Reissues: Roy Harper, Songs of Love and Loss
Listened to a lot: Kurt Vile, Smoke Ring For My Halo
Concert: Josh T. Pearson at Union Chapel in London on May 11
Movies: Benda Bilili! (watched on the tour bus), Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World (1937), and The Monk with Vincent Cassel
DVD: Brimstone and Treacle (the BBC TV version, not the Sting film!)
Film festivals: Screening of Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend at the BFI on December 9
Books: Oliver Twist, started reading Michael Horovitz
Art: Grayson Perry, “The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman” at The British Museum
Comic books: Anything by Alan Moore
Favorite cities: Dresden, Berlin, and started to enjoy London
Coolest thing found at a vintage or thrift store: A WWI officer’s compass
Best restaurant: The Golden Dragon in London’s Chinatown
Erland and The Carnival‘s latest album, Nightingale, was released on March 29. The band will be playing in Vienna at The Maifield Derby Festival on May 19 and again at The Orange Blossom Festival on May 26. For more on the band, please check out their website, Facebook, and Twitter.
The Stooges are legendary, but that word implies events from long ago, where the facts are less important than romantic myths. At this point in time, Iggy Pop is famous, while The Stooges have always been more infamous than anything else. But even if your mom has heard of Iggy Pop, she may not know much about The Stooges. Brett Callwood’s book, Head On, seeks to enlighten those who don’t know much about the untold history of this essential and influential Detroit band who came into being well before the so-called punk movement of the mid-1970s.
By Lisa Anderson
I recently re-read The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s novel about a beautiful but debauched young man whose enchanted portrait takes the brunt of both his years and his misdeeds. Soon afterwards, I got together with a group of fellow horror fans and watched two film adaptations: the1945 Albert Lewin version with Hurt Hatfield in the title role, and the 2009 direct-to-video version with Ben Barnes starring as Dorian. Not surprising in light of the time between them, both movies approach the source material in very different ways. Each deviates from the novel in different ways, and has its own strengths and weaknesses. The variations between the book and each film can be illustrated by discussion the tone of the films, and two pivotal incidents in the story.
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By Lisa Anderson
With electronic books pulling ahead of paper books in popularity, self-publishing is getting easier and easier. One of the pioneers on this new frontier is Dark Horse comics editor and Popshifter contributor Jemiah Jefferson. Jemiah and I met up over IM to discuss her recently self-published novel, Mixtape for the Apocalypse, as well as her previous work.
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By Danny R. Phillips
Halloween, for as long as I can remember, has been my favorite holiday. Christmas is too shiny, Thanksgiving is too anxiety fueled (I come from a large, loud family), and Valentine’s Day is a joke. But Halloween? That’s one I could get behind.
The darkness, the pranks, the unlimited imagination, the scary movies on TV, the candy . . . the perfect holiday. So, if you have the same feelings about the darkest night of celebration, then Halloween Nation: Behind The Scenes of America’s Fright Night is for you.
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As a film fan, I’m an unabashed lover of the 1970s. In the introduction to Horror Films of the 1970s, film and television critic John Kenneth Muir describes why in two words: “savage cinema.” There truly was something different about films of that decade, and horror films of the ’70s are no exception. In fact, sometimes lines between horror and non-horror were blurred so successfully that it’s difficult to define the exact genres of films like Deliverance or Straw Dogs, both of which are discussed in Muir’s book.
Part of what makes the “savage cinema” so unique and thrilling, claims Muir, is that it presented viewers with a universe in which there were no answers. Yet, he quotes documentary filmmaker Adam Simon, who says that horror can be “open to the traumas of the world” in a way which will “naturally convey truths.” This nexus between no answers and universal truths is precisely why horror films of the 1970s are so unique and so thrilling.
By AJ Wood
On a recent warm summer night I was re-reading my favorite Stephen King novel, Cujo, by the open window. Just as King was describing how the foamy-mouthed mangy dog was munching into a man’s throat with quite serious OM NOM NOM gusto, my cat decided to come to the window and play a little joke on me.
“Meow?” he said in his meanest, growlingest voice (at least as I heard it).
“AHHHHHHH!” I replied, my body jolting, nearly tossing my e-book across the room.
Two important things I learned that evening: 1) the same stuff I use to clean up the cat’s pee works well at cleaning up my own accidents and 2) exactly what it is about Cujo that really scares the bejeezus out of me.
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By Paul Casey
“It. Is. Later. Than. You. Think. Lights Out brings you stories of the supernatural and the supernormal, dramatizing the fantasies and the mysteries of the unknown. We tell you this frankly. So if you wish to avoid the excitement and tension of these imaginative plays, we urge you, calmly, but sincerely to turn off your radio, now. And now, Lights Out, everybody.”
By Kai Shuart
So, I’m just going to get down to the nitty-gritty: I love me some vampires. They’re violent, they’re sexy, and they’re transgressors of any religious, sexual, or social mores a mortal can think up. And they have the power to give that power to anyone they see fit.
But I am a vampire snob. Don’t come across my way with any of that Stephenie Meyer weak sauce; give me Eli from Let The Right One In, Anne Rice’s Lestat, Cassidy from The Preacher comics, Buffy’s Dru or Spike, or even Barnabas Collins from Dark Shadows (a callous hedonist turned vicious killer vampire turned tortured hero . . . yeeeah, with all due respect to Joss Whedon, the archetype didn’t start with a certain billowy-coated King of Pain). To me, a vampire is first and foremost a killer, and a gleeful one at that. Well, we should all take pride in our work . . .
I couldn’t help but wonder, though: why does each successive interpretation of what a vampire is and what a vampire does seem so tame compared to the early pop culture incarnations set forth by people like Bram Stoker and F.W. Murnau? This is a monster whose father was Vlad the Impaler, one of the bloodiest, most sadistic dictators who ever walked the face of the Earth; and whose mother was Elizabeth Bathory, a woman who threw orgies and bathed in virgin’s blood because she believed it kept her youthful. Now they sparkle? All snark aside, I had to ask how this shift took place.
Upon consideration, I think part of this comes from a very human need to make friends with what scares us. The thinking goes that if we somehow forge a connection with the monsters (both literal and figurative) that keep us awake at night, the monsters will eventually overcome their natures and spare our lives. This is exactly how the romances play out in modern vampire lore: Twilight’s Edward can smell Bella’s blood a mile away, but doesn’t do the deed because he loves her so much. (This is me. Retching.) In True Blood, there’s something in Sookie Stackhouse’s blood that drives vampires crazy, but Bill Compton protects her from some of his more primal cohorts. To be fair, there’s a lot of this dynamic between Oskar and Eli in the book Let Me In, but at least there’s a question of whether protecting Oskar wasn’t just a by-product of Eli procuring a meal.
The fact that vampires have grown significantly less vicious and amoral as time has gone on could also be because it plays into the rather marketable notion that a good woman can reform a bad boy. Even though Buffy the Vampire Slayer has many, many positive points, even that great show is guilty of this. In the third season, Angel is somehow brought back from the hell dimension to which Buffy sent him after his reversion to his evil Angelus form. In this form, he psychologically tortured Buffy through attacking—and in the case of Jenny Calendar, killing—Buffy’s allies.
After Angel’s return, Buffy finds him in an extremely feral state. But what does our heroine do? Instead of thinking that maybe she was a bit justified in killing her former lover and sending him to hell, she is convinced that the Angel she loved is still in there somewhere. Because of this, she makes it her mission to tame him through regular visits during which she feeds him, reads to him, and does Tai Chi with him.
A final reason for these shifting interpretations of vampires could be the political climate. The massively popular Twilight series was first published during the Bush administration, a period in which everything seemed oriented towards conventional sexual mores. Sure enough, Bella and Edward don’t have sex at all until they’re lawfully wed.
By contrast, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire was released in 1976, within a much more liberal environment that was likely influenced by the attitudes of the previous decade. This could account in some small part for the fact that a story that features Lestat, a sybaritic, gleeful killer vampire who makes no bones about how much he enjoys being a vampire, sold so well. Also, Rice was much less squeamish about the homoerotic elements of her story. For example, as melancholy as he is, Louis finds a “companion” in fellow vampire Armand. It’s not explicitly stated that the two are lovers, but there is certainly ample room for that interpretation.
Regardless of whether these shifts have come about due to political climate, human nature, or the marketing of gendered relationship roles, one thing is for certain: I will keep taking my vampires straight up. Fortunately for me and other like-minded individuals, a much more animalistic interpretation of the vampire has recently been coming into prominence, quite possibly in response to the vampire’s role as the dark, sexy, forbidding romantic figure.
Vampires in the film and comic 30 Days of Night, with their ghostly faces and mouths full of razor-sharp teeth, have a purely animal instinct to kill rather than seduce their prey, and they certainly don’t worry about how killing people affects the state of their immortal soul. Proving that everything comes full circle, this seems to be reverting to the much earlier pop culture incarnations of vampires, borrowing the gnarled claws and batlike visage from Murnau’s Nosferatu.
Will this interpretation eventually overtake its sparkly, more tween-friendly counterpart? Time will tell, but I for one really hope so . . .
“There are only two things I love in this world: everybody, and television.”
—Kenneth the Page on 30 Rock“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
—The Bhagavad Gita, as quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer
TV is bad for you, right?