David Dubrow's Blog, page 52
April 1, 2015
St. Louis Train Beating: Lessons Learned
This story has made the rounds for a few days now. As responsible adults, we need to dig a little deeper into both the coverage of the event and the event itself:
"When one man sat down next to a second man in a St. Louis light rail car and asked him his opinion on the shooting of Michael Brown, it was not the beginning of a discussion.
It was the start of an assault, police said.
The second man, who was white, didn't want to answer the question. Then the first man, who was black, boxed him in the face. Two more African-American men joined in the beating, according to a police report about Monday's incident."
Odd that the writer, Ben Brumfield, used the term "boxed" here instead of "struck" or "punched". Why is that? To mitigate the savagery of the attack? I've never heard the word "boxed" used like this outside of a specific reference to the sport of boxing, the metaphorical enclosure of someone or something, or the actual use of a physical box.
As with all violent encounters, it's terrible that this happened, but it's worse if we don't learn anything from it. The biggest takeaway is that the victim was profiled before the actual attack. While this particular assault is a bit peculiar for its lack of a robbery (perhaps another chapter in the Knockout Game), it was still brutal. And unnecessary. I'm not blaming the victim when I say that if the victim had taken steps to make himself a less attractive target, I'd be looking for a different story to write about.
Before we go further, watch this video of the attack with the sound on. The audio is important. I'll wait.
What's striking is that the person who shot the video knew that an attack was imminent. The videographer knew that the guy was going to get victimized. So did everyone else on that train except for the victim. We'll ignore the videographer's sniggering and tittering other than to say that it's particularly disgusting.
This assault started before the attacker asked to borrow the victim's cell phone. It began in the profiling phase, when the victim sat down on the train, oblivious to his surroundings. At that moment, the attacker knew out of everyone on that train who he was going to punch. (We'll save the racial elements for a different discussion.) Everything followed from that profiling phase, including asking to use the victim's cell phone (who does that?), sitting next to the victim, asking the victim a racially charged question, and reacting to the victim's non-answer. At every one of those points, the victim could have done something to change the outcome, but didn't. He ignored them, probably scared but hoping nothing would happen. You leave them alone, they'll leave you alone, right?
Wrong.
We have to learn from his mistakes and not do what he did. How do we do that? Remember these five easy steps:
Always carry a weapon. Always. Especially if circumstances force you to travel at night. Gun, knife, pepper spray, whatever: if you don't have a weapon of some kind on you at all times, you're putting yourself at unnecessary risk. Practice accessing and deploying your weapon under duress. Take your personal safety seriously.If you're tired, suck it up and don't look tired. Look alert. Take visible notice of your surroundings. If I'm a felon, I'm going to go after the guy who looks tired and oblivious over the guy who looks like he's going to be a problem every single time.Failing that, when someone who's obviously up to no good wants something from you, leave. Get out of there. Switch train cars. Move to a place where you have enough room to access and deploy your weapon of choice. Don't interact with him. He'll call you a pussy and ask if you're afraid of him. Remember that you have more to lose than he does and get away.If you can't run, at least stand up. Don't just sit there. A serious person who's got a plan for his own defense is unattractive as a victim. Once you're up, get that weapon out. If you think that's extreme, remember the context: you were sitting there, minding your own business, when a person or people who gave you a legitimate reason to be concerned (that scared feeling in your gut is a legitimate reason) got into your personal space and wouldn't let you move away. He's already assaulted you by arresting your movement. If after steps 2, 3, and 4, plus firm verbal demands for your attacker to back off haven't worked, you'll have to get proactive in your own defense. Every situation is different, obviously, but just remember that as a peaceful, law-abiding citizen, you have a legal and moral right to defend yourself.I'm not a lawyer, so don't take any of this as legal advice. It's ugly. It's scary to think about. It's difficult. And it's part of being an adult. Your personal defense is your responsibility. Own it.
In more situations than anyone would like to admit, being a victim is often a choice. Choose something else.
"When one man sat down next to a second man in a St. Louis light rail car and asked him his opinion on the shooting of Michael Brown, it was not the beginning of a discussion.
It was the start of an assault, police said.
The second man, who was white, didn't want to answer the question. Then the first man, who was black, boxed him in the face. Two more African-American men joined in the beating, according to a police report about Monday's incident."
Odd that the writer, Ben Brumfield, used the term "boxed" here instead of "struck" or "punched". Why is that? To mitigate the savagery of the attack? I've never heard the word "boxed" used like this outside of a specific reference to the sport of boxing, the metaphorical enclosure of someone or something, or the actual use of a physical box. As with all violent encounters, it's terrible that this happened, but it's worse if we don't learn anything from it. The biggest takeaway is that the victim was profiled before the actual attack. While this particular assault is a bit peculiar for its lack of a robbery (perhaps another chapter in the Knockout Game), it was still brutal. And unnecessary. I'm not blaming the victim when I say that if the victim had taken steps to make himself a less attractive target, I'd be looking for a different story to write about.
Before we go further, watch this video of the attack with the sound on. The audio is important. I'll wait.
What's striking is that the person who shot the video knew that an attack was imminent. The videographer knew that the guy was going to get victimized. So did everyone else on that train except for the victim. We'll ignore the videographer's sniggering and tittering other than to say that it's particularly disgusting.
This assault started before the attacker asked to borrow the victim's cell phone. It began in the profiling phase, when the victim sat down on the train, oblivious to his surroundings. At that moment, the attacker knew out of everyone on that train who he was going to punch. (We'll save the racial elements for a different discussion.) Everything followed from that profiling phase, including asking to use the victim's cell phone (who does that?), sitting next to the victim, asking the victim a racially charged question, and reacting to the victim's non-answer. At every one of those points, the victim could have done something to change the outcome, but didn't. He ignored them, probably scared but hoping nothing would happen. You leave them alone, they'll leave you alone, right?
Wrong.
We have to learn from his mistakes and not do what he did. How do we do that? Remember these five easy steps:
Always carry a weapon. Always. Especially if circumstances force you to travel at night. Gun, knife, pepper spray, whatever: if you don't have a weapon of some kind on you at all times, you're putting yourself at unnecessary risk. Practice accessing and deploying your weapon under duress. Take your personal safety seriously.If you're tired, suck it up and don't look tired. Look alert. Take visible notice of your surroundings. If I'm a felon, I'm going to go after the guy who looks tired and oblivious over the guy who looks like he's going to be a problem every single time.Failing that, when someone who's obviously up to no good wants something from you, leave. Get out of there. Switch train cars. Move to a place where you have enough room to access and deploy your weapon of choice. Don't interact with him. He'll call you a pussy and ask if you're afraid of him. Remember that you have more to lose than he does and get away.If you can't run, at least stand up. Don't just sit there. A serious person who's got a plan for his own defense is unattractive as a victim. Once you're up, get that weapon out. If you think that's extreme, remember the context: you were sitting there, minding your own business, when a person or people who gave you a legitimate reason to be concerned (that scared feeling in your gut is a legitimate reason) got into your personal space and wouldn't let you move away. He's already assaulted you by arresting your movement. If after steps 2, 3, and 4, plus firm verbal demands for your attacker to back off haven't worked, you'll have to get proactive in your own defense. Every situation is different, obviously, but just remember that as a peaceful, law-abiding citizen, you have a legal and moral right to defend yourself.I'm not a lawyer, so don't take any of this as legal advice. It's ugly. It's scary to think about. It's difficult. And it's part of being an adult. Your personal defense is your responsibility. Own it.
In more situations than anyone would like to admit, being a victim is often a choice. Choose something else.
March 30, 2015
Movie Review: Truth or Die
Truth or Die
is a movie that is extremely English insofar as the characters all have very stiff upper lips and, like an afternoon tea, there's nothing in it to particularly discomfit or terrify you.
Which is unfortunate, because it's supposed to be a horror film.
There are some interesting bits in it, including a fairly horrible death scene, but for the most part it's pedestrian, boring, and not worth your time. It suffers from the problem plaguing many horror films: bad things happening to unlikable people, so it's hard to care about any of it.
The Bad Guy: I'm one of those people who almost always roots for the bad guy in movies. Pleasantly, the best thing about Truth or Die was David Oakes's portrayal of antagonist Justin, a psychopathic military veteran. Creepy, physically strong without being infallible, he managed to bring both menace and a tiny bit of humanity into the role. You want him to see his work done, you want him to win, but unfortunately, that didn't happen, which was disappointing. Someone like him shouldn't have been vanquished the way he was, but the movie had to have a happy ending, of sorts. A shame, really.Whodunit: That was a bit of a surprise, which made it enjoyable. The problem was that the rationale for sending the postcard, while plausible, seemed very last minute. The character gave no indication of feeling that way earlier in the film, which made it too sudden, too sloppy.Stiff Upper Lips: Paul, Chris, Gemma, and Eleanor were all quite tough. Paul's gunshot wound didn't seem to pain him as much as being kneecapped might a normal person, and the defiance all four seemed willing to give to Justin would have been admirable if it wasn't so unbelievable. None of them panicked. They all found incredible steel inside of them when it was needed. I didn't buy it.Femme Fatale: Eleanor proved to be at least as psychotic as Justin and twice as tough, which didn't make sense outside of a writer or producer's requirement to have a super-strong female character. Didn't like her, didn't find her sexy, didn't find her interesting, didn't find her believable.The End: The rationale behind Felix hanging himself was way too complicated. Did they really need that much backstory, with corporate intrigue, blackmail, gay sex, and a bizarre family code of honor to uphold? Especially when it's all just spat out at the last five minutes?Truth or Die gets two stars out of five.
Which is unfortunate, because it's supposed to be a horror film.
There are some interesting bits in it, including a fairly horrible death scene, but for the most part it's pedestrian, boring, and not worth your time. It suffers from the problem plaguing many horror films: bad things happening to unlikable people, so it's hard to care about any of it.
The Bad Guy: I'm one of those people who almost always roots for the bad guy in movies. Pleasantly, the best thing about Truth or Die was David Oakes's portrayal of antagonist Justin, a psychopathic military veteran. Creepy, physically strong without being infallible, he managed to bring both menace and a tiny bit of humanity into the role. You want him to see his work done, you want him to win, but unfortunately, that didn't happen, which was disappointing. Someone like him shouldn't have been vanquished the way he was, but the movie had to have a happy ending, of sorts. A shame, really.Whodunit: That was a bit of a surprise, which made it enjoyable. The problem was that the rationale for sending the postcard, while plausible, seemed very last minute. The character gave no indication of feeling that way earlier in the film, which made it too sudden, too sloppy.Stiff Upper Lips: Paul, Chris, Gemma, and Eleanor were all quite tough. Paul's gunshot wound didn't seem to pain him as much as being kneecapped might a normal person, and the defiance all four seemed willing to give to Justin would have been admirable if it wasn't so unbelievable. None of them panicked. They all found incredible steel inside of them when it was needed. I didn't buy it.Femme Fatale: Eleanor proved to be at least as psychotic as Justin and twice as tough, which didn't make sense outside of a writer or producer's requirement to have a super-strong female character. Didn't like her, didn't find her sexy, didn't find her interesting, didn't find her believable.The End: The rationale behind Felix hanging himself was way too complicated. Did they really need that much backstory, with corporate intrigue, blackmail, gay sex, and a bizarre family code of honor to uphold? Especially when it's all just spat out at the last five minutes?Truth or Die gets two stars out of five.
March 27, 2015
Friday Links: French Aliens, Guns of Dawn, and an Announcement
Before we get to the Friday links, I have an announcement: I've finished the first draft of the sequel to
The Blessed Man and the Witch
. It's taken a year of brainstorming, outlining, agonizing, and banging out words one at a time to get there, but I got there. Editing it into a readable second draft comes next, and a third draft after. The working title of this novel will be The Nephilim and the False Prophet, but that may change if something much, much better comes along.
So yay me, and let's get to the Friday links:
At Sean Eaton's invaluable R'lyeh Tribune, he brought his excellent Monsterology series to a close with part three: "In David Cronenberg’s very disturbing The Brood (1979), a young woman is able to produce “psychoplasmic” offspring by converting intense suppressed emotions into fetal like growths—a kind of parthenogenetic, fatherless birth. Here again is the Renaissance idea that monstrosity, and its destabilizing effects on the family and society, results from the erasure of paternity. The potency and recurrence of this notion suggests it touches on some archetypal understanding about human relationships and reproduction." Part one is available here, and part two is available here.John Kenneth Muir had some interesting things to say about the 1997 movie Alien Resurrection: "Unlike all the others, this Alien film is a dark comedy. Yes, you read that right. Alien Resurrection is a grim comedy about, among other things, human folly. The film’s main character, a clone of Ripley, stands outside humanity and quips about the circumstances and nature of the failings she sees. It’s all very….French."Adrian Tchaikovsky's Guns of Dawn was reviewed by Greg James at Ginger Nuts of Horror: "The battle scenes are to be commended as there is a clarity to them that doesn’t always come across in works of Fantasy. The immediacy of Emily’s experiences in the field are balanced with a well-conveyed sense that her own skirmishes are a part of larger military movements taking place. She knows some of what is going on but not everything as you would expect, and so we see and understand enough of the bigger picture of the action to become involved without becoming detached from it by bald description and detail."Horror Land took a fresh look at John Carpenter's They Live: "The actually Aliens themselves are an odd design choice. I don’t think ive ever been very impressed by them. It looks as if they have over the head mask on with no moving lips, which really breaks the illusion for me. They look just fine, bug eyed and weird. But it’s the lack of mobility in the face that really ruins it. You only see them in colour at the end of the film (turns out they blueish) , through out the rest of the movie you only seem them through the black tint of the glasses. Which brings me to the cinematography!"Nev Murray reviewed William Meikle's novel The Dunfield Terror at Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "Lovecraftian. I don’t know much about this I have to admit. I haven’t read much Lovecraft. I get the idea though. I am beginning to fall in love with the Victorian style of horror writing and particularly the narrative style. In this story we have flashbacks to 1955 where mad scientist Muir and his dogsbody Campbell are trying to right a wrong. A wrong so bad that it has catastrophic potential. I’m not going to tell you what it is because that would just take away from the joy you will get reading the delightful descriptive narrative that Mr Meikle uses to paint a wonderful picture of sights, and sounds, and smells, of a time gone by, when technological advances meant conducting experiments in sheds, and if you didn’t get hurt then it wasn’t effective."Here, I related a war story about a self-defense video I produced with Jim Arvanitis and talked about the angels in the 1995 film The Prophecy.Illustration by Earl Geier, taken from Call of Cthulhu's Fatal Experiments supplement.
So yay me, and let's get to the Friday links:
At Sean Eaton's invaluable R'lyeh Tribune, he brought his excellent Monsterology series to a close with part three: "In David Cronenberg’s very disturbing The Brood (1979), a young woman is able to produce “psychoplasmic” offspring by converting intense suppressed emotions into fetal like growths—a kind of parthenogenetic, fatherless birth. Here again is the Renaissance idea that monstrosity, and its destabilizing effects on the family and society, results from the erasure of paternity. The potency and recurrence of this notion suggests it touches on some archetypal understanding about human relationships and reproduction." Part one is available here, and part two is available here.John Kenneth Muir had some interesting things to say about the 1997 movie Alien Resurrection: "Unlike all the others, this Alien film is a dark comedy. Yes, you read that right. Alien Resurrection is a grim comedy about, among other things, human folly. The film’s main character, a clone of Ripley, stands outside humanity and quips about the circumstances and nature of the failings she sees. It’s all very….French."Adrian Tchaikovsky's Guns of Dawn was reviewed by Greg James at Ginger Nuts of Horror: "The battle scenes are to be commended as there is a clarity to them that doesn’t always come across in works of Fantasy. The immediacy of Emily’s experiences in the field are balanced with a well-conveyed sense that her own skirmishes are a part of larger military movements taking place. She knows some of what is going on but not everything as you would expect, and so we see and understand enough of the bigger picture of the action to become involved without becoming detached from it by bald description and detail."Horror Land took a fresh look at John Carpenter's They Live: "The actually Aliens themselves are an odd design choice. I don’t think ive ever been very impressed by them. It looks as if they have over the head mask on with no moving lips, which really breaks the illusion for me. They look just fine, bug eyed and weird. But it’s the lack of mobility in the face that really ruins it. You only see them in colour at the end of the film (turns out they blueish) , through out the rest of the movie you only seem them through the black tint of the glasses. Which brings me to the cinematography!"Nev Murray reviewed William Meikle's novel The Dunfield Terror at Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "Lovecraftian. I don’t know much about this I have to admit. I haven’t read much Lovecraft. I get the idea though. I am beginning to fall in love with the Victorian style of horror writing and particularly the narrative style. In this story we have flashbacks to 1955 where mad scientist Muir and his dogsbody Campbell are trying to right a wrong. A wrong so bad that it has catastrophic potential. I’m not going to tell you what it is because that would just take away from the joy you will get reading the delightful descriptive narrative that Mr Meikle uses to paint a wonderful picture of sights, and sounds, and smells, of a time gone by, when technological advances meant conducting experiments in sheds, and if you didn’t get hurt then it wasn’t effective."Here, I related a war story about a self-defense video I produced with Jim Arvanitis and talked about the angels in the 1995 film The Prophecy.Illustration by Earl Geier, taken from Call of Cthulhu's Fatal Experiments supplement.
March 25, 2015
The Prophecy's Angels as Immature, Brutal Childen
Gregory Widen's
The Prophecy
is an extraordinary, imaginative film that shows angels in a much different light from the celestial beings humanized by television shows like
Touched by an Angel
and articles in Reader's Digest. Widen's angels are brutal, savage, animalistic. Rather than create an angel mythology out of whole cloth, Widen mined the Bible for angelic references to show us that angels are, in their hearts, killers.
This central theme is stated quite clearly when Thomas Daggett, the protagonist, says, "Did you ever notice how in the Bible, whenever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?"
Physically, Widen's angels display birdlike behavior, given that their true forms are winged, eyeless humanoids. They perch like raptors, a bizarre affectation that works very well in the film. Uziel, Gabriel's lieutenant, scents for the angel Simon like an animal would, and their subsequent fight is extremely brutal, without human finesse or mercy. After stabbing Simon, Uziel literally digs into the wound, trying to pull out his heart.
Uziel's autopsy scene further shows how separate the angels are from humans, from the lack of growth rings on their bones to the bizarre makeup of their blood (chemicals usually only found in an aborted fetus). Hermaphroditic, lacking eyes, they're just different.
Later, we see the Archangel Gabriel literally tasting the shed blood on the wardrobe after Uziel and Simon's fight, able from this to determine that it came from Simon. Not even a higher order of angel like Gabriel is exempt from this kind of base animalism. They're not beautiful, celestial messengers of God, but are, in Daggett's terms, "creatures."
In addition to their bestial nature, the angels in The Prophecy are bizarrely childlike in both temper and behavior. The entire conceit of the film, that certain angels became jealous of humans for being created with souls and acquiring God's chief affection, is essentially a gigantic, millennia-long temper tantrum. A war, with casualties and spiritual consequences that affect the spiritual future of the human race, based entirely on envy.
This is shown most clearly in Gabriel, arguably one of Christopher Walken's greatest roles. He contemptuously refers to humans by the juvenile term "talking monkeys," but can't even drive a car, showing an immature helplessness. During his confrontation with Simon, Simon tells him, "Sometimes you just have to do what you're told," which is very reminiscent of a parent scolding a child. When Simon won't tell Gabriel where he'd hidden Hawthorne's soul even after being tortured, Gabriel stamps his foot and shouts in a childish fit of pique: a mini-tantrum.
Perhaps the best indication that the angels are emotional children, bereft of a father as a result of their ruinous war in Heaven, is when Gabriel tries to entice Thomas to fight alongside him: "Nobody tells you when to go to bed. You eat all the ice cream you want. You get to kill all day, all night, just like an angel!" Gabriel's speaking ironically about the bed time and ice cream, but the language he uses still evokes images of childlike freedom. Despite his contempt for humans, he is himself beneath them in maturity and ethics.
And what of God in this war-torn universe? The only time we hear of Him is when Daggett asks Gabriel, "If you wanted to prove your side was right, Gabriel, so badly, why don't you just ask Him? Why don't you just ask God?"
Gabriel's answer is poignant, and in many painful ways puts him on the same level as us: "Because He doesn't talk to me anymore."
This central theme is stated quite clearly when Thomas Daggett, the protagonist, says, "Did you ever notice how in the Bible, whenever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?"Physically, Widen's angels display birdlike behavior, given that their true forms are winged, eyeless humanoids. They perch like raptors, a bizarre affectation that works very well in the film. Uziel, Gabriel's lieutenant, scents for the angel Simon like an animal would, and their subsequent fight is extremely brutal, without human finesse or mercy. After stabbing Simon, Uziel literally digs into the wound, trying to pull out his heart.
Uziel's autopsy scene further shows how separate the angels are from humans, from the lack of growth rings on their bones to the bizarre makeup of their blood (chemicals usually only found in an aborted fetus). Hermaphroditic, lacking eyes, they're just different.
Later, we see the Archangel Gabriel literally tasting the shed blood on the wardrobe after Uziel and Simon's fight, able from this to determine that it came from Simon. Not even a higher order of angel like Gabriel is exempt from this kind of base animalism. They're not beautiful, celestial messengers of God, but are, in Daggett's terms, "creatures."
In addition to their bestial nature, the angels in The Prophecy are bizarrely childlike in both temper and behavior. The entire conceit of the film, that certain angels became jealous of humans for being created with souls and acquiring God's chief affection, is essentially a gigantic, millennia-long temper tantrum. A war, with casualties and spiritual consequences that affect the spiritual future of the human race, based entirely on envy.
This is shown most clearly in Gabriel, arguably one of Christopher Walken's greatest roles. He contemptuously refers to humans by the juvenile term "talking monkeys," but can't even drive a car, showing an immature helplessness. During his confrontation with Simon, Simon tells him, "Sometimes you just have to do what you're told," which is very reminiscent of a parent scolding a child. When Simon won't tell Gabriel where he'd hidden Hawthorne's soul even after being tortured, Gabriel stamps his foot and shouts in a childish fit of pique: a mini-tantrum.
Perhaps the best indication that the angels are emotional children, bereft of a father as a result of their ruinous war in Heaven, is when Gabriel tries to entice Thomas to fight alongside him: "Nobody tells you when to go to bed. You eat all the ice cream you want. You get to kill all day, all night, just like an angel!" Gabriel's speaking ironically about the bed time and ice cream, but the language he uses still evokes images of childlike freedom. Despite his contempt for humans, he is himself beneath them in maturity and ethics.And what of God in this war-torn universe? The only time we hear of Him is when Daggett asks Gabriel, "If you wanted to prove your side was right, Gabriel, so badly, why don't you just ask Him? Why don't you just ask God?"
Gabriel's answer is poignant, and in many painful ways puts him on the same level as us: "Because He doesn't talk to me anymore."
March 23, 2015
War Stories: Battlefield Pankration
One of the projects I'm most proud of during my time as the director of video production for a small but notorious publisher was the book and video project
Battlefield Pankration
by Jim Arvanitis. It's a turnkey personal defense system, including everything from pre-combat de-escalation techniques to handling weapons like sticks and knives. Jim stands out among a hugely overpopulated crowd not just for his skill, knowledge base, and devotion to fitness, but also his personal experience in actual fighting. Until you know how you'll react to being hit in the face, you have no business teaching self-defense. Jim Arvanitis is the real deal.
I'd worked with him before on his video Secrets of Pankration , so I was pleased when he'd approached us with a new project, one that bridged the gap between MMA sport and streetfighting reality. We'd blocked out a week's worth of shooting, put it on the schedule, and worked out the details until he arrived.
Little did I know that the project would be one of the most difficult studio shoots of my career.
The first shoot day had gone splendidly. Jim's one of those rare authors who doesn't need a second take. Without getting too deep into the nuts and bolts of the shooting process (a subject worth discussing in future pieces), we did the usual thing which was to shoot through lunch and end the day in the late afternoon to give the author time to rest and me time to review some of the footage. In those days I got to the office around 4:45 in the morning and left between 4 and 5 PM. I loved the work.
And then around mid-morning on the second day, Jim strained a hamstring doing a side kick and we weren't sure if we could complete the shoot, let alone finish the day's work. (I may have the exact details of the injury wrong, but it was definitely a leg thing.) Jim's as tough as nails, the rub-some-dirt-on-it kind of man, but if you can't perform, you can't perform. It was the worst luck imaginable. Two weeks prior, we'd had to cut short another shoot because the author had rolled his ankle and could barely walk. A great deal of money and time had been invested, and a work stoppage represented a real hardship.
Pleasantly, the next day Jim was able to return to work, and things went well; you'd never know he was nursing an injury. The morning after, I had some trouble starting my edit suite (a Final Cut Pro machine), but it finally did boot after a few odd error messages. I made an offhand comment about it to one of Jim's assistants, who happened to be a computer engineer. He told me that my edit suite was about to shit the bed (without using those exact words). Macs don't have the same problems as PCs, and the errors I'd gotten were clear indicators that the hard drive was dying.
The next morning, it wouldn't start at all. A large part of my job wasn't just shooting the videos, but editing them, too. Without an edit suite, post-production ground to a halt. So in the midst of a shoot where we were already behind due to injury, I had to deal with Mac repairs as well.
In the end, we shot all the video parts, but couldn't finish the hundreds of still photos for the book, despite very long days and few breaks.
My wife's family lived not far from where Jim lives, so a couple months later during a vacation to Florida, I spent the day with Jim, his son Brandon, and his friend Bob to shoot the remaining photos. Jim was in the midst of suffering a nasty flu bug, but it didn't slow him down at all. Being the friendly, giving sort he is, I caught the bug myself and spent the plane ride home trying not to die from what I called the Greek Flu. Fever, chills, coughing, you name it. It sucked.
Despite everything, we produced a great piece of work that I'm proud of. Out of the many authors I became friendly with during my time in publishing, Jim's one of the few I'm honored to still call a friend. Even though he gave me the Greek Flu and almost killed me.
I'd worked with him before on his video Secrets of Pankration , so I was pleased when he'd approached us with a new project, one that bridged the gap between MMA sport and streetfighting reality. We'd blocked out a week's worth of shooting, put it on the schedule, and worked out the details until he arrived.
Little did I know that the project would be one of the most difficult studio shoots of my career.
The first shoot day had gone splendidly. Jim's one of those rare authors who doesn't need a second take. Without getting too deep into the nuts and bolts of the shooting process (a subject worth discussing in future pieces), we did the usual thing which was to shoot through lunch and end the day in the late afternoon to give the author time to rest and me time to review some of the footage. In those days I got to the office around 4:45 in the morning and left between 4 and 5 PM. I loved the work.
And then around mid-morning on the second day, Jim strained a hamstring doing a side kick and we weren't sure if we could complete the shoot, let alone finish the day's work. (I may have the exact details of the injury wrong, but it was definitely a leg thing.) Jim's as tough as nails, the rub-some-dirt-on-it kind of man, but if you can't perform, you can't perform. It was the worst luck imaginable. Two weeks prior, we'd had to cut short another shoot because the author had rolled his ankle and could barely walk. A great deal of money and time had been invested, and a work stoppage represented a real hardship.
Pleasantly, the next day Jim was able to return to work, and things went well; you'd never know he was nursing an injury. The morning after, I had some trouble starting my edit suite (a Final Cut Pro machine), but it finally did boot after a few odd error messages. I made an offhand comment about it to one of Jim's assistants, who happened to be a computer engineer. He told me that my edit suite was about to shit the bed (without using those exact words). Macs don't have the same problems as PCs, and the errors I'd gotten were clear indicators that the hard drive was dying.
The next morning, it wouldn't start at all. A large part of my job wasn't just shooting the videos, but editing them, too. Without an edit suite, post-production ground to a halt. So in the midst of a shoot where we were already behind due to injury, I had to deal with Mac repairs as well. In the end, we shot all the video parts, but couldn't finish the hundreds of still photos for the book, despite very long days and few breaks.
My wife's family lived not far from where Jim lives, so a couple months later during a vacation to Florida, I spent the day with Jim, his son Brandon, and his friend Bob to shoot the remaining photos. Jim was in the midst of suffering a nasty flu bug, but it didn't slow him down at all. Being the friendly, giving sort he is, I caught the bug myself and spent the plane ride home trying not to die from what I called the Greek Flu. Fever, chills, coughing, you name it. It sucked.
Despite everything, we produced a great piece of work that I'm proud of. Out of the many authors I became friendly with during my time in publishing, Jim's one of the few I'm honored to still call a friend. Even though he gave me the Greek Flu and almost killed me.
March 20, 2015
Friday Links: Lowell Dean, Iain Rob Wright, and the Mothman
Now that the promise of Friday has arrived, let's take a long look back at the days that led up to it.
The Film Connoisseur reviewed the classic 1927 film Metropolis: "One of the questions Metropolis addresses is, how can you feel sympathy for something you ignore or don’t understand? When Freder goes and sees the working class, laboring away, nonstop, exhausted, even to the point of putting their lives in danger, he has a change of heart. Now he understands, when he sees things with his own eyes, when he experiences their pain. Freder literally switches places with the working man." (Note that it's very funny when you pronounce "connoisseur" as "cun-OIS-er". Just an FYI.)Kurt C. Schuett reviewed Sebastian Junger's A Death in Belmont for Ginger Nuts of Horror: "The series of murders highlighted in and around the City of Boston in the 60s, earmarked by increasingly dramatic staged sexual assaults and post-rape humiliations, serves as the book’s catalyst. Most readers will be shocked to discover the perverse arrangement of victims as the killer’s blueprint maintains consistency through ninety percent of the killings. One of this book’s strengths is its descriptive fact checking; Junger and his editors at W.W. Norton spared no expense in regard to their collective and expansive foot-noted road map of the Boston Strangler saga."At Nev Murray's Confessions of a Reviewer!!, it's been all Iain Rob Wright all the time. Here's part one of Nev's interview, part two, and a sneak peek at Wright's newest novel Hot Zone.
Snakebite Reviews
reviewed Splatterpunk #6: "I shouldn’t have to sell Splatterpunk to you. It’s usually a limited run of a few hundred copies and it always sells out. And so it should. Jack Bantry continues to dazzle with his latest offering collecting of five stories plus an assortment of reviews and musings on the horror genre." This issue included a story from Kit Power.
HorrO's Gory Reviews
got a great interview with Lowell Dean, writer and director of WolfCop: "HorrO: The first thing I always like to ask is why horror? How did you end up in the horror realm? Lowell: I think I got into horror because horror enlists a big emotion. It gets you on multiple fronts. If it's sometimes sillier or not as good horror you'll laugh and it will be a big laugh, and if it's really good horror it'll haunt you and it'll be in your brain for years to come. So I just love the big reactions that a horror film, a good horror film, sometimes even a bad horror film can get."At the mind-crunchingly erudite R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton discussed monsterology: "In less civilized times, monsters were placed just beyond the margins of the civilized world. They were assumed to inhabit the surrounding forests and wilderness, out in the region known as terror incognita. Some of the earliest monster stories seem to be related to archetypal tales of the hunt. The monster is not so much ‘the one that got away’ as ‘the one we almost didn’t get away from.’"Ghost Hunting Theories focused on the Mothman: "One year later, in 1967, the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant collapsed. Forty-six people died. In a mid 1970s book written by John Keel, the story of the Mothman takes a turn toward the concept of a harbinger of the coming disaster. The Mothman showed up in the town before the disaster and encounters increased, supposedly including the passage of information of a prophetic nature."Here, I analyzed the 1991 movie
The Rapture
.Illustration by Kevin Ramos for Call of Cthulhu's
Spawn of Azathoth
supplement.
The Film Connoisseur reviewed the classic 1927 film Metropolis: "One of the questions Metropolis addresses is, how can you feel sympathy for something you ignore or don’t understand? When Freder goes and sees the working class, laboring away, nonstop, exhausted, even to the point of putting their lives in danger, he has a change of heart. Now he understands, when he sees things with his own eyes, when he experiences their pain. Freder literally switches places with the working man." (Note that it's very funny when you pronounce "connoisseur" as "cun-OIS-er". Just an FYI.)Kurt C. Schuett reviewed Sebastian Junger's A Death in Belmont for Ginger Nuts of Horror: "The series of murders highlighted in and around the City of Boston in the 60s, earmarked by increasingly dramatic staged sexual assaults and post-rape humiliations, serves as the book’s catalyst. Most readers will be shocked to discover the perverse arrangement of victims as the killer’s blueprint maintains consistency through ninety percent of the killings. One of this book’s strengths is its descriptive fact checking; Junger and his editors at W.W. Norton spared no expense in regard to their collective and expansive foot-noted road map of the Boston Strangler saga."At Nev Murray's Confessions of a Reviewer!!, it's been all Iain Rob Wright all the time. Here's part one of Nev's interview, part two, and a sneak peek at Wright's newest novel Hot Zone.
Snakebite Reviews
reviewed Splatterpunk #6: "I shouldn’t have to sell Splatterpunk to you. It’s usually a limited run of a few hundred copies and it always sells out. And so it should. Jack Bantry continues to dazzle with his latest offering collecting of five stories plus an assortment of reviews and musings on the horror genre." This issue included a story from Kit Power.
HorrO's Gory Reviews
got a great interview with Lowell Dean, writer and director of WolfCop: "HorrO: The first thing I always like to ask is why horror? How did you end up in the horror realm? Lowell: I think I got into horror because horror enlists a big emotion. It gets you on multiple fronts. If it's sometimes sillier or not as good horror you'll laugh and it will be a big laugh, and if it's really good horror it'll haunt you and it'll be in your brain for years to come. So I just love the big reactions that a horror film, a good horror film, sometimes even a bad horror film can get."At the mind-crunchingly erudite R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton discussed monsterology: "In less civilized times, monsters were placed just beyond the margins of the civilized world. They were assumed to inhabit the surrounding forests and wilderness, out in the region known as terror incognita. Some of the earliest monster stories seem to be related to archetypal tales of the hunt. The monster is not so much ‘the one that got away’ as ‘the one we almost didn’t get away from.’"Ghost Hunting Theories focused on the Mothman: "One year later, in 1967, the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant collapsed. Forty-six people died. In a mid 1970s book written by John Keel, the story of the Mothman takes a turn toward the concept of a harbinger of the coming disaster. The Mothman showed up in the town before the disaster and encounters increased, supposedly including the passage of information of a prophetic nature."Here, I analyzed the 1991 movie
The Rapture
.Illustration by Kevin Ramos for Call of Cthulhu's
Spawn of Azathoth
supplement.
March 17, 2015
Analysis: The Rapture (1991)
Along with Gregory Widen's
The Prophecy
, the 1991 film
The Rapture
is one of my all-time favorite movies. Theologically speaking, you can see some of its influence very clearly in my first novel, The Blessed Man and the Witch. Any film that deals so specifically with religion will typically have faith as one of its main themes, and this movie is no exception. What sets it apart is that writer-director Michael Tolkin also asks the audience to have faith. Sharon, the protagonist, is an unreliable character even at the best of times, and as such, we're never sure whether to credit what we're seeing from her perspective until the end. It takes a leap of faith, our faith, to believe in Sharon.
Sharon's introduction to the film begins in a gray, lifeless purgatory: the tedium of her job as a telephone information operator (a task made obsolete today, which dates the movie somewhat). From there, we see her cruising the streets of Los Angeles with her swinger friend Vic in a decidedly predatory fashion, looking for couples to swap partners with. Even when they're successful (with David Duchovny as Randy and Stéphanie Menuez), we gets hints that she finds this unsatisfying.
Later, after overhearing her co-workers discussing the Note (the Archangel Gabriel's Trumpet) and the Boy (a prophet), she tells hew new boyfriend Randy that "Everything seems so empty." Subsequently, she encounters some missionaries who tell her that the end of the world is coming, and she won't go to Heaven if she doesn't accept Jesus Christ. This echoes the Bible in Ephesians 2:8-9: "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God. Not of works, lest any man should boast." This becomes central throughout the film: it's not enough to be a good person. You have to believe. You have to have faith in God if you want to get into Heaven. (Remember the vampire Jerry Dandrige in
Fright Night
when confronted with a crucifix held by a terrified Peter Vincent: "You have to have faith for it to work.")
Sharon's conversion seems abrupt when she throws Randy out of her bed so she can change the sheets and scrub the sin off of her in the shower, but it's been coming for some time. "I want my salvation," she says to him (note the possessive pronoun). "I'm tired of feeling empty all the time." Randy's arguments against her search for God are facile, juvenile, and unconvincing. Writer-director Tolkin then asks us, the viewers, to have faith in Sharon for the first time: after an abortive suicide attempt, Sharon drinks herself into a stupor and sees a vision of the Pearl, a sight only the truly devout would be granted. But is this a hallucination or a true vision? Are we supposed to believe that Sharon is granted this vision so soon after accepting Jesus Christ? Yes. Because the ending makes all this true.
Years later, after she's married Randy, had a daughter, and loses Randy to murder, she sees another vision: Randy telling her to go to the desert. Once again, we're supposed to have faith that this grief-stricken woman's visions are true and not a result of her questionable mental state. When she questions the nature and purpose of the vision, the Boy prophet tells her, "Don't ask God to meet you halfway," and this is where we get to the crux of the film: not only must you have faith, but it must be perfect faith. You have to go all the way. It's God's way or the highway.
Her pilgrimage to the desert with her daughter is fraught with petty humiliations, the kind that holy people aren't supposed to suffer. We cringe for her, even though her daughter Mary has the perfect faith that God demands. Convinced beyond any shadow of doubt that the Rapture is near, Mary doesn't want to wait for the world to end to go to Heaven. She wants to go to Heaven "the quick way." She wants to die. Sharon's faith admits some cracks when she says to her daughter, "Let's give God one more chance." This foreshadows the terrible choice she makes at the end of the film. In the throes of a heavenly vision (possibly brought on by hunger), Mary says to Sharon, "Don't ask God to meet you halfway," just like the Boy had.
The scene in which Sharon kills Mary is very hard to watch. Imagine killing your own child, even if that child begs for death. Sharon's original intent is to kill Mary and then herself, but after shooting Mary, she points the gun upward and, screaming in terrible grief, empties the revolver into the sky. While she later explains that she didn't kill herself because suicide is a mortal sin, it's clear that in shooting the sky, she is in essence trying to shoot God for allowing her to kill her own daughter. She's lost faith and says of God, "I don't love Him...He let me kill my little girl and I'm still supposed to love Him."
And then the world ends. Gabriel's Trumpet sounds, literally shattering the walls of her prison cell. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride out, terrible and frightening. We are told that everyone has until the seventh blast of Gabriel's Trumpet to accept God into their hearts if they want to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. They have to love God, and the clock is ticking.
Sharon refuses. Even when reunited with her pleading, angelic daughter in a Purgatorial space between Heaven and Hell, she will not love God. She has rejected Him. When she tells her daughter, "I love you," Mary replies, miserably, "That isn't enough." This is the terrible choice Sharon makes: to spend eternity in Purgatory rather than love a God that let her kill her daughter.
If we, the audience, kept faith the way Sharon did not, the apocalypse at the end of the film would not be surprising. All of the signs were there. You just have to believe what you're seeing.
Sharon's introduction to the film begins in a gray, lifeless purgatory: the tedium of her job as a telephone information operator (a task made obsolete today, which dates the movie somewhat). From there, we see her cruising the streets of Los Angeles with her swinger friend Vic in a decidedly predatory fashion, looking for couples to swap partners with. Even when they're successful (with David Duchovny as Randy and Stéphanie Menuez), we gets hints that she finds this unsatisfying.
Later, after overhearing her co-workers discussing the Note (the Archangel Gabriel's Trumpet) and the Boy (a prophet), she tells hew new boyfriend Randy that "Everything seems so empty." Subsequently, she encounters some missionaries who tell her that the end of the world is coming, and she won't go to Heaven if she doesn't accept Jesus Christ. This echoes the Bible in Ephesians 2:8-9: "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God. Not of works, lest any man should boast." This becomes central throughout the film: it's not enough to be a good person. You have to believe. You have to have faith in God if you want to get into Heaven. (Remember the vampire Jerry Dandrige in
Fright Night
when confronted with a crucifix held by a terrified Peter Vincent: "You have to have faith for it to work.")Sharon's conversion seems abrupt when she throws Randy out of her bed so she can change the sheets and scrub the sin off of her in the shower, but it's been coming for some time. "I want my salvation," she says to him (note the possessive pronoun). "I'm tired of feeling empty all the time." Randy's arguments against her search for God are facile, juvenile, and unconvincing. Writer-director Tolkin then asks us, the viewers, to have faith in Sharon for the first time: after an abortive suicide attempt, Sharon drinks herself into a stupor and sees a vision of the Pearl, a sight only the truly devout would be granted. But is this a hallucination or a true vision? Are we supposed to believe that Sharon is granted this vision so soon after accepting Jesus Christ? Yes. Because the ending makes all this true.
Years later, after she's married Randy, had a daughter, and loses Randy to murder, she sees another vision: Randy telling her to go to the desert. Once again, we're supposed to have faith that this grief-stricken woman's visions are true and not a result of her questionable mental state. When she questions the nature and purpose of the vision, the Boy prophet tells her, "Don't ask God to meet you halfway," and this is where we get to the crux of the film: not only must you have faith, but it must be perfect faith. You have to go all the way. It's God's way or the highway.
Her pilgrimage to the desert with her daughter is fraught with petty humiliations, the kind that holy people aren't supposed to suffer. We cringe for her, even though her daughter Mary has the perfect faith that God demands. Convinced beyond any shadow of doubt that the Rapture is near, Mary doesn't want to wait for the world to end to go to Heaven. She wants to go to Heaven "the quick way." She wants to die. Sharon's faith admits some cracks when she says to her daughter, "Let's give God one more chance." This foreshadows the terrible choice she makes at the end of the film. In the throes of a heavenly vision (possibly brought on by hunger), Mary says to Sharon, "Don't ask God to meet you halfway," just like the Boy had.
The scene in which Sharon kills Mary is very hard to watch. Imagine killing your own child, even if that child begs for death. Sharon's original intent is to kill Mary and then herself, but after shooting Mary, she points the gun upward and, screaming in terrible grief, empties the revolver into the sky. While she later explains that she didn't kill herself because suicide is a mortal sin, it's clear that in shooting the sky, she is in essence trying to shoot God for allowing her to kill her own daughter. She's lost faith and says of God, "I don't love Him...He let me kill my little girl and I'm still supposed to love Him."And then the world ends. Gabriel's Trumpet sounds, literally shattering the walls of her prison cell. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride out, terrible and frightening. We are told that everyone has until the seventh blast of Gabriel's Trumpet to accept God into their hearts if they want to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. They have to love God, and the clock is ticking.
Sharon refuses. Even when reunited with her pleading, angelic daughter in a Purgatorial space between Heaven and Hell, she will not love God. She has rejected Him. When she tells her daughter, "I love you," Mary replies, miserably, "That isn't enough." This is the terrible choice Sharon makes: to spend eternity in Purgatory rather than love a God that let her kill her daughter.
If we, the audience, kept faith the way Sharon did not, the apocalypse at the end of the film would not be surprising. All of the signs were there. You just have to believe what you're seeing.
March 13, 2015
Friday Links: Horror Monsters No. 9, Quonset Huts on Mars, and a Pernicious Review
Some pretty neat and bizarre things were uploaded onto the internet this week. Here are some of the more interesting pieces:
Monster Magazine World showed us what lay in the pages of Horror Monsters No. 9, published in Fall of 1964.Terrorphoria reviewed Acid King's album
Middle of Nowhere, Center of Everywhere
: "A few noticeable departures from past albums. Lori's vocals are more sparse. She really does a good job of giving the music an epic amount of space, and you'll ride through waves of riffs for up to a few minutes before she punctuates them with her recognizable style."At Ginger Nuts of Horror, Paul M Feeney interviewed Tim Dry: "To be totally honest my true calling is whatever I’m passionate about and excited by at any particular time. In the 70s it was painting and mime, in the 80s it was rock ‘n’ roll, performance and music and in the 90s it was photographic art, acting and more music. Now I find that writing is the sole medium that does stimulate and inspire me. One of the reasons is that I don’t need anyone else to help me create something. Everything comes from the right side of my brain onto the page and if all technology went tits up tomorrow I could still do it!"Sean Eaton's perspicacity was in full display at The R'lyeh Tribune: "Hamilton’s graphic descriptions of the hazards on board a primitive rocket as it takes off from Earth and lands on the treacherous surface of Mars closely resemble the dangers on a battlefield, including the terrible casualties among the men. The soldiers live in Quonset huts on Mars, and the noisy claustrophobic spacecraft resemble the innards of battleships and submarines. Hamilton’s intent is to deglamorize spaceflight, and metaphorically, the war. Haddon has nightmares about what he saw and experienced on the expedition, and the sounds of airplanes bring back vivid, terrifying memories. The narrator’s symptoms are identical with what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder."Nev Murray reviewed The Seance by Jack Rollins at Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "The descriptive writing makes it very easy to slip into the times. The clothes the people wear, the language they use and the settings and surroundings totally take you back in time, really making you believe you are living in the past. This makes the horror aspect of this book ten times more powerful." Also, check out this good news from Nev.Maynard's Horror Movie Diary reviewed Pernicious, a low-budget horror film directed by James Cullen Bressack: "'Pernicious' is far from being original and borrows/steals a bit too much from other films, especially from classic J-horror flicks like 'Ju-On: The Grudge' or torture porn classics like 'Hostel' - but due to Bressack's spot-on direction, I ended up enjoying this little low-budget flick a lot."Adam Millard wrote a tribute to the late, great Terry Pratchett at This Is Horror: "Pratchett, a hero of mine since the first time I picked up a copy of The Colour of Magic as a teenager, was knighted for services to literature in 2009, around the same time he publically declared his wish to die by assisted suicide before his disease rendered him unable to make such a crucial decision. And yet, despite all of this, Pratchett continued to campaign, to raise money, and to write like he had never written before."Here, I analyzed the movie
Event Horizon
, talked about myself a little, and linked to a review I wrote of Ian Jarvis's Dark Equinox.Illustration from Call of Cthulhu's
Cthulhu Classics
supplement.
Monster Magazine World showed us what lay in the pages of Horror Monsters No. 9, published in Fall of 1964.Terrorphoria reviewed Acid King's album
Middle of Nowhere, Center of Everywhere
: "A few noticeable departures from past albums. Lori's vocals are more sparse. She really does a good job of giving the music an epic amount of space, and you'll ride through waves of riffs for up to a few minutes before she punctuates them with her recognizable style."At Ginger Nuts of Horror, Paul M Feeney interviewed Tim Dry: "To be totally honest my true calling is whatever I’m passionate about and excited by at any particular time. In the 70s it was painting and mime, in the 80s it was rock ‘n’ roll, performance and music and in the 90s it was photographic art, acting and more music. Now I find that writing is the sole medium that does stimulate and inspire me. One of the reasons is that I don’t need anyone else to help me create something. Everything comes from the right side of my brain onto the page and if all technology went tits up tomorrow I could still do it!"Sean Eaton's perspicacity was in full display at The R'lyeh Tribune: "Hamilton’s graphic descriptions of the hazards on board a primitive rocket as it takes off from Earth and lands on the treacherous surface of Mars closely resemble the dangers on a battlefield, including the terrible casualties among the men. The soldiers live in Quonset huts on Mars, and the noisy claustrophobic spacecraft resemble the innards of battleships and submarines. Hamilton’s intent is to deglamorize spaceflight, and metaphorically, the war. Haddon has nightmares about what he saw and experienced on the expedition, and the sounds of airplanes bring back vivid, terrifying memories. The narrator’s symptoms are identical with what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder."Nev Murray reviewed The Seance by Jack Rollins at Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "The descriptive writing makes it very easy to slip into the times. The clothes the people wear, the language they use and the settings and surroundings totally take you back in time, really making you believe you are living in the past. This makes the horror aspect of this book ten times more powerful." Also, check out this good news from Nev.Maynard's Horror Movie Diary reviewed Pernicious, a low-budget horror film directed by James Cullen Bressack: "'Pernicious' is far from being original and borrows/steals a bit too much from other films, especially from classic J-horror flicks like 'Ju-On: The Grudge' or torture porn classics like 'Hostel' - but due to Bressack's spot-on direction, I ended up enjoying this little low-budget flick a lot."Adam Millard wrote a tribute to the late, great Terry Pratchett at This Is Horror: "Pratchett, a hero of mine since the first time I picked up a copy of The Colour of Magic as a teenager, was knighted for services to literature in 2009, around the same time he publically declared his wish to die by assisted suicide before his disease rendered him unable to make such a crucial decision. And yet, despite all of this, Pratchett continued to campaign, to raise money, and to write like he had never written before."Here, I analyzed the movie
Event Horizon
, talked about myself a little, and linked to a review I wrote of Ian Jarvis's Dark Equinox.Illustration from Call of Cthulhu's
Cthulhu Classics
supplement.
March 12, 2015
GNoH Review: Dark Equinox
At Jim Mcleod's Ginger Nuts of Horror, I reviewed Ian Jarvis's
Dark Equinox
:
"You’ll find psychics, occultists, psychic occultists, ritual magick, tough cops, weak cops, terrorism, a drooling demonic spirit, and a stinging indictment of our celebrity-obsessed culture."
Is this a must-read, must-miss, or somewhere in the middle? Click to find out!
"You’ll find psychics, occultists, psychic occultists, ritual magick, tough cops, weak cops, terrorism, a drooling demonic spirit, and a stinging indictment of our celebrity-obsessed culture."
Is this a must-read, must-miss, or somewhere in the middle? Click to find out!
March 11, 2015
Answers to Questions for Writers
On Google+, the social media outlet that's been dying of the same heart attack for years (shades of Hyman Roth), +Shen Hart tagged me on a list of questions about writing. What follows are my answers.
Do you share your work with your partner or spouse? Does it matter if it’s been published yet?
I always give my fiction to my wife to read first before it goes anywhere. She's very detail-oriented and works as the Product Owner for a software program that if you don't currently use, you've probably heard of. She has to make sure that the i's are crossed and t's are dotted (hee hee) in all aspects of the product, and is extremely good at her job. In addition and most importantly, our tastes in fiction don't always coincide. This means that she doesn't have expectations about the subject matter, so if she likes it, that's helpful. If she doesn't, she tells me why and I can decide to change it or not from there.
How much of your family and/or closest “friends in real life first” read your stuff…let alone give you feedback about it?
I have one friend whom I trust to give me unbiased feedback. His name is Mike. He's an educator and one of the sharpest men I've ever met. Knowledgeable and smart don't always coincide, but they do in him. He beta-read my first novel and I hope he'll do so for the next. I have other close friends and family, and I value their feedback as well, but I fear their affection for me may cloud their perspicacity somewhat.
What do you do with the pieces that continually get rejected–post on your blog? Trash? When do you know it’s time to let it go?
I have only one piece of writing that has been rejected, but it's still a great story. When I have more time, I will send it and other pieces further afield. What I won't do moving forward is publish my fiction on my blog; there's some really good stuff there, and I want to get paid for it. I trust myself to know if something's worth holding onto or ditching.
What is your main source of reading-based inspiration (especially you essayists)? Blogs? Magazines? Journals? Anthologies? Book of essays by one writer?
I don't read fiction for inspiration. The essays I write are inspired by current events, usually. When I'm not reading fiction, I'm reading newspapers, news sites, magazine articles, and other pieces of political interest.
What tends to spark ideas more for you: what you see/hear in daily life or what you read?
I don't know. I've never measured that and don't know what the terms for calculating it might be. My ideas come from my sick, sick id.
Who have you read in the past year or two that you feel is completely brilliant but so underappreciated?
I've recently started writing book reviews for Ginger Nuts of Horror, the UK's largest indie horror website. Any of the four or five-star reviews written there will point you to brilliance that needs to be appreciated more. My fellow reviewers there are extremely sharp and know good books from bad.
Without listing anything written by Dani Shapiro, Anne Lamott, Lee Gutkind, or Natalie Goldberg, what craft books are “must haves”?
Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish, Artisan Breads Every Day by Peter Reinhart, and Dough by Richard Bertinet are all extraordinary craft books on the art of baking bread, and- oh. You mean books on writing. I don't know. I don't own any, nor have I read any. I read a lot every day, both fiction and non-fiction. Does that count?
Have you ever regretted having something published? Was it because of the content or the actual writing style/syntax?
I would like to rewrite The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse some day, as I'm a much better writer now than I was in 2010, when it was published. But I don't regret it or anything else I've published.
Do you share your work with your partner or spouse? Does it matter if it’s been published yet?
I always give my fiction to my wife to read first before it goes anywhere. She's very detail-oriented and works as the Product Owner for a software program that if you don't currently use, you've probably heard of. She has to make sure that the i's are crossed and t's are dotted (hee hee) in all aspects of the product, and is extremely good at her job. In addition and most importantly, our tastes in fiction don't always coincide. This means that she doesn't have expectations about the subject matter, so if she likes it, that's helpful. If she doesn't, she tells me why and I can decide to change it or not from there.
How much of your family and/or closest “friends in real life first” read your stuff…let alone give you feedback about it?
I have one friend whom I trust to give me unbiased feedback. His name is Mike. He's an educator and one of the sharpest men I've ever met. Knowledgeable and smart don't always coincide, but they do in him. He beta-read my first novel and I hope he'll do so for the next. I have other close friends and family, and I value their feedback as well, but I fear their affection for me may cloud their perspicacity somewhat.What do you do with the pieces that continually get rejected–post on your blog? Trash? When do you know it’s time to let it go?
I have only one piece of writing that has been rejected, but it's still a great story. When I have more time, I will send it and other pieces further afield. What I won't do moving forward is publish my fiction on my blog; there's some really good stuff there, and I want to get paid for it. I trust myself to know if something's worth holding onto or ditching.
What is your main source of reading-based inspiration (especially you essayists)? Blogs? Magazines? Journals? Anthologies? Book of essays by one writer?
I don't read fiction for inspiration. The essays I write are inspired by current events, usually. When I'm not reading fiction, I'm reading newspapers, news sites, magazine articles, and other pieces of political interest.
What tends to spark ideas more for you: what you see/hear in daily life or what you read?
I don't know. I've never measured that and don't know what the terms for calculating it might be. My ideas come from my sick, sick id.
Who have you read in the past year or two that you feel is completely brilliant but so underappreciated?
I've recently started writing book reviews for Ginger Nuts of Horror, the UK's largest indie horror website. Any of the four or five-star reviews written there will point you to brilliance that needs to be appreciated more. My fellow reviewers there are extremely sharp and know good books from bad.
Without listing anything written by Dani Shapiro, Anne Lamott, Lee Gutkind, or Natalie Goldberg, what craft books are “must haves”?
Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish, Artisan Breads Every Day by Peter Reinhart, and Dough by Richard Bertinet are all extraordinary craft books on the art of baking bread, and- oh. You mean books on writing. I don't know. I don't own any, nor have I read any. I read a lot every day, both fiction and non-fiction. Does that count?
Have you ever regretted having something published? Was it because of the content or the actual writing style/syntax?
I would like to rewrite The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse some day, as I'm a much better writer now than I was in 2010, when it was published. But I don't regret it or anything else I've published.
