Man Trying to Escape Police Eaten by Gator

Read: Song of Susannah–“9th Stanza: Eddie Bites His Tongue”

I’m tired of King’s faux-humility when having characters talk about him. “Maybe he’ll amount to something. What if he becomes famous or critically acclaimed–the chances are remote, but still.” Horseshit. Dude, you are the most popular author in the history of the world. Dine out on that instead of making your characters skeptics about your prospects and crowing to yourself “I showed them!”

Also, are we supposed to share Eddie’s astonishment that the plot of Wolves of the Calla is the plot of The Magnificent Seven and the name of the town is the name of the director? If not, are we supposed to be entertained by watching him realize this? If the answer to either of those questions is yes…I just hate you people who wanted me to read this more and more, basically.

I mean, really, fucking up in The Drawing of the Three by saying Co-Op City is in Brooklyn and then making that part of the stories’ continuity?

I did wish Eddie killed Calvin Tower, because then a) there’d be one less of these annoying assholes to read about, and b) maybe then they’d lose their quest for the Dark Tower and the bad guys would win pluck the goddamn rose and knock down the goddamn Tower and wipe everything out. I am totally rooting against everyone in this book now. Even Roland. He could have put bullets into all these other douchebags four books ago.

Read: Song of Susannah–“8th Stanza: A Game of Toss”

Even though I read it today, I had to flip through this chapter before starting to write this post just to remember what was in it. As best I can tell it exists to point out that Roger Clemens is a good pitcher, that people in New England like the Red Sox a lot, that Eddie dislikes that Calvin Tower character, and that King thinks that ‘Salem’s Lot is “a corker” of a book and that he himself is a pretty nice guy. Mostly it makes me wish that I could use Black Thirteen to go back in time and stop the goddamn fucking Red Sox from ever winning a World Series ever, just to ruin King’s day.

Seriously, what the hell, people. This is not entertaining. You people who encouraged me to stick with this? I’m coming for you.

Bloody Disgusting’s “huge” interview with Clive Barker is up. It’s actually not so huge, as it turns out, but it’s interesting as you’d expect it to be thanks to quotes like this:

I cried at the end of The Exorcist when she touches the cross that is hanging around the neck of the priest and dimly remembers what she was saved from. That got me. Yes, you’re not going to weep in the middle of a Freddy Krueger picture and I’m not writing Hellraiser for tears. I’d rather people wet their seats with urine. That’s the nature of horror stories. I’d like us to be doing more than just telling horror stories. Why can’t we tell the Doctor Zhivago of games? Why can’t we do the Lawrence of Arabia of games? I use the David Lean model only because he was telling these massive narratives, which had extraordinary emotional fuel, and the battle scenes still remain definitive benchmarks. Without the aid of CGI he still made battles scenes more exciting than George Lucas could or indeed Peter Jackson could by multiplying infinitely the number of Orcs. So what I’m saying is let’s look for the models within cinema that are plausible, that we can reasonably aspire to. I only tend to cry in a movie during a moment of triumph. I see no reason why a game shouldn’t do that.

Matt Maxwell does my “list your favorite horror movies” thing, but uses quotes instead of images.

Read: Song of Susannah–“6th Stanza: The Castle Allure”; “7th Stanza: The Ambush”

If you know me well, you could have probably guessed that I’d get excited when they started mentioning Discordia. Basically that’s just another word for the primordial soup in the King-verse, though, and not a crazy goddess, so oh well. A lot of other “oh well” answers are forthcoming in this chunk, mainly in chapter 6. Mia is white, she might be a demon, there’s like six big-deal demons who are each both male and female, the one who had sex with Roland in the willow jungle and the one who had sex with Detta when Jake crossed are the same demon, that demon took Roland’s sperm and impregnated Detta/Susannah/Mia with it so that’s whose baby Susannah is carrying, his name is Mordred just like in the Arthurian legends and he’s gonna kill his dad, blah blah blah. It’s a boring cosmology.

Meanwhile, the evil genius overlord of the vampires and the low men and shit, Richard P. Sayre, devises a foolproof plan to kill Roland and Eddie by sending in the same mafia goons who the pair wiped out in an alternate reality earlier in their adventures together. How could that possibly fail?

A final self-indulgent twist sees our heroes get rescued by some just-folks flannel-wearing “ayuh”-saying guy in Maine. So in a series that, need I remind you, began as Conan starring the Man with No Name and at one point included a giant cyborg bear, we now spend a paragraph or three marveling at how people from Maine pronounce words like “boathouse.” (Bwut-huss, if you were wondering, which you weren’t.) Turns out that’s how the people in the Calla pronounced it too! Isn’t that amazing? No, you’re right, it’s not.

Even though the thought of voluntarily subjecting myself to more Stephen King at the moment isn’t a particularly appealing one, I heard good things from a friend who saw an advance screening of The Mist, which the trailers had kind of turned me off of. (Just seemed too ersatz Spielberg; I prefer the real thing.) MTV’s got a whole bunch of clips from the movie up. I really hope it’s good. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

Norman Mailer looked like Ed Asner with more hair.

This week’s Horror Roundtable is about horror stuff we’ve forgotten the names of but remember enjoying. Mine are all books from my youth, and by the look of it ol’ Horror Blog Steven has at least one of the answers I seek.

I had so many of these forgotten horror touchstones on my mind that I didn’t even bother talking about the unbelievably awesome classic-monsters activity book I had, but I wish I could track down a copy of that thing too. There was one activity where you had to match the monster to its weakness. It was SO RAD. I feel like I did every activity twelve times, or maybe I just studied them once I completed them.

Related: This “Science Over the Edge” page at a site called The Un-Museum that I came across just so happens to contain information on two of my young self’s favorite scary “true” stories: the disappearance of David Lang (from a book whose title I can’t remember, which I mention in the roundtable) and the Berkeley Square Horror (from Daniel J. Cohen’s The World’s Most Famous Ghosts). The best thing about the latter was that it combined the usual apparition and poltergeist stuff with the possibility of some sort of monster/demon thing, that I think might have come up from the sewers, and had the awesome tagline that anyone who spent the night in the haunted room either died or went mad. Try to imagine how awesome that would sound to a second-grader.

Read: Song of Susannah–“2nd Stanza: The Persistence of Magic”; “3rd Stanza: Trudy and Mia”; “4th Stanza: Susannah’s Dogan”; “5th Stanza: The Turtle”

Three recurring elements of King’s Dark Tower storytelling technique appear in these chapters:

1) His seeming inability to differentiate the wheat from the chaff. In Chapter Two, there’s page after page describing magical pendulums plumb lines and shit. In a world with giant cyborg bears, who cares?

2) Random characters who get introduced, seem like they’ll be come important supporting cast members, then disappear. This harkens all the way back to The Drawing of the Three, with Eddie’s stewardess and Odetta’s driver and the cops who try to stop Roland/Jack Mort. This time around this poor Trudy woman even gets her name in a chapter heading, but as far as I can tell that’s the last we’ll see of her.

3) Using the promise of answers to drag the reader (well, me at least) through stuff I don’t give a damn about. I still don’t care whether Susannah lives or dies and wish the other gunslingers would just leave her for dead and get on with it. (I feel the same about Eddie, and Father Callahan has gotten pretty irritating pretty quickly, too. Jake and Oy are pretty cool, though. God, how much better would this series be if it were just Roland, Jake, and Oy, a sort of Lone Wolf and Cub and Cub deal?) However, I’ll put up with her if Mia really is gonna spill the beans to her about her demon baby and whatever the hell else is going on.

I’ve also picked up on a couple SPOILERS, somewhat inadvertently and somewhat not.

1) Thanks to that Dark Tower comic that Marvel put out that I was flipping through yesterday, I know what the Crimson King looks like. Familiar, is how I’d put it.

2) I also know that there’s a big cameo on the way in this book, thanks to the back-jacket copy. Argh, is how I’d put it.

I haven’t watched a lot of TV this fall, aside from Dr. Phil and Judge Judy, that is*, because with The Sopranos done and Lost and Battlestar Galactica not returning until mid-winter at the earliest, we went from having three of my four all-time favorite dramas** on the air to zero and it knocked the wind out of my sails. Because I love them so, I’ve been very curious as to the impact the WGA strike would have on Lost and BSG‘s already convoluted scheduling. A pair of interviews with the shows’ striking creators tell the tale, and in the process shed light on the absurd and rapacious behavior of the networks and studios that led things to this sorry pass.

First up is Ronald D. Moore of Battlestar Galactica, interviewed at IGN. He says that they will have the first 10 episodes of Season Four available to air, which brings things up to the mid-season cliffhanger, and then nothin’. This isn’t that big of a change from the pre-strike status quo, considering how SciFi Channel was dickering with the notion of splitting the season in half and not showing part two until 2009 anyway, but it forces that particular hand. Moore also has one of the most illuminating examples of the kind of shenanigans the writers are up against:

“I had a situation last year on Battlestar Galactica where we were asked by Universal to do webisodes [Note: Moore is referring to The Resistance webisodes which ran before Season 3 premiered], which at that point were very new and ‘Oooh, webisodes! What does that mean?’ It was all very new stuff. And it was very eye opening, because the studio’s position was ‘Oh, we’re not going to pay anybody to do this. You have to do this, because you work on the show. And we’re not going to pay you to write it. We’re not going to pay the director, and we’re not going to pay the actors.’ At which point we said ‘No thanks, we won’t do it.’ We got in this long, protracted thing and eventually they agreed to pay everybody involved. But then, as we got deeper into it, they said ‘But we’re not going to put any credits on it. You’re not going to be credited for this work. And we can use it later, in any fashion that we want.’ At which point I said ‘Well, then we’re done and I’m not going to deliver the webisodes to you.’ And they came and they took them out of the editing room anyway — which they have every right to do. They own the material — But it was that experience that really showed me that that’s what this is all about. If there’s not an agreement with the studios about the internet, that specifically says ‘This is covered material, you have to pay us a formula – whatever that formula turns out to be – for use of the material and how it’s all done,’ the studios will simply rape and pillage.”

That’s pretty astounding to me. Moore goes on to viciously insult the networks’ argument about not knowing how to make money online. Read it. (Via Jason Adams.)

Next is Lost‘s Damon Lindelof, interviewed at E!. Points of interest:

1) Eight episodes for Season 4 have been filmed so far and they will start airing in February as planned.

2) The eighth episode is a major cliffhanger.

3) If the strike continues long enough for the remaining eight episodes of Season 4 not to air this year, it screws up their plans for the final three 16-episode seasons considerably.

In related news, a series of Lost webisodes are slated to debut on Monday–a year or so later than they were supposed to, of course, because of the very issues the writers are on strike over. (Via The Lost Blog.)

*Totally not kidding.

**Twin Peaks.

It’s hard to tell what little kids will make of Fred Claus, but it’s not as if they haven’t been primed for it. By now, the Shrek movies and other Pixar/Dreamworks/Disney animations have taught them that fairy tales are to be mocked and deconstructed, not believed or adored. Reimagined today, Bambi and Dumbo would be plagued with work-related stress, acid reflux and sleep apnea.

–Steven Boone, Fred Claus: The problem isn’t Santa’s brother,” Newark Star Ledger

(Via Matt Zoller Seitz)

Read: Song of Susannah–“1st Stanza: Beamquake”

When you realize the book you’re reading is going to be about a frantic search to find the title character before the demon baby she’s carrying pops out and eats her and your first thought is “good riddance,” that’s probably a bad sign, right?

Oh.

My.

Fucking.

God.

(Found here. Via Matt Maxwell.)

Here at the A&F Quarterly we’re big fans of Seattle-based artist Bill Brown. He’s one of our go-to illustrators. Here’s why.

His line practically looks like it’s puffing away at a pipe while wearing a smoking jacket, and man does he know his way around the color wheel.

You can see more of his work at his website, and at his page at Art Department.

Read: Wolves of the Calla–“The Meeting of the Folken“; “Before the Storm”; “The Wolves”; “Epilogue: The Doorway Cave”; Author’s Note; Author’s Afterword

It’s Duck Amuck???

Oh brother.

You know, I had a feeling. I’d put it aside because King’s gotten cute about this sort of thing before; in Misery, for example, the events of The Shining and the career of horror author Stephen King are both referenced as real things. Eddie said what he said about feeling like they were in a storybook or fairy tale, and King made sure we noticed “Stephen King” listed as one of the items on The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind’s strangely changed “menu,” but I didn’t think that was really where we were going. Now that apparently it is, I really don’t know what to say except that this idea is not interesting to me. Like, at all. Sheesh, what would Sergio Leone say?

Ultimately it strikes me as another idea King couldn’t stop himself from spackling atop all the other ideas he has for this series, like weapons based on lightsabers and Doombots and the golden sneetch from Harry Potter. (Which also explains that hideous chapter-heading font he’s using here.) Those were kinda fun, and also kinda plausible based on what we know about the robots developed by North Central Positronics and LaMerk Industries, all of which seem designed to be superficially appealing to children in some way. Making the whole thing meta, though, is just–I dunno what it is. An apology for using genre tropes so head-on? Doubtful. Apologetics for genre aren’t King’s style. I’m going to go with “a misguided attempt to explore ‘the dark magic of storytelling'” or something like that.

Ah well. The fight was pretty cool, though over just as quickly as Roland thought it would be and without the major complicating problem you thought was coming (and maybe should have come, predictable though it may have been), a la the death of Susan in Wizard and Glass. I was impressed by the Slightman headfake, how we were lead to believe the major problem for Jake would be how his friend Ben Jr. would look at him once his dad was outed as a traitor, never once suspecting that Ben Jr. wouldn’t be alive to look at him at all. And now we’ve got a new name to add to the big-bad list: Finli o’ Tego, maybe a bird-headed taheen, maybe another Flagg alias.

I think the most instructive part of this concluding chunk was the bit just prior to the battle, where Roland muses that there’s probably only 15-30 second before the blood-madness of battle descends upon his mind but until then he can see all things in his mind’s eye real clearly–and then King spends a full page detailing every thing he could see. It reminded me of the part in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure where Jan Hooks’ Alamo tour guide says “there are thousands and thousands of uses for corn, all of which I’m going to tell you about right now!” That’s The Dark Tower in a nutshell.

Most people who know me personally know that I spend a lot of time hanging around a Tori Amos messageboard. (It’s really more like a messageboard for people who met through being fans of Tori Amos, especially if you ask them, but that’s hard to explain.) Many of these folks are kind of not so crazy about Tori’s last few albums. The most recent, American Doll Posse, saw her create and adopt four separate personae–political Isabel, lusty Santa, angry Pip, and earthy-airy Clyde–between whom she alternates from concert to concert, performing certain songs only as particular “Doll” and apparently treating the whole thing like an extensive method-acting project cum David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust routine.

The thing about Tori, though, is that many of her fans, particularly among the ardent ones of the sort who’d meet while following her concert tours around the country, got into her because of how she’s spoken and sung about her own very real experience with rape. She did this most directly and most famously in a song called “Me and a Gun,” a harrowing and uncomfortable a cappella number from her solo debut Little Earthquakes.

Anyway, in news that astonishingly could actually be seen as horror-related, last night she came out as “Pip” and at some point cranked up the band, started singing “Me and a Gun,” and then did this:

At different points during the song, Tori/Pip rubbed herself with the knife, used it to simulate having a penis, held the gun to her head, and pointed it at the audience.

The whole situation has some fans (mostly people who were out of love with her already) in an uproar. They feel the whole thing reeks of schtick, that it’s shock rock, that doing it as a character invalidates the original song and makes a joke out of this interpretation. The fans who were at the show sound generally much more favorable, calling it one of the most intense performances they’ve ever seen.

The thing that sticks out at me is the notion that performing in character adversely affects the emotional or artistic or aesthetic truth of the performance. Even if you put aside the fact that “Tori Amos” is a character created by Myra Ellen Amos, there’s obviously a long and incredibly rich history of artists (of all stripes) adopting pseudonyms, re-christening themselves, even creating whole new identities to inhabit to get their points across. You’ll never convince a David Bowie fan like me that “Moonage Daydream” would have been better or truer or realer live had a young man named David Jones taken the stage rather than an eyebrowless freak called Ziggy Stardust, and just earnestly sung the song rather than dropping to his knees and pretending to blow Mick Ronson.

When Paul Karasik was drawing his contribution to my David Bowie sketchbook (much to his own chagrin), he and Gary Groth asked me what it was I liked about Bowie. I was tongue-tied and my explanation came out garbled, but the gist was that I spent most of high school and college fixated on defining myself. The movies I watched, the clothes I wore, the books I read, the bands I listened to (and almost more importantly, the bands I wouldn’t be caught dead listening to) were all carefully calibrated to add up to The Eternal Sean. That’s not to say that my enjoyment of any of it was a pose, because it wasn’t; the pose came in the constant pressure to adhere to my own standards, which once set could never be broken. Suddenly, along comes Bowie, picking up influences wherever one catches his eye, incorporating or even inhabiting them for as long as they move him, then moving along to the next thing without batting an eye. How enormously liberating! I’ll never be able to overstate that. Change your mind? Like something you didn’t used to, or aren’t supposed to? Who cares!

The Who, now that you mention it, are the reason I wrote this post. I’m watching this documentary about them called Amazing Journey that I TiVo’d off of VH1 Classic, and there’s this part where they talk about how this publicist named Pete Meaden saw the enormous potential of linking the band to the burgeoning Mod culture. As Roger Daltrey puts it, “He said, ‘Right–get out there, cut your hair, go down to Carnaby Street, try on all the clever gear,’ and all of a sudden we were a Mod band.” No handwringing about whether tailored suits and Union Jacks meant Roger Daltrey didn’t have the balls to really be himself, no gnashing of teeth about theatrics and image–just bam, okay, hey, this works! And listen to “I Can’t Explain” and tell me it didn’t.

(Photos found here)

That’s more or less how a school-shooting rampage that left eight dead in Finland is being portrayed by the news media, because the killer posted videos on YouTube implying that the rampage was in the offing. For example, This CNN story on the killings was once headlined “Finland school shooting linked to YouTube” on CNN.com’s front page. This is Bryan Alexander territory, I know, but you never saw headlines like “Columbine school shooting linked to pen and paper” because Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold kept diaries.

Speaking of Harris and Klebold, the Finnish murderer, Pekka Eric Auvinen, shared their affinity for German industrial act KMFDM. This is a trait that all three shared with me (or at least me in high school and college), so I think it’s equally meaningless.

All told it’s a story rife with elements that make for sensationalistic, Robert Downey Jr. in Natural Born Killers-style reporting, right down his pose and T-shirt in the photo above.

(Video still by STF/AFP/Getty Images, via Andrew Sullivan)

Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud.

–Deroy Murdock, “Waterboarding Has Its Benefits,” National Review Online

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

As a teaser for a promised upcoming whopper of an interview, Bloody Disgusting has posted a few quotes from Clive Barker regarding the varied status of several film projects–the Hellraiser remake, the Nightbreed director’s cut, the Tortured Souls collaboration with Todd McFarlane, and the Masters of Horror/Fear Itself network transition. Check it out.