brendan halpin

In recent conversations with friends and acquaintances, I’ve found myself in the unaccustomed position of being optimistic. Which is weird with the world falling apart around us, but let me explain.

A rehearsal studio somewhere in England. 1978.

Enter Roger Waters.

So I was perusing the photos dumped by the Justice Department, and I saw two photos of a man I once worked for, Danny Hillis. (My first job out of college was at Thinking Machines Corporation, the doomed supercomputer manufacturer founded by Hillis, who knew computers, and Sheryl Handler, who knew business. Apparently neither of them was actually very good at what they did because the computers broke all the fuckin’ time and they couldn’t sell them after a while and the whole venture went belly up a few years after I left).

It’s tough for us horror weirdos when Halloween ends and we start getting bombarded with treacly Christmas entertainment. Fortunately, there’s always some weirdo who puts out a nasty Christmas horror movie, and may Satan bless them for their efforts.

On a recent episode of the Tomb of Terrors podcast, host Old Man Brad extolled the virtues of the new Silent Night, Deadly Night. I had never seen the original, so I decided to correct that before seeing the new one.

The only thing I really knew about the original was that Siskel & Ebert absolutely lost their minds about it when it came out. (yes, I was watching Siskel & Ebert in 10th grade. Wasn’t everybody?) I mean, they hated slashers in general, but they seemed profoundly offended by this one, clutching their pearls about THE CHILDREN and how evil it was to have a killer in a Santa suit. (Had they seen Christmas Evil in 1980?).

I went out to see some bands play on Friday night. (Ray Liriano Experience, Muck & the Mires, and The Chelsea Curve, all of whom were absolutely fantastic! These are all Boston bands, but if you have a chance to see any of them in Boston or anywhere else, do not miss it). I did not come home smelling like cigarette smoke.

If you’re younger than, I dunno, 50, this may seem like a weird thing to remark on. Why would you come home smelling like cigarette smoke after seeing bands play?

In most cases, when people say a novel is good or bad, they’re wrong. Because novels can offer a variety of pleasures: an involving plot, interesting characters, beautiful prose, keen observations, titanic imagination, dialogue that is better than real life speech but not so much better that it sounds fake, an atmosphere that you enjoy getting lost in, or just a vibe that hits you in the right place at the right time.

We all value certain of these pleasures more than others, and no novel offers all of them. And our preferences for things done well and tolerance for things done badly can change from book to book.

Whenever someone (thinking currently of Zohran Mamdani, but insert anyone’s name here) advocates having the government do something to acutally help people, you typically get two responses.

One is from the corporate centrists, who say, “well, of course we’d like to do something like that, but it’s just not realistic.”

The other, from the right, derides the whole idea as “people wanting free stuff.”

A common argument for a confiscatory wealth tax is that it will save society from billionaires. This is both true and a good argument, but there’s a side benefit here that is not really discussed: confiscating obscenely hoarded resources will save billionaires.

Last Friday I was in San Francisco and rented a car so I could go see ancient redwoods. They gave me a Tesla model Y, which marked the first time I’d been behind the wheel of one. I rented a Chevy Bolt in Cincinnati last spring and loved it, so I figured a Tesla would be cool to drive for a day.

I wanted to write about horror movies today, but I saw something that bugged the shit out of me, so now I have to write about that.