"Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."
These words of wisdom come from Nelson Algren's 1956 novel A Walk on the Wild Side, which details the hard-ass lives of pimps, drunks, whores and hoboes in Depression-era N'Awlins.
Like a rasslin' match between Jim Thompson and Jack Keroauc with William S. Burroughs in the ring as the referee, Walk... treats the reader to some extremely shady characters and criminals, serving them up with some nice moments of musicality and poetry, and revealing their humanity (or remnants thereof).
Algren's characters are well-developed, displaying layers of humor and humanity that contrast (or stand in doomed defiance against) the bleakness of their situations and surroundings, and his prose is rife with internal rhymes and rhythms, as well as moments of utter hilarity. Ostensibly a road novel, following Dove Linkhorn from home to N'Awlins to home... Of course, there's a bit more to it than that, but that's in the reading... There was a film adaptation as well, but the story is very different than the novel... (Why don't you post us a review, zwolf?)
Fuckin' recommended! (Algren also penned The Man with the Golden Arm, went to jail for five months and had a highly-publicized affair with Simone de Beauvoir back in the day, just so's ya knows...)
Ever get a crush on a movie? I'm so obsessed with Messiah of Evil (1973) that just writing a capsule review doesn't feel adequate. It's like being totally hung up on a woman and just saying, "Yeah, she's cute." It'd be an injustice. And, thanks to the miracle of YouTube, you can watch this whole movie online for free (just skip through the chapters there, or search elsewhere - there are other sources), so you don't have to take my word for it. I'm gonna be writing some major SPOILERS here, so you may want to go watch the flick and then come back to this. I won't mind. If you opt out of that, though, I'm going to use this post to try to twist your arm into watching it anyway, so, choose your path. This will be long 'cuz I'm going in-depth. Skim if you wanna.
The secret to this movie is multiple viewings. The first time you see it, it may even be a disappointment. It was for me, slightly, when I first saw it on tape back in the early 90's, because I was expecting an ultra-gory zombie movie, like Dawn of the Dead or Zombie, and while this is a pretty bloody movie, there's not a lot of intestine-gnawing in it. Something about the movie did stick in my head, though, and the next time I watched it I liked it a lot better.
Nowdays I feel compelled to watch it again every couple of months and collect multiple copies of it (which isn't expensive, since it's public domain and can be had for a buck or two, or even less if you buy one of those 50-movie packs). I'm definitely obsessed with the movie (to the point where anybody who spends any time around me is probably thinking, "Ah, Christ, Z's going to go on and on about that movie again") and think it's been woefully overlooked as one of the major classics in the horror genre. I'm not the only one obsessed with it, either. link (another guy who's definitely obsessed - the film inspired him to "rhapsodize" to the point that he kinda scared himself! I feel ya, bro) link or link. The power of it is, I think it's the closest thing to a nightmare I've ever seen captured on film.
Because of its dreamlike structure it's been misunderstood; Michael Weldon of the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (which my friend Rob is now re-creating in blog form - great stuff, check it out here) claimed it was a "confusing, badly edited story," but I think the confusion is mostly intentional and the editing is deliberately bizarre to keep the audience off-balance. The horror here is often absurd, and absurdity can be just as effective a tool for horror as it is for comedy. Fear dissipates with understanding, and this film withholds just enough from you that it enthralls you, but makes you fill in gaps, often with with your imagination's most dreadful things. Dream-logic is used throughout, and I'll explain some of that here.
A brief bit of background on the film: it was made in 1971, written (with Gloria Katz) and directed by Williard Huyck, who also wrote American Graffiti, More American Graffiti, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and did major script-doctoring on Star Wars because George Lucas, the force help 'im, can't write worth a damn. I'm afraid to admit it, but Huyck also directed Howard The Duck. Don't let that put you off. The world is full of bad directors who still had a masterpiece or two in 'em (Sam Raimi, Tobe Hooper, etc.) The film is also known by the titles Dead People and Revenge of the Screaming Dead, and was filmed under the title The Second Coming.
The basic story is this: a young woman named Arletty (Marianna Hill) goes to the "neon stucco" beach town of Point Dune (formerly known as New Bethlehem) to find her father, who's an artist. The letters he'd been sending her grew increasingly bizarre and he finally disappeared. Arletty discovers that the town is being taken over by a cult (or maybe some kind of spiritual disease?) of zombie-like people who stand on the beach and watch the ocean all night, waiting for the return of some "dark messiah." They also kill and eat people, and Arletty fears that she may be becoming one of them. Or perhaps it's all a madwoman's Caligari-esque delusion.
Now, on to specifics.
The dream-logic starts right off the bat with a pre-credit sequence in which a guy is desperately running through the night from some unseen threat. A blank-faced girl (apparently grazed by the Down's Syndrome bullet, if not 10-ringed) watches him from a gate. Then, suddenly she's sitting by a swimming pool on the other side of him (you know how people suddenly change locations in dreams? There ya go). She comforts him as he collapses in exhaustion, then suddenly and dispassionately slices his throat. The whole time a (seemingly) inappropriate love song is playing. Stephen Thrower of the excellent Nightmare USA movie guide lists this as one of the film's weaknesses, but I disagree and think he misunderstands the game the filmmakers are playing with us here. Using a love song as the theme for a horror movie is already throwing the viewer into a "what the fuck am I watching?" delirium. There's something off about the lyrics, too, with a lot of threatening imagery for a song about love.
"I gave my message to the wind, I told my story to the sea No one else is listening to me The hidden truth clear in my mind, soon all alone I will not find Somehow, somewhere, someone may hear me Hold on to love Hold on to love But beware of men who became beasts of prey How many are they? Child without a soul, men without a heart Their one hungry goal to tear your life apart How many are they, don't try to find out, stay away They are without shame, this is not a game From them stay away or you could become one As they. I gave my message to the wind, I told my story to the sea Somehow somewhere someone may hear me Hold on to love Hold on to love"
Then there's a wonderfully eerie shot of Arletty (seen as a vague backlit shape with just suggestions of emoting visible) wandering down an asylum hallway, emerging from extreme brightness to darkness near the camera. She delivers an unsettling little thorazine-lethargic speech about nightmares (see? They're giving us hints) and how everyone thinks she's crazy. It's even got some absurd laugh-inducing bits (I'm sorry, but a wail about urinating on the floor hits me as hilarious) before walloping you with an unsettling scream.
"They say that nightmares are dreams perverted. I've told them here it wasn't a nightmare, but they don't believe me. They nod, and make little notes in my file, and they watch me now, waiting for me to scar my breasts, to eat insects maybe, or to lift my dress like some crazy old woman and urinate on the floor! But there's so little time left. You've got to listen! Not far from here there's a small town on the coast. They used to call it New Bethlehem but they changed the name to Point Dune after the moon turned blood red. Point Dune doesn't look any different than a thousand other neon-stucco towns, but what happened there, what they did to me, what they're doing now. They're coming here. They're waiting at the edge of the city. They're peering around buildings at night, and they're waiting. They're waiting for YOU. And they'll take you one by one and no one will hear you scream. NO ONE WILL HEAR YOU SCREEEEAAAAAMMMM!"
Then she narrates (Thrower hates this, too, but I think it's highly effective and not only provides some much-needed gap-filling for the story, but also sets up a helluva mood) as she drives to Point Dune. She stops at a little gas station in the middle of the night, and the attendant is frantically firing a pistol into the darkness. She doesn't drive away, like any normal person would when faced with this situation (nobody reacts to anything appropriately in this nightmare). Then a giant albino black man pulls up for gas. The attendant notices a couple of mutilated corpses in the bed of the pickup, but his reaction to it is limited to hissing to Arletty to get out of there. Then, he goes back to working on cars, until he's attacked, killed, and hung upside down from the car lift. A brilliant shot shows the station lights going out in stages as he screams.
Arletty goes to her father's house, which is like some strange museum; a bed is suspended on chains in the main room, there are paintings of bland people and escalators on the walls, and potted trees everywhere. The colored lighting in these scenes make them look like outtakes from Suspiria. Arletty reads a diary her father scrawled in his sketchbooks, which is filled with worry about his approaching madness and strange things he's seeing ("pale women with sleepless eyes").
At dawn Arletty walks down the beach, past an ocean that looks made of chrome paint. This includes possibly my favorite shot of any movie, ever: she's in the distance in a black robe, walking on a seaweed-strewn beach, and all the rest of the world is obscured by mist. That is the bleakest, doomiest, end-of-the-world-looking frame of film I can think of, and I wish I could do a screen-grab.
Arletty visits the local art gallery looking for any information on her father's whereabouts. The art dealer is a creepy blind, mute woman (that's a blind art dealer, folks, just in case you doubted this film has "absurdity" as an agenda) who communicates by tapping her fingers on her associate's palm. How she's able to convey complicated concepts like her father's name through a few finger taps is unknown and surreal.
Arletty's sent to a motel room where a wild-eyed drunk (Elisha Cook Jr.) is telling a story ("Mama delivered me herself, she took me from between her legs, a bloody little mess, just about to feed me to the chickens when Daddy said 'Maybe we could use a boy, Lottie.' That's how I came into the world."). A fancy-looking guy named Thom (with two pretty girls traveling with him) has paid him for folklore, and Cook describes past days of a red moon, with people losing religion, bleeding out of control, and children eating raw meat. Later he pulls Arletty under some stairs (where it looks like night even though it's noon everywhere else), says "I'm an ugly old man but I'm harmless!" and tells her that she needs to kill her father and burn his body. Cook is later found dead and half-eaten.
Thom and the girls move into Arletty's house uninvited, and she lets them stay, even though the girls act infuriatingly smug. Thom (played by Michael Greer, who was cast against type as a playboy, since he was well-known to be gay) wants to talk to Arletty's father about the blood moon, and tries to seduce Arletty.
One of Thom's girlfriends (knockout Anitra Ford, who was a Price Is Right model) decides she's had enough of Thom's bullshit and splits, catching a ride with our giant albino black friend,. The bed of his truck is full of dead people, but he has to eat a live beach-rat before the jaded Anitra's freaked out enough to get out of the truck. Soon after she's attacked by zombies in a nearly-deserted supermarket (everybody was at eating raw meat out of the butcher bin). This is a classically-creepy scene, with these bland-looking citizens (they look like accountants and such) chasing her through the aisles. The bright lighting and muzak add to the weirdness. If you think fast zombies started with 28 Days Later, check out these stampeding undead conservatives!
Arletty's father is then found dead on the beach under a weird sculpture he was building, but only his hand is exposed under the rubble. That's still enough for Arletty to recognize it's not her father, and there's some conspiracy going on. Arletty's soon noticing signs of encroaching zombism in herself, too; she burns her hand and doesn't feel it, she digs at her leg with a pin and feels nothing, she weeps blood and vomits bugs, lizards, and worms.
Thom's other girlfriend (played by Joy Bang -- now there's a punk rock screen-name for ya) also gets fed up and decides to go to the movies, and we get another classic scare scene that'll stack up to anything in the genre, and was likely an inspiration for Lamberto Bava's Demons. She goes to see Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (ha ha, they make funny!) but instead a Sammy Davis Jr. movie, Gone With The West, comes on. This is a real movie (but came out several years after Messiah of Evil) but what they've done to it here is crazy, and adds to the absurdity. The movie is edited hapazardly, leaving nothing but crazed nonsense. The soundtrack usually isn't appropriate to what's on the screen, either, and jumps around abruptly, like it was pasted together by a meth-amped schizophrenic. As she's watching this insanity, the nearly-empty theater fills up with zombie-folk (it's reminiscent of The Birds) and when she notices people around her bleeding and tries to leave, she finds the doors locked, and she's alone with a crowd of people who want to eat her alive. Goddamn brilliant. (My favorite bit of it is the guy down front who's turned around and staring at her just before the lights go down).
Thom wanders the empty night streets, looking for Joy but finding zombies instead. A crowd of them battle with cops and he barely escapes.
Arletty's father (Royal Dano) comes home, crazy as hell, telling stories about a preacher who survived the Donner Party, came up with a "new religion" fit for a tired, disillusioned world that's looking to old gods. In flashbacks we see this preacher, and he appears to be Thom. The film may have planned to expand on that, but doesn't, leaving it unexplained and weird. Her father paints himself blue and splashes paint all over. Arletty ends up having to kill him and set him on fire.
Thom returns and shadowy zombies are pressing themselves against the skylights and glass of the house. They attack, and Thom and Arletty fight them off and try to escape in the ocean. But she ends up in an asylum and they assume her tale is all an insane delusion. Is it? Or are we ignoring a warning if we're so quick to dismiss it?
She ends it saying, "We sit in the sun and wait. We sleep. And we dream. Each of us dying slowly in the prison of our minds."
Her first lines mention dreaming, as do her last. So I think that "confusion" and "bad editing" that was bothering some people? All intentional, kids. And damn if it doesn't work, too.
The film is very Lovecraftian, without ever actually mentioning anything Cthonian beyond a god emerging from the sea. Point Dune might as well be a sister city to Innsmouth, and the atmosphere of it is extremely evocative of little "neon-stucco" beach towns. I've been in a few, and they're creepy. Pensacola Beach, Florida, in the early 70's was a very strange, Point Dune-ian place, with boxy little stucco houses painted all kinds of horrible colors (pink, lime-sherbet green, etc.). And I was once in some town in Florida that was as deserted as Point Dune seems to be. It was on the way back from a trip to Disneyworld, I think, and I don't know the name of the town but I remember my parents and their friends trying to get something to eat there and not being able to find anyone in any of the stores, restaurants, or anywhere. It was highly creepy, and Point Dune reminds me of that place.
The zombies here may not really be zombies. I don't know if they're "dead," or if they're cultists. I do know that they're not all willing, because some people who are running from them get dismayed to notice the "zombie symptoms" appearing in themselves (such as the woman who begs Thom for help but he can only say "Your eye. I'm very sorry." because she's already weeping blood). This isn't a gory movie, really, but it has atmosphere to burn.
The film has fallen into the public domain. All the DVDs of the film seem to come from the same VHS source, full-screen and kind of grainy. Supposedly CodeRed is working on a top-quality DVD release of this, and I'd greatly appreciate that (hell, I'll probably buy more than one copy), but I'm not sure when. Until then, your options are limited to variations of the same thing, all of approximately the same quality. None will set you back more than a few bucks, though. I think maybe the best transfer is on the Chilling Classics 50 movie pack from Mill Creek (click on the picture of the box and it'll give you a list of all the movies in the set, with clickable descriptions and even clips for a lot of 'em), which is also the best deal since you get 49 other movies in the bargain, some of which are also pretty great (such as Silent Night Bloody Night, which I'm also obsessed with). Usually that's cheapest on DeepDiscount.com, but sometimes Amazon undercuts them, so shop around. The next-best quality-wise would probably be the St. Clair "Living Dead" box set, followed by the Diamond Entertainment double feature (with Devil's Nightmare, also a great film), and the Alpha double (with Sisters of Death). Brentwood used to have copies on some of their 10 movie packs, but those were sometimes defective. They're all pretty close to each other in quality, though, since they're struck from the same source. so go with whichever you can find. But, by all means, pick this one up.
Yes, I read three books in one day, and you can, too! Here's how: first, get three books. Read them all until you're about 20-30 pages from the end. (Take months on this step if you need to.) Then, when they're all almost done, pick a day and read the remaining few pages in each book. With the proper application, you could finish 10 or more books in one day using this method.
Then, you would get all the ass.
It's true: there are women out there who will sleep with you if you let them know you read a lot of books. And then pay them fifty dollars.
Anyway, this method can also be applied to "how to become a millionaire in one day." First, save up $999,999.50 from your chosen career. (If your career pays as well as mine, this should only take you around 50 years or so, if you never eat, pay bills, or buy anything).
Then, return some pop bottles. Ba-dang! You're a millionaire, gangsta. Go get dat ass!
Anyway, on to the three books in question. I'll save the best for last.
The Sociopath Next Door - Martha Stout, Ph.D. Broadway, 2005 Interesting psychology book about the 4% of the population who were born without a conscience examines how they think and operate, how to recognize and deal with them (avoid them whenever possible, basically), and the problems -- sometimes dangers -- they present. It's an easy-to-follow book full of recognizable examples, and explores the effect of such individuals on society. Stout is at her best when she keeps her desires to be a poet in check, and that's why you're advised to skip the last chapter, which is mostly an opinion piece where she injects an unwelcome (and dishonest) attempt to tie conscience and morality to spirituality and religion. Up to that point, however, it's an interesting study. I read it because I suspect a person or two at work. It's interesting to know that one in 25 people are sociopaths. So, if you ever find yourself in a room with 24 other people and they're all nice and well adjusted... you're it!
The Terror - Dan Simmons, Little-Brown, 2007. 950-page daisycutter of a novel combines a detailed historical saga of the 1845 Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage with giant-carnivorous-beastie horror. Sailing into the northern seas (where it's so crazy cold that you'll lose a hand if you take off your mitten for five seconds), two sailing ships, the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus, get icebound for a couple of years when summer thaws don't happen the way they're supposed to. Eventually the coal supplies burn out, and much of their lowest-bidder-supplied rations go toxic, but they're also being stalked and killed by a monster that's like a giant polar bear. With the ships being crushed by the ice, the threat of mutiny, the extreme cold, the amputations due to frostbite, the food poisoning, the starvation, the scurvy (which is a particularly horrible disease, if you've never looked into it), and the cannibalism, the whole monster thing becomes really unnecessary and would hardly be missed if it were taken out; in fact, the silly spiritual-symbol nature of it eventually becomes obtrusive in an otherwise-very-realistic story. But it's still not a bad monster overall, and the story's powerful enough to handle a bit of compromising. Even though this is a long read and remains set in a desolate landscape all the way through, it's still gripping and intense, pervaded by a menacing aura of doom. A 950 page book isn't just a read, it's a commitment; no one-night stand here, you're going to have a relationship with this thing for a while, but in this case it's worth it.
White Line Fever: The Autobiography - Lemmy Kilmister with Janiss Garza, Citadel Press, 2002. Some say the Bible is the word of God. Ha! Then how do you explain this? Motorhead is my all-time favorite band and the ne plus ultra of musical perfection (not necessarily musicianship-wise, but just as a unit that gels into a whole solid lump of noisy protoplasm). And this is the autobiography of the guy who basically is Motorhead. Lemmy recounts (in inimitable and funny-as-hell Lemmy style) what he remembers about all the bands he's been in, which go back to the dinosaurs. He roadied for Jimi Hendrix, he saw the Beatles live when they were first getting started (he said they used to tell a lot of jokes and eat cheese rolls during the show), and he was in a ton of bands, from a weird bunch of musical terrorists called The Rockin' Vicars to drugfreaks Hawkwind. The style of this book is loose and conversational, with frequent (and always interesting) tangents, and covers everything from his birth (on Christmas Eve of 1945, five months premature) up to Motorhead's Hammered album The only flaw in it is that it'll leave you wanting more, so hopefully Lemmy will find some time between his endless Motorhead tours to write a sequel. Or two. I'm sure he could fill volumes with all the stories he's got. This is a fast, un-put-downable read with never a dull moment, just like his albums. Even if you're not a Motorhead freak this is a funny and engaging book. A few things I learned from this:
- The Rolling Stones were a bunch of mommy's-boy college students who cultivated a tough-guy image, but the seemingly-innocent Beatles were actually hardasses. Once while Lemmy was watching them, somebody in the audience called John Lennon a queer, and he jumped off the stage, smashed the guy's face so bad that he was spitting teeth, then got back on stage, said "Anybody else? No? Alright then, here's 'Some Other Guy.'" John Lennon viciously kicked a guy's ass! Mr. Peace-Boy! Whodathunk?
- Lemmy didn't fit in with Hawkwind very well because he was a speedfreak and they were all into pot and LSD. The only other speedfreak in the band was a guy named Dikmik, who played a ring modulator; all he really did was control sonic waves that would either make audience members go into convulsions, or shit their pants. To aid in this, the members of Hawkwind used to sneak around and spike the audience's food with LSD. Which is uncool as fucking hell if you ask me, but it does make for a good story. Lemmy notes that when he left Hawkwind, he "took the cojones with him."
- Lemmy has abused drugs and alcohol to such an extent that he no longer has human blood. Around 1980 he decided to clean up by having a total transfusion, the way Keith Richards supposedly did. But after the preliminary blood tests, the doctor told him that pure blood would kill him, because his blood is no longer human. He also can't donate blood, because his blood would kill anyone else. Again, doing this to yourself is ignorant to my way of thinking, but, eh, it's Lemmy!
- The only drug Lemmy would not mess around with was heroin, which he hates because it's killed so many of his friends, including his best-ever girlfriend. Since Lemmy's a history buff who collects Nazi memorabilia, some people have mistaken him for a racist, but the number one love of his life (to whom the book is dedicated posthumously) was a black girl who died of a heroin O.D. Once, while they were in the midst of a breakup, she had sex with Mick Jagger. Lemmy asked her what that was like, and she said, “Well, he was okay, but he’s no Mick Jagger,” which Lemmy thought was perfect. :)
- Lemmy did O.D. once during his Hawkwind days, when he ate about 50 downers to avoid being busted by some cops. He ended up laying on the floor with his eyes open, unable to move or tell his screaming friends that he wasn’t actually dead.
- Lemmy once tried to give Sid Vicious some bass lessons, but after a few attempts had to tell Sid that it was impossible. Sid later showed up in the Sex Pistols, even though he still couldn’t play. The bass player from The Jam once stabbed Sid in the face with a broken glass, too, and Lemmy had to check to make sure Sid wasn't dead.
- Philthy Animal Taylor and Fast Eddie Clarke used to regularly get in fist-fights with each other. And Phil was apparently notoriously clumsy and frequently had near-fatal mishaps, such as walking off the edge of the stage and stuff.
- Lemmy almost lost an arm once due to infection from some stupid fan who threw a razor blade (stuck between a couple of coins to give it weight) at him. His whole arm turned black.
- Lemmy used to have a gay roomate (he's not a homophobe, either) who was murdered by some hate-crime creeps while Lemmy was on tour. They stabbed him over 50 times, stuck a knife of his ass and pulled it to the front, cut his dick off and stuck in up his ass, and set the place on fire, and the guy still almost crawled out.
- Lemmy’s biggest money-making venture was when Sharon Osbourne hired him to write some songs for Ozzy’s No More Tears album. Lemmy wrote “Desire,” “I Don’t Want To Change The World,” “Hellraiser,” and “Mama I’m Coming Home” and made more money in Ozzy royalties than he had for the previous 15 years in Motorhead.
A few random quoted passages:
“I’ve been known as Lemmy since I was around ten. I didn’t always have the moustache... I’ve only had that since I was eleven.”
“I mean, you teach people that the Messiah was the offspring of a vagabond’s wife (who is a virgin) and a ghost? And this is the basis for a worldwide religion? I’m not so sure. I figured if Joseph believed that one, he deserved to sleep in stables.”
“I lost my father a couple of years ago -- rather careless of me, don’t you think?”
“My stepfather used to come in and catch me going at it [with my girlfriend]. He caught me so many times, it was fucking silly; I think he was a voyeur. ‘Do you know you’re on top of that girl?’ he’d shout. ‘Yes, I know I’m on top of the bloody girl!’ I’d say. ‘How do you do it?’”
“That was a great time, the summer of ‘71 -- I can’t remember it, but I’ll never forget it!”
“I was walking around with a TV under my arm, talking to it. Somebody else was trying to feed the trees outside his window. It was really interesting for a while, actually.”
“Eventually the doctor showed up. ‘If we’d got to you in another hour, you would have been dead.’ I was thinking, ‘I bet you’re sorry, you miserable bugger.’”
“Hawkwind wasn’t one of those hippie-drippy, peace-and-love outfits -- we were a black nightmare!”
“I’d like to mention that I’m available for more songwriting if anybody is interested. Quite reasonable -- just the mortgage on your first-born child!”
“You’re supposed to laugh in life. Laughing exercises all the facial muscles and keeps you from getting old. Looking stern gives you terrible wrinkles. I also advise drinking heavily -- it helps the sense of humor! Smoking pot helps the sense of humor to no end, but after a while you lose it altogether and all you can do is talk about the cosmos and shit, which is really boring.”
“To be honest, although ‘Ace of Spades’ is a good song, I’m sick to death of it now. Two decades on, whenever people think of Motorhead, they think ‘Ace of Spades.’ We didn’t become fossilized after that record, you know. We’ve had quite a few good releases since then. But the fans want to hear it so we still play it every night. For myself, I’ve had enough of that song.”
“I still like talking to fans today... except for the occasional drunk fucker who insists on singing ‘Ace of Spades’ in my ear nonstop! We have made a few albums since the Ace of Spades days, after all -- if he’s drunk and starts singing something from one of our last couple of records, I might not mind so much!”
“I don’t like walking off stage, but I will not be fucking spat on! Incidentally, one of the reasons I won’t put up with it is this: Joe Strummer of the Clash was singing once and one of these dickheads spat right down his throat! Not only was it nauseating, boys and girls, no -- wait -- he got hepatitis! Nice, huh? Not me, sweetheart!”
“The only time I’ve seen any rebellion was in the fifties, sixties and early seventies. The rest of it you can keep. The kids now have attitudes more like the parents we were all trying to fight! They’ll probably raise a bunch of fucking freaks. We raised a bunch of estate agents, a bunch of fucking accountants. God knows how we did it. I guess it’s because most people give up. As I pointed out earlier, a lot of people say, ‘I used to listen to Motorhead,’ implying that when you grow up, you can’t. Well, I’m glad they say that, man, ‘cause I don’t want no grown-ups listening to me. Grown-ups are the ones who fuck everything up. Since I was about twenty-five, nothing changed, except I got smarter and wiser and things have an effect on you. But I never thought I was any older, really. It was just a very long twenty-five.”
“In my life so far, I have discovered that there are really only two kinds of people: those who are for you, and those who are against you. Learn to recognize them, for they are often and easily mistaken for each other.”
“Inherited hatred (i. e. hatred your parents schooled you in) is not only stupid, it is destructive -- why make your only driving force hate? Seems really fucking dumb to me.”
And now, so none of you will be one of those people who only sings "Ace of Spades" if you happen to bump into Lemmy, as a public service (okay, overindulgence) I'm gonna stick in a shizzleload of various Motorhead video bits I poisonally selected for ya. Some people think all their songs sound alike, but I can identify almost any one of 'em just by hearing the first thirty seconds, and know the lyrics to around half of 'em.
That's probably why my lawn is dying, as prophesied.
A general public service announcement from Motorhead:
Remember a while back when we were making lists of scary songs? Check out this poem-thing Lemmy did. At around the one minute mark this becomes the scariest goddamn thing you ever heard:
This is an audio-only vid of Motorhead covering Metallica's "Whiplash," and this is the most crushingly monster-badass thing I've heard in quite some time. Instead of going with guitar, Lemmy makes his downtuned Rickenbacker the forefront instrument and plays it fast as hell, and it makes that song even more of a sonic annihilation.
Live "Don't Need Religion" from Iron Fist (one of the songs that convinced me I wasn't the only sane person in the world back in high school):
Newer-school song you could sing to Lemmy to make him happy, with a bit of social consciousness there.
Some mid-paced stuff just to prove they're unsafe at any speed:
One of my faves... I love the bass that opens this song, it sounds like a shot-up airplane going down, somehow. Just dirty-nasty rumble. And the lyrics get more brilliant the more you contemplate them.
And apparently there's gonna be a Lemmy bio movie out sometime in the next year or so. Me am happy! Shouldn't you have "49% MOTHERFUCKER, 51% SON OF A BITCH" written on something you own? I'm lookin' for a bumpersticker!
Freaky-ass creepy song Lemmy did in the early 70's for Sam Gopal's group:
Lemmy does Chuck Berry on Letterman:
And now this last thing has nothing to do with Motorhead, but it's the funniest thing I've seen on YouTube lately. It's kinda sad that people are bullying this poor kid (he is a homophobe, which sucks, but he also appears to be about 11, so cut him a break), but his performance here is classically hilarious...
Also look for his version of Samuel L. Jackson's Bible quote from Pulp Fiction. Oi.
We lost David Carradine today; he was found dead, hanged with a nylon rope, in a hotel room closet in Bangkok. According to the Bangkok Police (and I'm sure they're super-efficient...), the rope is believed to be from the room's curtains. Results of the official autopsy should be made public by the weekend... Investigators have found no sign of forced entry into Carradine's room.
Carradine is, of course, famous for his role as traveling Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Caine in the 1970's television series Kung Fu, and as Bill from Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill films.
He was 72. And you owe it to his cold, dead body to watch the 1978 quasi-mystical quest flick Circle of Iron, in which he plays the role(s) originally intended for Bruce Lee. And a flute, sorta...
Go now! Hurry! I'll wait for you here 'til you get back...
About a decade ago, I wrote a bunch of little stories for another website I used to be on, centered around Salem-The-Girl-From-Another-Story. (Actually she was the smokin'-hot Japanese bassist for a death metal band in a horror novel I wrote called Death Metal Creeps, which I've mentioned before. She's also the semi-basis for one of the girls I drew in that dumb comic I put up a couple weeks ago). I just liked her (she's a real smartass and therefore fun to write) and was bored so I threw her into other weird, surreal stories (or vignettes if you wanna be all that-way about it) to amuse people on this website... and confuse them since they had no idea what "other story" she was from). Anyway, here's one of the stories... and I'll explain why I'm bringing it up - and why I'm a prophet - afterward.
==========
Due to the less-than-miracle of bad writing, Salem found herself in a cheap, crappy bar from the 40's. It had to have been somewhere close to three a.m., because nobody was left but a few hardcore barflies who either couldn't find the door or were waiting for morning, when the county jail would be open for business. Slowly drifting layers of cigarette smoke hung in the air like hope's funeral shroud, and Salem was annoyed to be thrust into a place like this, especially after she'd just washed her hair. She was a fictional character, it was like being a cartoon, she could literally be anywhere, doing anything, and yet her idiot creator had dumped her here, where everything was grainy black and white and the ghost of David Goodis was wrestling with the ghost of Jim Thompson to see who had to buy the next round of major bummer. The bar was rough under her elbows, deeply gouged with the whiskey-dyed initials of a thousand different guys, losers all, desperately trying to use their keys, pocketknives, or broken shot glasses to leave a mark on the world in the only way they ever would. This was the wrong place to be if you were an eye-popping, soul-totaling superfox. And, to top it off, she could tell that the little nebbish a few feet down the bar was trying to work up the nerve to speak to her. And, damn him, he finally got brave enough. "Hiya, b...baby," he stammered, then flinched. "Need some company?" She cut her almond-shaped eyes at him, wondered if Peter Lorre had ever gotten busy with Ruth Buzzi on a particularly fruitful night, and then stared at the mirror behind the bar. "All the company I need is right over there," she said, waggling her fingers at her reflection. "Um... wanna go back to my place or something? I've got a book of riddles back there." "No thanks," Salem said. "Knock knock jokes, too," he said hopefully. "They're real funny. I bought it at the candy store one time when I had some extra change. Girls like 'em. It said so on the back." "I'm sure they're a laugh riot," she sighed. "Why don't you go back there and read yourself a few until you giggle your damned ass off?" "Cheee..." the guy said, disappointedly. He sat there a minute and then, apparently, content by the mere fact that he'd spoken to the goddess and not been killed, decided to keep going. He looked her up and down, taking in the long, straight black hair, the black leather vest laced around her bare torso, the short black leather gloves, the bulletbelt, the black spandex pants, the boots laced to her knees, and came to a conclusion. "You're dressed fancy. You some kinda superhero?" She looked coldly at him. "I wish. I wish I was Wolverine." She held her fist up, flexed her arm, said "Snikt!" and swiped imaginary claws at him, pretending blood. "I wish I was a superhero," he said. "Sometimes I read funnybooks and pretend I'm the guy in there, fighting crime, like I'm Batman or Superman. Not Aquaman, though. He's pretty weak. I mean, he can talk to fish. Big deal." "He talks to fish, and I talk to doorknobs. Hooray," Salem sighed to the pretty girl in the mirror. "When did it happen? When was I bitten by a radioactive jackass?" "Sometimes," the guy said, with a tone of just-you-and-me conspiracy in his voice, "I safety-pin a towel around my neck and go out and... well, I don't really fight crime, but I take note of it." "So you're a superhero?" Salem said, favoring him with another glance. "Yes. I'm Towel Man." "Cooooool." "Towel Maaaaaaan..." he sang quietly to himself, drumming on the edge of the bar. "Who's a girl gotta kill around here to get some kryptonite... or samsonite, or whatever works?" Salem sighed. "Brussel sprouts," the man said gravely. "Towel Man can't handle brussel sprouts."
=============
Okay, here's the prophecy part. I wrote this:
"Sometimes," the guy said, with a tone of just-you-and-me conspiracy in his voice, "I safety-pin a towel around my neck and go out and... well, I don't really fight crime, but I take note of it."
And now in the news today I find this article, in which a supposed "real-life superhero" says the following:
"Vigilantism is never a good thing," said Bernard Gonzales, public information officer for the Chula Vista, California, Police Department. He's had some interactions with real-life superheroes. "The very best thing a private citizen can do is be a good witness."
Mr. Ravenblade said he's just that.
"If you're a real-life superhero you follow the law. If you catch somebody you can't just tie them up and leave them for the cops, that's for the comics. You have to wait for the cops and give them a statement," Mr. Ravenblade said.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... Towel Maaaaaaaaan!
Which makes me Prophecy Man, I guess, since I predicted it. I gotta find me a towel.
Evildoers, beware! I shall take note of the people who may, in the future, be taking note of you! Tah-daaaaah! *bonk!* *thud!*
No unifying theme this time, since I'm lazy and uninspired and just mining some of my vast untyped-up-yet backlog. I'll try to add a few pictures and trailers to spice it up.
Aztec Mummy, The (B&W, 1957) aka La Momia Azteca, Attack of the Aztec Mummy A kinda-goofy professor tests his reincarnation theories by using a hypno-wheel to return a girl to her past life as an Aztec princess, where she got involved in a forbidden romance with a warrior named Popoca. As punishment they made him drink a sacred elixer and then buried him alive and sacrificed his girlfriend in a tiresome ritual that seems to be endless! To prove that it was an actual past-life memory and not just a hypnotized fantasy, they have to go to the tomb and find artifacts that appeared in the memory. For some reason, an arch-criminal called The Bat follows them there. They search out the tomb and finally (and I do mean finally, since she shows up in about the last 15 minutes of an 80 minute film) Popoca the Mummy emerges and menaces sleeping children and carries off women. He's pretty creepy, but he's photographed so dark you can barely see him, and you spend a certain amount of time staring at a black screen when he's around. This Mexican monster flick should have been great, but the pacing is leaden (slowed down even more by the utterly-dispensable "Bat" subplot) and it doesn’t deliver enough mummy-attack time to reward your patience.
Boys Next Door, The (C, 1985) aka Big Shots, Blind Rage, Death Takes A Holiday, No Apparent Motive. Bo (Charlie Sheen) and Roy (Maxwell Caulfield) are a couple of high school jerks who've just graduated and are headed for a lifetime of factory work, which they're not happy about. Roy, in particular, isn't happy about much of anything; he tells Bo that he has "bad stuff inside of him" and is angry all the time. He proves it when he and Bo head off for L.A. for the weekend and their little party trip turns into a killing spree. They start with a gas station attendant, and that's got some slight motivation to it, but soon they're killing completely at random. Bo's kind of shocked by it, but he goes along with it while suprisingly-efficient cops try to track them down. This movie is better than you'd think and came from director Penelope Spheeris's good period, when she was making angry, alienation films and working through her hellish James Elroy-esque adolescence. Then Wayne's World came along and fucked it all up, but, hey, a lady's gotta make a living. Anyway, this is a nicely done American nightmare with believable performances by Sheen and Caulfield. Even if you don't like them, it's worth watching just for the badass Plymouth Roadrunner they're driving.
Gang War (B&W, 1940) aka Crime Street. All-black-cast "race film" take on the old 30’s gangster flicks plays kind of like a rough no-budget version of Scarface. A light-skinned hoodlum named Meade takes over the Harlem rackets through brute force, killing off or intimidating all the competition. He starts by killing off the town’s top crime boss, and then he and his men start forcing all the juke joints to use his jukeboxes instead of his rivals (apparently those were really lucrative back then). While his crew does a hostile takeover of the Harlem underworld, Meade tries to win over a rival’s girlfriend; oddly, his ruthlessness doesn’t extend to his love life, because he plays Scrabble with his girl and kisses her like a third-grader! These movies tend to require music almost as much as Bollywood movies do, so there’s an overlong nightclub scene and even a weird bit where rival gangsters force Meade’s girlfriend to sing to him over the phone to keep him busy while they kill one of his men (named “Slickum.”) This causes more violence, and matters come to a head. It’s technically crude, with a bad over-reliance on newspaper headline montages and multilayered images, but it’s also fast-moving and has more shootings than most Cagney films. There are also some pretty good big-old car and motorcycle chases (watch close to see a motorcycle cop dump his bike on a wet street!). Cheap, rough, and derivative, but still good enough to deserve a reputation. Check it out.
Love From A Stranger (B&W, 1937) aka A Night of Terror. Carol wins a lottery and her boyfriend doesn’t accept her good fortune very well, so she dumps him and marries a suave new guy, Gerald (Basil Rathbone). He acts devoted to her, but reacts with rage if anyone goes into the cellar, where he spends a lot of time locked away, secretly developing photos and then crazily destroying them. He has violent outbursts and makes weird accusations, and it soon becomes clear that he’s not only a madman but a serial killer who’s obsessed with being able to “at one moment hold someone in your arms at the next to hold some thing!” Basil goes all out and his unhinged performance is scary; all his slick and well-mannered portrayals of Sherlock Holmes have not prepared you for the screaming batshit rage he unleashes here, which is especially shocking since the film has a refined British tone otherwise. Based on an Agatha Christie novel.
Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave, The (C, 1971) aka Lo Notte Che Evelyn Usci Dalla Tomba, The Night She Arose From The Tomb, The Night Evelyn Left the Tomb. The all-time classic title (with the all-time classic poster depicting a skull-faced woman in a nightgown holding up a severed head under the legend “THE WORMS ARE WAITING!” - when I was a grad student the guy I shared an office with had an original of this poster hung up on our cubicle wall, which was a great source of pride for us) isn’t quite backed up by the movie itself... but then what could live up to that hype? Anthony Steffan (The Stranger’s Gundown) is a demented pervert named Alan who deals with being cuckolded by his late wife by bringing home redheads, dressing them in thigh-high boots, and whipping them... and, apparently, murdering them. Threatened with being committed, Alan tries to cure himself by getting married... but that doesn’t help. In fact, it seems as though his late wife Evelyn has returned from the grave and is stalking Alan. A few killings are happening, too (a guy gets snakebit, a woman is eaten by foxes). Is the supernatural at work, or some sinister human plot? This giallo ends up Shakespeare style with the set covered by dead cast members, but there are only a couple of gory instances, making up for it with a little nudity, including the eerily-hot Ericka Blanc doing a strip-tease in a coffin. To see any of this you’ll need the NoShame uncut DVDE, since the public domain versions (which are so numerous as to be almost inescapable) tend to be cut.
Northville Cemetery Massacre (C, 1976) aka Northfield Cemetery Massacre, Freedom R.I.P., Harley's Angels You'd think this was a horror movie with that title, but instead it's one of the best biker flicks ever made. A motorcycle gang (played by the Scorpions of Detroit) start getting hassled by cops almost as soon as the opening credits are done. They get thrown in jail for not wearing helmets (which is apparently a huge crime, 'cuz the cops even wear helmets to drive their car), get run through a car wash, and have a wedding... which also gets hassled by cops. One of the deputies rapes one of the girls and blames the bikers for it. Her dad is hellbent on revenge, and the biker-hating rapist cop instigates some vigilante action and gathers a group of gun nuts to hunt down the gang and kill them all. At first the gang thinks a rival gang is doing the shooting and almost starts a war, but the vigilantes tip their hand by opening fire on the rival gang, too, and a lot of biker funerals start happening (which the cops also hassle). The vigilantes attack a funeral, but now the bikers are armed, too, and you have the titular massacre. The gunfights are Peckinpah Wild Bunch taken to the next level, complete with some amazingly well-choreographed gun shots and the best blood squibs ever (which they accomplished by using squibs in the guns, too, to keep the timing perfect). Filmed cheap on 16mm, but looks great and is professionally-handled and captures bikers a lot better than any Hollywood flick. Shot in 1971 (as Freedom R.I.P.) but not released until 1976, when the biker movie thing was already pretty much over. It looks newer than that, somehow. Great stuff.
Taken (C, 2008) Liam Neeson is a government troubleshooter who retired because he wanted to spend more time with his daughter Kim, or at least as much as his embittered ex-wife will begrudge him. He reluctantly agrees to let Kim go to Europe for the summer, even though he’s an overprotective dad and thinks Europe is far too dangerous for a 17-year-old. Turns out father knows best, because she gets kidnapped by Albanian white slavers while she’s on the phone with him. Working from the tiniest of leads and fighting against a very small time-window before recovery would be impossible, he sets to work trying to track down the kidnappers so he can kill them all and get his daughter back. The man’s driven, smart, resourceful, and capable of some pretty impressive and ruthless violence, and he’s quickly turning the slagheaps of Paris upside down and giving them a good shake. It’s always good to see an action film that doesn’t require you to turn your brain off while watching, and this one has exceptionally good pacing and a confident performance from Neeson, and it never gets too implausible.
Uninvited (C, 2003) aka 4 Inyong Shiktak Quiet, slowly-paced Korean horror about a lonely man who’s haunted by two little dead girls he saw on the subway; their mother had poisoned them and left them on the train, and he didn’t realize they were dead until he saw it later on the news. They show up at his kitchen table and it understandably freaks him out. While helping a narcoleptic woman who had a fainting spell, he discovers that she, too, can see the dead girls, and while asking her about it, he learns that she’s haunted by a few things of her own, such as the idea that she saw a woman’s eyes as she flew past her window during a suicide leap. The story is a little confusing (as most recent Asian horror tends to be) and is almost too slow-moving (I had to watch this in several installments because I kept falling asleep), and it’s creepy but not very scary (although scenes of a baby dropped off a balcony and a child being run over by a truck are pretty shocking). It’s not essential as horror, but it is beautiful-looking and does have a sad, disquieting cumulative effect, if you’re patient.
Velvet Vampire, The (C, 1971) aka Cemetery Girls, The Devil Is A Woman, The Waking Hour, Through The Looking Glass. A free-spirited young couple, Lee and Susan, meet a seductive (and pretentious as hell) woman at an art gallery and go to visit her at her home in the desert. The woman (Celeste Yarnall, who could be Lynda Carter’s twin sister) is named Diane LeFanu (in obvious homage to Sheridan LeFanu, who wrote “Carmilla”) and she’s a vampire (even though she can walk around in daylight). She and her male servant feed on some of the locals (like a dune buggy mechanic and his girlfriend) and eat bits of raw liver, but only has sex with her guests (or watches them have sex through a two-way mirror). But then Diane’s metabolism kicks in, making her more bloodthirsty, and even our not-very-bright swingers start catching on that there’s something wrong with her and they want to leave... but Diane wants them to stay, one way or another. Fairly standard vampire tale perked up by eroticism (the women here are all really pretty) and some style (including weird dreams of beds in the desert). There are moments of creepiness but overall the pace is a little too slow.
Zorro’s Black Whip (B&W, 1944) 12-chapter Republic serial has nothing to do with the Zorro character beyond the fact that the heroine (that’s right, heroine) dresses a little like him. An evil crime boss named Hammond tries to stop Idaho from gaining statehood, because then federal marshals could stop his gang. A masked hero called The Black Whip fights him vigilante-style, but he’s killed in the first chapter. His sister (smokin’ hot Linda Stirling) assumes his identity; how she has the same riding/shooting/brawling/bullwhip skills isn’t clear, and as good as she looks in all black, it’s a shame to put a mask over that gorgeous face. When she’s not going mano-a-mano physically, she’s battling corruption in her day job as a newspaper editor. When she’s not fighting, one of her male associates is, so there’s constant (if somewhat repetitive) action. Cliffhangers usually involve explosions or falls off of cliffs, and one really scary one involving a pitchfork. The stuntwork is better than the acting, or the scriptwriting for that matter, but it’s still entertaining stuff, and any serial with Linda Stirling is irresistible (even though you know that most of the time you’re seeing “the Whip” it’s just a small stuntman in the costume). Strangely for a Western, there’s a lot of use of telephones; I guess Idaho had phones before they had statehood. Lots of furniture-damaging fistfights; if you see any kind of railing in a room, you can bet it’s going to end up trashed.
(the following picture is also of Linda Stirling, but from another serial, The Tiger Woman. I love the very patient "Okay, I'm wearing a kitty-cat-head hat, but, what the hell, it's a living" look on her face:
Tortoise - via Pitchfork's website - unveils the first video, "Prepare Your Coffin," from the upcoming full-length release Beacons of Ancestorship. Artsy bastards...
Less than four minutes of your life, with black + white filmij and neo-Morricone/electric Miles sound; Tortoise puts the 'mental' in 'instrumental'...
If the embed window above does not work (which is likely since the fuckin' HTML code I used is utterly changed once added to the blog... WTF???)...
For about a year or so, the online site where I buy most of my DVD's and CD's has been doing something that I think is genius marketing. It's called the "Daily Deep Deal," and they basically take some junk of questionable appeal that they found in a warehouse somewhere, knock the price down, and make fun of it (and themselves) in sort of a Mad Magazine style. The concept is explained here (seriously, go read that, it's freakin' hilarious!)
This concept works pretty well, because even though I have yet to buy any of their "Deep Deal" items (which tend to be things like hoochie-girl refrigerator magnets, Kleenex dispensers shaped like soccer balls, volleyball player action figures, Steve Irwin in a tube with rubber 'gators, bad board games, etc.) I've occasionally noticed sales on DVDs or what-not while I'm checking their site just to see what funny thing they're mocking that day.
Today, they continued with the "choking hazard" running gag (no pun intended, or, hey, what the hell, pun intended, since it's funny, damnit!) and added it to the description of a "saving up for a pair of jeans piggy bank":
Anyway, I'm not really trying to shill for 'em (although I can vouch for 'em - I've ordered from 'em almost weekly for a decade or so and never had any problems) but I thought that shit was so funny I had to pass it along... :)
Lots of throbby bass, weird keyboard bits, cool over-the-top effects (I've always been a sucker for a ring modulator...), dreamy blisst-out vocals... this is the band I always played for customers who wanted a recommendation + referenced Portishead or Massive Attack...
Sure, there's none of that dancebeat happening, but beyond beat is that lush, trippy vibe + turning someone on to a really cool (at the time kinda) underground band is always preferable to hocking the same ol' schlock alla time. And, of course, indie-rockers into My Bloody Valentine or Sonic Youth + looking for something different would get steered toward Jessamine, as well as Bardo Pond, Labradford, TFUL282 and (cuz I love em soooo much + they're sooo damn good) Tortoise.
Jessamine's line-up was:
Rex Ritter - guitar/vox
Dawn Smithson - bass/vox
Andy Brown - keys
Michael Faeth - drums
Discography:
Jessamine (Kranky) 1994
The Long Arm of Coincidence (Kranky) 1996
Don't Stay Too Long (Kranky) 1998
(singles compilation) Another Fictionalized History (Histrionic) 1997
(with Spectrum) A Pox On You (Space Age Recordings) 1996
(with Experimental Audio Research) Living Sound (Histrionic) 1999
Post-Jessamine, Rex Ritter + Andy Brown went on to further sonic experimentations with Fontanelle. Ritter has also been involved in post-metal drone-masters Sunn O))) - whose newest release Monoliths + Dimensions is fookin' excellent!
"Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."
Another band that kicks my ass... JESSAMINE!
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