Day: December 10, 2008

Wednesday various

  • Scott Tobias on J-horror ghosts:

    There’s no particular menace to these specters — I recall Kurosawa himself, in a Q&A following a screening of his fine 2000 thriller Séance, joking that ghosts in Japanese horror films “don’t do anything” — but their presence is an unnerving suggestion of death itself, specifically that unholy transitional space between the human world and the afterlife. These aren’t the usual hauntings, where spooks are looking to settle a piece of unfinished business; instead, they’re pitiable folks who are now stuck, perhaps permanently, in one fixed place, from which they can never break free. To me, that prospect is a heck of a lot scarier.

    The original Pulse, by the way, is often incredibly frightening. Tobias’ criticisms of the film — which include a whole lot of spoilers — aren’t completely off, but I definitely recommend it.

  • Well here’s something you don’t read every day: “…even a horny Sasquatch has an impeccable sense of orgy etiquette.” Or maybe you do, I don’t know. Me, I read it here, in a write-up of the annual Texas Bigfoot Conference. [via]

  • Starting next fall, Boston college will stop offering its students e-mail accounts, instead offering a address and forwarding service to the e-mail provider of their choice. Reading the comments to that Chronicle of Higher Education article, I gather this is either long overdue or the worst idea ever. [via]

  • Over at Desuko Movie Spot, Eric B. has posted a really useful index for browsing his older movie reviews. As he writes, “These 166 films represent 93 years of movie history, from 1915 to 2008,” and he always has something interesting to say about them.

  • There is, in fact, a giant black hole at the center of our galaxy:

    According to Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit.

    That’s sort of equal parts terrifying and beautiful. [via]

  • “Rasta Irish meth-heads doing parkour”? I almost want to see the new Punisher movie now!

Baby this town rips the bones from your back

The kinder, gentler, less relevant Bruce Springsteen? Via Gerry Canavan:

Right now, though, the streets aren’t burning. The night isn’t lonely. It isn’t some infested summer in a dead man’s town with nothing but boring stories of glory days. A bright new day is percolating across the land. What will Bruce do for material?

It’s not an invalid argument. Although it may seem counter-intuitive, boom times don’t necessarily produce great art, whereas oppressive regimes often do. And while it’s too soon to call the Obama presidency a boom time, and it might — might — be a stretch to call the last eight years of Bush an oppressive regime, there’s evidence to suggest that happiness maybe isn’t always great for great art.

But, y’know, if the price of getting rid of George W. Bush and turning this country around is a mediocre album or two from Bruce Springsteen, I’ll gladly pay that price.

It’s like what Patton Oswalt says:

I’ll happily give back the 15 minutes of “our president’s a sociopath who can’t speak and believes in angels” material I wrote if we WEREN’T TORTURING PEOPLE ANYMORE. I know everyone thinks Bush was some sort of comedic Everlasting Gobstopper but believe me, history’s going to look at these last eight years and think, “I don’t know if teetering that close to the brink was worth the funny YouTube impressions.”

That’s one way of putting it

Peter David on the current season of Heroes:

It’s like someone poured both previous seasons into a blender, started it up, yanked the top off, and the resultant explosion all over the ceiling is what we’re seeing.

Every time I read something new about the series, I’m happy again that I gave up on it months ago. I think it used up whatever limited storytelling chops it really had in the first couple (if not the very first) seasons.

Writerly advice

From today’s Writer’s Almanac:

[William Faulkner] said, “The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”