Stephen McClurg's Blog, page 49

The Week That Was, or Pollen-esia

Our just-turned-four-year-old makes dinner a full contact event. We quit trying to play into her attempts at doing anything but eating, so we just hope that she eats a few forkfuls of something. Every now and then she eats a whole dinner or just ignores it.

This week I had asked her to eat a few times and she just wasn’t interested. We have leftover Easter candy and she and her sister get a little bit for dessert if they eat their meals. Evidently, I enforce Draconian dining rules.

At the point we figured she just wasn’t going to eat, she decided to distract us. “I’m going to draw a picture of the family. First, I’m going to draw Daddy, who doesn’t listen…he looks like a crazy old lady with lasagna on his nose.”

Bravo.

…..

One nostril seemed to go into some sort of allergic shock while I was administering the ACT exam. Half an allergy. I don’t know. It quit after 48 hours.

Meanwhile, the four-year-old reminds me every day that it’s ok to step on the pine catkins because they aren’t worms.

That explains some of the nightmares….

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Driving through fog and from a wedding reception, the children got into an argument that devolved into tears and shouts. The argument was about whether or not “Starlight” was a good name for the vacuum. I told them they had to stop. They went to sleep.

…..

I don’t really understand Pinterest yet. Mostly I look at pictures of libraries, studies, and studios. Probably a kind of wish-fulfillment. Maybe I do understand Pinterest. Anyway, I was fascinated by their choices for me:

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I was able to return to Lost Chords this week with a short review on the Angles 9 record Disappeared Behind the Sun.

Another record I found surprising is Sun O)))’s Monoliths and Dimensions. I physically couldn’t listen to more than one track at a sitting because of the intensity of the experience. I recommend listening on a nice loud system or good headphones. I had never heard the band before and I just can’t imagine what a live set is like.

I’ve been listening and learning Black Sabbath tracks for fun. After the flood, I had to go through my instruments for damage (just the upright needs some repairs), but they all need some TLC. It’s been exciting to dig back into playing music again after so many years away from it.

 

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“Monkey Love Experiments” (2014), partially based on the Harlow surrogate mother experiments, is a beautiful and beautifully sad short film about a monkey who believes it is going to the moon. There’s an amazing amount of information in this nine-minute film, but it never feels forced. It’s partially filmed in stop-motion, one of my favorite techniques, but it also skillfully blends computer and live-action effects.

 

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Bill Frisell is an astonishing musician and a rarity. He has always seemed in control of his ego and has never been afraid of melody or tenderness or complexity. He’s engaging on recordings and live. Bill Frisell: A Portrait (2017) traces his life and career up to the present.

The Week That Was, or Jackasserie

The post below is originally from Friday, February 23. As we were settling down for the night, we heard running, then rushing water. Within minutes water was pouring out of the ceiling and flooding over my shoes. Parts of the ceiling fell in. No one was physically hurt, but we had to move to a new apartment and the kids will be waiting for another month before we have all of their clothes and toys in order to know if they are too damaged from the water. We were in a hotel for about two weeks. We’re slowly getting life back together. 

I’ve had to abandon several writing projects that I hope to resume as soon as I can. Until then, this may be the last update for a while.

I have to give thanks to family, friends, students, and colleagues who have been patient and helped support us through this. Thank you! 

Also, a big thanks to Elton Ripley, who has been incredibly helpful. We couldn’t have gotten through this process without him.

Here’s what I was writing a few Fridays ago: 

Shorter work weeks feel more difficult than a normal week. It’s like everyone still crams in the same amount of work and expectations over fewer days.

And that’s been most of the week, really. Lots of work and essay grading, which will likely continue for at least a month before reviews start kicking in.

My AP students did an exercise writing descriptive paragraphs that used polysyndeton in one version and asyndeton in another. Then they analyzed how the devices altered the tone and tempo of their writing. Though descriptive writing can be blended into any writing mode, it sure felt like a break reading these in between the various analytical papers we generally write. It’s nice to see a different side of their personality come out in their writing.

I did a random line doodle that turned into a portrait of a donkey. Balthazar? I was once told I was like the Eeyore of faculty meetings. I’m trying!

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Bluebeard (1936)

I love stop-motion animation and I had never heard of this one before it turned up on FilmStruck. It’s short, but fun–and extremely violent. I mean it’s like California Raisin gore, but still. It retells the Bluebeard folktale of a powerful, ugly nobleman whose wives have a habit of disappearing. He warns a new wife that she can go anywhere and enjoy any treasure, but to stay away from a chamber in the bottom of the castle.

While not the smoothest animation, Bluebeard has some interesting design concepts and sometimes an interesting use of materials, for example, the cottony fabric used for dust coming off of the roads.

And the quality in some spots is breathtaking, though you can tell that the film stock or stocks that the restoration was done from were damaged. It’s part of a Criterion Collection of Jean Painlevé’s, Science Is Fiction, which features some outstanding short films on underwater subjects like the octopus and sea horse.

The Week That Was, or The Shape of Pizza

We celebrated our oldest daughter’s birthday. She was excited that she got to hear her name over the intercom at school. She is still young enough that everyone in her class brings in cards and treats. The youngest was stashing candy and wrappers everywhere, a chaotic flurry of plastic and chocolate. Demanding pizza. Drawing on doors. Then being as sweet as anything.

I had a man express his unsolicited thoughts to me on the state of frozen pizza in Mal-Wart. Things aren’t good, but Red Baron is best. I grew up eating Red Baron and as much as I like a fresh pizza out of a brick oven, I love frozen pizzas, too. I wanted to suggest some of the newer, more expensive ones that are really good, but this wasn’t a conversation.

Lost Chords #6 featured an album I quite like, Screen Memories by John Maus. I wrote several paragraphs about the cover image and mediation that I removed. Maybe I’ll add to those thoughts later.

I also wrote about the profound effect Eraserhead has had on me for The Terror Test: Test Prep.

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A good friend of mine brought  Amphibian Man  (1962) to my attention. He’s been on-and-off researching the history of horror in Soviet and Russian film and mentioned this. It’s hard to describe, but it’s about a mad scientist who gives his son gills. The son falls for a lady much in the same way the Gill-man falls for one in Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). There are familial and societal roadblocks to their love affair. There are shades of Victor Hugo, Beauty and the Beast (and other fairy tales), and Frankenstein, and it has a look somewhere between Forbidden Planet and Star Trek. An obvious precursor to The Shape of Water, and  possibly to films like Starman or The Man Who Fell to Earth–as told by Powell/Pressburger.  It’s on Amazon Prime if you’re interested.


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Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (2017)  is a fantastic documentary for fans of rock music, American music, and folk traditions. Highlights disturbing laws and violence against American Indians and also traces the thread of their musical cultures though American vocal music, blues, and rock. I’m hoping to read Like a New Sun, a collection of new indigenous Mexican poetry.



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Jon Ronson’s  Lost at Sea collects various articles and essays from throughout his career. Indigo children. Psychopaths. Frank Sidebottom. I wanted each chapter to be a book of its own. The audiobook is fantastic partially because he reads it. Hearing this in his own voice is addictive. I wish Zadie Smith would record her novels.

The Week That Was, or I Wish the Shoe Fit

This week included, but was not limited to speeding tickets, stomach viruses, the stinkiest, and ultimately most inedible, Brussels sprouts ever, and a white-knuckled trip to work in rain, standing water, and without streetlights.

My just-turned-four-year-old got a special present of pull-ups for her birthday because of the stomach virus.

Taking care of sick children did allow for a lot of snuggling, watching cartoons, and some reading.

Getting writing done is another story.

I did write a Lost Chords on the heavy metal art book Hellraisers.

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It’s been two decades since I’ve seen Buñuel’s work, with the exceptions of Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age D’Or (1930). These are strange, beautiful films I revisit every year or so, each containing images seared into my visual memory. Well, aural memory, too. Almost every version of Un Chien I’ve seen uses “Tango Argentino.” It’s a piece of music that I hear in my head on a weekly basis. I’m not kidding. Maybe I should have given a warning before that link.

With Viridiana (1961), Buñuel managed to anger not only film censors, but also Franco and the Vatican. There is a fearlessness to his work, even if some argue that some of his metaphors are too obvious. I don’t know. Those images! These films were uncanny and almost incomprehensible when I was a young viewer. I enjoyed and felt transported by that quality. Now I can see the historical and social implications in his work and the films have taken on multiple meanings.

He was asked to change the ending in order to make it less suggestive. Originally, Viridiana goes into her cousin’s room and it is assumed that they are beginning an affair.  [spoiler here] He reshot it and had three characters sit down to play cards, and suggest the beginning of a polygamous relationship among them. And the censors okayed that ending! Cojones, Buñuel!

There are a several films I’ve missed by him (Robinson Crusoe?) and I’m hoping to dig into his work more formerly over the next year or so.

 

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Tom Hart’s How to Say Everything is a fantastic addition to the art/craft/storytelling shelf. Seriously. I found it as smart and warm as it is inspiring. I’m hoping to take a class at his Gainesville school, The Sequential Art Workshop (SAW), and who knows, maybe I could develop some online classes in literary content that he wants the school to have? I’ve been trying to establish a creative writing class for years and there just doesn’t seem to be money available to make that happen in the public schools where I work. But then again, it would be great to do some sort of film, philosophy, literature, or mythology course for these students. SAW’s website includes some free resources among other cool items.

I read excerpts from Hart’s Rosalie Lightning, his most famous work, several years ago and I just can’t read it in its entirety right now. I had a baby almost the age of Rosalie when I started reading it, and I knew the background story from a friend who teaches at SAW sometimes. What I read was beautiful and painful. The book is about the deepest love and loss that may be possible. I am planning on reading some of his lighter work, though, and I’ll read Rosalie some day.

 

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I ignored Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead initially because of the oxen-like contrariness I seem to have about something I hear about too much in popular culture. Finally, after so many people I respect had mentioned this, including Ashley M. Jones, I decided to check it out.

Smith’s work is confrontational, political, personal, and can somehow be serious and seriously funny at the same time. Their use of form in this book is fantastic–styles that work against the traditional stage or page dichotomy. These are poems that live on the breath and breathe on the page.

 

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Delaine is awesome. Not My Small Diary is a series that she has edited for more than two decades now, while also doing her own autobio comics series My Small Diary. I was so excited to get this one because I’ve been a fan of the the series and the “unexplained” since before I could read. I had more than one Time Life collection on oddities, and for a brief period I had cable which made Monster Quest a great way to start a weekend.

The bittersweet center of this collection is that within days of getting mine it became known that longtime contributor (he’s possibly in every anthology in the series) and all-around cool comix guy Mark Campos took his own life. Unlike a lot of contributors and fans of this series who knew him personally, I can’t say that, but I can say that I deeply enjoyed his work and his contribution was always one of the first that I read. His work reminded me of some of my favorites from MAD (Aragones, Jaffee, etc.), and while he could be funny, he also took that cartoon style and fused it with so many disparate influences, and wound it through his own perspective, moods, and tones.

He is missed.

 

 

The Week That Was, or Even More Tireder

My five-year-old and I went to her first concert this week. We saw Marker, a group of younger musicians led by Ken Vandermark. She loved it but wanted to leave 20 minutes in because she was tired. It was cool to finally see the Jaybird (Hi Burgin!), which houses the Alabama Zine Library. I’ve seen Vandermark in several live settings and he’s always focused and committed to whatever work he’s performing.

In March we are planning on seeing a performance of Steve Reich’s Drumming. I’m probably more excited than she is.

Earlier this week I wrote about Daphne du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now” and Macbeth for another round of Test Prep for The Terror Test. She is someone I look forward to reading more of soon. I wrote about 13 pages and cut it to

 

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If you don’t know the story of the horror boom that began in the late ’60s and early ’70s and lasted until the ’90s and are interested in it, then this is a great book. It’s still pretty good, if you’ve been reading that story for years. I’ve been reading books about horror since I could read. I read magazines like Fangoria, GoreZone, Deep Red, and others. Reading some of these stories today though comes with a little sadness. So many of these folks are gone, a few very recently: Romero, Craven, O’Bannon, Hooper, Blatty, etc.

 

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Fantastic graphic memoir about the immigrant experience, Vietnam, America, and much more than that suggests. I grew up with many friends who were first and second generation Vietnamese-American and later I tutored Cambodian monks. I loved hearing about Angkor Wat and would love to see it in person some day. Many told powerful stories about fleeing war or the Khmer Rouge. These communities always treated me like family. Bui gets at not only the complications of these larger societal difficulties, but also the complications of family. I read it in one sitting and will likely read it again.

 

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A friend mentioned The Color of Pomegranates (1969) by Sergei Parajanov to me this week. I hadn’t seen it in years, not since my days of renting dusty library VHS copies. Discovering that libraries had films was a revelation. In middle and high school, I grew up on an island (not as exotic or as fun as it sounds–I worked at a seafood restaurant) and the nearest library was about an hour away. I should have checked out the Bookmobile that came down maybe once a week, but instead, I ordered books and movies through catalogs. There was no where else to spend that restaurant money anyway.

My friend and I laughed about how awful reds looked on VHS (lots of red in Pomegranates). Anyway, FilmStruck/Criterion has a restored version for streaming and it has the highest quality in which I’ve seen any of his films.

Pomegranates is gorgeous. Every frame is like a painting or collage and is in reference to aspects of poet Sayat Nova’s life or work, which I only know from this film. There are excerpts of poems read, but if I remember correctly, there is no dialogue. Characters communicate through gesture, action, and facial expression. Parajanov, at least what I’ve seen by him, made visually dense and symbolic films. He influenced Tarkovsky and they grew to be friends.

Not a movie for everyone, but possibly for fans of Deren, Buñuel, Jodorowsky, Švankmajer, Greenaway, Resnais, and other arthouse or surreal short films.

The Week That Was, or Waiting Out the Clock

An exhausting week. Sometimes in a good way–a decent amount of work and writing done, children’s art and messiness–and sometimes bad–just sort of, well, exhausting.

I wrote about Fever Ray’s Plunge and the last of The Outrider’s season on resistance and community is available.

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David Foster Wallace said that the production company’s edits on Lynch’s Dune meant that some of the film became “literally incomprehensible.” As I mentioned last week, I quite like it anyway, and I quite like Evil Brain from Outer Space (1964) though it offers an even more absurd level of incomprehensibility. Likely, part of the problem is that it is three Japanese films from the ’50s spliced into one American Z-grade sci-fi flick in the ’60s.

It’s everything I love about these kinds of films: melting alien brains, kung-fu aliens, superhero aliens (Starman–like a Superman with little moth wings and one antenna), dada robot aliens, Batman-aliens (or just miscreants dressed like Batman–I can’t remember), and an alien that looks like an emaciated Devine in an unbraided Elsa wig. It’s a mess. But I’d watch it again.

 

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Speaking of Devine, John Waters recommended Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegh, to David Sedaris, who recommended it to those of us in his reading audiences on his tour before the big diary compilation came out. Moshfegh’s writing is as crisp and raw as Eileen’s winter hands and is a true morbid joy. I love the voice captured in this book, but if you’re someone who wants to be friends with your narrator (and not hear about how her fingers smell or her challenges with bowel movements), this book’s likely not for you.

I’m looking forward to reading more of Moshfegh’s work.

 

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I’m continuing with the horror book club I mentioned a few weeks ago. Afterage by Yvonne Navarro is a post-apocalyptic vampire novel and is way better than that probably sounds. A lazy critique could call it Salem’s Lot meets The Stand.

It’s one helluva first novel. There’s a lot of control, especially since she chooses to follow multiple characters like As I Lay Dying. Many contemporary YA novels I’ve read that attempt this usually aren’t very successful. Same with horror, though. Are these characters approaching anything like Moshfegh’s Eileen? No, but that’s also not what this book is trying to do. I Am Legend (the book) does something like that fantastically.

What’s surprising about Afterage, published in 1993, is how many recently popular tropes may have started here: there’s a badass with a crossbow (Walking Dead), human farm (Daybreakers (2009)), Stake Land (2010) comes to mind, there’s a wintery thing with light like 30 Days of Night at one point, and, I don’t know, probably others I missed.

 

Besides listening to a bunch of stuff for my music blog at The Drunken Odyssey, I’ve also been listening to several Entombed records, Johannes Ockeghem’s choral music, and the Shirelles, who are so great I don’t even know what else to say about them.

I’ve also come around to Danzig III, which I had never heard in its entirety. It may have his best vocal performances. It seems peak recording quality anyway.

The Week That Was, or You got some Duncan Idaho on my Gurney Halleck.

The week began with some semi-restful snow days. I don’t believe anyone in our home was permanently damaged, though a few tears were shed and more than a few markers bled.

The almost-four-year-old sang while we were discussing dinner plans. Her song began, “Tiki masala / I need a dolla.” Not bad.

I wrote about the new Sparks record for The Drunken Odyssey. I also wrote about one of my favorite movies, The Brood, for the new semester of Test Prep, part of The Terror Test podcast.

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Frank Herbert’s Dune has been on my to-read list for over twenty years. I liked, and still like, the David Lynch movie, which introduced me to Herbert’s mythology.

The book was a blast. Not only is it a satisfying sci-fi/fantasy adventure story,  but it also delivers beyond action. I particularly enjoyed the use of multiple texts contributing to the story as history, the Machiavellian political machinations, and the variations on religious teachings. If you’ve even contemplated reading it before, I recommend it.

I’ve heard the first three books in the series are worth reading. I’m going to consider that, but I find I am often as bad about completing a book series as I am about finishing a TV show.

 

 

I’ve only just seen Margarethe von Trotta’s fantastic work. While she has her own style and subject matter, there are shades of Kieslowski, Bergman, and Tarkovsky. She’s associated with the New German Cinema movement, which includes work by Wenders, Herzog, and Fassbinder.

She’s as good as anyone on that list.

Sisters, or The Balance of Happiness (1979) and Sheer Madness (1983) are the two most recent films I’ve seen by her. Both films focus on difficult interpersonal relationships, societal expectations, and suicide.

Last year I watched her first feature, The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978), along with Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground (1982). They were both revelations. It’s argued whether or not Collins is the first or second African American woman to direct a feature. Unfortunately, the film only played a few festivals, Collins died of cancer soon after the film debuted, and she left a great deal of work unfinished. A biography was recently published about her and it’s on my reading list for this year.

I watched Losing Ground because I saw Duane Jones in the cast list. Jones is the lead in the original Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the main reason that movie, I think, stands out as not just a good horror movie, but a great film. Notoriously, he seemed embarrassed by it and did very few movies after that, but was well-known and respected on stage and as an educator. He died at 51 in 1988, the same year as Collins. I wish I could have seen him on stage. NOTLD and his performance have meant so much to me over the years that I choked up a little seeing him on screen in a different role. Some of that may have been Romero’s recent death as well.

I’ve seen a few episodes of Tales from the Darkside: Season Two and I’m excited that Monsters has now made it to Amazon Prime. I love these mostly dreadful (and not in the expected sense of the macabre) horror anthologies.

 

The Week That Was, or Down and Out on Electronic Submission Platforms

I think I’ve garnered more rejections in the last year than I’ve ever received. The takeaway from that is that I’m submitting more than I used to.  Sometimes that makes the process seem easier and sometimes it doesn’t.

Lost Chords and Serenades Divine #2 is available for your perusal.

 

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Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932)

Not my favorite Renoir, but I’ve seen little of his work, though Le Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are fantastic, and all of these films are only part of his output in the ’30s, in a career that stretched from the ’20s to 1969.

Boudu is a tramp, sometimes brute. He’s a little bit Monsieur Hulot and a little bit of Johnny, the misanthrope of Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993). I’m usually more engrossed by the performances of the co-stars who have to respond to the don’t-care-flair of the main character.

This was later remade as Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986).

 

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Torso (1973)

A giallo (Italian precursor to slasher films) that has all the elements you expect and a few surprises for those who love the genre. I’m wondering if these releases are now unedited. When I was growing up and watching a lot of horribly dubbed VHS tapes, there was never a lot of blood or nudity. This was partially why Argento’s films stood out. Maybe he had enough umph to get proper releases. Torso, also released as The Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence (!), has been one of those films I heard about, but couldn’t ever find. It’s hilariously bad, and if you like this sort of thing, probably just plain hilarious, a pizza-and-beer movie.

Evidently there was a clothing shortage in Italy when it was made. A women’s clothing shortage I mean. Many seem to have had to rely on thin, transparent fabrics or scarves in which to wrap themselves. There are several times during the day, sometimes sort of sunbathing, where women just forgo clothes altogether.

The film has the typical psychosexual motivation for the killer that gets revealed in a bit of sweaty exposition. There are tires squealing…on grass. There is a fight scene featuring actors trained at the Shatner Stage Combat Academy complete with sound effects from low budget martial arts movies.

Spoiler: Like you care! Ha! In traditional genre terms, you could count this a comedy! Whatta hoot!

 

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“The Mesmerist” (2003)

Despite my love for cinematic atrocities like Torso, my two most-frequently watched directors last year were Shirley Clarke and Maya Deren, both fantastic artists and most often described as experimental or surrealist directors. Art film, basically. (Check out Shana Moulton if you like this kind of stuff!)

Bill Morrison is a new director to me, though he’s been working for at least two decades. He’s done a lot of collaborations with some of my favorite musicians. What I’ve seen of his work fits the experimental/art film side of things, though much of it also seems to be about restoration. He frequently reinterprets pieces of lost films and gives them a kind of retelling using a variety of what appear to be chemical effects. I did not expect to like this as much as I did.

Discovering Morrison’s work is as exciting as when I discovered Guy Maddin’s, or any of the filmmakers listed above. They create distinct, strange worlds.

 

The Week That Was, or And But So

Most of the week was taken up with getting the second semester of school under way. That and the continual fight with the dryer. I will now have to hire a true mercenary after four troubleshooting attempts that have exhausted my limited handyman artillery.

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I’ve been a lifelong horror fan and spent a lot of time reading horror fiction when I was growing up. By college, I was reading mostly other genres, but I have kept up reading horror classics I missed and I’ve slowly been re-reading Stephen King’s bibliography in order. After a few years, I’ve only managed ’74-’81 and am currently on Cujo.  By the time I finish it, he will likely have written three more books.

Recently, The Horror Show with Brian Keene announced a book club. Given that the choices were contemporary, I thought of it as a chance to read some decent books in the genre that I have missed. January’s pick is Primitive by J.F. Gonzalez.

Primitive is and isn’t a zombie novel. I don’t want to say too much about it because much of the joy of the book in Gonzalez’s fresh take on the zombie apocalypse. Similar to pulpy sci-fi, the enjoyment here is the speed of the narrative and the ideas that Gonzalez plays with in the novel. Also similar to pulp, the speed kills chances to slow down and get into world, character, and thought. An argument could be made that the fast tempo matches form to subject matter. Okay. On that level the book delivers.

I generally want a little more.

So as a pulp horror novel, it’s fun, but that means that there is a lack of finesse in places. There are odd repetitions–spots where characters would repeat lines almost verbatim within a few paragraphs or pages. The pace of the narrative also meant that there were awkward expository conversations.

After reading this, I looked at some reviews and some people don’t like the move Gonzalez made at the end of the novel. I like what he did with form.

Keene has started, as a continuation of a project Gonzalez began (he died in 2014), a History of Horror Fiction at Cemetery Dance Publications. So far it’s a great series.

Maybe next year I’ll have time to jump on the Bowie book club.

 

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This is the first book of Wallace’s short fiction and the first of the genre I’ve read by him. I can’t really give a proper review of Primitive in this space, much less this one. Wallace reportedly renounced much of the work here and, if I remember correctly, in his first novel The Broom of the System.

I’ve found both interesting, but Girl feels like a young writer swinging for the fences with both success and failure. I am especially interested in the various masks Wallace puts on and how it seems purposeful that there is both an author and a persona speaking at the same time and that the author is somehow commenting on what the persona is saying.

If anything, on a first reading I was surprised by the endings of these stories and how much work likely went into them. There are times when a story seems to have devolved into a post-postmodern metanarrative only to spiral into some kind of emotional truth or beauty that feels somehow universal and unstable at the same time. The book could be frustrating, but in interesting ways. Definitely worth a reread, but it’s not for everyone.

 

I’ve also started writing a music review blog for The Drunken Odyssey podcast. Enjoy! Or not!

Though I won’t write about it, I am currently listening to Rush’s discography. I don’t care that you don’t like them. My brain is full of the love that is like the view from Rush’s stage: thousands of air drummers in perfect, glorious synchronicity.

I’m also reading Dune, so I kind of feel like that kid in “Subdivisions.”  Then again, I’ve always felt like that kid.

Nothing new here except the year.

The Week That Was, or Poverty Row Double Feature

Along with trying to meet some deadlines, I’ve been getting time in with the kids and their wonderful goofiness. Even in winter, the three-year-old seems to be allergic to pants. I am also watching videos about changing dryer heating elements. ‘Tis the season, I guess.

Part of a conversation I heard last night:

3YO: *Leaps onto mom’s legs and recently dislocated knee.*

Wife: Get off my knees, please!

3YO: *Still on legs.* That rhymes!

Wife: Yes. Yes, it does.

3YO: That Grinch is nekkid.

 

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I recently finished My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 1 by Emil Ferris. There’s a lot to like about this book: the art, composition, and colors, just for starters. I love the meaningful incorporation of horror comics and art into the story and its themes. I can see why people are so excited about the next volume and disappointed in its delay. Here’s a great comic about how the book came about and is an example of Ferris’s unique approach to the form.

 

As a monster kid myself, I’ve long wanted to see some of Bela Lugosi’s non-Dracula roles, but they were difficult to locate growing up. I recently watched two: Bowery at Midnight (1942) and The Corpse Vanishes (1942). These are perfect late night low-budgeters, if you like that sort of thing. Both are mixed-genre horror films. Bowery incorporates detective/thriller elements (and one could say that it’s more a crime film with elements of horror, but, anyway–) and Corpse incorporates sci-fi and gothic devices. A favorite plot element of Bowery involves the dual lives of Lugosi, who still sounds like Dracula in both, but no one recognizes him as a professor because when he manages his soup kitchen (his front as crime boss, which I guess is really his third role, sort of), he doesn’t wear glasses.

It takes a certain type of person to want to sit through that and maybe even another type who loves it. Corpse had me at the summary that begins, “Lugosi revels in his role as European horticulturalist Dr. Lorenz.”

Both films are worth multiple viewings for B-movie fans.

I hope you enjoy your New Year’s weekend!