"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
Some links:
On the IMDB, Ed Champion discovers a movie called Blood Car:
In the near future gas prices have reached astronomical highs nearing $40 a gallon. One man, Archie Andrews, an environmentalist elementary school teacher, is trying to discover an alternate fuel source. While experimenting with wheat grass, Archie accidentally stumbles upon a solution. That solution turns out to be blood. HUMAN BLOOD!
Champion wonders if the film will be pointed satire or just cheesy horror. While, unlike him, I’m not sure I’d want to see it either way, I think I’d be more interested in the cheesy horror version. Not as a filmgoing experience necessarily — there the satire would probably be more interesting — but simply as cultural artifact. The idea that we may have entered a period when $40/gallon gas seems like such little exaggeration, that it doesn’t feel like satire — I find that idea very interesting. Depressing as all get out, sure, but still interesting.
[I]t’s worth remembering that totalitarianism doesn’t have to look like we imagine it. In dictatorships people eat at restaurants and get married and more or less get on with their lives. In fact, the only fundamental difference between a dictatorship and a democracy is that in a dictatorship leaders take power, and in a democracy leaders have to ask for it.
First off, the idea that superhero comics should reflect the news headlines is not one I tend to subscribe to. I’ve always preferred using my comics to talk about the world around me in the language of symbolism and metaphor and I’m more interested in telling stories about how people behave in bizarre situations than I am in commenting on current events…
…the idea here is not to soften or emotionally reset Batman as an exercise in nostalgia but to make him more real and relatable, while at the same time offering some rationale for his complex multi-faceted personality….So, while I won’t pretend we all live on Sunnybrook Farm, I don’t think its appropriate – particularly in trying times – to present our fictional heroes as unsmiling vengeance machines. I’d rather Batman embodied the best that secular humanism has to offer – a sour-faced, sexually-repressed, humorless, uptight, angry, and all-round grim ‘n’ gritty Batman would be more likely to join the Taliban surely?
“You do the best you can, you fight that technology in all kinds of ways, but I don’t know anybody who’s made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really. You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static. Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded ’em. CDs are small. There’s no stature to it. I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like, ‘Everybody’s gettin’ music for free.’ I was like, ‘Well, why not? It ain’t worth nothing anyway.'”
1 Via Bookslut
2 Via Backwards City
3 Via Ed Champion
So there’s this:
You guess the lyrics. I say, “Good job!” You beam and blush with unconcealed pride. “There’s some froods who really know their music,” think everyone else. Next week the cycle begins anew. It’s guaranteed fun! Best of luck.
Last week’s answers are here.
Oh cool. Michael Chabon’s new book comes out in May.