Much Love for Guy Maddin.

Unconventional stylist.

Visual historian.

Gifted filmmaker.

Master of the homoerotic display.


Guy Maddin is all of these things. I'm just coming off the high of interviewing him, and I feel practically like a giggling schoolgirl. The interview will follow sometime this weekend (tonight's the Dirty-Third Birthday Party) both in print and audio form. Just a glorious experience, truly.

So I read this: The Midnight Hour by Donald Bacon.

This book is kind of a mess. It's pretty much equally split between ancient evil/unspeakable pagan rite horror, reincarnated woman-in-jeopardy suspense, and Stokerian boxed narrative, with a leavening patina of graphic sex that feels out of place compared to the rest of the book.

Caroline Enders is an up-and-coming banker in New York City who, despite still attending banking classes, is finally making enough to get a place of her own and move out from the walk-up she's been sharing with her longtime friend Beth (and, more recently aplpha male Harry, the kind of brusque male presence who you know will eventually get hammered and honed down into the principal love interest).

Unfortunately for Caroline, she gets the apartment that used to belong to insane art historian Mondrian de Kuyperdahl, whose been the keeper of an ancient pre-Druidic relic that is the only thing keeping a demonic 'messenger' (the book's terminology) from decapitating the world and tormenting their souls forever while their heads are stored in an ominous wooden cabinet.

We've got a human follower of the messenger whom we know is evil because he messes up library books, lots of excerpts from de Kuyperdahl's diaries, which provide all the context, important information, and sex that we get in the story, and a couple of lengthy drives upstate to either get away from or sew the seeds of evil. Unfortunately, this has an inconsistent worldview and the most anticlimactic ending I've encountered in a while.

If you're at all into 80s-career-feminist horror or Druidic/Celtic history/mythology, there are some interesting moments within. But this isn't essential reading, and even as a devotee of 80s/90s mass-market horror paperbacks, I'd have to call this effort middling. The cover looks awesome, though.

At the movies: Pineapple Express

Director David Gordon Green has been making great films since his 2000 debut George Washington, and he’s been crafting a thoughtful and distinctive career making smaller, contemplative films about American lives that we don’t often see. So it’s intriguing to see what happens when he, having already hewn out a distinctive approach to character and visual mood, joins forces with the armies of current comedy godhead Judd Apatow. The end result is a scruffy and beautiful stoner amble through genres past, capable of combining bleary-eyed 70s guffaws with car-chasing, property-exploding 80s-styled thrills.

It’s a remarkable achievement as a film, if for nothing else than letting James Franco be funny again. Everything since Freaks and Geeks has found our man James stuck in brooding mode (one of the pleasures of the overly-maligned Spiderman 3 being Franco’s turn during Harry Osborne’s goofy amnesiac scenes), so to find him let loose with comedic gold like drug dealer/future civil engineer Saul Silver is pure pleasure. Star Seth Rogen gets to work his flusterable everydude thing, and that’s all well and good, but the film belongs to Franco and costar Danny McBride. As Red, a middleman who ties Saul to shot caller/murderer Ted Jones (Gary Cole, looking like he’s ready to file some TPS reports on the world’s ass), McBride hearkens back to his bigscreen debut (as Bust-Ass in Green’s 2001 masterpiece All The Real Girls) and banishes all memory of his near-unwatchable ‘comedy’ The Foot Fist Way from earlier this summer.


Pineapple Express is literally the specific strain of marijuana that ties process server Dale Denton (Rogen) to the scene of a murder. The plot, courtesy of Rogen and writing partner Evan Goldberg (who wrote last year’s Superbad) is a meandering thing that spans seventy or so years, a lazy-assed conspiracy, and a small-scale drug war, but one that nevertheless ranks with 2003’s Shaun of the Dead in its insights into the vicissitudes of male friendships. The ace in the hole with this film, though, is the visual grace that Green and his ace cinematographer Tim Orr bring to the proceedings- this is easily the best-looking film that has ever emerged from Apatow Productions. Here’s to more fruitful collaborations along this line, and much respect to all involved parties for maintaining their respective integrities.

"All I wanna do..."

Well, this is a House of Leaves of links, but it's provocative, fascinating, informative, and stuffed to the gills with much of what makes modern media writing fascinating. Make sure to explore the associated and featured links (especially the Christgau piece). Being informed is a good thing.

So I read this: Watchmen by Moore and Gibbons

Pretty much everything you've heard is true. This really is the grandaddy of the postmodern comic book. It haunts me to no end that this came out back when I was a serious comic reader and collector and it completely passed me by. Though, truthfully, a lot of Alan Moore's more meta conceits would have gone right over my head. Certainly this was aiming higher than anything else at the time, but it still took Elektra: Assassin to bring me into the world of adult comix, and I still stand by that. You can take Frank Miller's hypersexed reactionary fever dreams of statuesque assassins and the grotesque violence they deal and respond to that from the perspective of a twelve year-old, which I was. But I worked my way through its fragmented and experimental narrative and found it rewarding. I would probably not have been able to appreciate anything about Watchmen had I been reading it back in '86-'87.

But I will say this, and it's the damned truth; Dave Gibbons' art is kind of boring. Perhaps that is intentional- a way to get some of the more baroque narrative touches across without triggering to many warning lights until Moore's ideas get their hooks into the soft grey matter. But if you could have had Moore working with Bill Sienkiewicz on Watchmen- holy shit. I mean, that would have been a work of art that society couldn't withstand. It would have been amazing.

But Watchmen on its own is something unique and well-worth exploring. The forthcoming (if you can call March of next year forthcoming) movie adaptation by Zack (Dawn of the Dead remake "yay," 300 "boo") Snyder has got interest in the title up, which is good. But it's not a particularly cinematic work, and I don't think that this movie will work. But it's good to have some of the concepts in Watchmen resonating throughout global culture.

This is rumor control. Here are the facts.

I have not had a regular internet connection for two weeks now. It is annoying as hell, and I am trying to get everything in order and taken care of and get some stable wireless service in my life.

I'm looking into trying to shirk the yoke of Comcast and its hegemonic tendrils, so I'm looking at alternatives.

I will do my damnedest to keep things update and going strong, but all I ask of y'all is some patience.

It will be good. Better, even.

So I read this: Whores of Lost Atlantis by Charles Busch.

An interesting and gossipy roman a clef from drag diva Busch, fictionalizing the circumstances behind his 80s-Off Broadway smash Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. Fans of underground theatre and delicious dialogue should delight in this offering, even if it at times seems a little too glowing with regards to its author/subject.

Ideally, I'd love for someone to lay out who everyone's real-life counterpart is in the story, because there are some juicy tidbits that are crying out for an expose of some sort. But still, this was a pleasant read for a sweltering summer.