Another late one, folks. Sorry about that. I could be incredibly boring and start telling you about the declining quality of plane wi-fi, but the fact is that I found another way to be boring yesterday. On a five-hour coast-to-coast flight, I read half of a book I need to finish for work (“Agents of Chaos”) and a third of a book I’m just tired of pretending now to have finished (“Dracula”). Doing that was more rewarding, in the moment, than muttering at a GoGo screen and muttering again when my seat-mates got up to use the restroom.
Boring end to a terrific week. I spent most of it in southern California, first trip back since my wife and I relocated. This trip, to cover the second Republican debate and the California GOP convention, overlapped completely with my birthday. Not an important birthday, no zero at the end, but I had an excuse to invite friends out and I used it, twice. On Tuesday, after landing at LAX, I drove to Vence and stopped at the Brig, a bar that some of my friends could walk to; one had brought along a former yogi who nobody else had met, but who had some fascinating detail to add to every story. Woodstock ‘99 came up — he’d been there! That level of raconteur.
The debate came Wednesday, and I drove the next day to Tim Heidecker’s podcast studio to record Office Hours, which is filmed live. That’s dangerous for a klutz. At the hour break, Vic Berger handed out two bags of exotic potato crips, chemically flavored to taste like squid and like flank steak. I struggled a bit to open the bag handed to me. I heard Megan Stalter urge me to give it to her, and heard Vic say “pop it,” and wouldn’t you know it, I popped the bag, exploding it, sending chips across my lap and the studio floor. Two consolations: It was funny, and I didn’t spill the chips that smelled like fish.
Vic and I reunited with more friends on Saturday, when my work was finished; we got dinner at Yangban then followed a friend to the gig he’d just come from, a Climate Fest at an open-air arts center. Between a stop-motion animation studio and a bus which I was told (and couldn’t confirm) had been used by Fergie on tour (which tour? Didn’t ask) was a dance floor; above the dance floor was a DJ stand where only French electro-pop got played.
I didn’t feel my age. That was the whole point. When it was over, I returned to a friend’s guest house and put one on of the euro-rock albums he’d left out for me to play on a Victrola. You need these kinds of days, in between the ones where you’re waiting for rich people in hotel ballrooms to finish eating so you can hear a senator biff his stump speech.
I listened more than I read on this trip, bringing too many books anyway. Let’s get started:
The Best Thing I Read: You just saw my disclaimer! I finished only the graphic novels I’d brought to California to give away. The first was “Hellblazer: Rake at the Gates of Hell,” one of the John Constantine collections by Garth Ennis that I’d bought on sale guessing that it’d be good. The other was (sigh) “Zombie Tales: Outbreak,” an anthology of short stories that landed in 2011, midway through the last zombie craze. No one could read all the undead content that slopped out in those years, and no one should.
However: One of my most unoriginal opinions is that the horror genre’s most fun to read in October. We observe Lindy traditions in this newsletter, and the Feast of Samhain happened in October; so does AMC FearFest. I don’t crave grim stuff most of the year, and I don’t eat candy anymore, so my seasonal perk is reading and watching horror and sounding fairly normal when I talk about it with other people.
Neither comic was a masterpiece. Sequential art is good for one type of scare — turning a page and seeing something sick, something that the artist had to suffer to make. Junji Ito is the master of this, delivering a melted face or a man twisted into a spiral shape or a broken body emerging from a hole when you flip over. This is a powerful technique.
But I find that art can make a story less creepy. The work of Josh Simmons is an exception, but inconsistent art wrecks a story for me; I enjoyed pieces of (again this title) “Zombie Tales,” like a story in which a helicopter co-pilot betrays his social darwinist sniper, but felt fine giving it away.
Then I read Stephen King’s “Night Shift” on Kindle, and got more dedicated to this month’s theme. If you grew up in the 80s and 90s, you could be familiar with King without reading, or watching, much that was good. “Children of the Corn,” which has produced more sequels than any other King property, is a poorly-acted movie with a goofball ending; “The Ledge” sticks with you if you snuck in a viewing of “Cat’s Eye,” but I remembered it being a little Tex Avery-ish, with a hooting villain playing pranks to force his captive off the building.
On paper, god, they’re fantastic stories. “Stephen King: Pretty good!” isn’t an interesting enough idea to hang a diary entry on, but in his 20s and 30s the man was just lousy with good ideas, and quick about getting to them. “Jerusalem’s Lot,” his version of an Marche/Lovecraft weird fiction, was the only bit that felt imitative, and it was supposed to be. A few pages later I was getting genuine dread from a pigeon (with “bright, hateful eyes”) pecking the ankle of a man who might fall off a ledge, from an amateurish Christ painting, from a satyr crawling behind a lawnmower and eating everything that pulped behind it.
I’m bouncing between some other short stories and another October project, “Dracula,” which I never got into as a kid but adore now; I’d forgotten how the whole thing is told in recovered letters, with a decent mix of styles, preventing the monotony you can get from extended Lovecraft exposure. Between that and a few things I need to read for work, that’s my month.
The Best Thing I Saw: Still on horror, bear with me. On Saturday, I had three free hours between the convention I was covering and a dinner with friends. I spent 67% of them watching shorts at Beyond Fest, a free horror/weird fiction festival at three L.A. theaters. By pure luck, just because it was the time I had free, I saw a set of body horror films capped off by “The Key,” an “okay, I GET IT” allegory about Israelis living on land they’d expelled Palestinians from.
[Spoilers! If you care.]
The body horror was more fun, with more range. “Eyestring” was the simplest, a trichophagia-gone-wrong story about a woman who cuts what seems to be a long hair out of her eye socket, then grows frantic as it comes right back. The “monster” is a long piece of thread — literally, and we see one dumped in a trash can, taken from a woman experiencing the same condition. But it was beautifully done, and my crowd of freaks who were hiding from a nice warm day to get grossed out really lost it during the shot of thread being pulled from the eye and getting thicker as it comes. Every other film had more going on, more traditional effects and objects rammed where they shouldn’t go; “Nosepicker” had a great climax, and a stellar performance from the mother of a catatonic, booger-eating problem child who never says a word, just looks at him with a mix of disappointment and dread. I walked away liking “The Third Ear” most, a story about a ne’er do well art model that plays with an old trope — an artist changing reality. This time, it’s a sort of bumbling (and unidentified) art student ruining the model’s life with his lousy anatomy work.
I have never had a bad time at a horror festival, and until now only had a bad time watching a shorts compilation. BeyondFest is a miracle. The Hal Hartley marathon can come later.
The Best Thing I Heard: Still on the classical kick, especially because it works so well with what I’m reading. You never go wrong when Solti’s conducting.