Wow, I’ve got to wake up in the middle of the night nearly out of my head from flu and meds more often! I’m getting some long-overdue blogging done, and I’m lovin’ every minute of it!
First up, I’ve done some thinkblogging of the sort I rarely get around to these days, about the role and “meaning” of brutality in art. It was engendered by Stacy Ponder of the very fine Final Girl and her discovery of and musings on this Delaware Journal article on torture scenes in recent popular films and TV shows. Recommended reading. And for an object lesson in the kind of thing I’m talking about, I’d suggest perusing both Slate film critic David Edelstein’s Best of 2005 piece and the critics’ roundtable he leads as well.
On a not unrelated note, Jog the Blog walks the cultural condescension beat and catches Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman in full these-crazy-kids-and-their-rock-and-roll mode over Final Destination 3. It’s a highly amusing get-together between fish, a barrel, and some bullets, even if (as I suspect) the movie’s deeply so-so.
In happy happy happy news, M. Valdemar is blogging again! He’s forsaken his old digs and begun a new blog called Thump Thump. Expect bumps in the night.
Lots going on on the book beat. First, Dark But Shining links to this in-depth interview with Black Hole writer-artist Charles Burns by Peter Breedveld. I find Burns’s take on his masterpiece fascinatingly direct and unpretentious; moreover, it gives me an excuse to run art like this.
(More Bowie in a moment.)
Also between the covers is Louis Sytsma of Horror Reader, who links to Stephen King’s podcast on the story behind his new techno-zombie book Cell, which I still haven’t gotten around to picking up from the library. Slate columnist Bryan Curtis’s piece on the cellphone as a locus for horror in American slasher films, the Asian horror wave, and, of course, King’s book was also up my alley.
Meanwhile, ADDTF’s favorite author Clive Barker is the subject of a lengthy interview at Newsarama, conducted by comics company IDW’s Publisher and E.I.C. Chris Ryall, who’s adapting Barker’s novel The Great and Secret Show into funnybook form. In other Barker news, Pete Mesling at Fearfodder links to the Horror Channel’s report that Shrek 2 codirector Kelly Asbury will be involved with the filmic adaptation of Barker’s The Thief of Always. Finally, I happily conducted my own interview with Barker on Wednesday; hopefully you’ll be seeing the results over the next couple of months.
Everyone knows this by now I suppose, but the kid in me who watched Destroy All Monsters on WPIX channel 11 on many a happy Saturday afternoon would be remiss if he didn’t mention the sad news that Akira Ifukube, composer of the music for the Godzilla series, has died. Unsurprisingly, Giant Monster Blog has the most in-depth take on the news; Heidi MacDonald at The Beat pays perhaps the best tribute possible by linking to an mp3 of Ifukube’s absolutely unforgettable “Four Monsters Attack Tokyo.” I hadn’t heard it in years, and I remembered every note.
On a similarly musical note (groan), I’ll wrap things up in non-horror fashion: Christopher Bahn at Incoming Signals links to this loooooooong Lester Bangs interview with/article on Brian Eno. Aside from the obvious pleasures of reading Bangs on Eno, there’s much fun to be had seeing where Bangs’s take on Eno’s work diverges both from your own and from today’s critical consensus; for example, Bangs favors Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) to the now more highly regarded (and deservedly so, IMHO) Here Come the Warm Jets; he writes off Eno’s classic collaborations with Bowie; and he dismisses Devo almost entirely. But if you’re the kind of person who wants to know what Lester Bangs thought of Robert Fripp’s guitar solo on Brian Eno’s “Baby’s On Fire,” then this is for you, my friend. (After all, if you are that kind of person, you are most likely my friend.)