Girl in a Cage

Guns, God, and Baseball

Well, sports is usually oustide my purview, but living in Boston it's been all about the baseball recently, and so I must share some thoughts.

I live about 3 miles from Fenway Park, and so my ears rang with the roar of the fighter jets doing their pre-game flyover before game 1. Am I the only one who finds this bizarre and somewhat creepy? We shake our heads and cluck disapprovingly at dictators reviewing their military equipment in big parades, but isn't having war machines at our sporting events pretty much the same thing? It just seems like we're reinforcing this idea that the United States is its military. Surely there's more to us than this. One of the great things about sports is the way they allow competition in a non-deadly way. I'd like to just do away with the weaponry at baseball games.

The Colorado Rockies, managed,owned, and largely populated by evangelical Christians, have been known to credit God for their victories and their remarkable run up to the series. (Read all about it here.)

So now that the Rockies have been decisively crushed by the Sox, what are the theological implications for the Rockies? I see the possibilities as follows:

1.)The world is a battleground between an equally powerful God and Satan. The Sox, Satan's favorite nine, triumphed over God's own Rockies. This is supported by the office lights in the Prudential building being lit in a pattern that spelled out "Hail Satan" after the game 2 victory. (Note--those who believe this aren't really Christians at all, but, rather, Manichaeans. I'm just saying.)

2.)God honored an earlier obligation to his "chosen people", i.e. Sox GM Theo Epstein.

3.)Lots of Catholics live in the Boston area and are Sox fans. Perhaps God prefers Catholicism to evangelical protestantism.

4.)Massachusetts is the birthplace and current headquarters of Unitarian Universalism. The Sox victory is a message that He wants people to embrace the open-mindedness and tolerance of Unitarian Universalism.

5.)The Red Sox represent the only state where anyone can marry anyone they want. Perhaps this is the almighty's way of suggesting that the rest of the nation remove its cranium from its rectum on this issue.

6.)God is displeased with Colorado. Fire up another anti-gay ballot initiative before spring training!

7.)There is no God.

8.) God doesn't give a shit about baseball.

These, as far as I can tell, are the only possible interpretations of the Sox' complete dominance of the Rockies in the world series.

Finally, have the Sox become the new Evil Empire? Should I, as a Red Sox fan, be alarmed that their success means the rest of the country won't view them as scrappy underdogs anymore? Yeah, Yankees fans were tormented by these questions for decades, weren't they? No, actually, they just cheered on their team as it mercilessly crushed the opposition with the force of its payroll. I plan on doing the same. Maybe when the Sox have had their boots on the Yankees' necks for 85 years or so, I'll consider relenting.

The Horror, The Horror

Well, we've passed October 21, which for me is the day that embodies everything horrifying, so I'm calling a halt to the month of Halloween posts project. Though of course I will still be geeking out on all things horror-related from time to time. (I'm working on a theory that the horror comic may be the single best expression of the horror genre.)

On to a bunch of other crap I've been thinking about!

The Breakfast Club is the best John Hughes movie. I think he has weird streaks of both cruelty and sentimentality that mess up most of his movies--thus Sixteen Candles features the "humor" of kids in back braces (Joan Cusack!) and the fact that some people are---Asian! O, the hilarity! And comedies of cruelty like Ferris Bueller and Planes, Trains and Automobiles are wrecked by jarring transitions to mawkish, sentimental dramas at the end. (I mean, the kid crying about his relationship with his dad at the end of Ferris Bueller--where the hell did that come from?) But in the Breakfast Club, we've got Vernon and Bender to embody the cruelty, and Brian and Andy to embody the sentimentality, and it all seems to balance. Yeah, the ending is unrealistically sentimental--(Except for them making the geek do all the work while everybody else tends to getting laid--all too realistic!)--but hey, it's a movie.

Looking up John Hughes a while back, I saw that he still writes screenplays under the name of Edmond Dantes. Is he plotting an elaborate, ultimately self-defeating revenge? That might be kinda cool.

My reactions to Reaper and The Bionic Woman have flip-flopped since the premieres. While Sam still bugs the hell out of me on Reaper with his shocking wussiness with regards to the hot girl who is inexplicably fond of him, the characters of Sock and Satan are just so full of glee that it's hard not to like it, and it's fun to watch. Meanwhile, I still like the Bionic Woman, but it's just not fun enough. So very, very serious for a show about a woman with robotic limbs. Lighten up, Francis!

Caught Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny last week. While the theft of the pick has genius moments of Kyle's training paying off, overall the movie just wasn't very funny. It was charming and kind of fun, and Tim Robbins, Dave Grohl, and Meatloaf were all great, but, overall, I just didn't laugh very much. Given the movie's endorsement of weed as a spur to creativity, I had to wonder how high they were when they wrote the movie, and if they realized that stuff that seems funny to people who are high doesn't always seem that funny to people who aren't. Marijuana only ever made me tired, which is not a state I require chemical assistance to achieve, so I haven't touched it in about 20 years and don't know if being high might make this movie funnier. I suppose it probably couldn't hurt. Unless you're like me in your reaction to the drug, in which case you'll just be passed on the couch and it still won't seem funny.

See, Now This is Why People Hate Music Writing

I just read the dumbest thing in the New Yorker, and I had to vent. The thesis of this article, if I understand it correctly, is that indie rock has forsaken black music influences. Apparently this happened in the 90's--white rockers stopped incorporating black music into their music because they couldn't rap like Snoop Dog. I'm not making this up.

Now, I don't care about this question much, but what bugs me about the article is that it's bad reasoning and bad writing, and this guy gets paid by a prestigious publication to write crap like this, and I don't.

He dismisses rap-rock as irrelevant to his thesis because it sucks horribly. Agreed, but Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit and Korn have sold millions of records and ruled the airwaves for a few very ugly years. Hardly supports the thesis that white rockers aren't showing their black music influences since the 90's. He ignores Beck and the White Stripes completely because they both incorporate traditionally black music into their music and therefore don't fit the thesis, but how can you possibly make some half-baked pronouncement about indie rock while ignoring these two acts? I guess you can if you're the New Yorker's music critic.

About halfway through the article, he bashes the hell out of Wilco and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in particular. Finally, it seems, we get to the raison d'etre of the whole stupid article--he wants to kill a sacred cow and piss people off. Now, I like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but I dig the whole idea of pissing off the Tweedyites. But did he have to dress it up in this piece of crap, full-of-holes article? Couldn't he just write an article about how he doesn't think one of the best albums of the 00's is any good? Grrr.

All Night Horror Festival

So the Coolidge Corner Theatre (ooh! British spelling! That's how you know it's an "art" cinema) is running their all-night horror movie fest next weekend. It's just crazy enough that I kind of want to do it, but I don't know if I might not be too old. I mean, I like my sleep. And I don't know a single other person dumb enough to want to do this with me. Well, anyway, I was going to write about some of these movies anyway, so here's the lineup.

1.The Monster Squad. I am very skeptical of this entry. It came out in 1987, during the years when I was an obsessive movie viewer and a bigger horror fan than I am now, and I totally don't remember it. Now, the charitable possibility is that it's for kids, and my 18-year-old self was too cool for it. The uncharitable possibility is that it's a piece of crap that's being dressed up as a lost classic to pump up the DVD sales. Still, it's presence in the rest of this rock solid lineup is enough to make me consider it.

2.Near Dark. Already wrote about this a week or so ago. Don't feel like linkin', but feel free to browse the archives!

3.Evil Dead 2. I wrote about this in It Takes a Worried Man, but briefly, a nearly perfect movie with a great balance of gross-out gore and laugh-out-loud humor. One of the best movies ever made.

4.Halloween. Much as Bob Dylan spawned scores of less-talented, unlistenable singer-songwriters, so this masterpiece spawned scores of barely-watchable slasher movies. But this particular one is great--suspenseful and spooky and not just gory. Great use of Blue Oyster Cult, too.

5.The Thing. Evil Dead 2 is a better movie all around, but this might well be the best pure horror movie ever made. It's also the only remake I can think of that's light years better than the original. It's an unrelenting tale of horror and suspense in the arctic, or possibly Antarctic. Who's really who they appear to be, and who's a bloodthirsty alien? Ack!

6.The Fly. Like most David Cronenberg movies, it's very well made, it's all about fear and horror of the human body, and having seen it, I don't feel like I ever need to see it again. I mean, it's really well done, but whereas I can watch Bruce Campbell fighting his own hand in Evil Dead 2 over and over again, I just don't feel like I need to watch Geena Davis give birth to a maggot again. But anyway, this one's running in the ten-to-noon slot, so I could duck out early and go to a kids soccer game or something. Ah, it's never gonna happen.

Misogyny Loves Company

So the more I've been thinking about horror movies, the more I feel like I have to examine the misogyny that's rampant in the genre. Now, I was bashed to within an inch of my life in college for being a straight white man, so I am certainly not one of these guys who goes around complaining about misogyny everywhere. (Those guys got a lot of play in college, though--I suppose feigning outrage about the oppression of women was a pretty good scam!)

But, I mean, really. In two weeks I've written about two movies with rape scenes. I've been geeking out on the horror stuff with the Rue Morgue Radio podcast, and they were talking about the release of Dario Argento's "The Stendhal Syndrome" on 2-disc DVD blah blah, and they were like, "Yeah, it's a great movie, but those rape scenes involving his daughter Asia are pretty hard to take." (emphasis mine.) They go on to say that they can't possibly imagine putting their own daughters through the horror of filming something like this. And then they recommend that we go buy this on DVD. WTF?

It seems like sexual violence, or the threat of sexual violence (against women--always against women. We couldn't menace men like that, now could we? I mean, it's in Deliverance, and everybody knows about it, but a woman is raped in like every third horror movie!) is a mainstay of a lot of horror movies. Some, like Humanoids from the Deep and Invasion of the Bee Girls, linger on the rapes in an unseemly way. Some, like Last House on the Left or I Spit On Your Grave, try to have it both ways, by reveling in the rape at the beginning and then making sure the rapists meet a violent end. Hell, even in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Leatherface thrusts the saw between our heroine's legs. The Evil Dead features a woman raped by plant life. (This is one reason why I prefer the second one, which is really just a remake of the first one without the rape.) And don't even get me started on Dead Ringers, which should probably be retitled Fear of Vagina.

So what the hell's going on here? Certainly female sexuality is probably second only to death in terms of fearful things many horror movies are dealing with, but why all the rapes? Something like Fright Night, for example, is all about the fear of female sexuality (yeah, buddy, your virginal girlfriend is actually a saucy vampire mistress!), but there's no nasty rape involved.

I mean, I especially enjoy horror movies because they deal with real fears--like death, death, death--by using unreal creatures--like zombies, ghosts, vampires, and Godzilla. It's fun to be scared by stuff that you know can't really happen. Which makes the prevalence of sexual violence especially heinous to me. I mean, I don't have the statistics at hand and don't care to look them up, but I'll venture that a lot more people will be raped than stalked by masked serial killers, chained to radiators with hacksaws next to them, etc. etc. etc. So for all of those people who've lived through it, these movies that are fundamentally escapist aren't escapist at all. They're somebody trivializing and exploiting a very real horror.

I guess the easy answer to why this is so prevalent in horror movies is just that horror movies tend to be made by geeky men who probably didn't get a lot of dates in high school, and all these fictional rapes are their little revenge against the girls who wouldn't date them when they were teenagers. I don't know if that facile explanation holds water or not, but if it does, I have this message for you, O Horror Creators: Get over it! High School is over! There are things way scarier than girls! Girls are actually nice! Enough with the sexual violence already! Bring on the good old regular violence!

Halloween Month: Day 15

So I've been seeing the previews for 30 Days of Night, and it looks incredibly cool, so I went out and bought the "graphic novel." (Also known as "paperback collection of stuff that originally came out as COMIC BOOKS") It was half price in celebration of the movie. Bargain!

The comic looks great--it's probably worth buying for the spooky art alone. And the story is very clever, too. And yet, at the end, I felt curiously unsatisfied, like when you eat Oreos for dinner.

Maybe it was the colossal plot holes. (Spoilers a-comin'!). Okay, so the big head vampire guy shows up and is all pissed that the vampires have laid waste to the town, but he knew about it earlier and made no attempt to dissuade anybody when exchanging emails with the other vampire guy. Also, why is Our Hero able to remain himself when he transforms, when the guy he got the tainted blood from wasn't able to?

We don't know. I guess a lot of stuff just seemed to be glossed over in the comic--here's hoping they'll flesh out the characters and the situations a little more in the movie, which still looks cool as hell. Here's a trailer for ya!

Eek! Spooky! I'm all over it!

A bunch of days of Halloween. Rocktober 14

I suppose it's a pretty damning indictment of my ambition and work ethic that I set out to write a blog entry every day for a month and have already missed 3 days. Oh well.

Anyway, a couple of months back, I bought a box of 50 movies on DVD for 20 bucks. (Bargain!). They're called Drive-In Classics, but of course they're mostly Incredible Steaming Piles of Crap. I expected nothing less at less than fifty cents a movie.

Still, the other day I caught one of these movies that I really enjoyed. 1973's Inavasion of the Bee Girls. It's about evil Bee Girls who cause men to die of "sexual exhaustion". Like so very many horror movies, it's about the fear of female sexuality. (and, I mean, yes, men who created this movie, I get it, female sexuality is both scary and alluring, but did you have to punish the non-bee woman with the gross attempted rape scene? Geez.) It's a bit light on the gore but certainly delivers on the gratuitous nudity.

Best of all, there's one classic comic scene. There's been a town meeting at which a scientist recommends that everyone abstain from sex just to be on the safe side. (He's ridiculed by a truck driver who stands up and says "What am I supposed to do when I get home? Crawl into bed and go to sleep?"). We cut to a middle aged couple getting into bed. He starts reading the paper as she applies her cold cream. "Abstinence is nothing new around here," he says, resentfully. The wife fixes him with a cold stare and says, "If I could be sure it'd kill you, I'd do it!"

Anyway, definitely a cut above the normal 70's exploitation flick. Written by Nicholas (the 7 Per Cent Solution) Meyer, who would go on to direct Wrath of Khan!

31 Days of Halloween, day 11

So today I'm thinking about a rather unconventional master of horror: Max Fleischer. He did the old Popeyes as well as the old Betty Boops, and a lot of the Betty Boop cartoons in particular are kind of nightmarish and hallucinatory. Like this one, a kind of twisted music video featuring Minnie the Moocher. There are all kinds of these old, weird Betty Boop cartoons, and many of them are really creepy. So perhaps we should add Fleischer when we talk about Carpenter, Craven, Romero and Raimi. Just an idea....

31 Days of Halloween, Day 10

Today, another horrifying tale from The Dark Descent. It's called "The Autopsy" by Michael Shea. I first read this story when I picked up the anthology about five years ago. It concerns a mine collapse, parasitic evil aliens, and an act of heroism under extreme circumstances. It's grim and somewhat gory, and I suppose owes a fair amount to "Alien," which is the second time in ten days I've said that. I don't know if I ever really appreciated before doing this how incredibly influential that movie is. I mean, yeah, there's nothing new under the sun, and Alien in turn probably owes a lot to "Who Goes There?" the story that inspired both versions of The Thing, as well as the original Halloween. But still, when you look at the horror landscape, especially in the early 80's, Alien's footprints are everywhere. So hats off to screenwriter Dan O'Bannon and, though it pains me to say so, Director Ridley Scott. (I just have a hard time forgiving him for Thelma and Louise. And, for that matter, Black Rain sucked too.)

Anyway, back to "The Autopsy," which is a tight, mean little story with a really satisfying twist ending. And yeah, though it's ostensibly about parasitic aliens, it's really about facing disease and death. You can read it in just a couple of minutes before you watch Alien.

31 Days of Halloween, Day 9

For the next couple of days I'm going to be spotlighting stories from the best horror anthology ever. It's called The Dark Descent, and it's edited by David G. Hartwell and published by Tor. Now, I buy anthologies from time to time, and they're always uneven. Usually they start out strong and taper off in quality and I lose interest about halfway through. I thought this was just the way anthologies were until I picked this one up. Nearly a thousand pages of top-notch horror fiction. Given the spotty quality of most anthologies, that's a remarkable achievement.

Anyway, today I'd like to talk about "Sticks" by Karl Edward Wagner, but it's hard to talk about that without first talking about H.P. Lovecraft. For those of us into horror fiction, H.P. is kind of like your racist uncle--he's embarrassing as hell, but you can't help but love him. Lovecraft's tales are way, way, overwritten, and he was an unabashed racist, which comes through loud and clear in his stories (usually not being white is a pretty clear sign that a character is evil.) (But then the same thing is true of Tolkein. Funny how in the whole LOTR frenzy, Tolkein's blatant racism was never really mentioned. And no, smarty, I don't mean he's anti-orc. I mean how the bad humans who fight for Sauron are the dark-skinned men of the south. I mean, honestly.)

But I digress. If you can get past Lovecraft's racism and his Poe-wannabe prose stylings, there are some genuinely horrifying ideas in his work, which is probably why it's still so popular. Basically it boils down to people discovering the existence of horrific powerful beings to whom humans are completely insignificant. It's like Sartre with screams, really--the horror of a lot of Lovecraft is the horror of discovering the insignificance and meaninglessness of human existence.

But there's the bad writing and the racism to deal with. Which is why I recommend Karl Edward Wagner's "Sticks". It's a terrifying story in the Lovecraft tradition, but without the overwriting and the racism. Check it out when you buy the whole anthology. It's still in print, and no library should be without it.