though I was unemployed, frustrated and unhappy. Here in Boston I can hardly think straight. Partly it's that I'm busier and up till recently have been working three jobs at once. But that's not the whole story.

The reason for this hard left turn in what has been a historical narrative is that I feel a need for sacred sites. They must fulfil a set of urges in me: they must be either out in the wilderness on the fringe of civilized areas, or they must be incredibly peaceful and beautiful in an urban area; they must contain some element of bygone times and old ways of humanity; they must contain some element of untameable nature. I was happy when it began to snow off and on yesterday, because snow carries that untameable beauty of the natural world to everything it touches. This is why I love ruins. This is why I enjoy beautiful decay.

I spent last summer as a tour guide, and I'm still working another branch of the tourism industry, telling people all about the weird and nifty people who used to live in Boston. It is fun partly because it serves my sense of continuity: this place once belonged to them and their wants and needs, and you get to know them a tiny bit better by going where they went. But it's annoying because the city has changed so much, we don't have the houses or buildings or sometimes even the land where X lived and Y happened. I couldn't lay my finger on the Breed's Hill battle site, because the hills have been cut down by half their height since then. This is why Americans get such an inferiority complex about European history: it's got like castles and shit, and there are cities with streets that haven't changed their look much in 400 years.

So I want to find the site of Merrymount in part because there's still an almost mystical value in being at The Place Where It Happened. Old forts are my perfect combination of ruin and neglect, manmade skill, former importance and present wildness. That's why I relished the trip redcolumbine and I took to Georges Island and Fort Independence in 2010. Despite my cynicism ("On this very downspout, Ben Franklin was sick after a bender in 1765!"), it's good to stand where the people you admire stood, and it does have meaning for me to go to Merrymount and say, "This was the colony, this their beach, and they would have looked out across this coastline at the sea. Probably not changed much except for the natural gas plant and the airport."

Here's Chris Pahud singing "Morton's Return," by local songwriter Jim Ryan. I first heard this one back in 2004 and it's stuck with me ever since. Note that this is Morton's first return. He doesn't realize that the place has been trashed in his absence and most of his people will be gone when he gets back.

Well, I'll tarry no longer, to Merrymount I shall go,
I'll drink whene'er I want to, and dance around the pole,
Wild women will attend me, in the company of friends,
Crying, "Old Tommy Morton's come to Merrymount again!"

swords replace feelings

2013-01-31T02:08:35Z

YouTube rec time! An infomercial and two short films I've been enjoying lately, not one of which has anything to do with the other two.

Greatsword cutting demonstration by Cold Steel. Warning: contains gross meat visuals, including two whole pig carcasses being cloven in twain. The boots take the cake for sheer horror, though. What boots? Watch the video. It's addictive. And the wielders all look very happy.

"Paperman," an original short silent animated film. Simple, elegant and heartwarming.

"The Outsider," a short live-action film based on the HPL story of the same name and filmed mostly at Balgonie Castle in Fife, Scotland. Mind you, the ending is unintentionally funny in its literal-mindedness and silly makeup. But there are some shivery moments early on in the cavernous building which work better for the story than any illustration I've ever seen. Most of all do I like this image: the protagonist's mental image of himself, young and sullen, clinging to a book and a candle for comfort, suffering from ennui, thinking in capital letters about how no one understands him. It's funny too, but it conspires with the audience.

I LIVE

2013-01-26T06:14:33Z

Recovering from a post-Arisia cold, but otherwise fine. I missed you guys; I've been reading but not interacting, but from now on I'll be back a little more often.

I realize that like my last three posts have been All Knowledge Is Contained In LJ posts, but what the hell, it's helped me every time I've done it.

Does anyone on my f'list:
--live in the Boston area (as in, MBTA-accessible) and
--have mad guitar accompaniment skillz and
--want to give me a few guitar lessons?

I still have negothick's Guild guitar and I feel that I've reached the extent of what I can teach myself without another player's input. Also, I've been writing a lot of lyrics lately and my need to play accompaniment is getting urgent.

Do you dare show me the wound?

2012-12-02T05:28:40Z

Sorry to drop off the face of the earth without an explanation, guys. I ask your indulgence a little bit longer: I'm in job training for something fun, and I don't want to talk about it for fear of jinxing it before I have jumped through all the hoops.

I finally got myself to one of the classic horror screenings at the Brattle Theatre: The Wolf Man, 1941. It was a beautiful experience. The print looks great on a full-sized screen, the special effects are nifty even when they're silly, and I'd forgotten what a good film it is. Seventy minutes, and not a wasted word or image.

(Sometimes I put favorite albums/films/books aside for months or years to make sure I don't wear them out. The last time I watched this film all the way through was back in 2010. Now it gives me a strong sense of the context in which I last saw it, and all the time I was in the theater tonight I was thinking, Man, my life sucked when I last saw this movie! Man, does it suck less now! And that's quite enough about that.)

Lawrence Talbot: my beloved Larry. He suffers so adorably. One of the three or four best horror performances I've ever seen on a screen. If you ever feel like you can't catch a break and no good deed goes unpunished, watch this film. Is there a name for the trope in tragedies and fairy tales where a protagonist does some harmless thing and is therefore condemned to suffer and die? You know what I mean. She threw her golden ball over the wall = she gets stolen by icky goblins. He picked flowers in the sacred garden = he will be executed. Galahad fails to ask the right question in the castle of the Grail (or asks the wrong question) = he is flung out and everyone stays cursed. The Lady of Shalott looks out the window = keels over and dies. And Larry Talbot tries to defend a friend from a wild animal = he catches werewolf herpes and is condemned to turn into a furry abomination forever and ever.

There are certain constants through the series of Wolf Man/Frankenstein/House Of Whatever movies. You can't lock a werewolf in or tie one up effectively. They always get out. Werewolves always get out of anything--as the Universal horror films go on, Larry gets wise to this and knows enough to caution the poor fools who get close to him. Also, Larry can never die, apparently never ages past his mid-thirties, and any cure for his lycanthropy is strictly short-term. The Wolf Conquers Everything. Larry's self-loathing will be eternal. He's probably still out there, even as we type. You could throw Larry Talbot into an active volcano or bury him ten feet deep in cement, and he'd still turn up in the next movie, bloodshot and rumpled and whining at the top of his lungs that he longs for sweet, sweet death.

The fog and mist rolls through the creepy old woods, and the moon is apparently buried in the roots of a tree somewhere in Wolfwood judging by the way its rays shine upwards instead of down. (Where is this moonlight coming from? The same place the music comes from.) All the guys look sharp and tailored in their 1940s suits. Larry has snappy outfits, nice pointy lapels, and Brilliantined hair slicked back hard. It contrasts well with the way he keeps turning up after yet another wolf episode, disheveled and ragged and covered in filth. On a side note, Lon Chaney Jr. was damn cute at that age. As I think lemonlye once said about Meatloaf, I love passionate fat guys.

Mind you, Larry's peeping-Tom stalkery behavior puts a lot of people off the movie entirely before it even gets to the monster. I'm able to buy liking him anyway, and it's all down to Lon Chaney's playing it dense and good-natured. (The road to hell is paved with good intentions.) Not gonna lie, he's scary sometimes. Larry is so sympathetic to any viewer who's ever felt alienated that it's easy to overlook this, but he comes off as a real psycho once or twice. It's not even related to the fact that he meets Gwen Conliffe, his maybe-girlfriend, by looking in her window with a high-powered telescope. It's more that he's full of suppressed violence--amply played out by his monster self, but it surfaces a couple of times when he's in human form. Like when he defends Gwen from the non-dire threat of three older women by shouting and menacing them with a walking stick as though they were a physical threat. As the plot gets grimmer, he still smiles sometimes, but it's stopped being a nice smile. It's a crazy-eyed padded-cell miserable smile. There is a viable alternate interpretation of the movie, a la Cat People: Larry really has flipped out, either years earlier or at the moment when he witnesses Jenny's brutal murder, and there's no such thing as a werewolf, except in his own head. I don't ever like to go that route, but I like that they left that door open a crack.

I'd forgotten this: when Larry first walks into town to see Gwen, the wall of the building next door has a big painted ad for "Saneman Products Ltd." Then later when Larry turns up at her house in the middle of the night, crazed and desperate, his upper body is blocking the "Sane" part.

Lon Chaney Jr. keeps getting paired with really short actors who nonetheless tower over him. In context, it works brilliantly for the tone of the movie--Larry has an adolescent voice, rasping and grumbling, and sheepish teenage body language, slumping over tables and sitting awkwardly on the arms of chairs. He's never at ease around his father. It's all in the body language. Claude Rains and his Napoleonic posture loom up despite being like five feet three inches tall. Larry is always positioned in a crouch or a slump when Sir John is around. He looks up hopefully, smiles, and generally acts like a floppy-eared dog, desperate for approval. This is the Movie of the Daddy Issues. Sir John welcomes him back to the old family manse with a stiff-necked speech about how it's too bad they've become estranged and they must not be so undemonstrative. Then they shake hands, stiffly, and Larry pretty much spends the rest of the movie acting like a guilty twelve-year-old.

Maria Ouspenskaya as Maleva: I want to be her when I grow up. Tiny old woman with the ramrod posture of a ballet dancer and arcane, foreign good manners. Maleva bows slightly from the hips as a sign of respect, like a Japanese person or the witches from the Discworld books. She has seen everything. Like another Discworld character, Miss Flitworth, a depressed werewolf isn't even in the ten worst things she's ever seen. Death, horror, monsters--no one else knows what the hell they're looking at, but Maleva has lived with a werewolf for years and she's been there, done that, and knows all the folklore and sad poetry. She's from another country, and an earlier time, and an obscure culture, and possibly another reality. I basically spent this fall doing ghost tours as a cheesy psychic/medium/spiritualist who wants to be Maleva and never quite gets there. Between her style and Gwen Conliffe's, this movie gave me my fixation on huge dangly earrings.

Damn, now I'll have to get Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man because I can't just leave it there. (The horror! The literal horror!) For the moment I have one other odd observation: the Second World War and the Holocaust never happened in the world of Universal Horror. It's much like the way the Tintin comics never acknowledged the war: during WWII, both franchises were setting their stories vaguely between-the-wars (and Herge worked for a newspaper run by Nazi collaborators). Then afterwards Herge didn't want to draw comics about the war--no wonder--and Universal pretty much stopped making monster movies for years. If you imagine characters' lives on the historical record, both Maleva and Larry Talbot lived through the war. They'd both have survived it, of course, because Maleva is extremely old and wise and able to look out for #1, and Larry can't die. But I wonder what happened to them.

I've heard it asserted as a widely accepted truth that the reality of WWII horrors upstaged filmic horror. But I think that's hooey--cinematic horror is escapism, after all, a world away from actual death and carnage. There's not a cause and effect relationship there. Universal and other studios were cranking out monster-centric horror during the war years, and the public lapped it up despite all the death and killing and sundry grossness in reality. I think the fact is simply that the genre had boomed during the war and burned itself out for the moment by 1945.

Play soothing bass solo.

2012-11-12T07:53:05Z

So, I've been reading my way through Homestuck. Right now I've read four of six acts, so I'm nowhere near caught up. It is mesmerizing. It swaps back and forth between being boring as hell and fascinating. I can't look away, so no matter what happens I'll finish it, but right now I'm experiencing mixed feelings.

--Part of the time, it's fantasy with playful language, horrific things happening to people I like, the impending apocalypse, plenty of quirky and odd characters, and a specific kind of fetishistic wacky imagery that reminds me of Ellen Raskin. (Man, did that woman write some weird shit. It's haunted my nightmares over the years.) The central concept is simple but the execution is so complex I could follow its reflexes for ages. There are cartoons, there are flash animations, there are little quasi-joystick games. There is a demonic dog, there are crows and time-looped pumpkins and dream travel and cloudy blue skies and funny dorky gardener girls. The art is simple but gorgeously colorful as a box of jujubes. I can't get enough of it.

--Part of the time, it's a boring story based on all the stupidest parts of text adventures. The plot is explained in long boring screeds or ignored in the apparent hope that I can figure out what's going on from the inexplicable images before me, nothing makes any frigging sense, and the creator spends like thirty pages at a time, regularly, telling us all about each character's weapon stash and how he carries it around. I don't care. Apparently this matters to somebody somewhere, but it isn't me. Every time this happens I want to punch the panel.

Does anybody know whether the storytelling gets any better from here on?

Ha, ha! A foreigner!

2012-11-08T05:32:53Z

Holy smokes, look at the Google doodle for Thursday, November 8! It's Bram Stoker's birthday. Not just Dracula, but old, sleazy, mustached Dracula! Be still, my heart! As it were.

a sinister and stately grace

2012-11-04T18:42:38Z

ALERT ALERT: if you love monster movies and have never seen Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1931), get ye to the Brattle Theatre today at 4:00. It's not only the ur-source for mummy movies and sinister ancient Egyptian sorcery movies, it's one of the earliest uses I've ever seen of the genre where an immortal-sexy-evil-magic dude seeks his reincarnated sweetie. (See Bram Stoker's Dracula et al.)

My thing for Karloff continues unabated. His appearance invites cliche as I try to describe what makes him beautiful to me. Wouldn't I sound twee if I said that his eyes are caverns full of shadow? Yet they are. That's just what they are. Directors who give him a lot of front-lighting are wasting their time.

Apparently Karloff (birth name William Henry Pratt) was one-quarter or one-eighth East Indian. This was a secret during most of his life--when somebody asked him "How did you get such a good tan?" he would answer "A tight collar and too much gin!" He exoticized himself in different ways: bogus Russian name, roles we'd call brownface or yellowface. I think the point was that if he was going to let people fetishize him as exotic/mysterious/foreign, he'd only let that happen in the ways he chose. In a few of his young pictures he has an enormous mustache to balance his huge eyebrows, and that's the only point where he looks Indian to me--you could imagine him as a young guru.

I saw the Frankenstein/BoF marathon before Halloween, with a live interview beforehand: Sara Karloff, Bela Lugosi Jr. The latter looks like a carbon copy of his dad, minus everything performery; the former is a handsome middle-aged woman with big deep-set eyes and a deliberate white streak in her black hair. They and the interviewer spent time decrying the decline of the horror genre. You know the meme: back in my father's day we had psychological terror, there was subtlety, imagination, skill; these days it's buckets of blood and severed thumbs and the Saw movies. I think this is the horror-film equivalent of how every genre has old silverback writers/creators/experts who go on TV in leather jackets/stand up at conventions/write opinion columns and cry about how the genre is being destroyed and whippersnappers are doing it wrong. *coughJoshicough*

Oh well, there are plenty of horror fans (Ms. Karloff isn't one, by her own admission) who themselves say the genre has degenerated into torture porn. But I would like to point out that in the prime of B&W horror, not everything was suggestion and indirection. Let me direct your gaze to The Black Cat (1934), in which Karloff plays a character named Hjalmar Poelzig who is basically Alistair Crowley except also a war criminal who has stuffed and mounted his past girlfriends and wives. He would probably also be a Nazi, except that it's 1934 and the world did not have the Nazi sorcerer pulp-fiction villain cliche yet. I unironically love this movie.

Let me direct you to a fanvid of this movie set to "The New Zero" by Rasputina. It's a nice little bento box of the horrors on display. All the characters are perverts except for the chaste hero and heroine, our Brad and Janet. Most of the perverts are also sex offenders and murderers and traitors to their nations. Rather more appealingly, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff play a pair of former friends who are heavily implied to have been shagging back in their youth. ("The years have been kind to you," says one on beholding the other for the first time in decades.) The movie is about their torturing each other. It ends with Lugosi's character trussing up Poelzig and skinning him alive.

Come and see the violence inherent in the system! NOTE: no actual horror on display in this picture. Safe for the squeamish. It does contain shirtless Boris Karloff, but I consider that a plus and not a minus.

This entry was supposed to be about half as long. Damn my film-lust. Non-damn the Universal Pictures marathon at the Brattle. Only the unimaginative suppose that horror must be confined to Halloween.

If not by faith, then by the sword/ I'm going to be restored

2012-10-31T14:15:42Z

jonathanlhoward's The Fear Institute is to be published in the US! By Thomas Dunne, apparently a Macmillan imprint and unlikely to fold without a trace. That's more like it.