30 Nights of Terror Halloween party

( how was i going to say anything new about this ?)

Arbogast puffed a Lucky and watched the long legged young man walk up the steps to the Charles Addams house he called home. Jeez, the kid moves all regal like goddam Miss America. Something stirred in Arbogast's suit pants. Young master Bates was a swish! Master Bates. Arbo, you drove right into that one with your bright lights on. Neiman or Norman - yeah Norman said he still changed the sheets weekly. Did Norman take the sheets, as his colored buddy Miss Otisia put it?
Arbo, you're due for some action. That swabbie in San Diego was two weeks ago and he wouldn't go all the way. Don't brown me, he'd whined. I ain't Betty Crocker, kid, he'd said. I want to fuck you, not fry you.
Norman was a pretty thing. You could tell he was confused. He'd never stick his wick in that gash Marion Crane but he'd be suskeptical to her charms. All women had a mantrap between their legs
but Norman hadn't gotten his pecker caught yet. He was a v-i-r-g-i-n. It'd take a lot of spit and persuasion to get in but what a sweet ride. Arbo set the scene. He'd hide in the shower while Norman changed the sheets, getting an eyeful of Norm's sweet ass as he bent over. Arbo springs out of the bathroom and chloroforms Norman. He pulls down his jeans and applies a huge gob of Vaseline to his schvontze and the kid's pretty pink rose. oo la la. The chloroform was only to expedite the fucking. Otherwise Arbo would have to dress up as a broad to catch Norman's eye.

30 Nights of Horror October 30

This is for Bernard Welt and David Ehrenstein.

The Seventh Victim is, after Cat People, my favorite Lewton movie. A young student ( Kim Hunter) is informed that her sister, perfumier Jacqueline, has quit paying Mary's tuition and cannot be located. Fearless and naive as all Lewton heroines, Mary sallies forth into the Village bohemia of the '40s iso her sister. She learns that Jacqueline has quit the perfume racket and left her business to the overbearing Mrs. Redy ( Isabel Jewell). She meets her brother-in-law Hugh Beaumont, an italian hostess named Bella and, of all people, Jacqueline's psychiatrist ( Tom Conway). Obviously, in the timeline of Lewtonia, Conway has not yet met Elena the cat person.
A queer logo catches Mary's eye. We learn that it is the symbol of the Paladys, a cabal of "non-violent" satanists. "Non-violent", my eye. They have already murdered private eye Irving August and dispatch a knife wielding killer after Jacqueline when, at last, she turns up. All the fuss is over jacqueline's blabbing the secrets of the Paladys. I don't know why she'd want to belong to a club that can only afford a one armed pianist.
Mary is confronted in the shower by Mrs. Redy, a scene that presages the Marion Crane murder.
Jacqueline had taken a small room containing a chair and a rope slung over the rafters with a noose at one end. Mary meets her tubercular neighbor, who's determined to go out and trip the light fantastic and damn her health. I will not reveal the ending of this film. It's the grimmest ending in the Lewton canon.

30 Nights of Horror (for Inthemostpeculiarway)

Strangers in the night - Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation. Until recently I had only seen the rated version of this film. At the end of the credits of the original vhs release in '96, Araki berated the distributors, the Clinton administration and everyone else imaginable for nobbling his gory road movie. I did some quick research before sitting down to write. When will I ever learn? The only piece of useful information I found was, of all places, on wikipedia. ( My rule with wikipedia is simple. If I can only find a fact on wiki it's either a factoid, in Mailer's original sense of something unproven repeated until it's accepted as truth, or a lie interpolated by a prankster, propagandist or provo.) The "no thanks to Cheryl Ladd" at credits' end was Araki's flipoff to the former Charlie's Angel for not allowing her daughter Jorfan to play Amy Blue, the Rose McGowan character. Ladd did appear in the dystopian Nowhere, GA's next film.
Like The Living End, TDG is a road movie, a gruesome hilarious and finally numbing road movie. The sexual geometry of Jordan ( James Duval at his beautiful doofus best), Amy and Xavier ( the handsomest man-man to adorn an Araki picture) has been compared to Pasolini's Theorem but in a twisted way i was reminded more of Rebel Without a Cause, if Ray's classic had been dark and post-analytic. X is a sex object and a father figure to Jordan, who is fascinated by X the second he lays eyes on him. Although J and Amy are "virgins", Amy's clearly the more experienced virgin. She functions as a maternal figure to cute, sweet but sofuckindumb Jordan. The increasing attraction between her man and her bf doesn't faze her in the least, her protestations notwithstnding. Before I get to the horror ( and if this isn't a non-genre horror film, what is it?) i want to say that the bathtub sex scene between J and A is immensely lovely. The comic verisimilitude of James Duval having trouble getting his jeans off fast enough, hairy ass crack and all, is worth a thousand Pitt - Gainsbourg - Garrel fashion layout sex scenes.( The Dreamers is almost as false and sickmaking a film as Oliver Stone's NBK monstrosity, a film I detest.) I gasped when I recognized the foreshadowing in J's nosebleed as I witnessed the rape - murder -castration finale, filmed as if seen in secondary glimpses through hands covering eyes.

This night of terror is dedicated with admiration and respect to a young man with a critical future.

30 Nights of Terror October 7

Beverly was about to pack up her stuff and go when the Portises finally arrived, twenty minutes late.
She had considered peeing in the back yard of this wretched place but the memory of her colleague Susie Temple stopped her. Susie was so annoyed by her dilatory clients that she squatted and, well, defecated in front of the fixer upper in East Jesus as, guess what, the clients walked up the driveway. They'd had a flat tire three miles away and weren't amused by Susie's antics. Susie lost her realtor's license and bungled her new career choice, meth cook, in a literally flamboyant way.
Oh well, here are the fucking Portises at last.
Darren and Samantha Portis were a slightly attractive couple in their late twenties. They both spoke in an elongated upper New York state drawl.
" Hi, I'm Beverly Pills. Why don't .."
" Oh, Dare, this is it. They've painted it and landscaped but it looks juust like that Ann Roool book cover."
" Doctor Dickbiter's house! Get some pictures with your phone, Sammy."
" Darren, the owners prefer no amateur photos of the house or grounds."
" Oh shut up rreal estate lady. Grounds. That's rich."
" Yeahh Dare are they like the grounds Doccy Dick had for suing Ann Roool? As in nonexistent."
Sammy let out a horrid, braying guffaw. It didn't even sound human.
While the awful couple strolled around giggling and taking phone pictures Susie thought about the relative isolation of the place.
She'd have to improvise.

Dare walked around the corner of the house first. Susie let him have it with a nice two by four she'd found in the basement. The combined blood and mold was really pretty but Susie didn't have time for aesthetics. While Dare stood wobbling Susie rammed her pistol into his mouth and squeezed off two shots. Sammy was speechless for a second when she saw what was left of her DH on the ground. Exhaling loudly she grinned and said " Thank you, Bethany. I'm sorry i called you rreal est -"
Beverly only shot Sammy once, in her stomach. She screamed and complained while beverly kicked her repeatedly in the head. Beverly was reaching for her gun when, quite suddenly, Sammy quieted down, nice like. These goddamn crime tourists were always more trouble than they were worth. How long would it take to dispose of the bodies? The old sinkhole near Grippe's Farm was almost full. She tried to remember the Farmer's Almanac weather for this anniversary day. Nope, she thought as she doused the couple with accelerant, the rain should hold off long enough.

Tonight's movie: Wes Craven and Sean Cunningham's Last House on the Left.

30 Nights of Terror Oct.6

When Peter Lorre was acting in Fritz Lang's M , his night job was singing and hoofing in a musical comedy. Lorre always seems a very modern actor, even in an early film like Mad Love aka The Hands of Orlac. Cinematographer Karl Freund directed, Gregg Toland was dp. A digression: in Pauline Kael's The Citizen Kane Book, she presents stills from ML ( Lorre in baldpate, the drunken housekeeper's pet cockatoo) with similar images from Citizen Kane, visual ammo for her controversial theory that Kane did not spring Athenalike from Orson Welles' head. Toland, of course, was the cameraman on Kane and, I guess, responsible for Mad Love's lively Vorkapich montages.
Lorre is Professor Gogol, a brilliant surgeon who can restore lost limbs. He's hopelessly enamored of an actress, Yvonne Orlac. Nightly he visits the strange theatre where she performs and ogles her wax figure in the lobby. Yvonne appreciates Orlac's attentions as a fan but she's devoted to her concert pianist husband Stephen Orlac ( Colin Clive). When Orlac's hands are crushed in an accident, Gogol sees a chance to win his beloved. As this film can be seen free on TCM on demand, I suggest you check it out. Seventy three minutes of delicious weirdness. Another magesterial American movie seems to have nicked a detail from Mad Love. Can you guess its title?

30 Nights of Terror - Oct. 4

Hannibal Lecter is the best known villain since Professor Moriarty. Red Dragon, Thomas Harris' first novel about the FBI'S Behavioral Science Unit, was filmed twice. In 1986 Lecter wasn't a household word. He appears in Michael Mann's adaptation of RD three times and is played by Brian Cox. Manhunter is the story of the empathic Will Graham, called out of retirement after a serial killer has begun murdering entire families in a ritualistic fashion. Graham can enter a killer's mind fairly easily. It's the exiting that's difficult.
Graham ends up consulting Lecter in his cell at the Antonioni-white Chesapeake Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Lecter toys with him and sets off a panic reaction in Graham when he tells him
" We're alike, you and me." When it's discovered that the wanted perp aka the Tooth Fairy has been corresponding with Lecter through a tabloid's classified section, Graham stages an interview and photo op with the odious Freddie Lounds, tab journalism's star. Freddie is abducted and tortured by the Tooth Fairy. His awful reentry into the outside world is captured in a mere four shots.

Enough of the synopsis. Red Dragon was filmed again in 2002 with Anthony Hopkins in his final appearance as Lecter. It's a dismal film that shows us its best sequence ( Graham's capture of Lecter) before the credits roll. Michael Mann's somewhat dated version is, according to me, the better of the two. Tomorrow - Lucio Fulci's The Black Cat.

30 Nights of Terror - 10/02

In October I try to watch at least one horror movie, or what i deem horror, a day. This is a log of those afternoons, evenings, nights and mornings.

Cloverfield - JJ Abrams' American Godzilla movie, shot a la Blair Witch Project, is a first rate roller coaster movie. No one will ever cite it for psychological depth or great characterization. It's a good example of social observation that answers the question: What would a group of blithe upwardly mobile 20somethings do if their party was interrupted by a monster attack? A lot of dialogue was apparently improvised. Although the film was actually shot by a number of camerapersons and edited with a finetooth comb, it's easy to believe you're watching the calamitous events of that night through one person's POV.
Ok. Fine. My only reservations about this movie began rising to the surface as the credits rolled. Abrams and company seem to have watched all the available 9/11 footage. This very enjoyable movie is, on some levels, a terrorist attack restaged as a thrill ride.
Die Monster Die - An American International adaptation of Lovecraft's Colour Out of Space with Boris Karloff, Nick Adams ( looking very spruce) and Suzan Farmer. Lots of fun. Tonight may be Hammer Night. You six will have to click my link and see.

Prawn to the People / District 9

District 9, the South African science fiction tale of exoskeletal aliens segregated in Johannesburg townships, is the best foreign genre film since last fall's Let The Right One In. Its' mockumentary format, which breaks down after about thirty minutes, is so deadpan and hilarious that I thought I was watching an ultradry comedy, more Mars Attacks than Independence Day. Wikus, a moronic bureaucrat, heads the project to relocate the disliked, unwanted catfood noshing aliens. After being exposed to a mysterious fluid, his mangled right hand is replaced by a prawn claw, giving him the ability to operate alien weaponry, which requires alien DNA to work. Humans can't fire these weapons, at least not until Wikus, who's become the most wanted man in Johannesburg after news of his transformation spreads. He falls in with Christopher Johnson and his son, little CJ. Big CJ has a very interesting secret that it would be unfair to reveal.
As a matter of fact, as much as I'd like to babble on about this movie, its' various borrowings and the really weird treatment it's gotten from reviewers, ranging from the clueless types who have no business writing about this sort of film to more perceptive mainstream / "alternative" critics who don't seem quite sure what they've seen, I'll keep my peace until at least one of my four readers has had a chance to see this unexpected gem.

OP ALAS 1 - I,JFK

( first in an irregular series of posts about books which have gone out of print to my great sorrow)

I, JFK is a comic fantasy by Robert Mayer, author of Superfolks. It was published in 1990 by St. Martin's and appeared in paperback in time to get on the Oliver Stone JFK fantasy bandwagon. Kennedy is in heaven with his brother Bobby, LBJ, Martin Luther King and Marilyn Monroe. He must explain himself before moving on to heaven's next level. I bought this book in paperback and initially suspected that it was the work of Gore Vidal or perhaps Thomas Disch. Wrong. It's the work of a novelist who is proud that he never repeats himself.( That's fine but it makes the people in marketing reach for the Xanax.)
It's an awful temptation to recount the funniest parts of this book but I shall resist. I'll only say that Mayer's vision of November 22 Dealey Plaza outdoes Robert Anton Wilson's fantasia of multiple assassins in Illuminatus! It's topped only by the account of what really happened the night Marilyn Monroe died. A book that deserves more readers.

WV or Terror of the Random

Blogger likes to keep the spammers at bay with its word verification device. In order for his comment to appear, the poster must type a more or less random series of letters that sometimes form an actual word but more often are a bizzaro portmanteau wordoid. At times the WV seems to possess an oracular editorial spirit. Some have called it the I Ching of the internet.
That way lies madness, according to Portland writer Ronnie Cordova, who refers to the wv as a schizophrenia test. If you think its cybergibberish means anything, you should be on Prolixin maintenance. Cordova's brutal common sense approach to anything spooky or outre' has its merits.
But I must disagree. The wv is the happiest, and most treacherous, verbal accident since Brion Gysin's discovery of the cut up technique.

Ten More Things About Me

or, when in doubt, post a list.

1. Someone gave me a zucchini the size of an Invasion of the Body Snatchers pod.
2.A friend and I invented hip hop rhyming in 1975, aided by a rhyming dictionary.
3. I have never seen Gone With The Wind.
4.I own a copy of The Wind Done Gone, the revisionist version of the novel.
5. If we wrestle, you'll win.
6. I am afraid to be alone with the zucchini in #1.
7.If you send me a SASE, I'll send you the recipe for that powerful cocktail, the fantod.
8. I have never actually drank a fantod.
9. After waiting for three years for the new Morrissey album, I got around to buying it a couple of weeks ago.
10. I hate it ( not really).

Truth in Blogging,or, Ask Me No Question

As a shy type, I am not a natural blogger. I don't feel compelled to show pictures of my pet or significant other, although I've seen some very saucy ones recently. My blog is personal but not terribly autobiographical. If it's the minutiae of everyday life you're after, I'm not your boy. However, just this once, I'll tell the tale of a blogger who got blogged down in his own version of the truth.
When this individual lived with a friend of mine in Baltimore, he sent me a link for his livejournal or whatever he was using at the time. I was surprised to see him describe the house where he rented one small smokefilled room as " my investment property." He posted a photo of himself nude that had been hideously photoshopped to make him the envy of Dirk Diggler.
He inherited some money and bought himself a Vespa, which was eventually stolen but not before it became the love object of a phantom fetishist who jacked off on its' smoothrunning leather seat before dawn each day M-F. He began disappearing regularly and calling. he claimed, from the ICU of various local hospital. He was dying of a rare cancer triggered by recovered memories of witnessing the murder of his older brother in childhood. At last he moved out of my friend's house. I stopped receiving e mails from him.
Two years ago I idly Googled him and found that there was an entire site devoted to the discrepancies, pseudonyms, embellishments and plain damn lies that permeated his various blogs, posted under various names. The photo he displayed of his bf turned out to be a dj photo of a childrens' book author in Texas. He has complained of cancer in nearly every organ of his body and lives camped at death's door much of the time. Unmasking his online personae has almost become a cottage industry in da blogosphere. I suspect that some of these disgrutled folk expressed support, sympathy,etc. on one of his many blogs before smelling a rat. Not nice, Steve, not nice at all.
It's 4:17am, rain and thunder, lukewarm Diet pepsi at my elbow. Isn't reality revolting?

Famous Authors 2

blogger Viddy Knobs said...

Vida and I are in Maryland looking for chiroptera. As this is a nocturnal activity, our days are free. We eat horrific food at unspeakable "joints" as Frank and Peggy and Tony vocalise on the jukebox. Yesterday I ordered a bowl of oatmeal at breakfast. A moth came flitting through the room. "Maybe we should be collecting them instead of bats, darling."

If Famous Authors Left Comments at DC's

blogger Frank Jafja said:

The office is really going to drive me out of my mind. My dreams have gone from being simply prurient to unspeakably strange. Last night I dreamed I awoke transformed into a gigantic pig. At soome point in the man-to-piggy transformation i devouured the Goyutat book Dennis had posted a few days ago. My sister came into my bedroom and screamed, at which point I woke up .... I think.

25

I've been reading a lot of lists on Facebook and even found a Facebook -inspired list on the Dodie Bellamy blog. 25 facts and statements about myself:

1. I'm a bit of a namedropper ( see above - and below}
2. I am lefthanded and not at all ambidextrous. My right hand is a stupid but attractive appendage that does all the heavy lifting and carrying.
3. The first time I ejaculated, I thought I had some kind of disease.
4. Deranged, even schizoid people are drawn to me.
5. I wish I knew the reason for #4.
6. Although I think she is not bursting with ideas and is in many ways an artistic coward, I have seen Laurie Anderson perform in seven different venues.
7. Bowling is not part of my skill set.
8. I've got a never ending love for you, whoever you are.
9. All my dreams are in widescreen format.
10. In 1976 I delayed Ann Beattie's supper.
11. What did I tell you? Larry McMurtry used to hide when he saw me crossing M St. heading toward Booked Up.
12. I have never written anything that could be described as journalism. However, you could call it reportage.
13. I have mixed beer and Campari and survived, but not without sustaining neural damage.
14. When I am alone, I do not talk to myself. Peace and quiet is more important than "vocalizing the interior monologue."
15. Gus van Sant's Gerry is a fuck you to the pseuds and poseurs.
16. The first time I had a dry orgasm I thought I was dying.
17. I lent my best friend three Dennis Cooper books. He used them to prop up his weights bench. He read at least one of them but he can't remember which one.
18. The last Woody Allen movie I saw in the theatre was Small Time Crooks. I fell asleep.
I also fell asleep during The Matrix Reloaded.
19. In Ottowa I was twice accosted by prostitutes, one male, one apparently female.
20. A barroom discussion about Edgar Allan Poe and necrophilia almost came to blows.
21. My grandmother bought Dale Cooper's FBI memoir not realizing it was a television tie-in. Waldenbooks wouldn't let her return or exchange it.
22. I like brie on cheeseburgers.
23. I'd blog daily if all I had to do was complile stupid lists.
24. All my sex partners have been human or at least humanoid.
25. I have no animal phobias.

Snow Day

The Outlaw ( Howard Hughes)I have probably seen fewer westerns than any other type of genre film. If this vanity piece was the first western one ever saw, one wouldn't be in a great hurry to see another. Hughes' inflated ego floated through Hollywood for several years. Clamor and outrage surrounded this movie, with its unequivocal "suggestive" music cues and bizarre camera angles ( courtesy of Kane camera man Gregg Toland)that drew the viewer's eye
to the generous bosom of Jane Russell. When Hughes isn't steaming up the room with Ms Russell, he's telling a version of the story of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Pat's best friend Doc Holiday is cleverly played by Walter Huston. This isn't a dull film but the absence of la Russell only emphasizes Hughes' sub- Ed Wood directorial prowess.

Master and Commander ( Peter Weir)Peter Weir hit America with Witness, a sound variation of his theme of cultures colliding. He made one more picture that was on a par with his Australian films, Fearless, the tale of a man who has no business being alive ( he's survived an airliner crash)that has affinities with Phillipe Mora. Master and Commander is a precis' of the work of the popular nautical storyteller Patrick O'Brian. Weir depicts the archetypal homosocial milieu, the life of the sea, but plausibly keeps everything on a friendly basis. It's still enough to wring a tear from even the phlegmatic likes of me. Russell Crowe gives us another 3D portrait, his best after John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. Paul Bettany offsets Captain Aubrey's genuine piety as the ship's doctor, an amateur naturalist whose idea of heaven is the Galapagos Islands. It's no The Last Wave or Gallipoli but a worthy film. I'm sorry I missed it in the theatres.

Dance With A Stranger ( Mike Newell)Nightclub hostess and retired prostitute Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in England. Scenarist Shelagh Delaney presents the events leading to Ellis' execution as the impossible triangle of the lady, aspiring race car driver David Blakeley and unrequited lover/ protector Desmond Cussen. Blakeley is besotted
with Ellis and even breaks off an engagement to "the kind of girl my mother wants me to marry". But this is England in 1954. The kind of slumming popular among the toffs was still several years away. Ellis is played by Miranda Richardson as a collection of tics,twitches and tantrums. She conveys so much through shrieks and cries that she's almost the female Nick Nolte. I've spoilt the movie already but I hope my description of Richardson's acting drives you to find this movie and watch it anyway. There were at least two other very good British true crime films during the late 80s - early 90s, Peter Medak's
The Krays and Let Him Have It. The latter was most people's first look at Christopher Eccleston.

When it snows, I watch movies.

Some Favorites of 2008

( A film or book or record's inclusion doesn't necessarily indicate that it was published or released in 2008.)

Wild Nights - Joyce Carol Oates. JCO imagines the last days of James, Poe, Hemingway, Dickinson and Twain.
The Sluts - Dennis Cooper - The latest by the man the gay lit establishment loves to hate. This assemblage of sex worker critiques is marbled with some of the darkest comedy imaginable.
The Secret History - Donna Tartt - My weakness for school stories isn't limited to tales of boarding school buggery. Can anyone tell me why this book reminded me so often of John Fowles' The Magus?
My Lives - Edmund White - White throws pretense to the four winds and gives us the book lurking beneath his famous autobiograhical quartet.

Let The Right One In
Margot at the Wedding
The Host
In Bruges
Fear(s) of the Dark
Midnight Meat Train
The X Files: I Want To Believe
The Dark Knight Returns
My Winnipeg
Savage Grace
Mother of Tears
Newcastle

Live music:
The National / Modest Mouse / REM Columbia,Md.
The Duke Spirit Baltimore, Md.
Melissa Etheridge D.C.

I played the hell out of Enigma Love Sensuality Devotion, Morrissey/ Smiths in toto, Cassndra Wilson's Miles Davis album, Kevin Ayers Joy of a Toy, Bryan Ferry Dylanesque, Van Dyke Parks Tokyo Rose, Richard and Linda Thompson / Best of and John Cale The Island Years.