H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937): I gave Rhode Island's great contribution to world literature a whirl in either high school or college, and found him rather distasteful, wallowing in the kind of overwrought gloom I generally try and avoid in fiction, both in my own and others'. I think part of the problem was that I stated with "The Statement of Randolph Carter" (1919), a chilling little tale that nevertheless takes place in a graveyard, which I guess I thought was a silly, cliched idea until I started living across the street from one. I suspect this introduction threw off my reactions to his other stuff, in particular the now-superb novella At the Mountains of Madness (1931). There was also the cultish whiff about the man (hardly his fault, mainly due to the posthumous work of his collaborator August Derleth), like a darker Tolkien, that warned me away. Fortunately, that meant that I got to rediscover his stuff recently with very pleasant results. Lovecraft, now widely recognized as the greatest of American "horror" writers, wrote around sixty short stories and three novellas, just about all of which I've now read over the past couple of months. He was a central figure in the growth of what I used to call "speculative fiction" and what I now happily term "weird fiction," like most scholars (it sure sounds better), along with Britain's Lord Dunsany and the States' Robert E. Howard (of Conan fame) and Clark Ashton Smith, whose stories I've also been reading a lot lately.

 What I love most about Lovecraft is that he operated in an era before the rigid stratification of genre fiction (which, for the purposes of this discussion, means horror, fantasy, and science fiction) and wrote stories that could be placed in any of these categories, or in most cases, in all trhee. Since the early 1960s or so, most fantasy to my knowledge has been pretty much imitation Tolkien or Celtic mythology fan-fic, with not all that many writers going back to the period when one could ignore genre and write with a more fluid understanding of what was possible in stories. For my part, the chance discovery of Lin Carter's Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy (1973) at a used book sale several years ago was a major revelation in this regard. Carter's impassioned partisanship on behalf of pre-Tolkien authors like the great William Morris, Dunsany, Howard, Smith, and--especially--A. Merritt* opened my eyes to the possibilities in this kind of writing, one that pretty much bypassed the late-twentieth-century domination of genre literature and allowed greater latitude in subject and style.

As a result of all this, I was much more amenable to Lovecraft than I might have been before. I still have a hard time with some of his stuff, particularly the earlier stories he wrote when he was more under the influence of Dunsany, but that's probably because I've grown a little disenchanted with the kind of Dunsany in which Lovecraft was interested. Dunsany wrote some of the most dazzlingly baroque, enchantingly loquacious short stories ever, beginning in his early career with imaginary religious fables told in a mystical, poetic cadence (his 1905 The Gods of Pegana was probably the first instance of an invented religion for a fantastic world, a device that would later become pretty standard for most "fantasy" writers), but I've gotten rather bored with that sort of thing--it can be excessive--and greatly prefer his later, prosier, non-fantastic tales (his hilarious yarn "The Pirate of the Round Pond" beats anything by Tolkien for me). Lovecraft's 1927 novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath crowned and completed his Dunsany worship, although I found it much better going this time around (boring and incomprehensible when I first read it several years ago). Beginning around "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926), Lovecraft evolved an imaginary "religion" of his own, which wasn't based so much on actual gods (Lovecraft was a fervent materialist) but on powerful extraterrestrial and extra-dimensional beings masquerading as or mistaken for gods. The "mythos" has given rise to at least one popular role-playing game of the 80s and 90s and reams of imitative homages, and informed much of the rest of Lovecraft's fiction, including his superb short stories "The Colour Out of Space" (1927--Lovecraft considered this one his own personal favorite), "The Whisperer In Darkness" (1930), "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931), and "The Thing On the Doorstep" (1933), which combined traditional horror themes with more scientifically-based threats to create a memorable and hugely influential form of literary brew. While Lovecraft's ideas were fascinating and probably daunting for writers used to more orthodox forms of "supernatural horror" (M.R. James was no fan of Lovecraft's) as he put it himself in his informative and occasionally illuminating 1927 treatise Supernatural Horror In Literature, his main contribution lay in the establishment of a brooding and sinister mood, an area in which he matched and occasionally surpassed Poe, his putative idol. Lovecraft frequently reached too far in trying to set said mood (he was well-aware of this, too, as seen in his amusingly self-parodic 1922 story "The Hound"), but he always got the job done, and if you can't go overboard occasionally in weird fiction, then when is it ever possible?

Scott Smith--and Carter A. Smith, The Ruins (2006 and 2008): Scott Smith's novel fits well into the now-burgeoning "American tourists menaced by foreign things in general" sub-genre, with a cast of four attractive young collegians on vacation in Cancun who decide to investigate the recent disappearance of a casual acquaintance's brother (?). Their journey takes them into mainland Yucatan and a mysterious archeological site with a horrible secret. Once they're at the site, the locals won't let them leave... While the leads aren't really that sympathetic, their plight and increeasing paranoia is well-rendered, although the latter is done at such talky, excruciating length that it nearly neutralizes any pathos the reader might feel. It's competent enough, but I really couldn't understand what the big deal was, apart from an inventively grisly moment involving bodily fluids (yes, it's one of those). The reviews seemed to treat The Ruins as some kind of reinvention of the horror novel, when the Lost Patrol trope's old as the hills and the concept of its central threat has been well-plumbed in various ways by several writers, including John Wyndham and even yours truly (in a story I had in The First BHF Book of Horror Stories which I wrote back in 2004). In the end, The Ruins is a decent story, but the time Smith takes to tell it and the encrusted hype make it difficult to truly enjoy. Fortunately, Carter A. Smith's surprisingly not-bad movie manages a serviceable end-run around the novel's shortcomings, though the moral of the story seems to be in many ways "never go anywhere with anyone who looks and sounds like John Phillip Law." The central threat, while a time-honored trope (and deservedly so--it's creepy as hell), is brilliantly realized by what I assume to be CGI, and the circumstances surrounding it are fairly fresh. The male characters do well enough, but the heroines are as appealing a pair of horror protagonists as I recently remember. I'm willing to see just about anything featuring the lovely and fiendishly talented Jena Malone (and occasionally pay the price, as with the lukewarm Saved and the wretched Life As A House), but the gorgeous Laura Ramsey's nearly as good (better, according to the excellent review in the Detroit Metro Times--again proving its superiority to the obnoxious Entertainment Weekly), and "does terror" extremely well. In the end, The Ruins wasn't anything especially groundbreaking, but was certainly an improvement on an overhyped novel.  

V.C. Andrews, Flowers In The Attic (1979): It took me forever to get around to reading Andrews' modern "classic," probably because of its (well-deserved) hokey Gothic, Dark Shadows reputation. Now more amenable to that sort of thing, I had a crack at it after reading a few friends' negative comments. It's listed in the Ann Arbor District Library catalog as a "teen novel," and it's one hell of a kinky one. Four profoundly annoying children (the grotesquely prim cadences of the elder two reminded me of Zoey Dean) enjoy a relatively idyllic life with their hardworking father and Corinne, their princessy mother, until the former dies in a car crash. Corinne, whose extravagant lifestyle has led to a crisis in their financial affairs, takes her brood to live with her fabulously wealthy parents in Virginia. Once they arrive, however, things go sour. The grandfather, a demented old coot who's ignorant of his grandchildren's existence, informs Corinne that the only reason he hasn't disinherited her is because she hasn't had children (he'd opposed her marriage for reasons that become starkly apparent throughout the novel). The grandmother learns of the children and agrees to keep the secret, albeit by keeping the kids locked up in a set of attic rooms for what turn into years. As time goes by, the children learn that all isn't what it seems. Frequent whippings and incest can add an agreeably grotesque twist to a story, and Corinne, at least, is a memorably realized character, but it's all so overdone and unintentionally comical (and less suited to the latter than similar stories) that the end comes as a blessed relief.

Pay it no mind, it's just a song.

One minute, I'm dreaming of doing the things I usually do--read, write, cook, watch movies... when an old friend/crush from Akron--"Circe," we'll call her--shows up at the door, in the midst of one of her famed "chaos road trips." We get decidedly intimate and I understandably opt to join her. Stopping at her parents' house, I discover that she's Circe's evil twin, who fights the real one and loses. I then proceed with the real Circe, only to find our bliss short-lived. Surviving a hair-raising chase down a freeway where a truck ferrying tuna salad has skidded and crashed in the midst of a driving rainstorm (rendering the freeway a raging torrent of rainwater, rusted aluminum, and tuna salad), in which I have to get out in the water and lead Circe and the car to safety (like Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen), we come to my own "house" (which I'd never seen before) where a different extended Irish-American family to the one I actually have is carrying on a wake/get-together. Circe bids me a tearful farewell, explaining that she's gotten a scholarship to study in Dublin. My pain fails to deflate even on discovering that my house is now a ski resort. Yielding to my "relatives" (who include an annoyingly bufferish old Anglo-Irish "Ascendancy" squire who probably resembles influential early twentieth century fantasist Lord Dunsany), I agree to go sledding only to find an ominous rumble start up once we get to the top of the hill. Fortunately, it didn't sound too bad, so I had the presence of mind to shout "quasi-avalanche!" just before I woke up. Thank heavens for that.

The middle of the month and I and my blog are practically strangers. I've been writing a lot and reading almost as much. In between, I've been cooking, filling out applications (only two, but one was obnoxiously long), and, as one might imagine, watching movies. If I don't see anyone soon, have a happy rest of the month.

The 1996 Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie riffed on This Island Earth (1955--funnily enough, the first movie my high school friends and I chose to inaugurate our semi-regular movie nights in 1989 or 1990) and did nothing with its funniest line. I still gape.

 At what point do certain movies make the leap to being good? I wonder...

 Hostel (2005): An online acquaintance of mine had a high enough opinion of Hostel 2 that I've decided to ignore its practically universal critical damnation and watch it eventually. First, though, I figured I should watch Hostel to make sure. I didn't think I'd like it very much, but it managed to be rather... I shrink from the term "good," as it's a classic aughties case of style over substance, but some of the style is pretty decent. It's nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be, let's put it that way. Three massive dipshits--two Americans and their Icelandic buddy--are in Amsterdam further dragging the Republic's name in the mud. Anyone who's ever had to spend any time in close proximity to college campuses or sports bars will recognize Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) immediately. Of course, being Americans in Amsterdam, the only thing they can think to do is hit the hash bars and whorehouses. They meet Alexei, a roguish Russian (probably) who tells them about the unsurpassed fleshpots of, yes, Bratislava. So, as you or I would, on the first suggestion of some guy they meet after missing curfew, they immediately change their travel plans from Barcelona to Slovakia (Oh, the hell with New Orleans--let's go to Toronto!). Admittedly, things seem to look up at first, with a comically better hostel than the Dutch can apparently offer. They end up quartered with two pathologically slinky Slavic beauties who take them to the spa and then the disco, and that's when people start disappearing. Hostel was directed by up-and-coming auteur Eli Roth, a director widely disparaged for being all style and no substance. This is largely true, but if the style works, I'm willing to forgive a few things. I certainly wasn't expecting this to be The Wicker Man or Don't Look Now (both of which wind up clumsily--yet effectively--"referenced" in Hostel). The sense of location is fantastic; I don't know if it was actually filmed in Bratislava (Prague seems a better guess), but there's a nice mix between the post-milennial sheen of Amsterdam and the post-Communist grunginess (and faded Habsburg grandeur) of the former Czechoslovakia. The big red flag for many critics was the question of "torture-porn," and, yes, there are some very grisly scenes during the movie (as well as stupid and occasionally offensive plot points). I found myself baffled, though, as much of it isn't terribly worse than a lot of other stuff that's come out over the last four decades (five, if you count Mario Bava, or--if you must--Herschell Gordon Lewis), and it doesn't take up a lot of screen time either, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes at most (and this scattered throughout the movie).  The characters start as douchebags, and I love that Josh is supposed to be an aspiring writer (not that I don't believe he is--I've known some sacks whove gone on to moderately successful and intensely localized literary careers)--"Prague? Oh, yeah, Kafka's cool." Paxton's apparently the less sensitive one, and does have a marvelous line of dialogue when encouraging Josh to be a little more adventurous in the space-age Amsterdam brothel: "When I'm studying for the bar exam, and you're doing your thesis, this... is what we'll think about." Aim to fail, fellas. After Oli ("the Viking") vanishes, though, Paxton and Josh start to show a little believable humanity, which makes this thing better than it might have been, and a few creepy character turns by the villains add a nicely sinister touch. So, it's no masterpiece, but it looks really good, and is way better than Saw, but surprisingly slightly below former Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider's Strangeland (1994).

Scarecrow Gone Wild (2004): "If you say 'let's split up,', I'll bitch-slap the pair of you!" A long time ago, the Meijer on Ann Arbor-Saline Road held a colossal clearance sale of an Alexandrine library's worthh of cheap DVDs, of which I barely took advantage. I promised myself the next time it happened that I wouldn't be nearly so chary of loading up on what promised to be hugely entertaining crap, and found another chance a few weeks ago, just before I saw Cloverfield, at the location on Carpenter Road. I wound up with four, one of which was Scarecrow Gone Wild. The basketball players at what looks like a tremendously run-down state university satellite decide to go hit the beach one weekend, but not before running some of the going-on-thirty freshmen out to the cornfield for a little haz--I mean, "instilling character and upholding tradition." Paul (Matthew Linhardt), one of the team's stars, is practically blood brothers with Sam (Caleb Roerhig), one of the freshmen, and encourages him to ask lovely Beth (Samantha Aisling) out on a date. No sooner does he do this than the rest of the team drag Sam off to the cornfield, and Paul and Beth take to running around campus and making out in a gazebo; some real friendship right there. The team, though nominally run by the coach (Ultimate Fighting luminary Ken Shamrock, billed on the DVD case as "The Most Dangerous Man Alive," with an indescribably funny expression on his mug), seems to take its orders from Mike, who appears to be fighting both a Napoleon complex and an "outie." Why a cornfield? Well, there's this legend, see, that some scarecrow took on the soul killed in the cornfield and now he goes around... killing people. Sam's hypoglycemic, and you can sort of guess where this is all going. I was fully prepared to find Scarecrow Gone Wild utterly loathsome, but it was really far more entertaining than it had any right to be. There's the usual bucketload of unintentional laughs (at one point, the pathos in Paul and Sam's relationship threatens to turn into a "Lifetime Original Movie"), but there are a few genuinely funny bits as well, and writer-director Brian Katkin (who wrote some of the music--never a good idea, ask John Carpenter--along with some band called the Filthies) sems to know his audience rather well. One cast member death is particularly welcome. While certainly not good, it's short, fast, and well-paced; I was never bored. The DVD is from York Productions, an outfit also responsible, according to the "previews" extras, for Aquanoids (which actually looks like a lot of fun) and Alien 51 (which doesn't--it stars Heidi Fleiss as some sort of carnival ring-mistress and has that weird late-80s B-movie feel to it). I remember being afraid at one point that the decline of VHS would result the death of in movies like these, but thankfully I needn't have worried. 

"He's basically Ed Wood, but with an inexhaustible supply of money."

--"Moodie" of the British Horror Films Forum on George Lucas.

Yes, it's Oscar season, apparently, and this year marks the first time (I think) that I've ever seen all five Best Picture nominees in the year of their eligibility. I'm happy about that, as this has been a really decent year for that sort of thing, with one glaring exception that I mentioned earlier. I'm behind There Will Be Blood, although I'll only get irritated if Atonement wins.

Michael Clayton (2007): Tony Gilroy's moody 70s-homage thriller played for a day at the Michigan Theater, and as I missed it earlier at Showcase, I decided to catch it before I left. Michael Clayton (George Clooney) wokrs as a fixer for a wealthy and influential New York law firm on the verge of merging with a London concern and going global. His friend Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), the firm's most lethal and feared counsel, flips out and strips naked during a deposition in a class-action lawsuit against one of the firm's clients, a sleazy Archer Daniels Midland simulacrum called UNorth (their TV commercials are priceless bits of satire on the fim's part). Yes, Arthur's having a crisis of conscience, and the firm's head honcho (Sydney Pollack) sends Clayton to Wisconsin to manage the meltdown. Arthur's actions and the apearance of a damning memo from UNorth's scientific staff spark rebellious impulses in Clayton (once an idealistic lawyer working in the D.A.'s office), which grow after ambitious UNorth executive Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) tries to interfere with his search for the truth. I really enjoyed this; I hadn't seen a good meat-and-potatoes flick like this in a while, and while it doesn't have the linguistic, visual, or thematic fireworks of fellow Best Picture Oscar nominees There Will Be Blood or No Country For Old Men, it's got an appeal all its own, and I don't remember applause breaking out at a crucial scene during the other two movies. The idealist-lawyer-against-the-system story is one of the most dependable--and hackneyed--storylines in American movies and television, and it's a credit to Gilroy and the actors that they manage to make the story seem fresh and inspired (especially with its relatively downbeat ending).

Juno (2007): Will and Ariel Durant, the longtime eminences grises (usage?) of middlebrow "you-can-own-the-entire-set" history, once wrote of a British playwright (I think it was Sheridan) that his "wit dulled by excess." Something much the same could be said for Juno. Sixteen-year-old Juno McGuff (Ellen Page)--a confused, hyper-articulate, but still very likeable mess, much like the movie itself--gets pregnant by off-and-on boyfriend Paul Bleeker (the great Michael Cera of Arrested Development) and, after a weird set of happenstances, decides to carry the baby to term instead of aborting it, and searches for a couple looking to adopt. She finds Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) and Mark (the great Jason Bateman of Arrested Development--I wish there had been more of a pattern there), a cartoonish pair of yuppies, advertising in the Penny Saver and quickly strikes up a business relationship with them as a surrogate mother. Juno herself is very nearly unbelievable, were it not for the fact that she reminds me very strongly of an old friend of mine (who actually had a similar origin to her unusual name from Greco-Roman mythology).  First-time screenwriter Diablo Cody (who's also one of the only reasons to read Entertainment Weekly these days) trowels on the quirkiness to the extent that the first half of the movie, at least, feels a lot like a live-action cartoon. I might have taken more umbrage at the suffocating hip of Juno's own dialogue if it hadn't been so damn funny. It's not just Juno--her family and friends are similarly sarcastically gifted, with only Mark and Vanessa left out (for the most part). The latter's well-to-do suburban uniformity gets run through the satirical wringer with the same daring and originality with which it's been done in other movies over the past thirty or forty years. Fortunately, by the time the movie rolls into the second half, the power of the story and the overall excellence of the acting (I've thought of Bateman and Cera as Michael and George Michael Bluth for so long that their prowess in dramatic scenes is genuinely revelatory) break throught he dialogue and twee soundtrack (it's hard to miss the Wes Anderson vibe in the latter, what with all the mid-60s Kinks and post-Cale Velvet Underground--it really ought to be the other way round, although it goes without saying that Juno beats the pants off Royal Tenenbaums). Page has been hailed for her winning performance, and rightly so, but the real surprise for me was Garner--I was never into Alias, and haven't seen her in much of anything else besides Pearl Harbor, but she was really good in Juno as a character who's very nearly a yuppie caricature. To be sure, it's almost impossible not to like a movie in which two characters argue over whether Herschell Gordon Lewis or Dario Argento was the greater horror director (and the answer is Argento, for fuck's sake)*. Speaking of horror, watch for Ginger Snaps' marvelous Emily Perkins as the abortion clinic receptionist. In the end, Juno's a lot like musician Kimya Dawson, late of the Moldy Peaches, many of whose songs appear in the film. I heard her at the Blind Pig several years ago out of curiosity. The actual music didn't rock my world, to be honest, but the warmth and sincerity of the show itself melted my heart, to the extent that I gave her a huge hug after she hand-stenciled a T-shirt for me (so that I could send it to my aforementioned Juno-reminiscent friend, strangely enough). In the end, that's what I wanted to give Juno--a hug (the final scene really is terribly sweet).

*I noticed, however, that Michael Reeves, Larry Cohen, Pete Walker, and George Romero all went unmentioned.

Until the beginning of this month, I hadn't really written anything in some time; either the brief heartbreak of last November had taken it out of me (you'd think it would be the other way round) or I'd just run out of steam. At February's start, I promised myself to write every day, to at least a couple of thousand words a week. Two recent events have rather renewed my purpose.

The British Horror Films forum, of which I'm a happy and proud member, recently saw the announcement of an "experiment" by our friend Kath, whereby a very haunting picture was posted (I don't have the link, but it showed two desiccated corpses clutching each other tightly against a sickly-sweet yellow backdrop) and members were asked to write stories based on that picture. I hemmed and hawed and said it would probably take a couple of weeks for me to do something, and then I write this that very night in under an hour. The enthusiastic reaction really jazzed me, and it was great, too, to see some other excellent contributions as well. There's a lot of genuine talent on the board, and considering the crap market for short stories (especially horror or "speculative fiction," a term I prefer to "scifi-fantasy"), it's likely the only place we'll ever have to see other people's honest reactions to our work. Bless you guys.

Monday, I went to hear local poet Karyna McGlynn read from her chapbooks Scorpionica and Alabama Steve at Shaman Drum. I've known Karyna for several months now (my friend Adam's her significant other), and had grown increasingly curious about the work she did--she's an M.F.A. at Michigan and teaches at Washtenaw Community College, and apparently won the prestigious Hopwood Award (named for Charles Hopwood, local literary luminary of the early twentieth century and writer of Gold Diggers of 1933, which I inexplicably haven't seen). So when I heard she was going to read at Shaman Drum, I figured I should go hear her. I've made my feelings on most contemporary poetry known already, and was a little alarmed that I'd have to indulge in the well-meaningly mendacious "um, yeah, I thought it was pretty good" shuffle that's a persistent danger whenever you have to read work by people you know (I've certainly been the recipient of such "praise" more times than I care to remember). Fortunately, after the hilariously rococo introduction given by that guy at Shaman Drum who does it so well (I've heard him introduce Peter Balakian, Daniel Clowes, and Kim Deitch, and it's a crackup every time), I found rerlief that such muffling wouldn't be necessary. I heard nothing that started with "I am a gull," nothin'. The poems from Scorpionica were powerfully haunting cinematic pictures from her childhood in Texas that could easily be done into short films, and then we got Alabama Steve, poetry after my own heart. It's hard to describe Alabama Steve--the pieces are a lot like "Rollo's Lament," only better and more coherent, all boisterousuly funny "poetry-prose-flash-fiction-whatever" involving the adventures of a semi-mythical character named Alabama Steve. Apart from the appearance of Journey's Steve Perry and a praying mantis scientist named Alejandro, I can't really say much else, but was charmed beyond words, and reminded that there's really a place for whatever literary lunacy you care to name--including hers, including mine, including everybody's. Thanks, Karyna.

 So if I stop again, I only have myself to blame.

I wonder if it works the other way round?

Rodentz (2001): Also known as Altered Species, but either Ken Russell threatened to sue or the producer thought the "z" added badly-needed street cred. Mopey lab assistant Walter (Allen Lee Haff) works in a supremely sketchy arrangement where Dr. Irwin, stripped of university funding because his research wasn't "PC," experiments with some kind of growth serum on rats in a private facility--on the wrong side of the tracks. It's apparently the weekend, and Walter's charismatically annoying "friends" are tooling around in a van that might have belonged to Michael Kelso on That 70s Show. Alicia, Walter's girlfriend (Leah Rowan), rides with them, struggling to avoid the slimy advances of Gary (with one of the funniest rejection lines I've ever heard) and getting directions wrong after swigging from what looks like a gasoline can filled with tequila. Any question that raises recedes into the background, as they pull into the lab ("it's kind of sexy") and find that all isn't well. Walter's being cartoonishly wishy-washy and both Dr. Irwin and janitor Douglas (whose accent gives the impression that the "Douglases of Virginia" have served proudly as janitors since Jamestown) have been eaten by hungry little rats (as has their very inappropriately named cat). On top of all that, they have to face down a giant rat only marginally more convincing than the one in the 1977 Doctor Who classic "The Talons of Weng-Chiang." I started laughing about ten minutes in and didn't quite stop for the rest of the movie. When I think that our recent movie night featured Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1932 snoozefest Vampyr instead of this... it's good, clean, dumb fun, with irritating characters whose obnoxiousness actually works for the movie instead of against it. My favorite was probably Alicia, both for her cool retro-90s wardrobe and constant "what-ever" facial expression, but others may think differently. If you ever run across it, treat yourself. It's a hoot.

Vampire Weekend: I heard their eponymous CD over the weekend and, once I found that they had an early show in Ann Arbor at the Blind Pig starting at eight, decided I might as well give them a whirl. For those who don't know, these fellas are the latest New York area blogger/music-magazine swoon (with, among other things, a recent writeup in Spin). This probably means they'll follow the same meteoric year-long rise and subsequent disappearance  previously plowed by the Strokes and Franz Ferdinand. It's a pity, as the CD is rather good (of course, I thought the same thing about the Strokes and Franz Ferdinand), with some good beats and melodies helped along by a healthy Afrocentric fusion sound (although one song toward the end--I think it was the one before "Walcott"--sounded a lot like either the Arcade Fire or the disappointing British Sea Power). The fact that it was an early show decided it for me, and so I wound up waiting for an hour in the snow (rendering it impractical to read from the collection of M.R. James short stories I'd brought with me), in the midst of a student-clogged line before learning that they'd sold out. I don't consider it time wasted. I found myself behind one annoying conversation ("Oh, I speak French! Where were you in France?" "[Oh, we summered in] Nimes"--it would have been too funny had the bracketed version been the one I heard, but there was also a debate over sartorial politics featuring Nicolas Sarkozy and Gavin Newsom, and the girls' boots were both attractive and sensible; you don't see that too much anymore) and then turned behind me to find an absolutely hilarious one (for which I thanked those responsible more than once), careening wildly from ruminations on the origin of Kiwanis to plans to smoke up in the Eight-Ball bathroom to thoughts on a friend's upcoming birthday party--"if he wants his birthday party to turn into an orgy, I think that's unrealistic." We also got to watch a sideswipe between two cars at the entrance to the parking lot opposite, and the consequent (and disproportionate, if you ask me) police presence. All that fun and I saved $10. An excellent Tuesday evening, I'd say.

Sweet Potato and Peanut Stew

1/4 peanut oil, 1 chopped onion, 1 red or green bell pepper, 1 fresh jalapeno or serrano pepper, seeded and minced

Heat in pot and cook until vegetables tender (7-10 mins.)

4 cloves minced garlic, 1 packed TB minced fresh ginger

Add and cook for 2-3 mins.

1 TB chili powder, 1 tsp cumin, 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes

Add and cook for 1 min.

2 sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into small cubes, 1/3 tomato paste

Add water to cover, and add potatoes and tomato paste. Bring to boil, lower heat, cover, and simmer 45 mins., stirring occasionally.

2 small trimmed and sliced zucchini

Add and cook 15 mins.

1/2 cup peanut butter

Place in small bowl and add 1 cup of stewing liquid. Mix and add to pot. Cook another 15 mins. Serve with grain of choice (rec. rice or couscous).

This was a pleasant surprise. I made this with chocolate-banana tea loaves and a roasted red pepper tart for our movie night (they're only half an excuse for me to cook, really), and I was a little worried about making a peanut stew, but it's delicious--sweet and tangy and with a real heat at the end of the bite. The rice takes some of the sting away. I'll have to remember this one.

Slow day for post titles, although I wanted to acknowledge that the funniest thing Bill Murray's ever done was that "Il Retorno di Hercules" sketch when he came back to host Saturday Night Live in the 80s.

 Sometimes I really, really can't stand this town. I'm pretty sure I always had a good time at Leopold Brothers (with a couple of niggling exceptions), and its departure will be a gaping loss for Ann Arbor. Along with the decent beer, excellent food, and awesome jukebox, owner Todd Leopold, with his stalwart defense of sustainable development and genuine environmentalism --that went beyond a purely cosmetic version for well-to-do "bourgeois bohemians," i.e. "The Ann Arbor Greenway"--was an excellent example of the small-businessman/public citizen, the kind of person of which this town and country need a lot more. His frequent and incisive criticisms of city and state policies on Ann Arbor Is Overrated and Arbor Update demonstrated how hollow notions of progressivism really are in Ann Arbor, as some of the town's more comfortable and complacent commenters seemed to have taken one lesson away from their semi-legendary pasts in "The Sixties" (TM): Never, ever, criticize anything. He was also a Go!Team fan, which is awesome.

Eric Alterman has a great take on an old foolishness. For the record, I'm proud to be one myself.

In related news, Charlie Pierce really needs his own blog. It's rare you can get that kind of polemicism mixed with dead-on analysis, and now's a better time for it than ever.

Atonement (2007): As Bill the Cat might say, "thhhhpppppthhhh!" What a silly bastard of a movie. I'd simply describe it as a "load," but mitigating factors prevent me. I'd heard wildly conflicting reviews of this one from a far-flung variety of sources and figured it was essential that I try it out for myself. What emerges, despite being based on a recent Booker Prize-winning novel by Ian McEwan (I've never read his stuff, and maybe it is that silly in real life)* is basically an unconscious stiff-upper-lip parody of people acting very, very stupidly, with heavy-handed attempts to make it more "adult" and "modern." It's sad, really, as there's a good story in there, and most of the performances, though intially of the same parodistic water, start to grow on you.  In 1935 England, sisters Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and Briony (Saoirse Ronan, and how cool a name is that?) Tallis live an upper-class life on an (I suspect) improbably beautiful estate with Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) as their friend and gardener with a convoluted and similarly improbable past of his own. Though all three are friends to varying degrees, an almost random and explosive act of injustice tears them apart. It involves the word "cunt," and the way in which that particular aspect of the plot was handled reminded me of a godawful U-M Basement Arts production that I'd seen, in which college kids, given the chance to put on a play free of parental or school supervision, loaded down the show with cussing and sniggering references to sex. A prerogative of college kids, but not of Oscar bait. I saw what director Joe Wright was trying to do, but it didn't work. Robbie goes to prison, to be released four years later for the BEF so he can wait with everyone else at Dunkirk. The characters relate to each other in drastically changed circumstances during the war years (Briony now played by Romola Garai), until the scene shifts close to the present day, with an elderly Briony (Vanesa Redgrave) reflecting on the tragedy of her younger years and the pitfalls that ignorance of desire can represent. It all looks fine on paper, but... every attempt to gussy the story up with snazzy camera angles, shooting in reverse, relatively explicit sex scenes, and schoolboy-obvious visual and audo cues actually makes it more stodgy and "Ehngwish" (I don't know if there's an existing equivalent for "Oirish," the kind of thing you get in, say, The Quiet Man--which was, let us remember, good--but if not, I'm making one up). The musical phrasing is particularly annoying. When Robbie writes a passionate love note to Cecilia at the beginning of the movie, of course he's listening to La Boheme, and when Briony, now a nurse, sits up with a mortally wounded French soldier from Dunkirk who goes on about this girl he knew who used to play Debussy, of course Clair de Lune starts to play as she leaves him. What's unfortunate about this is that there's good in the movie, but none of it comes together. It was like Brokeback Mountain, only worse. If you want a good story about Dunkirk, grab the Foyle's War episode "The White Feather" (Rome's Tobias Menzies, who's in Atonement for about thirty seconds, is fantastic in it). It actually had me silently giggling in places, to the doubtlessly disapproving stares of my neighbors (who can bite me, by the way, especially the guy who left his cell phione on during the show). McAvoy and Knightley, though their accents are tewwibwy, tewwibwy pwoper in a nails-on-the-chalkboard way, get much better as the movie goes along (and as I think both are excellent actors anyway, I blame the movie), especially in an argument scene with nurse Briony. The best thing about the movie, though, is Ronan. Foreign movies seem to have had an unusual run of luck over the past few years with child actors (I think especially of Keisha Castle-Hughes in Whale Rider and Ivana Baquero in Pan's Labyrinth), and Ronan holds what she can of the movie together in a way that speaks well of her future career. And her name really is pretty cool. As for Joe Wright, I charitably hope his artistic fortunes improve, as 2005's Pride and Prejudice, though not a patch on the 1996 BBC classic, wasn't all that bad (Brenda Blethyn, who plays Robbie's mother in Atonement, brings a pathos to Mrs. Bennet that Alison Steadman never evinced in the TV version, and Jena Malone and Carey Mulligan just need their own damn movie). If this wins the Best Picture Oscar, it'll be grand folly of Braveheart-Forrest Gump-Driving Miss Daisy proportions.

Cloverfield (2008): Okay, that's more like it. Great; I had to go and fall in love with Lizzy Caplan again. I was thoroughly prepared to laugh my ass off throughout this movie at its ridiculousness, but found myself taken aback at how good it was. Even the occasional bit of cheesiness ends up with some pertinence to other themes. Producer J.J. Abrams and director Matt Reeves set up a Godzilla-like monster attacking Manhattan and show the efforts of a doughty band of survivors trying to make it out of the beleaguered borough before either the monster or defending government do for them. Mild spoilers ahead!! The movie's an odd hybrid; filmed much in the style of The Blair Witch Project (all on someone's home video), the first ten minutes or so actually comprise a very funny short about a going-away party at a painfully hip downtown crib thrown for Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who's just got some sweet new job in Japan but who has very mixed feelings about leaving his recent ex-girlfriend Beth (Odette Yustman). Rob's mildly sketchy brother Jason slacks off his camcorder duties--assigned by his severely gorgeous girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas)--and cons the bumbling Hud (T.J. Miller) to do the job, if the latter can find time to do so while incompetently flirting (mind you, is there really any other kind?) with the devastatingly beautiful and very cool Marlena (Lizzy Caplan--oh, Lizzy Caplan). Rob and Beth get into a fight, and he, Jason and Hud end up out on the landing, threatening to begin one of those vaguely "you're so money" post-nineties guy conversations for which Swingers has yet to pay (although Jason did, so that's something, anyway). Thankfully, right at the most excruciating moment (literally), all hell breaks loose. Fleeing with the rest of Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge, Rob discovers via cell that Beth is still in her apartment and badly hurt--Rob and gang to the rescue! The "princessy" stench Beth gave off earlier in the evening lends Cloverfield a faint fairytale vibe. I found very little wrong with this movie. The first ten minutes were painfully familiar; I could easily imagine the scenario playing out in Michigan (Madisonfest, Arbourfest, Mittenfest, take your pick). What happens afterward is genuinely affecting; the characters could have been such easily despicable hipster fucks (which still would have been great fun; it could have been Cry Funny Happy Meets Ghidrah--or Monster Zero, depending on which planet you're from), but I found them truly empathetic, although Hud could be a little too cartoonishly bumbling. I thought Marlena was the most memorable, but then I'm obviously prejudiced (besottedness aside, she did have some very funny and moving scenes). Caring for characters, of course, is a lot harder to do when your real "star" is the ingenious CGI horror ripping the city apart. I never thought I'd say this, but I think people are starting to get good at CGI. It helps that not much of the monster is ever shown; the only real long shots are usually through explosions, dust, and murk. While I understand that a number of theories have been floated regarding the monster's actual nature, I was reminded most, of all things, of those weird horse-like creatures Jen and Kira rode to get to the tower in The Dark Crystal. Sadly, for various reasons, I doubt we'll be seeing a series of increasingly ridiculous and pointless--yet funny--movies featuring constant attacks on New York with people pointing up at the sky en masse and screaming "It's Cloverfield!!!" with their mouths not exactly matching the words. While I seriously doubt this'll be up for Best Picture anytime soon (despite its overwhelming superiority to one of this year's choices), I expect its ending to prove as relatively controversial as the ones for No Country For Old Men and There Will be Blood. A very pleasant surprise, and a great way to get Atonement out of my system.

*Why the hell doesn't someone try and film Wise Children? Mind you, when it comes to Angela Carter adaptations, The Company of Wolves was rather uneven. And given the frequent fate of many literary transfers (with the glittering exceptions of No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood), maybe it's best that they don't.