Month: June 2002

It’s been weeks since I updated the short movie reviews in the sidebar — which would be fine if I hadn’t seen any movies, but that’s most definitely not the case. If you’re even remotely interested in what I have to think, the reviews have finally been updated.

And speaking of films, my friend Brad, without whom I don’t think the Penn State Monty Python Society would have ever performed publicly or recorded a CD — that’s right, blame him for my penis song — is an independent filmmaker with two short films available for download. Neat.

I’ve always thought that Salon’s “Masterpiece” section was a little silly and that lately they’ve been…well, kind of reaching with some of their choices. I mean, really, Pac-Man?

But in those secretly uneasy times, Pac-Man was one of the signposts that suggested that the future might be OK, that circuitry could provide the good spirits, character and taste that so much of contemporary culture only pretended to have. We pumped in the quarters and bought the trading cards and lunchboxes and sleeping bags because that lovable yellow guy promised a world where even the lamest kids could get past that first maze, where the ghosts weren’t scary and where, even when you died, you went out with a funny noise.

Uh huh. I have one question then: is anything Salon finds cool not a masterpiece?

There’s a moderately interesting discussion about H.P. Lovecraft going on over at Metafilter, including mention of a unidentified underwater sound that researchers have nicknamed “Bloop” (listen here) and that some people joke could be Cthulhu. Looking for something to add to the discussion, I came across this interesting excerpt from a Salon interview with Stephen King:

Does your evocation of the Maine landscape owe anything to the fiction you read as a kid — H.P. Lovecraft in his books set in the woods of Massachusetts?

No, not really. I mean, it did at the time, when I was 13, 14, 15 — which I maintain is the perfect age to read Lovecraft. Lovecraft is the perfect fiction for people who are living in a state of sort of total sexual doubt, because the stories almost seem to me sort of Jungian in their imagery. They’re all about gigantic disembodied vaginas and things that have teeth. And that sense of the ancient New England landscape … very kindly, Lovecraft was a lot less interested in using the landscape as a place where reality was thin and sort of deserted in the New England community as he was in trying to express that kind of feeling of ancient life. So I had a tendency to copy that when I was a kid, and I think later on I just tried to go back and find a more realistic way to talk about the quality of that landscape. For instance, you know, when Lovecraft writes “The Dunwich Horror,” about Dunwich, Mass. I mean, in a way it’s a lot of idealized crap — he was a city boy. He didn’t live in the country. And what he knew about it he saw from the windows of buses going between Providence and New York City.

Well, apparently the Friday Five is back:

1. How often do you do laundry? When I start to run out of clean clothes. I sometimes think it would be simpler just to keep buying new socks.

2. What’s in a typical wash load? Typically, I mix clothes and detergent and water and let the machine take it from there. It’s more qualified than I am.

3. Front or top loader? Powder or liquid detergent? When will this inquisition end?! But seriously, top-loading washer because that’s what my apartment complex has. Liquid detergent because…um…well, just because.

4. Do you use fabric softener in the rinse cycle? That would require that I be in the laundry room when the rinse cycle starts, so no. I typically ignore my laundry until it’s done.

5. Dryer or clothesline? Dryer. Because I have no back yard and besides, what would you do if it rained?