Stabs In The Dark

500 words a Day Minimum (Personal Writing Challenge)

2012-01-15T16:41:00.000-08:00

So far so good on my self-imposed 500 words a day minimum writing challenge. 4 consecutive days so far. Today I did 904. It's nice to be consistent after so much wasted time in the past. There's a little pressure, but it's not overwhelming. I think the 500 words minimum is just the right amount.. it usually takes no more than an hour's writing to achieve, and once done if the rest of the day gets frittered away I don't feel so bad about myself. They key is that there is no maximum: if I want to write more I will, if not, then I just give up for the rest of the day. If I get back to working a real-life job soon, this should fit neatly into any schedule, no matter how severe. 45 minutes a day to get 500 words.

Also I want to write more blog posts in 2012 than in the two previous. We shall see, but those posts won't count towards by daily word count minimum. That's strictly for ongoing works of fiction.

2012 is my year to get a novel and book of short stories ready for publication. I hope. We shall see.

YellowBrickRoad

2011-12-10T19:12:00.001-08:00

YellowBrickRoad-- one of the better horror movies I've seen in a while. Similiar in theme with Blair Witch Project, but also different too. The ending is as icy as they come.

Also, dont listen to the bad reviews of this film, they totally miss the boat.. The increasingly disorienting, vague aspects are to me plusses, not minuses to the film's overall effect. Basically every negative review includes some comment along these lines: 'the lighting was bad, the movie dragged, and the ending was vague, and the first kill was ridiculous'. Wrong! The atmosphere of this movie never fucking lets up, just keeps escalating the fear, disorientation, confusion, fucked up psychology, a beautifully portrayed unraveling of sanity. Some of the special fx were a little off or cheesy, but didn't detract too much.

So if you require your horror movies to absolutely make sense, have at least one survivor in the end make it back to 'comfortable reality', need cats or bad guys jumping out of dark closets every 5.5 minutes, need everything about the horror construct explained, you probably won't enjoy it. The worst thing that can be said about the movie is it IS derivative, the plot is not all that original and borrows a lot of themes from Session 9 and Blair Witch Project, but succeeds in my view on the unrelenting build of atmophere, and the total physical and psychological breakdown of the team sent out to explore the woods.

It also borrows a bit from M. Night Shamalot's, The Happening, which happens to be one of the worst horror movies ever made.

13 Assassins

2011-11-25T13:19:00.001-08:00

I liked it.

Anaal Nathrakh's, 'The Codex Necro'

2011-11-19T01:21:00.000-08:00

So this week I’ve been listening to a lot of technical death metal, black metal and extreme noise metal, more so than usual. This album caught my interest, and after doing a bit of research, turns out it’s considered a more recent masterpiece in the genre by many, which is no surprise. Of course, by nature this brand of metal is intense, frenzied and aggressive, but this one hit me a little harder than most. It feels more serious, more accomplished, and all this without knowledge of the lyrics. (They apparently do not publish their lyrics). The songs are wildly inventive brutal attacks, with only a couple tracks missing the mark with me. I can’t help but think of the Tasmanian Devil cartoon while listening to this, cyclonic and heartlessly destructive. All the riffs feel like they’re spinning out of control, shifting at blinding speed, pulverizing the listener, keeping him constantly off balance. Pure sonic frenzy for frenzy’s sake. This band accomplishes what Slipknot in their wildest dreams wishes they could accomplish.

The Howling (1981)

2011-11-19T01:20:00.001-08:00

Not being a huge fan of ‘the big three’ creatures of horror, werewolves, vampires, zombies, I did at least enjoy this film. The story is simple; there is nothing at all unpredictable about the plot. And it all develops quickly, perhaps too quickly, which comes off as clunky in parts. The special effects were decent, but since I’m simply not all that awed by special effects in horror movies, I felt the transformation scenes were the least interesting aspect of the movie. Yeah, yeah, develop that wolfish snout already, I’m getting bored…

Another weakness I thought is the theme of the ‘old ways’ vs. the Colony’s attempt to ‘tame’ the werewolf instinct toward violence wasn’t fully explored. Could of been a deeper, more resonating film, but instead they went for the cotton candy, please the masses approach. Was rather surprised to see John Sayles in the screenplay credits– but a writing gig is a writing gig I suppose. This movie didn’t wow me like a horror cult classic should, but I liked it nevertheless. The tongue-in-cheek ending and the constant wolf references gave it a self-referential charm as well. Dee Wallace was cute and captivating throughout. 2.5 stars.

Basket Case (1982)

2011-11-19T01:19:00.001-08:00

Honestly, off the top of my head I can’t think of a better way to spend 35, 000 1982 US dollars. Making an intentionally bad movie, with stop-action animation and a really ridiculous monster called Belial and some of the worst acting ever put on screen. I can see Frank Henenlotter actually saying to his actors, ‘You performed that scene too well… try to make it shittier.’

But, having said that, the film has a certain charm to it. And I think a lot of it has to do with the director simply having way too much fun, not taking ANYTHING AT ALL in the film too seriously, and lampooning New Yorkers, doctors, ghetto hotel dwellers, receptionists, everyone. A kind of admirable laziness runs throughout the dialogue, as if the director knew all too well a line was atrocious, but left it in there anyway, just to mess with people. A mindless, fun 90 minutes. 3 stars.

The Wicker Man

2011-11-19T01:18:00.001-08:00

This has been called the ‘Citizen Kane’ of horror films, and I can’t argue with that. Since I first watched it maybe ten years ago, it has remained at the very top of my short list of all-time favorite Horror movies. And after watching it again recently, its power, strangeness, and novelty still hold. Written by the screenwriter who also wrote, ‘Sleuth’, that ingenious and complex exercise in cruel mind games, Anthony Shaffer delivers here a somewhat less complex game-like script, but vastly more cruel. It is, in my opinion, one of the cruelest films ever made, at least by a major studio. Edward Woodward’s excellent performance as Sgt. Howie only heightens this aspect. You can literally feel his spirit deflate on screen at the end when he finally realizes he’s the hunted, and not the hunter, that he really is, as it turns out, The Fool. That he is not only to be sacrificed to the cult’s sun god inside that abominable Wicker Man, but has been mind-fucked for the sheer fun of it by them as well. Almost every move Sgt. Howie makes has been calculated ahead of time by the sinister and playful pagan cult. He is a dead seal in a game of ‘seal toss’ for a pod of Killer Whales.

Beautifully directed, masterfully scored– it really is one of the oddest musicals in cinema history, complete with catchy Celtic tunes– and intelligently written all equal: one disturbing but also quite fun horror film.

Be sure to check out the extras on the Anchor Bay release. The background information on the film is pretty interesting stuff. Apparently Edward Woodward actually had goat urine rain down on him in his scene inside the Wicker Man. A fun fact.

Victimology 1

2010-09-10T00:02:00.000-07:00

It's not the murder itself that bothers me so much, but the fact they got so little value out of it. A weeks worth of cigarettes and beer maybe, at best? Did they even enjoy it? If someone murders me I hope they at least get supreme and lasting pleasure out of it.

Silent Scream

2010-08-31T08:49:00.000-07:00

This came out in 1980, in the 'second wave' of American slasher films, along with Friday the 13th, Prom Night, Terror Train, etc. Silent Scream stars Rebecca Balding (damn cute in this one, eyecandylicious) who was on the tv sitcom Soap I believe. And she does a pretty decent acting job here as well.

The movie is worth a watch for the really pretty interesting backstory of the Engels family, but is otherwise cliche-ridden, with empty-brained college students, cheesy music (some of it outright stolen from Psycho) and lame sexploits with poor dialogue. There is nothing artistically stand-out about this one, but it's one saving grace is the storyline about Victoria Engels (played rather well by Barbara Steele) and her 'brother' and mother. The movie is set on the Calfornia coast in a creepy mansion (a boarding house for college students).

There are a few good and predictable scares, and a sinister secret passage way and room in the mansion that works well. The homicide investigation subplot is dumb and rather shoddily thrown in to break the tension. The two cops are boring and useless. The main and only highlight is Barbara Steele's character, and I'll only say this if you decide to watch it (it's on Netflix instant play): she never utters a word.

Not the best, and certainly not the worst, slasher film ever made.

Frontiers

2010-03-17T20:52:00.000-07:00

This film's strength ended up being it's major weakness: it's unflinching violence. At some indefinable point, well into the second half, the plot went from intriguing, fun and somewhat horrifying, to stale and predictable and cheesy in about as much time as it takes to snap an Achille's heel with a pair of giant forceps.

It basically became a version of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" set in the French countryside, although about ten times bloodier. But the movie is not all bad, most of the acting is top-notch and there are several great chase scenes between the young thieves and the weird Nazi clan. Unfortunately the last twenty minutes were just plain predictable and seemed to rely on the old horror/revenge/gore film paradox, whereby we are supposed to believe what is happening in the film with the strictest of logic but at the same time everything that transpires seems cartoonish and full of logic holes. Somehow, just somehow, we just have to believe that our "heroine" will make it through, no matter what the odds. Schwarzenegger would be proud.

And the last five or ten minutes were just intolerable, with the blood and muck drenched heroine shaking and barely able to walk from shock (kudos for attempting to get that close to reality), after being beaten severely by a rifle butt and the hands of several very well-built men, yet still somehow, miraculously,survives that and a fierce gun battle against two women, with one even packing a machine-gun. All for the sake of what? To end their movie on the most over-used cliche in film history? "The good guy must prevail." Although they did tack on a swell little irony with her getting caught by the police at a roadblock. A little too late to save the film for me.

Enjoyed the set up, was mildly intrigued by the weird Nazi clan, and was totally let down by the ending. All the hinting at the malformed children in the mine shaft ended up being a total let down as well. What could have been a very interesting plot device, similar to what was used in a far better film, End of the Line, was all lost here for a bland and painfully rhapsodic revenge trope.

Thoughts on the film, Antichrist

2010-03-06T20:46:00.000-08:00

Interesting that they dedicated the film to Tarkovsky, I thought of his films immediately when first watching. Ultimately, this movie ends leaving me with more questions unanswered than answered, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The use of the slow-motion scenes, and the surreal dissolves are absolutely brilliant. But was Gainsbourg's character a witch all along? Or perhaps just simply insane. You simply can't explain away the events in a linear and non-abstract Sherlock Holmes kind of way. There are too many scenes containing outright supernatural or magical events. Was Dafoe's character the Antichrist? And it took these occassionally incoherent, and brutal events to transpire before he could fully realize it? I may be missing a backstory, I've simply not researched the movie at all.

The first hour of the movie is beautiful filmmaking. I wouldn't describe anything here as "tabloid sensationalism," as someone critical of the film suggested. It is very raw, powerful and real emotion, grief. Interspersed are the surreal and unnerving scenes that make you at once cringe and want to know more. The unusual camera work doesnt seem contrived or unduly egocentric to me at all. I think it really enhances the overall bleak and emotional raw mood of this movie.. An argument could be made that the director perhaps owes a bit too much to Tarkovsky or Bergman, but I don't think so. I think he rather beautifully crafts his unusual shots, the plain amazing and beautiful ultra-slow motion scenes especially. nd they're not just there for show. He intricately places these. Some of the wildly spinning shots of the forest are also quite disturbing.

In the second half is where things get a bit fuzzier, while at the same time acutely more hideous and violent. This is some of the most cringing, bold and never before seen violence in Horror film history. It isn't at all artful, as say the violence in Dario Argento's films. And there isn't a whole lot of it, but what's there is pretty brutal. And the fact that there really isnt much of it, makes what's there even more darkly poignant. We see a woman cut off her clitoris with a pair of scissors. We see the woman jerk off her husband and cumming blood. It's pretty sinister. I absolutely don't see it in the realm of so called "goreporn" whatsoever. Whether she is falling under the spell of "Satan's Church" or just going insane, her acts of violence actually fit perfectly, in that they seem bizarrely random, with little or no meaning. Random, bizarre acts of violence perpetrated by those with severe mental illness very much mirror her acts as well, using items within reach. I honestly didn't find any of the scenes of violence or sex gratuitious. The theme of sex is very prominent as well in the movie, and could be further explored.

Yet there are a number of pesky problems in the plot. The last half, and ending of the movie relies too much on impressionistic hintings rather than actual exposition of a plot. Is there a plot? I havent researched the possibility of a backstory here that I may be not aware of.

So, overall, I have to say, I'm impressed with this movie. There were some truly disturbing scenes for me. Any mad woman with scissors in her hands, always raises a hair on my neck. That one scene with the mutilated fox actually speaking, saying something like, "Chaos Reigns", was a tad corny, and I laughed my ass off. The director probably could of left that scene out.

My only complaint is, does any of it make any real sense? But this movie has a lingering quality and will certainly make me think longer about certain themes in it. The rational vs irrational/dream mind, the "evil" qualities of nature, the beautiful transforming into the hideous. The artifical chapters in the movie, to make it like a dark fairy tale, really don't do the movie any justice. There are really only two parts, the first half, and the second. The beautiful and the hideous. And the epilogue, which is either release, or recognition (if in fact Dafoe's character is the Antichrist).

Well, that's all I can blabber about this movie right now..

22, Used and Abused

2009-12-12T22:41:00.000-08:00

"I can't wait to get married one day to that special someone and spend the rest of my life with him and start a family, I like volunteering at cancer camps for kids who have cancer in the summer time and I'm gonna volunteer at a new one in the summer, It's call camp twitch and shout. It's for kids who have Tourette's Syndrome. I wanna meet a guy who is caring and loving and with love me for who I am, I'm tired of liars and cheaters, I'm ready to find my someone special."

Her Religion is Feeling: Or, The Happiness of a 19 year old Hippie

2009-12-12T21:27:00.000-08:00

--"well, you seem pretty smart to me, but I think sometimes an inherited religion (and all the doctrine that comes with it, basically, baggage), can hinder a person from growing to their fullest potential. And sometimes thinking with ideas given to you wholesale, and not ones you've come to on your own, can be dangerous and unhealthy. "

--"im just a lil backwoods kid trying to figure out my place in the world...wrong or right...busted knees and broke hearts"

--"I just look around and to me that is enough for me to believe that there has to be more than we could see "

--"circles, spirals... what couldnt we see 600 years ago, we can now with a simple tool, a microscope. "

Dec 5, 2009: Snow Pictures

2009-12-07T14:18:00.001-08:00

About an inch, maybe a bit less. It melted quickly. Was all gone by noon. Early snowfall for Chattanooga, though.

Recent Suicide's Poem

2009-11-28T03:43:00.000-08:00

Found off the internet. He drowned himself in the Tenn. River recently.

----------------------- AND HIS TWIN BROTHER WERE
DIAGNOSED WITH A MENTAL ILLNESS AS TEENAGERS.
------------ ENJOYS CLEANING, WORKING, PLAYING
SPOONS, STUDYING MUSIC AND SCIENCE, WATCHING
CARTOONS, EXERCISING, WRITING POETRY, AND ESPECIALLY
PLAYING GAMES OF STRATEGY AND CHANCE.

I am so happy I am not sure why
Like a prize in a Cracker Jack box
Such
an unexpected surprise
And I feel so pumped up with joy
As I wonder
shall we be together soon again
For with the dice of fate, I dare do not toy
Yet I keep hoping somehow we can be close friends
So moved by your
radiant spirit
So happy you are alive
If you are touched, yes I’m glad
to hear it
May we spread angels’ wings and thrive
No I don’t know how to
tell you
How sorry I am for acting like such a fool
But now I know that
you lay close crafty kangaroo
So know, your prosperity I wish to feel
No
I don’t know how to dispel the truth
But I know that these good memories
don’t change
And this beautiful sensation stands as utter proof
Yes this
life evolves delightfully strange
There is always a vision in the darkness
Even the blind are never totalIy blind
And even when the world is at its
darkest black
It is so beautiful and kind
And I am so happy
And I
think that I know why
It’s just the knowledge you are somewhere near
Exploring the corridors of your life
Yes it’s just the knowledge
that you are out there somewhere
Experiencing life

Will Jacques's Drawing for The Anchorite's Daughter

2009-11-17T16:31:00.001-08:00

Is the picture you see above, at the top of the blog. See more at:

http://ghastlydoor.com/

Human Bridge, a Parable

2009-10-29T11:56:00.000-07:00

The exposed meat on bodies writhing. And more walking, crawling on top. Those that were well underneath had stopped moving months ago. Month? I'm not sure anymore.

All at the beginning of the bridge are just hardened, stinking meat. I'm near the beginning, deep in line, waiting for my turn to drop and lay myself on the great writhing mound of meat. I will fold and bury my limbs and face into the human muck in time, as is the vow we take, with abiding resolve and content. This brick mentality has purpose, a grand design, though I'm not clear on the precise nature of that design. There is risk. There was rumor great devouring creatures dwell in the dim-lit netherworld that seek our destruction, a ruin to our purpose. Thankfully the nether-world is vast, and their kind, few. We are building a human bridge to get out of the nether world, with the only resource we have on hand, our bodies. But why or where, I have no clue. The how is what I know.

We proceed with our moving queue in silence. In fact we are a tongue-less race. We chose to remove our tongues ages ago to avoid a more miserable fate. Sometimes a foot will sink deeper than one would want in the writhing top layer of brothers and he will trip and fall. That is his time. He will not try to rise and rejoin the queue, but simply sink his limbs whereever he can and take his accidental spot on the bridge. But there are no accidents. I'm careful with my feet placement but I know it's impossible to gauge precisely where hard bone or soft slippery muscle might be. Where a gap between a shoulder and another's armpit might be. It is not total darkness, but very close. I would describe it as red dusk. Always. We walk on, gently rising, arching over the abyss and out of this forsaken world. Into one more so?

In our routine, our plan, there is no optimism, but there is a kind of pleasure. It is dim like our lighting in the nether world, but it's discernable. Sometimes while walking, or crawling, a live arm will rise from the bridge and stroke my cock, or inside my thigh, and I will feel a kind of pleasure. There is that: the accidental contact of a brother on random spots. But there is also a more abstract pleasure we feel. Assuming "I" is "We", which I always have. It is a pleasure of belonging to a purpose-driven group, a brotherhood, of working together to build our bridge to the other side. We are apparently in endless supply, because we have been building thorugh the soft tint red haze for months, which could be years or decades. I'm really not sure. It is a numbing, slightly throbbing, sensation in my head and not my cock.

I do not know how long it took, but at some point in my journey across the heaps of bloodied trampled maloderous brothers, I begin to realize we were no longer arching up, but down. No one person decides on this deviation. It simply happens. Nothing changes in what I see all around me, other than an everpresent and quite vague, falling sensation. We were told of another danger, in the beginning. That the bridge at some point, way off, might crumble beneath us, and fall. We were comforted by the assurances that the fall would be forever, and we would die well before we hit a bottom. So we were not in fact, immortal? They could not gaurantee that.

At some point, I begin to feel a curious feeling: that I have not dropped in my natural place on the bridge at an appropriate time. I am overdue. The anxiety grows with every step. The other brothers, new companions, walking faster, look upon me oddly, with I suppose, derision. Though for ages the queue had proceeded without force or malice, I fully expect any moment to be jostled or even pushed down upon my fallen comrades, but this does not happen. It is of course, forbidden. But then, no one spoke of a renegade. As such, I become that renegade. So many times, I wanted to drop, so tired, drugged by desire to comply, out of love for the cause, out of lack of will to go on, but I did not. I simply, quite simply, continued to walk. If I tripped, slid, fell, I got up and walked on.

Not long after, several months or years, I hear a distant rumbling at my back. At the same time, for the first time, I see the absolute edge of the bridge. I see where it ends and a bottomless pit begins. And even more surprising, I see beyond the gap to a massive heap of rocks, a cliffside, an end to the chasm. I would only have to slow down, let others pass by me, for a good while, and I will actually make it to the other side. I decide to do this.

But all the while the rumblings, bass echoing grunts, grow louder, as if emitted by living things. I slow to what I can only describe as a putter. The others pass me and glance with abject derision. I have broken the brotherhood. The misery and heartache I feel is almost enough to cause me to fling myself over the edge of the bridge, but I know I would have to walk miles in either direction to find it. Why did I not just drop with the rest, do my duty?

Then suddenly, the bridge is complete. I am on the other side of the nether world. I find my feet hurting with the incredible difference in sensation between walking on my brothers' meat and bones and rock once again. I have but a vestige of a memory of how rock feels under my feet.

I stand and look back at the bridge arching vastly into oblivion. Those brothers that can view the end, simply begin a mass retreat, others fall in line, knowing instinctly what has happened. I am the only human that stands on the other side.

Then I see what made those rumblings. I stand in horror. They-- the great devouring beasts of the nether world-- are coming. Hideous, massive, incomprehensible. They are crossing the bridge. The bridge was always for them, not our brotherhood. The brotherhood is a lie.

It will be a matter of months, minutes, before they reach me at the other side. I have no escape but up the rocks. I am too tired to climb. I will surely be ripped apart, eaten in a flash, and be no more. Very soon.

I await my fate.

Bajo la Sal

2009-09-22T04:37:00.000-07:00

A good Mexican psychological thriller? Is it possible? Help me out, does one exist?

Mexican thrillers usually have that Catholic moral undertone to them and this one's no different. But this movie, despite it's sluggish plot and fairly predictable killer (although for reasons I didnt predict), turns out to be worth watching because, despite its flaws, it is a suprisingly moving story. The characters are just beautifully drawn and you sink into their tragic lives and something just clicked on a deeper level for me. This isnt Saw. It doesnt attack and entertain in a non-stop thrill ride like that one. In fact it fails as a thriller/horror in that sense, and miserably. Some might find it boring. Maybe because Ive been sick and dealing with flooded basements for over a week, therefore more open to invasions of such sentimentalities, This movie is melancholic and dark and weird, especially the 'Doll Sequences" and the little burgeoning love affair between the two young characters that is quickly snuffed out.

Worth a look, if you can find it.

REC

2009-09-05T14:23:00.000-07:00

First off, Im one of the people think Blair Witch Project is an good film. The first time I watched I was genuined chilled and on edge throughout. The second time, it did lose a bit of its punch. The ending was a bit too vague and senseless, but in my mind the best horror film ever shot entirely from the perspective of a camera crew.

The second best is the one I just got through watching, REC. It is one amazing thrill-ride. The last 20 minutes or are harrowing, mysterious and just plain intense. It even ended on a big time horror movie cliche, where the victim gets dragged by the evil thing away in the darkness, but I didnt mind that so much. And kudos for using a substance that actually looked like real blood. It really helped to highlight the rawness of this film.

This movie is done by people who are steeped in the genre. There are hints from their influences throughout. There's Blair Witch, obviously, a bit of 28 days later (the rage virus and the plague in the apartment building are similiar in effect, if not similiar in origin) and Session 9 (the secret recordings found that clue us in on what's going on underneath the surface of the film).

One complaint I do have is the sudden and out of the blue connection between the virus, the little girl, and devil possession. It just leaves too many questions. So many that it seems a bit contrived and unfulfilling. Another quibble is, even though REC clocks in at a swift 75 minutes, it still could have been shaved down. A few of the early scenes seemed superfluous and easily axed without harming the integrity of the film. Obviously some of the slower scenes help to give depth to the characters, make them all the more human, etc, but still there was a bit too much of it, in my opinion. It was almost as if a nearly flawless short film was stetched out as far as possible in order to make it a feature length film..

There are of course the same logic problems Blair Witch has when making movies from the persepective of a hand-held camera. One being, at some point, when the terror and panic reach a certain level, it seems highly unlikely the cameraman is going to continue filming. But REC for the most part, and in some scenes ingeniously, by-passes this flaw.

All in all, a pretty darn pleasing and effective horror film.

Sunburn, by Colin Hersh

2009-09-03T11:46:00.000-07:00

I have always enjoyed looking at the world through a window, but that’s only when there’s something to see. A willow tree, giving me nothing more to see than leaves, blocked the window I looked through in the mornings. I don’t mind seeing the tree, but the window next to it gave a view of the whole front yard where my grandchildren sometime played, and the country-side beyond glittered with life nearly all day in the sun. I would have given almost anything to look out that window just then... but the Lazy Boy recliner that I spent so many good years in was in the way. It's Jason's now, my damned son-in-law. When he came home from work I got to watch him relax in my chair! That boiled my blood. But it was a new morning, and new beginnings; I still had hope things would change.

As always, Lilly took me from the window to the breakfast table, fed me my plain oatmeal and told me all of her woes as she spooned globs into my mouth, dragging the spoon back up the chin like you do when feeding an infant. I would have liked to tell her that one of my woes is that she never adds sugar, cinnamon, or any damn thing to the plain Quaker Oats to give me a little variety, but I can’t, so I just sat and took it. This morning she told me that she didn’t know what she was going to do about Jason. Jason, she said, has been going out more and more to the casino, spending more, and more of her money. Her money! That’s a laugh! I’d like to explain to her that it was my money but I can’t so I just sat and listened. I always just sit and listen. After feeding me she did a half ass job of wiping off my face before she left, leaving me at the table alone, leftover oatmeal drooling from my mouth. How did I still love her, my only daughter; it seemed impossible but even now, I do.

Soon after, Jenny, my granddaughter, came into the house with a friend I had never seen before. They were talking excitedly about the things they would see in the woods today. Jenny’s friend stopped talking when she saw me and asked who I was. Would she introduce me? I was slightly ashamed I got my hopes up over such banal events. But I longed for anthing to break the monotony of the Willow Tree. Jenny only moaned that I was her grandfather and told Karla ( I got to know her name at least!) she should stay back because I smelled like pee. Jenny pinched her nose to emphasize the fact. Man that hurt! I knew I smelled like pee, but how could she treat her own grandfather so disrespectfully? Would she turn out to be like Lilly? How I loved my little Lilly when she was just a girl, and still do, and she is not so bad (a girl must become a woman). No, she is not so bad. Is she? I was the one who had the devastating stroke, not her. She's had to deal with me the best she knows how. But I thought I taught her better. To pay attention to little details about people. To truly care and love deeply. How could her love for me turn so shallow? Why don't I just die. But I don't want to die; I want to see the world outside from my recliner! Give me my goddamned recliner back!

Karla asked what was wrong with me and Jenny rambled out something about my stroke. But she told it in a way that made it out to be all my fault, like I inflicted my stroke on my family and myself. Hearing this, I was deeply ashamed. She went on to mention how she was forced to move into my house and live with me. Of course she left out the part where she and her parents were ‘forced’ to take all my money, throw out my belongings after first selling off most everything of value, then treating me like some old piece of ugly, smelly furniture people only kept around for sentimental reasons. At first I was glad to see the look of shock on Karla's face at how my granddaughter was talking to me, but her friend wass quickly assured that I could not hear them. In fact, she called me a "vegetable". Her friend laughed and asked, "What kind?"

The Anchorite's Daughter

2009-08-23T09:35:00.000-07:00

1.

Almost fourteen years ago Ted and Glenda Eyerstone were married in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in a small hideaway chapel, on the outskirts of that famous mountain town. It was an elopement; they could not wait for their planned date some three months later. And there were some less dramatic, practical reasons as well. The honeymoon was spent alone in a small cabin tucked high in the foothills, with a spa, a bar, a king-sized bed. They didn't leave the cabin for three days. They still had their ceremony later for friends and family, in a bigger church with an intricately latticed multi-tiered cake, celtic music strummed by a friend of the bride who played for free, massive explosions of hyacinth, peonies, and blood-velvet roses, a proper minister, a lavish wedding dress, a teary-eyed father either glad to finally be giving her away or simply overcome by the moment. And this second wedding day was beautiful, moving and made Glenda very happy and Ted very relieved when it was finally over. But they had that secret between them: they were already married. Privately, they enjoyed this special knowledge that only the two of them knew, and Glenda hoped no one else would find out about for the rest of their lives.

No one ever did. A secret sunk is a secret well-kept.

Ted stood on the balcony of their 12th story apartment, looking down at the city sparkling many-colored jewels in the night. His wife was inside on the sofa-- now a good thirty pounds heavier than the day they were married-- pretending to read a magazine, a Cosmopolitan, or Vogue. She was working on her fifth glass of wine and he was well into his third Brass Monkey. A light tinkling of some anonymous jazz played on the stereo. Ted had introduced her Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and others, early on in their marriage, but somehow only the most platitudinous, non-confrontational jazz appealed to her. And now that's all she listened to, almost out of spite, Ted thought. They had just returned from a dinner celebrating the retirement of one of her bosses at the CarpetWorld marketing firm she had worked for all these years. He could smell the leftover scent of her perfume, something bottom-heavy from the Amber family, still clinging to his nostrils, like a lingering snide remark. He was a chemist who worked for a small local perfumery, and it was "his bag"-- as Glenda liked to spit out, lushly at any social event or gathering, in a taxi to a driver with sunken stars for eyes, on the phone to telemarketers confused by anyone unusual enough to try to have a conversation with them. She never bought or used any of the perfumes he created for the company, or any of the other companies he'd worked for during in the past fourteen years. He stopped giving them as gifts to her early on in their marriage. But she loved to tell the world he invented perfumes for a living. Only her manner in telling was like someone trying to sell a clunker to a high school kid by telling them about all the hot women he's had in the backseat over the years.

It was something she had said, of course. Wasn't it always? One of her co-workers, some alcoholic swooning salesman named Rex, had leaned his rosy snout well into Glenda's pumped-up cleavage and took a deep snort, then commented something banal about her "enticing odor". She reeked like a dead tree slathered in cinnamon oil! Get it right, asshole! But no, Ted was his usual subdued, passive self and downed drink after drink, shrivelling up a bit more with each one.

When one of the office girls, Sheila Something, blurted out drunkly at him, "Why are you so quiet Ted!" he nearly sprang from his coiled rattlesnake position and hurled himself clear over the table, through the gathering storm of cigarette and cigar smoke and residue of office gossip and bolts of shrieking laughter like lightning, to clutch both hands around her tiny neck, squeezing hard, too hard and fast and bloodlusty for anyone to prevent her certain death. It was a question he heard every time he went out with his wife and after years of stuttering out lame explanations-- "Im a happy-go-lucky introvert!", "Well, you know, I'm a scientist by nature, and chemist by profession, and our types tend to sit back and observe the world..."-- he finally came to the conclusion a pale polite smile and bobbing of the head was the best response.

At the time Ted was not doing so well with his company, and his salary and commission had been cut dramatically. When a waiter passed by, Glenda patted the boy on his ass and said for all to hear, "If my husband had an ass this tight, I wouldn't care if I had to pay all the bills!" They all turned and looked at him, . "Haha, dear."

Within a week his company regretted to inform him that they were no longer in need of his services. They wanted to go with a newer, fresher team. Team? He was the only one getting the ax!

"You know the game, Ted," his immediate boss, Franklin Invernes, was saying as Ted packed away his supplies, "The owners just don't understand that inspiration for new and appealing colonges is not something that can be cornered, defined and put on a deadline... you're a good guy, Ted, a talented guy, Ted, and you've made this company more money than Gene or Rene even realize..." Then Franklin, that vacuum of forget already forming, ceased to speak. He could of just as easily been an surfboard leaning against the wall with a placating smile airbrushed on it.

As he carried his box through the maze of hallways to the elevator, Grigory Vintii, one of the company's salesmen and happy-hour comedian, came out of a glass door leading to the graphics department and patted him on the back. Vintii had made a small fortune last year off Ted's line of curry-chutney, and other indian cuisine-themed perfumes, with a top note of applescent and a fougere base.

"Say, old sport, you're not going to come back with a load of guns in your trenchcoat and blast up the joint, are ya old pal.. heh heh..."

"I don't even own a trenchcoat."

Then Vintii's sun set suddenly, going blue-dark morose. "Hey, Teddo, you know I'm just kidding with ya? Good luck and all."

Out on Broad Street he felt underwater, and the box of chemical supplies and personal items weighed in his arms like a ship's anchor. Steamy August clouds lazed overhead. A bus-- not his-- zoomed by too close to the curb, and he felt the rush of air from it like a whitecap. Although it went by at thirty or more miles per hour he saw, or thought he saw, every face on the right side of the bus, and they all had blackened, dead eyes, drooping mouths, dishevelled hermit hair.

The hot lava sun poured down on him. Everything, buildings, cars, people, benches and bus kiosks, seemed to sway like submerged vegetal matter. He began to walk slowly south toward the river. A homeless black man carrying, of all things, a broom, sat up against grafitted wall of an abandoned shopfront and smiled toothlessly at him. Ted went over to him and dropped the box.

"Want to trade?"

A look of incredulity flashed in his bloodshot eyes. "You want my broom, boss? What you got there?"

He looked into the box, studying the items, not really grasping their meaning.

"What am I gonna sweep off the concrete with when I lay down tonight?"

But it was obvious to Ted the man wanted these strange vials and containers and folders more than he wanted the broom. "Here, take it."

As Ted began to walk off with the broom, the black man shouted, "Hey, white boy, what you want with that broom anyhow?"

I'm going to give it to my wife as an anniversary present.

2.

After walking several blocks, his bones like swamp water, Ted noticed a young woman sitting alone at a bus kiosk. He sat on the bench beside, careful not to invade her sphere of comfort. He would not classify her as exactly beautiful, but her large and luminous eyes were intriguing, and her straight black hair cut abruptly just above the shoulders appealing. She wore an orange and black leopard-patterned blouse with thin straps instead of sleeves and tight black leather pants. Her body gave the impression of a long slender candle misshapen over the years with globs of redistributed wax. But her face was young. She was no more than twenty-five. When she turned her head to see who sat down near her, she didn't flash away shyly, like most people would, but her gaze seemed to linger uncritically upon him. Perhaps even a slight smile cracked, after taking notice of the broom which rested between his legs. Then quite suprisingly she said something.

"Are you the kiosk keeper?"

"Hmm? Oh-- this?"

He squeezed the handle tightly with his left hand.

"It's a present for my wife."

The girl scratched her cheek and waved away a fly from her face. He noticed part of a tattoo showing on her right breast. She had a pair of shades saddled on her thigh. She put them on."Well, here's my bus, catch ya--Hope your wife doesn't fly the coop." She boarded the bus and Ted watched as her strange lumbering gait took her all the way to the rear of the bus. Not once did she look his way.

He walked the entire three miles to his apartment building across the river. Halfway across the pedestrian bridge he stood and watched some guy do an epileptic dance. He was wearing really tight blue shorts and a cut-off T-shirt, and sandals on his feet. A baseball cap lay on the ground, apparently there to accept coin from interested onlookers. Past him, the river curled toward Wolf Shoe Bend-- where a mental hospital had been built on top of sacred Cherokee burial land-- its gray-brown water blending finally into the hazy hills. Asocial cumulus clouds hung heavily in the sky, unwilling to consort with their fellow cloud-brothers and form a refreshing afternoon thunderstorm. The nut job's rain dance wasn't working.

By the time Ted reached his apartment, he was hot, humid and angry. It finally sunk in properly. The bastards had fired him! Suprisingly, he found his wife home early from work. She was stirring up a drink a ttheir small pullaway bar underneath the blank wall, where the large original Hallfleece painting used to be. He remembered his wife's expression of revulsion when the delivery men brought it to the apartment (its dimensions were 9' by 6') and unwrapped it from the brown paper covering. "What...in..the. That's hideous!"

"I thought you'd like it Glenda."

"It looks like a poorly drawn monk being flushed down a giant toilet bowl! The colors are so bland and brown and uninspiring. It makes me wanna hurl!"

"I believe that was the artist's intent, Glenda. Why does it always feel like we're in an Edward Albee play?"

"Who's Edward Albee?"

"Nevermind."

****

Yes, Ted reminisced, if only their conversations could be like they once were, so literate, so piquant, so arousing. He realized his shirt was soaked in sweat."Hi, honey."

He held the broom bristles-side up, like the farmer's pitchfork in American Gothic.

Glenda nearly spilt her drink, laughing suddenly, violently. "You havent called me 'honey' in fourteen years of marriage, Ted! What have you turned jokester all of a sudden. Brushing up for open mike night down at the Happy Nugget? What the fuck do you have there, Ted!"

She giggled nervously.

"Oh, Glenda, sorry. I almost forgot our anniversary. I got this for you..."

"Ted, you're an idiot. Our anniversary isn't for three months," she blurted, then something distant, like the sun visible from Neptune, dawned on her. "Oh." "Well that's just lovely, Ted. A fucking broom."

"No, dear. I just remembered. Suddenly. Had to grab the first thing I saw you might like. Knowing your unfashionable and eclectic tastes... Well, I thought about bringing the owner of this broom instead for dinner. But I fear he couldn't chew the food you normally prepare.."

"Ok, ass. Why are you home, it's early." She took down her drink in one gulp.

"Babe I got some good news and I gots some bad news..."

3.

It was morning in the summer mountains, but Wilson Greer was already beginning to sweat. And like most mornings these days, he felt his heart skip around in his chest with those increasingly strange beats. He leaned on his walking stick, light-headed. He thought, irrationally, that if he bent over to pick up a curious pebble, or spy the morning routine of dung beetle, he would die. But the dizzying palpitations stopped just as quickly as they came on, and he felt alright again. Stream became unhindered by boulder, river to dreaming ocean, blood flowed to greater blood. In the midst of his having to leave, thoughts of his daughter flooded back-- how many daughters of the forest had he adopted in an effort to forget the real one? Who knows. Memories always bled back from the sleeping oceanic past to disturb his hermitage. There was nothing to do to combat it, he had decided years ago, so he simply just got on with his day.

He didn't want to leave his home of over a decade, but the new road paved through the mountains had brought tourists, more hunters, poachers, adventurous city-dwellers, fat older couples on motorbikes and also, more ranger presence. They were running him off finally (for all these years they knew he was here and cast a blind eye, but now they were going to pave the dirt jeep trail that wound its way around Old Smokestack mountain; he even had a few terse exchanges with Tucker McKinlin, a stern-faced ranger whose wife died of cancer when she was only thirty-five). Twelve beautiful years of isolation dissolved so sweetly into memory, were now coming to an end. His eyes pointed down and focused on one random spot on Cutler's Mountain, thought perhaps he saw a trickle of water. There probably wasn't a forest service road to get his truck anywhere near there. He could never find it anyways. Once under the canopy he'd lose track of the spot; he would never find that exact location, no matter how many times he bore it into memory. He decided to call it... heaven.

The day he left his church, his wife, his daughter, he did not also leave behind his religion. It was just as real-- heavier in fact-- than the materials he hauled up in his truck to build his hideaway home. Only difference was-- and it was a big difference-- that now he preached to the trees, to the rocks, to the rushing water. Sometimes a squirrel paid his sermons a moment of respect, before suddenly remembering a more promising nut to crack.

He headed back to his shack, made of river rock and poplar planks, with a roof built with swiped sections of corrugated steel siding from an abandoned warehouse down in Knoxville. Beside the shack was his faded green rusty Ford pick-up truck that he rarely drove anymore, with a tattered blue tarp thrown over the bed. He kept canned goods and other supplies there. He felt sweat streaming down his chin under his ratty gray-brown beard and under his cap. It was hot here, even at four thousand feet up, probably as high as 80 degrees. But in his chair in the shade underneath a slope-stunted beech tree, he would cool off quickly, catch a cooling breeze, maybe slide into a noon-time dream.

He hoped it wouldn't be like the last one. That one was too much pain. In the dream Wilson had decided to trim up his beard, get a haircut, put on a nice cheap suit and go visit his daughter in Sevierville. He expected to be greeted warmly by first the old hound in the yard, then a flock of happy screaming grandchildren, his ex-wife, Almira, rocking serenely, but with a slightly sardonic smirk, in the chair on the porch, then finally, by Julia, his daughter. But those expectations were not met. The hound barked and snapped viciously from the tight end of his chain, a brood of dirt-faced children stood expressionless in the yard. Then as he got closer they watched him, their eyes filling with dark expression, the younger ones with suspicion, the older ones with menace, and the old lady in the rocking chair spat tobacco out at his shiny boots in lieu of a greeting as he stepped onto the porch. "You don't belong here. You never did." Then Julia came out on the porch, wearing a flowing yellow dress and a white sunhat. But her hands were raw and calloused and big like a man's. She was holding a rifle crosswise in her hands. That had been his daddy's rifle, and those were his daddy's hands...

As he sat in his chair, occassionally flicking at blackflies, he wondered what would happen if he really did go down in the valley and visit his daughter. It was six months ago, that he drove by the double-wide trailer she and her mother and his four grandchildren lived in. He saw a tall bearded man with a baseball cap smoking a cigarette on the built-on porch, talking to another shirtless man sitting on an uprighted stump. Probably another boyfriend, or for all he knew, her husband. Wilson only drove by once or twice a year, and this was the first time he'd seen this man. Each time he came down out of the mountains to drive by his daughter's place, it was a different vignette, a clouded window, into the that life he left behind. He would also, invariably, drive by his old chapel where he used to perform impromptu weddings for tourists, but also where he gave sermons on Wednesdays and Sundays. He had only a small following, less than twenty members, and he often wondered if all had been assimilated by other churches, or did one or two lose their faith and backslide because of his sudden, inexplicable dissappearance. For the longest time, he fantasized that some of his flock would search him down and try to convince him to come back to the world, where his message was sorely needed. But no one ever came.

Off to the northwest he saw over the valley thunderstorms growing, merging, into one great supercell front. There would be rain and wild lightning this afternoon. The worst were those storms that skipped the valley entirely and formed directly in the upslope of the hills. Those storms came on with a supernatural abruptness, swallowed the mountain whole, turning all of Old Smokestack Ridge into a plasma lamp of sorts. Weird greens and blues, then up through the purples, reds and oranges as the sun broke back through the clouds. After, the forest would drip for hours, and that sound always had a purring effect on his soul. Distant thunder falling echoing away on the other side of the range, the storm tattered and defeated for the moment, only to gain momentum once again rising to meet the next ancient range to the west, deeper into North Carolina. The pungent rot of dead wood and understory would surround him like a warm breast, and he would sleep then, settled or unsettled, until early evening. In the almost dark he would start a fire and heat up a can of beans and have some stale crackers and a ripe tomato to go with it.

But now the sun baked over the small garden he kept and the gloom stayed over Knoxville. He was fond of imagining one of those storms over Knoxville one day simply taking away the whole town, leaving behind nothing but bare ground, no remnant of civilization. Just fertile red dirt to be reborn again. Maybe the storm would die off before hitting the mountains. That happened sometimes.

He slipped into a dream that had more truth in it than most dreams. He was still living in his old home near Gatlinburg and he walked in from church service to find his young daughter and still youthful wife, together, pleasuring a strange man while he sat in his recliner. The man had a shaved head, but long angular goatee, a tattoo of a pentagram on his left shoulder, and one of a dancing skeleton in tophat on his right forearm. His arms were crossed but there were other strange markings on his chest as well. A deeply disturbing stench filled the room, his nostrils, his brain, like an atomic cloud bursting.. perhaps a cross between incense and corpsereek and animal dung. Julia and Almira, both pulling their mouths off the stranger's organ at the same time, looked startled at first, then both began to smirk and laugh at him. Almira spoke: "You're home early, dear..." Then right before his eyes, the two women embraced and twisted into each other like writhing snakes, face going into face, chest merging into chest, until there was only one woman left. On her forehead was a small hole dripping blood and her eyes were sparkling ruby. It was a woman he seemed to both know and not know. She pointed at him with her left hand, then she said, "Join us, my husband, my father. It is pleasure you can not even imagine..." She reached for a butcher's knife that was on the coffee table.

In the background the dark man, now robed in black said, "Look close, Will's son, into the eyes of the fly."

Wilson jolted awake and nearly fell out of his chair under the stunted beech tree. He was drenched in sweat by the nightmare. The sun was covered by the almost-living swarming clouds. He could see rain was imminent, as sheets were folded into sheets down into the hollow he called White's Cove. The wind, like a great hissing of flies, disturbed the canopy above him. Thunder, a stroke on the brain, rattled bones of memories there.

"O Lord, I should of done the deed. Forgive me...."

4.

Weeks after telling his wife he got sacked from his job, Ted could not help but notice the relief in his wife's eyes. And these times were few, because she was always gone, staying overnight with Rex the Ridiculous, he was certain, and he was suprised how little he cared.

With wide-open nights and new eyes, he took to walking around town at night. On the first night out he again saw the homeless man from whom he had exchanged his work supplies for that broom (which still leaned on the foyer wall). He was with some stringy man with long unwashed hair, rows of dilapidated teeth and a ragged Pantera T-shirt. They both smelled like musk and swamp gas. The old black man didn't seem to recognize him, but the haggard metalhead smiled blackly, and said, "Give us a couple bones my man. We're like hungry you know." Ted passed on silently.

Behind him he heard, "Hey, hey! That's the white boy took my broom!"

Ted kept walking, faster now, but soon felt a strong hand grab his shoulder. He turned and saw it was the black man now. Recognition was flashing in his bloodshot eyes. "Gimme my broom back, boss. The wizard of Oz, man, he wantsit so we can get back to Kansas, dig? Wait, Clicks here just wants him some brains." A hideous tubercular cough-laugh followed.

The other guy cackled. "Lamar, you is the shit, bro! The wizard ah Oz is my favorite movie, main. Scared the bejeebers out of me when I was a kid!" Then speaking to Ted, "Lamar here says you stole his broom. I suggest you return it to us. Or-- or... give us a couple twenties. We can call it even".

Lamar looked skeptical. "Naw, I wants my broom, cuz. It belonged to my crackwhore ole lady and she's sho nuff the wicked witch of the west! Ain't that so, Clicks?"

Clicks stood with his arms crossed over his chest, nodding in agreement. "Bitch cast spells. Did. Whacked. Righteous man, give us some bread."

Ted fumbled through his wallet and gave the men everything green he could find, a total of maybe seventy dollars. "I'll bring the broom back too. Here take this. I just got to get going." He was caught in that uncertain space between being mugged and just offering charity to some disenfranchised individuals. It was a most unpleasant space to be in.

They took the money and headed off in the opposite direction, probably to get a cheeseburger.

On the second night, he avoided Malcom X Avenue, where he'd been accosted by Clicks and Lamar and stayed on Vinecourt Blvd, which was trendier and catered to the local university crowd. There were plenty of late-night restaurants, bars and local music venues, and drunken, sputtering college girls ambling along the sidewalks or in the street. One girl was being-- he assumed-- unwarrantedly abrasive to a potted plant outside a crowded beer joint. As he passed her he looked into the place and noticed the girl from the bus kiosk weeks ago, sitting at the bar, staring into a half-empty mug of Killian's Red. Her hair was mussed as if she just woke up and didn't bother to brush it down.

"Say, dude. I know you." It was the girl who had been puking into the potted plant.

"I-- I don't think so. How old are you, twenty?"

"As if, dude. My big bro is the bartender here. You're not with the pigs, are you? Because if you are, I'm twenty-one, AND A HALF!" She laughed as if this was the funniest joke in the world.

"Not a cop no, and if you will excuse me..."

Ted started inside, but the girl grabbed him by the shoulder. Second time in two nights a strange night crawler had done this to him. This time he was angry.

"Please don't grab me like that, miss." He suddenly realized he was holding tightly the girl's forearm. She jerked it away. He noticed red finger-shaped marks where his hand had been.
Her eyes were climbing up through viscous layers impetuous charm and novice civility. "Oww. I don't like your tone, mister. Buy us a drink, dollface." Simple, lusted over charm was back, in the blink of an eye. In other times, in other places...

But here and now, he simply said, "No."

He walked on, toward the Garden of Vines and the Debutt's Museum of Southern Railroads. From there he could see the river, black silk with silver streamers of moonlight, and the vestiges of the Tennessee River Rail Bridge. It was the oldest bridge to cross the river within the city limits. A vertical lift bridge that he hadn't seen "lift" for barge traffic in his lifetime, he had always been fascinated by the houses that sat atop each lift tower. He imagined all sorts of cranks, massive pulleys, cogworks and squeeling metal sounds up there. When he was a boy he used to think evil shadow creatures lived there, slept undisturbed and comforted by the horrific banshee winds. The bridge was a relic, rusted over, but still functioning. It still suprised him it had not been razed or rebuilt to modern codes. But he reasoned since it was only for rail traffic, Norfolk-Southern was a bit less strict in following safety codes or the aesthetic principles of your typical urban beautification society. Ted was one who found it alluring, even beautiful, even in its present worn-down state.

On the third night, he noticed the broom missing. A muggy September wind blew in from the patio. Apparently his wife forgot to shut the sliding glass door before she took off to fuck Rex the Reticulator once again.

On the fourth and fifth nights he decided to stay in and see if his wife would show up. She never did. He stayed drunk. In his closet laboratory, he fiddled with pine extract, antelope musk and his wife's orgasmal fluids. She had been a good sport from time to time, got to admit it to yourself, Ted ole boy...

On the sixth night he considered filing a police report, but decided against it. He broke down and called her cell phone. It went straight to voice mail. All he could bring himself to say was, "Hi, honey, dinner's ready." The ding of the microwave soon after verified this statement.
It really pissed him off-- for reasons he could not quite pin down-- that Glenda had taken, thrown out, or flown out on, his broom. The last possibility amused him, sourly.

He went out to his balcony and stared out over the river, and to the left, way in the distance, the Tenn-Bridge. Something odd made his eyes double-back. Hmm, that's strange. He'd never seen a light on in any of those weird high houses on the lift towers before. And even more strangely-- surely an ocular illusion-- the lights flickered as if the illumination was not electric but fire.

5.

Laughter like thunder made the rafters of the chapel vibrate, threatened to bring the whole worn-out building down. Then silence filled the room, the screaming of a baby subsiding as some dreamy-eyed woman held it under water too long. Candle-light caused long wire-thin shadows to flicker against the flaking walls. Someone grafitti artist had painted the words, "Love Light Lester", on one of the walls in lurid red. Bubbles rose to the top of the greenish tank, and then finally, a stillness. The woman with strawberry hair, let the lifeless child sink to the bottom. She was completely naked. She began to massage her breasts and flick her tongue like a snake.
Down below, hooded figures knelt on both knees in a semi-circle around a tall man covered with tattoos. He held, both hands gripping, a glinting daggar out from his abdomen and pointed it at each member, and spoke some words, the same each time. "Sine ullo desiderio vive et ama." Candle-scent and feces mocked the air.

The floor of the abandoned chapel was littered with dust and broken glass and assorted litter. Every window, blasting loud black night, had panes of jagged anarchal glass.

The tall man, also naked, spoke again: "And someone else tonight must die."

Almost before he finished, his hooded disciples hissed loud whispers in chorus, "Pick me, pick me, pick me...." Chaotic shadow-fire danced across empty pews.

Their leader laughed. "No dipshits! We must kill a pig tonight! Some fat cow and her vapid mercantile whore of a lover! I have a plan..." He tugged at his goatee, irritatedly.

Then up to the tranced and still writhing woman, "Julia, love, wake up. Please take the thing from the waters and bury it in the forest. Remember, six feet down!"

The woman's eyes suddenly caught candlelight, flickered demurely, and she smiled. She reached down with one arm and grabbed the lifeless infant by its arm and pulled it above the surface of the water. It had been a boy child. Its parts flopped wildly as she yanked it and smothered it not unlovingly in her arms. She slipped beyond the red velvet curtains backing the baptismal alcove. The green dead waters slurped gently, then rested, quiet for now.

*****

Outside the chapel, Wilson Greer sat in his idling truck, wondering what was going on inside his former house of worship. He turned his headlights off, and waited, watching through the side windows a concerto of flickering lights, expecting the whole place to go ablaze any moment, but it never did. He was certain he saw Julia among those who had entered over two hours ago.

A Knoxville station, through intermittent static, bleated out some Dolly Parton song, then after that, something way too old and sticky, by George Jones. He thought about walking up to one of the lower windows and seeing what was going on inside, but he stopped himself every time the desire to crept back up. After about an hour of watching, the lights inside went out. and soon after, dark figures sifted outside the side entrance, like jets of smoke. They all headed for the rear of the building. Then soon after a beatup van grinded through the gravel parking lot and headed south on the highway. Wilson waited another thirty seconds or so and pulled out slowly from his partially hidden location in a lot across the street and followed the van at a comfortable distance. In his rearview mirror he noticed a sudden explosion of incarnadine violence, bloodfire and wildsmoke, rapture and tumult, then all was lost as he took a sharp curve away from the city and bent toward the adumbrate foothills of the Smoky Mountains. He lost the radio station completely and clicked off the sudden blast of senseless static. For a long time after, still following the van south and south, his mind echoed the static, memories thoroughly dissolved now into nothingness. Nothingness night black and unloving like a dead lover back. South and south, road bending back and forth, up and down, a drugged orgasmic woman writhing beneath him. Love was a circle through the black. Night clouds ate through hills of dead october. Love was a circle of fire etched upon the black veins of night-trees slacked.

A memory blazed suddenly, of Julia underneath a massive and mostly dead oak tree many many falls ago. She was eight or nine. The tree looked split halfway down the middle, as if from some giant's axe, and a blackened streak remained from a long forgotten lightning strike. There was copper and gold tones in the October sunset, turning Julia's blonde hair into twines of firesnake. But what he remembered most was her face. Did his imagination create this face, or was the memory true? He could not rightly say. But her expression was not befitting a child; there was dark wisdom, even lust, in her eyes. And a smile betraying too much knowledge, too many layers of regret and empty passion, red and redolent eyes. Scent of dead burning leaves, womanmusk.

And in him growing again, unnatural, unwanted, evil desire. "No! No! No!" he shouted then, and even now. Even now as the secret, dead and withered, tossed around like windblown oak moss in the sepulchre of his brain. Thoughts we drink to drown or allow suddenly, almost without meditation, to fly away on broomsticks into star-scarred october nights, to pollinate the world of nightmares, stitch the masks of the prematurely dead, these empty children breathing beneath with no life, no heart, into slumbering ears the secrets of the eternally darkened life. "No!" Again he shouted as his daughter reached down and plucked a slug from the trunk of the tree. Smiling she placed it in her mouth, and chewed slowly, deliberately, vilely, savoring its sour spongey death....

*****

Spike, the tall one, the bearded one, the one driving, knew all along he was being tailed. Julia had spotted him even before they made it to the old abandoned wedding chapel on Codsack's Cove drive.

"Will he follow us all the way to the High Sanctuary of the Blue Heron?" Julia, sitting in the passenger seat, her face rigid and alternating long slow notes of dark with short blares of silvery light from oncoming headlights, barely opened her lips, saying, "He would follow me to Hell, and try to convert The Great Silent One himself. Stupid fuck."

They drove south and south, getting high on hellstench and hillshine. For forty miles, Spike manipulated Julia's clit while the rest of the coven writhed languorous and bewitched in the back of the van, bodies merging into one many-legged thing, an orgasmic catepillar. Merging was something grander than Love, a magical lava flow of desire, from volcanoes of lust and murder.

One day the anti-rapture of dead bodies will come, when stinking skeletons with hanging bits rotted meat gather in city centers, godwhores and motherfuckers encircled and fucking the empty spaces between bones, flickering twig-like remnants of tongues dancing around fire and fountains filled with shit-clumped sewer water. Then whole hives break off to roam the countryside for living survivors, humping with bones sharp as swords any fleeing warm-blooded thing. Screams of terror and pain quickly sublimating into moans of intense orgasm. Great gouts of green-tinted cum shower the country-side, sliming the trees, the abandoned buildings, monuments of a dead society. Earth becoming a sick green sun, pulsing erotic seas of mucus-- an orb of sickness palpitating infinite and divine. Miles-long black catepillars swimming forever, and rising to the surface to spout out lakes of catarrh sulphuric phlegm into a bloated atmosphere. Broken from its orbit now, it flies like a witless bomb through galaxies growing more massive with each aeon, each parsec, scouring green hell across the universe.

*****

And on the twelfth night, devil's night, eve to all hallows' eve, Ted concocted a scent that sent him into dizzying hallucinations. Just playing around with odd ingredients, by accident really. One whiff, and he was gone. Storms of fire and duststorms of glass across a red-tinted venetian landscape, crossing burning dune after dune. Exoskeletons of strange arthropods carpeted the ground. Flame geysers sprayed from the holes dotting the bleakscape like gopher holes in hell.

6.

Lamar was finishing the last of the bottle of vodka, while Clicks stood on the bank, one foot higher and resting on a huge river boulder, an unwitting caricature of John Ross himself. Lamar was sprawled out on the bench thinking about Halloweens past, when he was a kid in the ghetto. One time his older brother was the ghost of Robert Johnson and he was dressed up as the devil. A four foot ten inch red-faced devil with horns made of aluminum foil. He wore a black tuxedo his mother had bought him for his Uncle Sherman's wedding, who one year later was shot by cops during a break-in of a pawn shop. They went down to the crossroads, brought smiles to a couple street girls and pushers and brought home sacks full of candy. At that moment, it seemed like the only truly wonderful moment in his entire life.
"Yo, Lamar! Check that out!" He was pointing down the pathway, deep in greenish shadows. A man was strolling their way. He looked fucked up on something. He was wavering as he walked, his head rolling around slowly on his neck.
Lamar saw, and made an immediate identification of the man. It was that guy whole swiped his broom.
Clicks was heading straight to the man. "It's that motherfucker again! Hey motherfucker.. Beautiful night isn't it." Lamar tossed the empty bottle and walked over and they both faced Ted, who seemed barely conscious, and certainly didn't realize two men were accosting him. He walked right through them, shouldered them out of the way. Lamar and Clicks looked at each other, stunned.

"Did you see his fucking eyes!"

****

Moon-haunted clouds peeled away finally from the Railway Bridge. Keeping their distance, Lamar and Clicks followed Ted as he made his way to the edge of the riverfront park and onto the embankment that rose to meet the tracks. They looked up and saw a great flickering of lights, definitely fire, inside one of the structures atop a lift tower. And what appeared to be dark bodies flowing against it, in weird shadow dances. "Looks like he's going up there," Clicks whispered.

****

Massive cogwork and chains and pulleys stood idle inside a room bursting with the light of a center bonfire. Against the walls shadows stretched, retracted, writhed and connected in chaotic patterns, completely unmathmatical and wild. The heat was magnificent. The stench was of burning death.

Spike and the others tossed brooms onto the fire to quench its thirst, its eternal thirst. Piles of brooms of various head shapes and handle lengths littered the room in piles. All twelve were naked and greased with pig lard and their own mingled sweat. At times it appeared whole bodies merged into and out of each other. Julia into Michael, Michael in Orlene, Jake into Donna, Julia in Glenda. Only Spike stayed distinct and whole the entire time. He did not dance with the others. He waited. He could smell the coming of the infernal scent, the one he had longed for since discovering his love for maggots on his thirteenth birthday. He ate a mouthful of maggots and made love in them in his dreams. "He's near, my empty children!"

****

Ted, with a thousand red eyes, the eyes of flies, walked along the tracks towards the lift tower. Great Blue Herons, lined on each side of him, were silent and still, twinkling like dark jewels, onxy, sapphire. Once he reached the tower he opened the gate whose lock and chain lay busted on the ground. He climbed up the steep and narrow stairs that doubled back in an edged spiral all the way to the landing where the house sat. When he made the landing he peered into the one of the windows then pulled out the vial of perfume had had concocted earlier. He took one whiff and his eyes brightened and pulsed red to sun-red. He tossed the vial into the High House of the Blue Herons and had no time to escape the explosion, but he did not scream with the rest before burning parts, arms, legs, heads with hair of fire, arched out away from the bridge and went hurling, smoking, blackening, into the Tennessee.

****

"Holy fuck!" Lamar shouted.

Both Lamar and Clicks took off running down the long track they had come from, ears ringing with the explosion, and when they slide and tumbled down the embankment and realized they were in the clear, they stopped and looked up at the lift bridge. "What in the great goddamn is that?"

They saw a huge fly-like creature flying out of the hanging moon-glinted smoke. They saw, as it approached, it's gleaming red eyes. Then as the creature flew low through the ornamental trees and just above them, they felt the red dust emitted from glands underneath the unholy fly fall on their heads. It was a burning, but an orgasmic burning. It was a wretched smell, but one they loved. They walked away slowly back toward downtown, with red pulsing eyes.

Epilogue: Halloween

Wilson Greer had watched the entire events of the explosion from his pick-up truck parked just above John Ross Pier. When he saw what came flying out, he backed out of his space and flew through silent streets until he made the Interstate. Several times in the 3 hour drive back to his high hermitage he thought he saw red eyes in his rearview mirror, only to realize it was the backlights of vehicles that had passed him in the southbound lanes. By the time he reached Sweetwater, some of the gutwrench subsided and he turned on the radio. It was a staticky sermon of a local radio preacher denouncing the evil pagan practices behind Halloween celebrations. He flipped the station away and found a news report. The national guard was heading to Chattanooga. Something, some kind of terrorist activity, had occurred in Chattanooga.
He knew better. He cut off the interstate at Sweetwater and headed east to the mountains.

****

In a light snow shower he finally arrived at his shack on Old Smokestack mountain. As he stepped down from the stepboard, he felt his heart flurry and skip in his chest, and then, a piercing pain. He clutched his chest and tried to take deep breaths. He grabbed his flashlight from the truck and sighed with relief when the pain passed and his heart thumped normally, if a little on the brisk side. He flicked on the flashlight and headed toward his shack.He stopped when he trained the light over to his chair underneath his shade tree. His heart went insane. Sitting in that chair was the tattooed man from his dreams, with eyes blood red. He was smiling. He put his hands together to mimic the shape of a church.

"Here's the church, and here's the steeple, open it up... and there's the people."

Here's the church, and here's the steeple, open it up... and there's the people.. Again and again.

Wilson was frozen and could not move. Spike, now with enlarged luminous fly's eyes, finally came face to face. The flashlight scattered dampened light in the high grass. But the red eyes illuminated the scene:

In one quick move, Spike reached out with his left hand and grasped Wilson Greer's face and ripped it completely off. Then he turned the flimsy mask around and showed it to the man with wide-open lidless eyes, a face oozing blood and fat and exposed new skin. Then Greer's eyes were red as well, blinded by blood and he sank into the night.

End.

Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia

2009-08-20T07:18:00.000-07:00

The last shot of the film says it all: we are all staring down the cold dark barrel of a gun. A Western/Action movie cliche? Perhaps, like death is a cliche'.

I think it is Pechkinpah's tormented and divided nature that we see through the lense of Warren Oates' character, Bennie. It's a hard life when you are attracted to the darker grittier side of life (booze, broads, a neverending nightlife that always ends too soon) and also possess a fully functioning sense of justice and empathy, a higher conscience. Maybe I'm so fond of this movie because I too have a simliar divided nature.

This film does more than simply entertain an audience, although it is also not particularly informative or evokes some deep scholarship, unless it's scholarship of the bone. But it is moving, enthralls, disgusts, and oddly touches the watcher amid the swirling dry mexican dirt and mostly vile characters. There is no good or evil displayed here. As close as we get is some men are just emptier than others.

From the impetus character, El Jefe, who has all the power to trigger these violent events, and the stunted moral outrage of a father whose daughter is impregnated out of wedlock, to Bennie who finds love and just as quickly loses it, and who spends the last quarter of the film having a surreal conversation and escapade with a severed head, to the titular character whom we never see in a single scene alive, who can represent either the ghost of lost love or the haunt of uncontrolled lust-- no one has the purity of evil or good. Even Kris Kristofferson's biker character falls out of his role of evil rapist, and moves away from Elita, cowering in a weirdly pensive scene by the rocks, to allow her to come to him! We look for a personification of evil throughout this movie and find only blankness or despair. Maybe the cold, calculating Sappensly and Quill approach the film's closest examples of pure evil, and some could argue El Jefe, who has the funds and the power and the will to set this bizarre treasure hunt into motion, is an evil man. But you cannot say the man has no honor: he welcomes Bennie as a hero and has every intention of paying him that cool million in trade for Garcia's head, and letting him go safely away. But Bennie is blinded by a moral outrage of his own; he cannot let Elita's murder go unavenged, even after killing the two bounty hunters directly responsible for it. To Bennie, there is a higher responsibility. If not God, then why not a God of men on Earth, the wealthy, king of his own mexican town, El Jefe.

Another curiously moving aspect of this film is the change seen and felt in Elita. She moves from a plaything and brothel singer and whore to at last finding-- her own Quest-- redemption through true love. It is not the painful yearning lust she had for Alfredo Garcia, or any other man. It is calmer, and deeper. A way to find her lost innocence, to have like any good Catholic girl, a wedding in a church. Of course as events unfold, she must die. In a way more true than any silly chick-flick romance movie my ex-fiance made me watch with her, Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, is a beautiful love story. It resonates through the spiralling, eye-stinging sierra sand of brutal Mexico.

After, The Wild Bunch, this is Peckinpah's best movie. And quite possibly his most innocent and brutal, at the same time. God help the world if Hollywood ever attempts to make a remake of this great film.

A Few Good Trees

2009-08-19T11:55:00.000-07:00

Trees have always spooked me, from the one I fell out of when I was a kid, (or was I pushed?), to the Talking Apple trees in the Wizard of Oz that, like myself, have trouble taking criticism, to the huge Oak that just decided to tumble to earth and tore off our entire porch and nearly smashed my car to hell one suprisingly calm unstormy afternoon. I live in Eastern Tennessee, and trees are everywhere, a claustrophobic density of them. Here are a few pictures of trees I have taken while hiking: (and Ill add more, from my private stash and from the net as I come to them)

Bow Down To Peckinpah

2009-08-19T08:33:00.001-07:00

Let us all take a moment and worship the last true God of filmmaking, Sam Peckinpah. Thank you. Coming Soon, my review of Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia..

Lester Crow

2009-08-13T20:31:00.000-07:00

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Horror in the 1970s

2009-08-10T13:15:00.000-07:00

By way of Italy, the slasher film made it's way to America, and paved the way for more freedom in what was allowed shown in theatres to wide audiences. The masterpiece of transformational disgust, The Exorcist, certainly one of the finest Horror films, emerged in this decade. I think the 70s, more than any other, saw filmmakers pushing the envelope; think of Jodorowsky and his surreal masterpiece, The Holy Mountain. The vectors of violence, corporate greed, guru madness and spiritual seeking, all converge here in this wild festival of bizarre visuals, the like of which were never before or after seen. Argento in Italy went along similar lines, though in a more traditional Horror vein, and produced masterpieces in both supernatural Horror and giallo, Suspiria and Deep Red, and several minor ones as well. Some other mentionables, Black Christmas , The Wicker Man and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The 1970s were a pinnacle for me in originality in the Horror genre.

Fishing For Clues

2009-08-09T23:34:00.000-07:00

You're never gorgeous for long..
I tried twisting you through angel glasses,
And came up with sandcastle shards
Between my teeth.

The boat to Watts Bar Dam
Took me to near nuclear holocaust;
But Big Trees intervened.

Beavers ate my antlers
and stuffed my bones on home.

Gazelle drifts into, oblivion, alone.

Night Poem

2009-08-05T23:12:00.000-07:00

I love the night and all the damage it can do...

Math in leaves tries to speak, but you hit end note.
And nothing but witches are let loose, in your wild
Succulent dream. Air spins faster than you can think,
twirling like high society women, who take their time,
no, that's a terrible comparison.

I've watched by candlelight near-dead men eat slugs
On your Christmas morning. No that's not it...
I love how you reinvent all the mistakes you make in the night
Into leaves of love for future daughters concatenating
In raw putrid daylight.

The night brings mistral auras and cruel delights.
To be fucking these last darkberry bights...

I think that's it.. here comes trouble...

Oh, joy, it's Night.

The Quiet Ones

2009-08-05T17:32:00.000-07:00

All was white,
with no shadow that he could distinguish.
Light came from everywhere;
it was as if he was encased in a cubicle of starlight.
He lay flat on the cushioned floor, staring up into the brightness,
soundless, motionless, the drugs now transporting him
into the darkest realms of calm. Everything was
heavy and light at the same time:
his body seemed inseperable from the room.

If he tried to scream, all sound would be pinched in his throat,
burn there with the silence, the deafness of a thousand roaring suns.
If he tried to reason with them, his thoughts would stir to a quick frenzy,
like leaves and debris in an autumn cyclone.
In fact, though it was unbearable, all they did was watch him,
but with looks that penetrated all his feeble defenses.
They had no faces, no bodys yet. They glared at him from everywhere,
from nowhere, with dagger thrusts. And then the lights blinked on and off,
in each frame of darkness he saw them flash closer, amorphous, red-tinted shadows.

And then the lights were out and they engulfed him.
Madness reached its zenith; his thoughts were
a scatter-storm of dissonance– a mindscream.
He was being devoured by the Quiet Ones.

He was one of them forever, now.

Are You Related To Grumpy Smurf?

2009-08-02T20:08:00.000-07:00

Yes. My grandfather was hl mencken... which is close enough to Grumpy Smurf.

Yes, glad you all asked... there's an interesting tale behind how it happened.. How my mother was his illegitimate child conceived in the baptismal compartment during the time Grandpappy was in Dayton Tn covering the Scopes trial... the church goers were so busy writhing in the aisles, PahRAISIN' the Lord, and dodging rattlesnake strikes they missed my grandmother slipping off behind the curtained stage, beckoning the famous journalist with a wry smile and a curling finger to follow. Indeed the cantankerous Baltimorian went to her. She said, "I wanna handle your snake, sir..." and slipped her hand down inside the pants of the Nietzsche-ite and Social Darwinist. "Mmm, I think Ill call this piece, Backwoods Brothel," wisecracked the Jew-bashing essayist.

Lemme know if you want the x-rated version.

The Card Player

2009-07-30T05:44:00.000-07:00

I have some mixed feelings about this movie. There were a couple of suspense scenes of pure genius in this movie. Particularly, one at Det. Anna Mari's home where she sees the killer's reflection in a bowl and chases him outside and then returns to her dark house (Horror movie heroines hate well-lit rooms!) and notices her gun missing from where she just laid it on the table. That scene worked quite well. And also the scene where Romo-- the video poker whiz-- follows the beautiful girl through the alleyways of Rome who was paid by the killer to bring him to the Two Doors.

After that, it's downhill. I don't know much about Italian culture-- Im guessing there was a craze on video poker there while the rest of the world fell for Hold 'Em and Omaha-- but there really is no such thing as a video poker whiz. Video poker is a game of pure probability. There is no other skill involved beside playing the percentages over and over. It's rather a dull, simple game. The idea that the police needed someone to "beat" the killer at poker was misinformed. Of course it is a moot point anyways, after further plot developments, seen coming a mile away.

I guess the killer's identity was fairly obvious from the beginning. Det. Anna Mari spurns his advances in the opening scene. Her love affair with the alcoholic British detective is also flat and unconvincing. Some of the clues and false clues thrown in are interesting. The Diologue is even more annoying than usual for Argento. The movie was remarkably less bloody than most Argento films, and this is not necessarily a good thing.

I guess the days of wildly inventive movies with lush colors and a frenetic Goblin score are over. Oh well.

"Flowery" you say?

2009-07-10T23:01:00.000-07:00

"Flowery" I think is a good term for a writer who cant handle the intricacies his style demands.

When you are blending a slow or non- action sequence with interior thoughts of a character,or resolving description and sensation and impression into precise language and metaphor, fusing layers of interconnectedness, the "show dont tell" rule is utterly useless, a bogus guideline for hacks and plot-reliant thrillers.

When you are describing an intense scene (scary in our case as horror writers), with fast-paced action then the rule becomes all-important. If you want to be Richard Laymon, or write like him, then you should worship like one would a wrathful god, the "show dont tell" rule.

The balance of the two modes-- ie, how well and how many balls or bowling pins you can juggle-- is crucial to writing something good and meaningful. Otherwise you are just passing off cliched images and trite plot points as something new.

Being "flowery" is NOT necessarily being overly descriptive, but also directly proportional to how inexact your thinking and writing is.

Incidently, to truly disturb a reader, which I feel is of utmost importantance in horror writing, it might actually be advisable to "alienate" your reader sometime. Now, you dont want to BORE them, that's another thing altogether. The most important rule in writing (and IM not saying I succeed personally) is to be interesting to your audience. Also, another point, even though everyone on this board is a horror writer, our potential audiences are very personal, some quite small, others having more appeal to a larger public consumption.

Closet Space

2009-06-30T14:29:00.000-07:00

I had a life once. Now Im in this girl's closet. She will be home soon. I had a life once but the world began to eat at my shoulders. And long shadows cast from unseen objects-- things only our Creator can see-- blocked the sun from lighting my eyes. I had a wife, a little girl, a cute cottage in the foothills well away from town, shrouded in trees. My god, the trees..

She will be home soon and Im just sitting back, in the far back, of her closet, padded by piles of sweaters and other clothes. I can just make out how perfectly lined up her shoes are. They look so sad to me there, empty of feet. Purposeless. Soon to be abandoned by their mistress. So straight, so glum, colorless.

I remember how the trees possessed me in winter, with their naked black beauty. How they suffocated me in summer, green strangulation, green everywhere. I think even my blood turned green. My little girl climbed up into a huge japanese maple tree one fine spring day-- the kind of day that warms the loins of lovers and inspires a suicide or two-- and dropped twenty feet onto her neck. It snapped like a worthless twig. Six months later, my wife was dredged up from the bottom of Chickamauga Creek. I sold the house. I moved out to the desert. Away from the fucking trees.

She's a waitress working the night shift at a nearbye cafe in Yuma. Her boyfriend is in prison-- he beat up a drunk outside a bar one night past, and probably would not have stopped punching until the skull turned to a fruity pulpy mess unless I, and a few others, pulled him off the mouthy drunk. You just cant go around insulting everyone you meet and expect the world to back down each time. The world bites back. It eats shoulders..

A grayish light filters in through the slats of the closet door. She is home. I touch the blade of my knife against my cheek. The cold is fire. It's what inspires me, purifies me. The dying of fires, cold rocks. Desert night rocks. One from under which I come. My new home.

I watch the horizontal segments of her pass back and forth, each time dressed in fewer clothes. Until she is only in panties and bra. "We have an unexpected date, you and I.."

Soon there will be three dead by my hand. By my five green fingers. When Im done I will plant myself in the desert and return as a tree.

I will know what it means, finally, to thirst like a tree in the cold dry sand.

Red Herrings

2009-06-28T17:39:00.000-07:00

Argento movies are generally smart enough to play around with the red herring aspect so crucial to murder mysteries. People accustomed to how the cliched idea of a red herring works, might be thrown off and think, well it's too obvious this guy's the murderer so it really isnt him. Then start following false clues that point to another red herring. This was the case in Black Christmas, with Peter, the piano student, and it turned out he wasnt the killer.

In Sleepless, there's an object that the killer drops at one murder scene then it's revealed in another that a character is missing said object. So as an observer we think, hmm, is this missing object a sign that one of the characters in the current scene is the killer or just planted disinformation to throw the observer off? Turns out the object was a clear-cut clue to killer's identity.

When the red herring theme works well, the watcher, reader, is kept off balance. It also helps if there is an interesting story behind everything, well-drawn characters, well-placed clues.

http://www.absolutewrite.com/novels/red_herrings.htm

Sleepless

2009-06-27T20:37:00.000-07:00

While not his best giallo-- it's several marks under his better ones, like Deep Red, Tenebre, Phenomena, Four Flies On Grey Velvet-- this movie entertained me and gave me a few chills and cringes. The murder scenes are not particularly original, but they are definitely cringe-worthy. A face gets smashed over and over again against a wall. A woman gets repeatedly stabbed in the mouth with an English Horn. Etc.

Max Von Sydow, as the retired and senile homicide detective, is a bit of a quirky character but I didn't find him wrongly cast here, as one reviewer stated on Amazon. I enjoyed his odd one-sided conversations with his pet bird, Marcello.

While I was 90% certain of who the murderer was early on, there was still enough ambiguity in the characters to throw some doubt there. His camera work was, as is typical for Argento, inventive and phantasmagoric. The camera swirls in and out, revolves around scenes, moves in and out. The lighting is also strategically dim in all the right places.

The ending was a bit goofy, and the murderer's tell-all confession before his death reminded me of a bad impression of Matt Damon for some reason. Bad dubbing and sometimes silly dialogue, almost a trademark of Argento films, didnt distract me enough from the interesting mystery story involving a murderous dwarf obsessed with a nursery rhyme and plenty of believable red herrings.

And a nod for Goblin's score as well. Personally I rank this score in the top 3 scores for Argento films, after Deep Red and Suspiria.

Meth Dreams Under The Willow Tree

2009-06-25T16:14:00.000-07:00

we're all kicking back...at the lake.. by god...drinking a few.. and little Greg, JC Lightnin's boy... starts wading into the putrid lake... then.. WTF.. a giant Gar fish rises out of the muck and swallows him whole..

we kick back again and think.. by god.. that was rather unusual..l

ater we fuck. and laugh. We build the biggest fucking bonfire ever in honor of the boy's memory.

I remember him punching my old lady in the snatch.

Greg's mother tries to drink an entire ocean.

We sleep, we dream sad dreams. We dream dreams that fuck the sun.

In the morning Greg's mother is fucking JC up in the willow tree.

Little Greg, you'll be missed.

42 Miles to Omaha

2009-06-24T20:22:00.000-07:00

Being uncertain is a bitch. I need to be alone for awhile.

Then I woke up, and I was the last living human on earth, somewhere in middle America. And I loved it.

This lasted for 70 years.. without human hosts contagious diseases went into the deep freeze. I developed a strange habit of digging up graves and having tea parties with decomposed chaps, but other than that, I didnt miss a damn thing about the human race. I took up residence in the biggest library I could find in a city formerly known as Omaha. But I also travelled a lot. The roads were pretty safe. I set fire to Peoria Illinois just for kicks. Somehow I was always drawn back to Omaha.

I woke up again and I was in a pasture next to a highway. I watched cars zoom by all day. There was a sign on the highway and it said, 42 miles to Omaha...

It took me literally all the flaming day to realize, I was a cow.

http://cloningmagazine.com/cow.html

Your Author, Enjoy

2009-06-22T13:53:00.000-07:00

Thin Walls

2009-06-20T21:47:00.001-07:00

I heard some people talking about having me killed through the wall of a motel room.. then I saw a tongue begin to stretch the wall thinner and thinner like skin... then the tongue started to flick licentiously at me. Then it shot a huge wad of slobber at the mirror on the other side of the room. When I saw the axe blade peeking through the splintered wood, I decided to get the hell out of there.

...that's the second strangest thing Ive heard through a thin wall.

A Special Hell

2009-06-20T21:39:00.000-07:00

You're in a room forever with 3 people you truly care about.. they all have eyes swollen shut, their ears have been hacked off and the openings cauterized.. when you try to touch them you feel a shock and they go into convulsions. When you sit back and just try to feel comfortable that you are with them in silence, you become racked with intense stomach pain and spill its contents, which are spontaneously renewed.

...when they talk, and they can talk, all they talk about is how you betrayed them and abandoned them... That's when all you want to do is hold them. The compulsion is irrepressible.

If you ask for God's mercy, your eyes burn like two suns.

The Devil's Tomb

2009-06-17T20:54:00.001-07:00

...some uninspired dialogue, some stock characters, a confused recurring flashback sequence (which adds little to nothing to the overall story and breaks up the flow of the only thing worthwhile to the movie, which is some decent action in the underground archeological setting), a terrible ending, crap blows up, the demon is contained, some really stupid scenes with the possessed characters with bad skin conditions... sometimes you shoot them they die, sometimes they stay alive, really inconsistent.. an almost titillating lesbian scene with a gory kiss, but it doesnt last long enough... Click, the computer nerd, was the only character with any personality, everyone else was flat and boring...Henry Rollins as the priest was utterly useless to story and gave an even worse than expected acting performance... might have even been an in-joke on set when they decided to have his character's mouth taped up. Three words: DONT SEE IT.

They Never Sleep, rough draft

2009-06-15T09:27:00.000-07:00

Chapter One:

One word was all it took and she was awake, awake forever...

After tossing and turning all night, sleeping for only, short, exhausting stetches, Janice Stone finally gave it up, turned on the nightstand lamp and rose angrily out of bed, throwing her comforter to the floor space between her and the window. Her cat, Donner, flew along with it, floating errily above the comforter, then landed with taffy softness and scurried underneath the dresser. Donner eyed her from a crouch as if watching a potential murderer pass. "Sorry, kitty," she said.

She grabbed a glass of milk and went out on the balcony of her apartment. Her apartment building was high on a ridge overlooking the Tennessee River and downtown. She felt spent and abused. The wind stirred a pine tree nearbye, sending its sweet scent, along with something else she couldn't quite place, something mildly fishy, rotten. Maybe from the dumpster, she thought.

This insomnia was insidious. It-- yes, a material presence-- was growing again, sapping her of personality and happiness like a lurking brain cancer. Four days now with only a few hours total sleep; she wanted to crush those tiny parked cars down there with steel teeth. Tomorrow she would go to the doctor's for more sleeping pills, and hope her doctor did not think she was some kind of addict and ply her with ridiculous meditation/relaxation techniques.

Ever since her mother died two years ago, this insomnia took full possession (although it had always been with her in some form or another from childhood). Her boss at the dry cleaners was at first understanding, lenient when it came to her excessive sick days, but lately she sensed his growing annoyance; he had recently scolded her for being three minutes late. She was certain that any further infraction, however minor, would lead to her termination. And then where would she be? Move in with her senile grandmother across town? That paranoid old woman who thought her family was trying to kill her or drive her nuts. She remembered not long ago on a visit cutting a sandwich in half with a massive Butcher knife and her grandmother coming into the kitchen suddenly, with a look of prescient fear: "You're going to put that in my belly when Im asleep, aren't you?" What if she couldn't find another job? Ended up on the streets, found herself selling the only thing left worth anything. She would have to take up drugs to fight off her insomnia, the world, the sick emptiness no one wants you to become aware of, and then of course she'd hear the song of river siren and go to her, finally, deep in the fouled silt at the bottom of the Tennessee River. Balking, hesitant, at first, then wholeheartly, like nothing ever before.

On the cusp of oblivion, sleeplessness lurked like a cranked-up mugger, like a rapist with electricity for blood, like a murderer with blood-soaked thoughts heavy and dripping from his pointed eyes.

Realizing she was too wired now for sleep, and work only hours away, she made a pot of coffee and began to prepare herself for an uncomfortably long day. After showering, feeding the cat and trying to watch some old I Love Lucy episodes on the tv, she took a cup out on the balcony, sat and peered down once again at the city, still dead before dawn. Donner came out too, sniffed the air, then began his figure-8 cycle of brushing her lower legs. Weaving in and out, endless, forever. Only a slight nudge or kick would break it. She let him do it a bit longer than usual, feeling bad about his scare earlier when she got out of bed. "You're a good kitty pie." "Mrrrrow!"

The only sound was the low hum of the comatose city, as if a massive hive lay just below the surface, quiescent. What if a lightning bolt came out of the sky just now and punched a huge hole into the earth? Swarms of bees would rise from their dark honey dreams and cover the city like thick smog, stinging everything warm and moving, stinging the city to death. Distantly a dog also barked, muffled, slow and methodical, a dog just going through the motions, not so much to expose any threat to his sleeping masters, but merely out of boredom, some nighttime bewitchment: a plaintive, droning bark, half wail, half woof.

Donner went back inside suddenly, probably to go back to sleep, in one of his many special spots. Occassionally a car whooshed down below on Lupton Street. She vaguely wondered why this or that person was up and driving around at four in the morning. Maybe they had a job that started earlier than the typical time, or perhaps they were just getting off a late shift somewhere, heading home to a sleeping wife or husband, quiet tv watching or a few beers before bedtime, their room double-curtained to hold the day at bay, falling asleep on the couch while the newsman blithered on the tv, soon to be deep snoring sleep, plummeting sleep, dark as deep ocean. But who else? Who else would be up this time of night, cruising the cooled streets, slow creeping, prowling the night city? The odds were small, but it could be him, inside one of those cars oozing by like mercury, then known as The Pine Needle Slasher.. mainly because the women were mostly found in the woods. One on the unfortunate girls, possibly his first, had her vagina stitched up with thick black thread. Inside, like a gift, was a pine cone. Women much like herself, working girls, or girls working thankless jobs. She shivered as much from this speculation as from the cool March air. "If he got me, at least it would cure my insomnia," she said, laughing half-heartedly.

*****

Later that day, Janice was behind the counter, slumped in an almost protective posture, as a cranky middle-aged woman-- a Lookout Mountain socialite-- complained about her clothes smelling funny and being poorly pressed.

"Are you even listening to me?" the woman barked.

In the corner of her eye, Janice saw Mr. Grune, her supervisor, glaring out at the scene from above the computer monitor in his office. He always kept the door open, unless he was drinking. Meryl, the other girl who worked the counter with her, was off pretending to do something. She was picking imaginary lint off the plastic wrap covering customer's orders.

"Yes, ma'am I'm listening. We can redo your clothes and have them ready tomorrow afternoon..."

"But I need them today!" the crone shouted.

"Im sorry. I think Aaron has left for the day. He does the dry cleaning. We can get them re-pressed for you though. Miss Longerhorn is still here."

The woman's brow was furrowed and her lips curled into a snarl. Her hair was a bizarre shade of dirty blonde, the color of hay mixed with mud, mussed up like an angry wave on top and hairsprayed into a frozen state. Her face looked as if it had been removed and replaced several times and each time flattened and stretched a bit more, made thinner and more and more taut. To counter-act this, her lips looked obscenely inflated, much too large for a caucasian woman, painted a lurid red. Her eye shadow was a neon blue. The rest of her was covered in garish clothes, a blouse the color of spruce and unbuttoned midway down her frontside, exposing sun-blighted breast cleavage, massive ballooning things certainly too round and attentive to be natural. Black slacks covered her lower body and bright yellow high-heeled sandles protected her bony feet from the derelict floors of the world. All in all, she was a strange being to behold. Janice wanted to laugh out loud several times. But she could wait till the nightmare woman left and she and Meryl could have a good snicker over her.

Mr. Grune stepped out of his office, peering over his glasses, like a perturbed librarian. "Janice, is there a problem here?"

In her four years working here, Janice had not once witnessed this man, her boss, take up for an employee. He always sided with the customer, no matter how in the wrong they were, or abusive.

As if who he was beholding was the first lady of the United States, or the Queen of England, Mr. Grune gazed sympathetically, even a bit reverently, at the debuttante. "What seems to be the problem, Mrs. Sutton?"

"My clothes smell like an unshowered homeless man. I needed this outfit for a benefit dinner tonight. My husband, as you know, has organized a collective of Chattanooga businessmen in an effort to clean-up the Highbridge and Fallowbrook areas. I guess I can wear something else."
Mr. Grune turned to Janice, a look of annoyance in his eyes, "Did you tell this woman she could not have her clothes done today?"

"Well...I..." but he did not wait for a complete answer. "Janice, being rude to one of our longest and most devoted customers is not the kind of attitude we need here." He turned to face Mrs. Sutton. "I will personally dry clean your clothes and have Miss Longerhorn stay late to press them."

"I need them by seven." She looked unconvinced it could be done.

"Not a problem at all. Your clothes will be done in less than three hours. I'm truly sorry for this inconvienence, Mrs. Sutton."

"Well, I suppose that will be fine. Good thing I had plans downtown to have coffee with a friend." She turned to leave.

When the woman was gone, Mr. Grune turned and faced Janice. "Janice, you need to use your brain-- if in fact you even have one-- in these situations. For our important customers, who spends hundreds of dollars a month, we must be extra sensitive to their needs. Being rude--"

"I wasn't being rude. And you told everyone this morning you had to leave early today to take your son to soccer practice. So naturally I didn't think anyone would be here to..."

"Just come to me next time, Janice. You obviously cannot handle stressful work situations anymore." He turned abruptly and went into his office, shutting the door this time.

It wasn't long after, maybe twenty minutes, Aaron came through the front door, his face shiny and red from obvious drinking. He was smiling. "Grune in there?" He was pointing at the office door.

"Sure. He was supposed to start on Mrs. Sutton's clothes. Guess he called you back in."

The lanky, shaggy-haired man smirked and said, "You got it."

He knocked on the door and heard a muffled "yes". Aaron said, "Im here." Then to Janice, "Where's that hag's clothes..." Janice thought the grin on his face was alarming, and reminded her of the expression on her ex-boyfriend Tee's face whenever he smoked too much crank. He brushed passed her, too close, maybe on purpose. He grabbed the clothes and headed to the rear of the building. She heard voices exchange hellos and laughter. Both Aaron Steepling and Vera Langerhorn had over ten years at this place. After than she was next line for seniority, a concept utterly meaningless in this sweat shop. A fifty cent raise after ten years was the most you could hope for.

*****

As Meryl prepared to leave work just before five, she turned back and gave Janice a warm and condescending smile. "Hey, babe, you want me to work late for you? You look really really tired girl."

"Oh, no, Meryl. Thanks though. You know he'll just bitch me out again, maybe even fire me. I have to keep this job, as sorry as it is."

"Well, ok, hon. If you want to meet up with us at The Swarm later, you are perfectly welcome to join us. You know that don't you?"

"Rain check? I didn't sleep very well last night. Going to make an early night of it."

Meryl's expression dropped to serious, conspiratorial, "You need a little something, hon? Hydros, Oxys, Pillow Slammers? You know Robert has a real good connection... You'll have to swing by The Swarm though later tonight, when he get's off work, around nine, say?"

"Hmm, I'll think about it, ok? Goodnight if I don't see you later."

"Goodnight, hon."

When Janice turned around, after watching Meryl leave, she was startled by Mr. Grune, standing red-faced in the door way of office. One half of his face seemed to be mocking her, the other, wanted to devour her. When he spoke, his words slurred slightly, "Go home, Janice."

"Are you sure? I don't mind waiting out for Mrs. Sutton. I could use the extra money..."

His eyes turned insolent. "I said go home. Get some sleep. Get drunk. Better yet, get pregnant. Hey, do whatever, just go home. I can't afford to pay everyone overtime." Then something like a thought struck his eyes, like a glowworm in a cave. "Unless... Unless, you want to stay and have a drink with me." He shuffled closer.

Oh no, thought Janice. Mr. Grune had never deliberately come on to her in all her years working here at Riversong Dry Cleaners, but this smacked of perhaps the first time. Luckily, at that moment Aaron came to the front counter, to ask Mr. Grune a question. Aaron, my hero, she chuckled inside. The guy drank and did way too many drugs, but she always had an instinct of goodness in his heart. He even stuck up for her a few times when Mr. Grune was coming down on her. He was a very outgoing guy, and she was a bit on the introverted side, but she always felt he had an understanding, a soft side, for the quiet-spoken, the underappreciated. He used to play in a local sludge/doom metal band until one of the members, high on lsd, threw himself off the TennBridge, claiming he saw his better self made of solid gold, on the moon-crinkled surface of the river below. They tried to reform with a new lead singer, but it was never the same.. Janice had seen a couple of their shows-- what was there name... Osho Fire?-- and thought the lead singer had too much range, his lyrics too deep, to be confined within the narrow parameters of a sludge metal band. She didn't care too much for metal music in any genre but had a good nose for talent. And Jeffrey Allen Karsten, aka, Bloodthorn, was, she thought, vastly misplaced in the local music scene. Aaron told her once, while on a cigarette break outside the steaming dry cleaners (which stayed morbidly hot up until November, then became unbearable again by late March), that he had been up there and high with him that night, saw him jump. Watched him fall, in silver-lighted fractals that seemed thickened by distorted tv signals, one bloodthorn becoming thousands, then millions, in mathematical horror. "Aaron, Im solid gold at the bottom of the river, man. Look, Im dead." His last words. He was laughing as he fell. Tumbling, polarized in the moment, dancing down to death.

Both Mr. Grune and Aaron went to the back of the building, and Janice punched out quickly, and headed for home.

*****

When Janice got home she took a brief nap and woke up at seven p.m., with a suprising amount of energy. She might make it out to The Swarm after all. She needed a night out, drinks, friends, loud music, men bouncing off her like stingless mosquitoes. More like black flies, the more she got drunk.

Then she recalled the guy who seemed to be following her home from work. Yeah, that was odd. She only lived about a mile and a half from Riversong and walked every morning and afternoon between home and work. She had a car, an old beat up Corolla, that she avoided driving because she couldn't afford insurance. Truthfully, she loved walking, during the day, and sometimes at night. But in the last year or so, she tended to limit her nighttime excursions and got rides from friends. Not that she had many. Friendships were like illnesses, seeming to drag on forever, then in most cases dissipating into nothing. Sometimes they simply went away in a flash, like a cosmic trapdoor opened up and swallowed someone you felt like you were just getting close to. You'd still see them in the physical world, they were there materially still, but by and large they were gone to you. And now with Chattanooga's first ever bonafide serial killer in her lifetime, for the first time she was afraid to walk at night.

When she left work, the wind had picked up, and clouds were swarming in from the north, falling dark and coldly off the Ridge. She hadn't noticed being inside the un-airconditioned dry cleaners but the temperature had dropped way off. It must have been in the forties. She should pay more attention to weather forecasts, she hadn't brought a jacket with her. The day had started off sultry and the fat sun rose like an blood-coated abscess. She had thought surely the day would crack eighty degrees for the first time this year. But a cold front, powerful for late March, had come in earlier than expected. Flowering dogwoods shivered and tossed off their white blooms like dandruff. The sweet scent of unknown blossoms mixed with exhaust from cars and trucks coming off Fonteneau Ave.

As she crossed Fonteneau, her arms crossed over her chest to fend off the cold, a tall man slipped out of the alleyway between Ginger's Flower Shop and O' Flannigan's Irish Pub. On the other side of the street she walked south toward the river, and when she reached the corner of Lupton and Fonteneau, where an almost spanish-style Episcopal Church sat-- dirty cream adobe like walls and rectangular bell tower-- she peeked behind her and saw the man walking toward her. She would have thought nothing of it, but the cold air and darkening skies-- the sun would set within an hour-- and odd attire of the man made her feel immediately uncomfortable. He was wearing a dark trench coat and black leather gloves, and what appeared to be combat boots. On his head was a thin tight tobaggan and a black scarf around his neck. She could make very little out of his face, but two things stood out: his sharp beak-like nose and intent narrow set eyes.

Janice picked up the pace, nearly crashing into a man in a tweed jacket carrying a load of folders in his arm. "Hey watch out, lady!" "Sorry, sorry.."

She turned the corner and headed down Lupton Street-- which is the main riverfront thoroughfare on the north shore. Her apartment building was a few blocks down and up Vinecourt Road, which rose steeply into the hilly neighborhood above. Her apartment building, called Angelic Pines Estate, was fifteen stories high and her apartment was on the seventh floor.

As she passed the drug store she stopped at a street crossing, and looked back over her shoulder. the man was still behind her, but not any closer really, maybe thirty feet, and was now smoking a long black cigarillo. She decided to go into the drug store and see if he came inside as well.

When she turned and headed back toward the drug store, the man stopped suddenly beside a telephone pole covered with flyers for various businesses and local band gigs. He grabbed a green sheet of paper with his left hand and examined the contents. She now saw that the man had a long goatee writhing beneath the scarf. When she went inside, she couldn't see him, so she went to the cosmetics aisle and idled through various shades of lipstick. Every few seconds she turned to the entrance to see if he would come in. When at least ten minutes had elapsed with no sign of the man and one of the employees eyeing her with unconcealed suspicion, she headed back out to the parking lot. She didn't see the man anywhere. Maybe he went across Lupton and headed down one of the alleys which led to more parking areas, several restaurants and pubs, and the riverfront park. Maybe he went back the other way and blended in with those waiting in kiosks on city buses. Maybe he had simply crouched down between two cars, waiting on her next move.

She continued on to Vinecourt and didn't see him. The wind whipped through fragile budding trees and still naked limbs. She felt raindrops, almost sleet. Clouds overhead darkened, the sun was fast sinking behind Stinger's Ridge. Maybe I should call the police, she wondered. The closest known victim to her area had been miles away, near Sinker's Shot, a deeply racist working class white neighborhood snugged away in folds of oak hills and bisected by Rattlesnake Creek. When she finally made it to her apartment building, the light had faded to dusk, streetlights were coming on, and the shadows once again grew like animate things between houses and trees. where objects of the world were not, the shadows grew. Her follower would dissolve right in, if need be.

But she did not see him and made up to her apartment, took some pain medicine and ate a banana and fell on the sofa, almost immediately, falling asleep.

End of The Line

2009-06-04T14:44:00.000-07:00

It kicked arse!

WoW.. what a strange, ultra-violent thrill ride of a movie.. some bad acting, the usual horror movie cliches... but the setting and story were pretty original, the violence was extreme but not pointless to the story and had emotional power to it (when the pregnant woman begs her husband to kill/save her).. the scares worked for me... I was pretty tense the whole time. And the demons at the end (of the line), worth the wait.. and some nice eye candy along the way.

The Wicker Man (1973 version)

2009-05-26T12:57:00.000-07:00

There is just something about this film. I know that's corny and a cop out, but if the Farrelly brothers can get away with it (regarding Mary) then I suppose I can too. There is just something about Sergeant Howie. There's just something seriously weird and addicting about this movie.

The music is odd and light, airy, yet mysterious. My favorite song is, not suprisingly, "Willow's Song". A lovely, slightly melancholy lilt to it. Made more so by Sergeant Howie's torturous few minutes fighting those deepdark urges that momentarily consume him, bringing out a full sweat as he is drawn to the wall opposite Willow's room, where she sings her song and dances in the buff.

Without the consummate acting of Edward Woodward, this movie might not have worked, at least not as well. When he finally realizes he's been duped the whole time, and sees, and I mean, really fucking sees, The Wicker Man-- he exclaims, "Oh Jesus Christ!". It is a really powerful moment. But he only gets that faceless tower of wood stareing blankly down at him, and the uniform gaiety-- a hallmark of all that are blindly and wholly swayed by any religion-- seen on all the dancing faces of the townsfolk during their demented May Day celebration.

Best Hammer Film? Quite possibly.

My Horror Heroes

2009-05-21T12:55:00.000-07:00

These can include artists who create horror, real individuals who are famous for wreaking horror upon society, or simply famous icons from film or books that you feel have an important, historic place in Horror History.

1) Dario Argento: In the 1970s, amid worldwide violence, like the insane horrors of Vietnam and the Kymer Rouge, our planet shifted ever so subtly from a stifled, body-fearing superculture to one with a taste for true animal freedom, with the pandora's box of animal tastes exploding into the mainstream.. Amid this, the italian director created THE blueprint slasher film, Deep Red and other films such as Suspiria and Inferno, merged the horror of murder with the sensitivity of subtle art, through tricky plots and amazingly original filmmaking techniques. For more info on Dario and Deep Red go to: http://www.contamination.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/articles/deep_red.htm

2) Charles Manson: if Napoleon Bonaparte were born more than a century and a half later, in the humble environs of Kentucky, USA, the product of that genetic curiousity might have resembled Charles Manson. Manson was just smart enough to realize that the justice system of the United States was (and still is), mostly a sham, a con, just like himself. And what do the better cons of the world do? They compete. Manson is the perfect symbol for unique mediocrity failing to find it's true voice, it's perfect medium. The consequences could only be murder, murder on a grand scale. His victims were basically his alter-egos. Individuals as mediocre as himself, but through whatever dumb luck, actually made it in the world. He's not a bad artist, no not at all: http://www.museumsyndicate.com/artist.php?artist=478

3) Michael Myers, aka The Shape: He is certainly one of the 3 or 4 most horrifying characters in film history, but what seperates him from others is his anonymity, his voidness, his abyssmal lack of personality and humanity couched in a man-shaped form bearing a vapid mask. Few things are scary in the daytime, but The Shape is one of those. Rob Zombie, who never should have made it out of White Zombie, an admirable sludge-metal band, made the idiot mistake of trying to humanize and elaborate on what was already a perfect horror icon.

4) Elizabeth Bathory:

http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/Veranda/7128/

P2: mini review

2009-04-28T20:54:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed the first half of this, but I feel the last half was way too predictable and standard "girl-gets-revenge" fare. Everything was set up nicely, the acting was good, especially the guy playing the security guard (with only a few over-the-top moments from him.) The elvis bit was fun and creepy at the same time, lending the bad guy some depth, but not too much. Funny how she was going to let him live even after all he'd put her through until his true colors came out and he called her a "stupid fucking cunt." Works every time with most women.

It really pulls you in, even when the bad guy is revealed very early in the movie. That's a move you can only make if the character is well-developed and acted, which for the most part was. But past the mid-way point everything becomes inevitable and you're just waiting for the pieces to fall in place.

First half and Thomas' character-- B+
Second half- CWorth a rent for sure.

Top 5 Horror Films

2009-04-17T21:12:00.000-07:00

1. Black Christmas(1974)-- There are few false scares, plenty of disorienting camera angles, and a killer who is never fully explained. Some logical flaws in script, but otherwise the characters are written very sharply, creating characters that dont seem trite, flawed but real human beings. The strain of not knowing who the killer is, or even whether or not it is solvable based on evidence within the film itself, makes this movie a private torment for me. It's a puzzle that can never be solved; truly the stuff of nightmares.

2. Suspiria-- From the frenetic score to the wild pulsing nightmareishly colored sets, this movie pushed the boundries of what a horror film can be like few others. Murder becomes intricate art, for better or worse.

3. Halloween-- Too bad you've seen it too many times for it to still be scary, but this film is a blueprint for how to manipulate and horrify audiences.

4. The Exorcist-- The slow, agonizing transformation of Regan MacNeil is the essence of horror. The dread almost oozes off the screen. And it's a long ass movie.

5. (will shock and suprise) When A Stranger Calls Back-- This is the sequel to When a Stranger Calls, which is a decent horror flick in its own right. But the sequel was for me far more terrifying, and had a lot in common with Black Christmas(1974), in that the killer is so void and empty of personality he reeks of the abyss. He is a ventrilloquist, a sham of a performer, a nonentity. This was a made for TV movie and has nary a curse word to boot. And still manages to be a very effective fright film.

Recently watched The Wicker Man again, and may have to move it up on the list to the 5th spot, bur right now Ill give it an honorable mention. Mini-review soon...

The Wild Bunch

2009-04-15T21:50:00.000-07:00

Every few years I throw, The Wild Bunch, into my video player (I believe I first viewed it on VHS), just to see if Im still human I guess. In a bit over 2 and 1/2 hours this movie packs in more truth about human psychology and ideas of justice, honor and hope than any other film, with the possible exception of the Godfather I and II. It is not a great Western, in fact it is a movie depicting the death of the western, muses over what it was and what it could have been and what it will never be. It is not a movie dealing in strict realism. These events could never really happen as depicted. All the scenes are set up like a chess problem, not meant to show an actual flow of true events but to show, given the crude limitations of reality, a higher arrangement of beauty.

Horror Notes

2009-04-10T14:00:00.000-07:00

1) A good working definition of horror could well be: that which remains after all attempts to "draw the line" have been exhausted.

2) When a person's sense of justice is satisfied, this is in indirect proportion to the amount of horror involved.

3) The universe/god does not draw the line on that catastrophic and hypothetical asteroid following a direct path toward earth, hellbent on our removal from existense.

4) My mother did not draw the line on the overwhelming volume of mental suffering her suicide would cause her family.

5) Someone else's tragedy is another's movie of the week, to varying degrees of intensity, depending on your cable network of choice.

--How the reader or watcher's imagination works with the medium presented, is the key factor to being truly horrified.. In other words, horror is almost entirely personal. There are aspects we share, if you give credence to jungian archetypes, but ultimately we color our own world with our very uniquely tuned senses and memories of past events, and horror films and novels will always be sifted through this personal mind set.As for the "boo" factor, it can be cliche, and it is in most horror movies, but certainly the most stand-out horror films use it in new ways-- something carefully planned (like Regan McNiel doing the spider walk down the stairs, truly creepy moment in The Exorcist)-- with well-prepared backstory, atmosphere and score. Something truly shocking rather than this overused one: "Oh it was just the cat!" We briefly recover, then, the killer strikes.

TransSiberian movie review

2009-04-10T09:21:00.000-07:00

Transsiberian: why no hyphen or space in the title? seems odd. All in all I liked this movie, although not as much as Roger Ebert. For his take, check out:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080814/REVIEWS/808140304
Some very good acting here, except for maybe Woody Harrleson, who played his character a bit over-the-top. Still not bad, however. A special nod for Emily Mortimer’s performance. Having not really read the movie description on the back of the DVD, I was pleasantly suprised at several of the plot twists. We can never really pinpoint the villians until really the very end. Grinko is cast as a perennial good cop, but as we learn in the end, has a bit of a dark side as well.
The most interesting character in the movie, is Jessie. This movie is successful mostly because of her, and the fine performance of Mortimer. The scene at the condemned church is the highlight of the film, the most unexpected, and in a weird way, disconnected, scene in the entire movie. In terms of the plotline, this extra bit of drama is not really necessary. And one of the problems I find with this movie is her ultimate redemption from her actions there at the end of the movie, when Carlos’s past is revealed.
Even though Jessie blatantly went overboard in murdering Carlos, her womans’ intuition is proven just and correct, for it just so happens Carlos is a convicted sexual offender. Jessie clearly overreacted to Carlos’s actions, but she just so happened to have the right instinct there. Seems a bit too cute. Maybe he was going to rape her, maybe not.
Another minor quibble– and I understand with movies you have to sometimes suspend disbelief– is with Carlos’s body not being found by the cops. They knew in well enough time that something went down at the church, and would have had plenty of means to discover the body. If not, then what about the wolves? Grade: B+

The Bridge

2009-04-10T09:20:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago I watched a documentary called The Bridge. And of course it made me think of my mother, and her own bizarre, and violent, suicide. Here in this film we see a series of sad souls seeking some desperate and morbid last poetic impulse in their lives– who come to this scenic site (indeed most beautifully captured in its shrouds of fog and brilliant sun-lit hues) as final tourists on our mortal plane. Maybe they chose this place not only for its beauty but also for its popularity. Finally these lost, dejected souls can join a club that will never renounce their membership. Here they will forever belong.

This is reality television at its finest. Our hearts are churned up with emotion while at the same time our voyeuristic needs are thoroughly satisfied. This is definitely high brow oprah winfreyesque intrusional fair, only far more understated, better crafted, and dare I say, more sincere. There is in its choppy editting a conscious effort to be unsentimental, and to honestly seek out the reasons, varied and conflicted, why people choose self-annililation. Of course mental illness nearly always is the focal point, the dark heart of the act. These are folks that just can’t handle anymore the demands of cold reality.These are folks who continually lay their own roadblocks to recovery. Their world becomes an unnavigable maze. It’s time to jump ship.

My mother’s suicide could not have been more different than for instance Gene Sprague’s. He’s the black maned Maldoror-type we see sculpted by the wind, pacing back and forth on Golden Gate and certainly, to be fair to the filmmakers, is not an obvious threat for imminent suicide. Of all the people filmed taking the glorious plunge, his is the most elaborate fall, the most self-consciously staged. This man had art in his blood. Somehow he failed to find his medium. Truthfully, and what turns out to be the biggest failure of this movie, we never learn a damn thing about this man. He had plenty of friends. But still felt isolated.We never see his face, no we don’t know if he was burdened with a ugly or attractive face (these things can be vital to a person’s sanity). We are drawn into his mystery and forced to feel deep pity for him.But do we really know him? Maybe he did something so horrible he couldn’t live with himself. Have we been conned into feeling an inauthentic emotion for someone we never knew, nor will ever know?

When I was a boy we lived in the Bay Area, and one weekend afternoon our family went on one of our daylong driving trips to some scenic place or other in northern California. All those beautiful colors come back to me sometimes, haunt me. Split pea soup in a roadside restaurant, bare hills so yellow and lakes so intensely blue you think you were in a disney animation movie.

But this trip Im recalling now was to go across the Golden Gate Bridge. No one wanted to do it, but me. I begged till my mother and step-father relented. As we drew closer my mother begin to show her nervousness. She wanted to turn around. She had a deep phobia of crossing bridges. But usually we crossed them anyway. But this bridge, with its red imposing massiveness, was too much for her. We had to turn around. She wouldn’t let us cross it.

I’ve never crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. It lives like a fairy tale still in my mind.

http://www.thebridge-themovie.com/new/index.html

Short Movie Reviews

2009-04-10T09:13:00.001-07:00

Tenebre– 2nd time watching this, and still not sure if I like it or not. It lacks the visuals of a Suspiria or Deep Red (a movie Im trying to get off Blockbuster Online but apparently I have to wait 100 years), or Inferno. There is a fine twist in the end, even though I partly suspected it all along. There are some great murder scenes as well: Peter Neal’s fiance getting her hand chopped off, then spraying blood all over the wall, or the escapade with the vicious dog chasing the girl all the way into the killer’s lair. Plenty of throats getting slit, and even a fake throat slashing in the end. Another perhaps weak link is the score, which may be just a matter of opinion anyway. I absolutely love Goblin’s work in Suspiria and Deep Red, adding even more frenzied layers to those movies, but in Tenebre, the music just didn’t seem as inspired to me. Grade: B-

The Orphanage– This movie is insanely good, utterly captivating, almost a ghost story about absent ghosts. It’s more about paranoia and guilt than about the supernatural. But you dont know that until the end. Ghosts haunt for sure, but maybe all they are are memories, echoes from the past. Awaiting dissolution. The motif of the treasure hunt is subtly used throughout this film to highlight the idea that ghosts speak in riddles. And that clues in the game lead to answers, and that answers lead to revelations. In this case, the revelation is as poignantly sad as anything I can remember in a film, although my memory isn’t world-class. From our human perspective, only melancholy is the truly honest bend to the lense. Grade: A

The Spiral Staircase– saw this on TCM the other night, without much hope for a spectacular viewing experience for a horror movie made in 1945. But I was somewhat suprised here, although I can’t say I was utterly impressed with the film. It definitely had its moments. And might as well be the missing link from film noir/B&W horror classics to the giallo and slasher genres to come much later. Although no outright slashings occur (the method of murder is audience-friendly strangulation), there is a considerable number of brutal murders here, and all of them, women. Had to of been a milestone for American film. {will check to see if not a British made movie} I know that M, by Fritz Lang came ealier, and dealt with a serial killer. And i havent seen the hitchcock movie about jack the ripper. As one of the hosts for The Essentials mentioned, “Inky Black” helps to make this movie effective. But also the generalized creepiness of the cottage, the neverending thunderstorm, the almost goofily psychic old woman, who senses that one of her own sons is the killer. The characters are nicely drawn and devoid– mostly– of melodrama. The quirky Mrs. Oates is a nice minor character, who has some delightful drunken moments. The red herrings are laid out like clockwork, but the killer’s identity was way too easily discovered. And thank god for small miracles: Helen got her voice back! Grade: B

Blow Out-- Recently watched this again after many, many years, and I have to say, it may be De Palma's best. Stylistically, it definitely owes something to Dario Argento, plus the story hinges on an incredible coincidence, that being Travolta's character being on that bridge making sound recordings at the exact time of the botched frame up of the Governor of Pennsylvannia, who is running for the Presidency. What was meant to be just a way to ruin his reputation, turns out to be an assassination.The gunman (Lithgow) only shoots out the tire of the car as a means for the crooked reporter (Franz) to get some film showing the politician with a phony prostitute (Allen). What starts as a small crime, distasteful certainly, but not utterly diabolical, grows into something much more, thanks to the inate pyschopathic tendencies of Lithgow's character. It all reminds me of the hijinks of Fargo, where one man's greed and foolishness escalates by uncontrollable forces into multiple murder. And the ending is perfect noir or giallo fair, with the B-slasher film Jack Terry is sound man for finally getting its perfect scream, caught on wiretap during Sally's murder near the end of the film.

Blue Velvet-- How many get that this movie is a parody of happy ever after endings? It plies you with the stench of sexual and criminal darkness for nearly 2 hours then hits you with the love triumphs over all ending, the cute return to the same images the film started with. The suburban platitudes of blue skies, robins in the air, hope for all. Whether the anger is intentional or not, I dont know, but maybe Lynch is a sentimental cornball after all. Two quotes are the heart of this movie. One is from Frank Booth addressed to Jeffrey Beaumont:"You're the same as me." And one from the aunt at the end ofthe movie: "I could never eat a bug." There's truth to the first and falsity in the second.