What do you make of that M.I.A. record? For my money it’s got three good songs (the two singles (“Galang” and “Sunshowers”) and “Hombre”), and the rest is fair-to-middling dancehall with a pretty, “exotic” singer who makes Williamsburg-dwelling record critics named Josh or Adam feel like they’re Simon LeBon in the video for “Hungry Like the Wolf.”

Horror cropped up in an unexpected place for me last night, specifically in a TiVo’d episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent that I just got around to watching. To my surprise and delight the entire episode played like an extended tribute to J-horror.

Titled “The View from Up Here” (written by Jim Starling from a story by Starling & series co-creator Rene Balcer and directed by Alex Chapple), the ep revolved around the murder of a tenant in a hip Manhattan high-rise. The killing may or may not be related to a dispute between the tenants and the building’s main contractor, who’s allowing the ostensibly world-class post-modern apartments to fall into disrepair in order to collect bribes to finish the work he’d already been paid to do. But to my eyes the plot was all but incidental; the real attraction of the episode was the atmosphere of dread, decay, and wrongness created by the filmmakers, using the tools that J-horror and its Western analogues and acolytes have provided to makers of creepy pop culture.

The usual information-technology anxiety is present: Security cameras and monitors record everything; digital cameras materialize with impossible pictures taken by phantom photographers stored within them; a pager is used to receive messages from beyond; night-vision technology casts its green light over illicit goings-on; notably, a pair of binoculars being used to spy/peep is broken during the murder that kicks off the mystery. (I’m actually a little bit surprised that computers and the Internet didn’t figure in at some point.) Shades of The Ring, Blair Witch, and Dionaea House abound.

The “evil building” trope is also deployed; in fact, it’s central to the plot, as the tenants’ debate as to whether to bribe the contractor, and moreover a mentally disabled character’s belief that the building itself has succumbed to a mystical “plague” that presages a repeat of a 9/11-level atrocity, provide possible motives for the murder. But the filmmakers play around in this particular sandbox far too much for it to be mere plot-moving. In the episode’s opening sequence, bizarre and disorienting as is the series’ trademark, mirrors get fogged up for no apparent reason, steam erupts from strange places like wooden floorboards, the building’s concrete walls dissolve into sticky white powder, a mystery hole appears in a penthouse window; later in the episode, disembodied voices echo eerily in a hidden crawlspace connected to every apartment in the building by a series of ladders and trap doors; rain pours down the inside of a window. Dark Water, House of Leaves, and (again) Dionaea House fans would hardly be disappointed.

I was extremely tickled at how specific some of the homages got: The optical-illusionism of the scene in The Ring where Naomi Watts pauses an image of a fly on a monitor, then reaches out and touches it only to find that it’s now outside the TV, is neatly replicated by the scene in which the retarded housekeeper touches the rainy windowpane and discovers that the water is pouring down her hand. The most explicit reference is a hidden-camera night-vision shot of guest star Adam Goldberg climbing up through the darkness of a crawlspace in a scene that couldn’t look more like Samara scaling the walls of her well in The Ring and The Ring 2 unless he suddenly grew a head of long black hair.

Needless to say, the episode ends up faithful to the could-be-true-crime roots of the Law & Order franchise, and the potentially uncanny roots of the various phenomena experienced are duly explained away (though the writers do insert a commentary to the effect that some people are indeed tuned into “different wavelengths,” so to speak). Also, perhaps sensing that the weirdness of the episode was pushing the envelope pretty hard, the filmmakers had star Vincent D’Onofrio tone down his famously quirky performance as Det. Bobby Goren; his not-quite-rational mannerisms and odd leaps of intuitive logic played as small a role in the solving of this case as I’ve ever seen them play. But as a study of the uncanny in its classic German sense–unheimlich, meaning literally un-home-like–“The View from Up Here” was quite a sight to behold.

An extremely comprehensive chronicle of the rise and fall of trip-hop’s prodigal son, Tricky, by Scott McKeating of Stylus Magazine.

An extremely comprehensive examination of the Streets’ 2004 concept album A Grand Don’t Come for Free, by Marcello Carlin of the apparently defunct blog the Naked Maja.

A day in the life at a residential treatment facility for eating disorders, by my wife.

Fascinating thing, this Internet of ours.

Bill Sherman, one of my most very favoritest pop-culture bloggers in the world, has finally succumbed to the plague and seen Zak Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead; his astute-as-always take on the film can be found here. Bill’s review reminds me of one of the film’s great strengths: I think the beauty of the political undertones in this film is that they tap into paranoia period, rather than paranoia of a particular partisan stripe. The televangelist, Sheriff Savini, and the head security guard who says “What did I tell ya–America always sorts its shit out” are figures of fun-slash-fear for the blue-state audience, while the impotent news media, the once-a-criminal-always-a-criminal character, and the prominent presence of Islam in the opening credit sequence under Johnny Cash’s Christian armageddonmongering are triggers for the conservatively inclined. And I think that even on a more general level, the metaphor of hordes of zombie attackers can appeal to you whether you think the biggest threat to this country is the Bush Junta or the Islamofascists. As I’ve said before, the threat of violence from people who were once your neighbors cuts both ways.

I’ll be curious to see what political messages Romero puts into his own zombie movie next week…

The first thing that struck me about the new Coldplay album, X&Y, is how loaded it is with references-cum-homages to other, older bands. I mean, it’s apparent from the very first notes’ Also Sprach Zarathustra swipe (provided one counts Richard Strauss as a band). Then there’s the nod to the “something’s got a hold on me” part of the Velvet Underground’s “New Age” (on “What If”), the duly attributed melodic lift from Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” (on “Talk”), a self-plagiarizing “Clocks” all-but-remake of the sort that would make Saul Zaentz smile knowingly to himself (the much-commented-upon “Speed of Sound”), and the Mother of All Borrowing Types, a Beatles swipe, specifically the circling guitar crunch of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” (on “Twisted Logic,” which even obliquely references that sonic motion in its title).

The next thing that struck me is that I actually appreciated all these little salutes. “Talk” in particular reminded me why “Computer Love” has always been my favorite Kraftwerk song. The band takes that timidly sweet keyboard line, translates it to guitar, and suspends it in the space of the arenas it will surely be rocking throughout the summer; near the end of the song they take the strangely sinister river of bass that’s always been present beneath the surface of that melody and push it through the low end until it’s a roiling seething sea.

It’s that combination of space-rock and arena-rock sonics that gave me my third impression of the album, which is that I like it. I don’t think it’s as immediately impressive as either of the band’s first two albums–particularly their sophomore effort A Rush of Blood to the Head, which was really admirable in the way it refused to rest on the laurels of the “Radiohead’s less weird kid brother” reputation garnered by the band’s debut. There were a lot of sounds and songs on Rush that you hadn’t heard from Coldplay before, if you can remember–they’d never done a song like “Clocks” or “Politik” in their vocabulary prior to that, you know. X&Y is more a game of refinement and bigger-better-ism than one of staking out new sounds. (The exception is the insistent acoustic guitar and suddenly stepped-up vocal deliver of the hidden track, “Kingdom Come.”) Which is fine, really, if you’re refining and expanding upon such an impressive foundation. Personally I think the ultra-produced production actually works quite well, incidentally, and I say that as someone who complains long and loud about overproduction in many other cases.

The only thing that bothers is an increasingly apparent lack of lyrical sophistication. “Talk,” for example, is nearly undone by the repeated injunction “Let’s talk, let’s talk” at the song’s conclusion. Quite frankly, it’s like something you’d expect from one of Phil Collins & Genesis’s more earnest mid-’80s efforts. And there’s oodles and oodles of “when you think you’re sinking, I’ll be your life jacket” sentiment draped here there and everywhere. At times I believe that Coldplay, as much as everyone likes them now, will be regarded in much the same way in 10 or 20 years as Genesis and the like is now. Some future Bret Easton Ellis will have some future American Psycho pen a chapter singing the band’s praises in some future satire of aughtie excess and emptiness. In no small part this is due to lead singer Chris Martin’s public persona as a starlet-marrying, stupid-baby-naming, cause-embracing poor man’s Bono. I will also admit that I managed to listen to the whole album at least once without a single song registering as more than background music (to be fair, I was pretty busy at the time). That said, I’m not convinced any of these criticisms are truly valid–at the least, a Phil-esque fate is certainly not unavoidable. A dip into a more self-effacing Achtung Baby/Zooropa/Pop mode might help the band’s fortunes immeasurably, though I’m sure as the second-biggest band in the world they’re probably pretty happy with where they are.

—–

Much more of an immediate knockout punch, and I mean a teeth-flying-out-your-mouth, serious-concussion, career-ending knockout, is Get Behind Me Satan by the White Stripes. Everything that all the critics said about Elephant, Satan‘s predecessor? They were right. They were just one album too early. Good God, this is sophisticated, weird, supremely confident music making.

For starters, there’s almost no guitar. At all. The most notable exception is the album’s lead track and lead single, “Blue Orchid,” which I’ve talked about before. It’s a sinister ass-shaker with a full-sounding hook that combines the best qualities of a New Wave synth riff and a full-on Tony Iommi onslaught. But perhaps the most fitting point of reference is Led Zeppelin: Just as Zep started off their largely acoustic album III with “Immigrant Song,” the single most aggressive metal track in their catalog, so too do the White Stripes use the borderline-industrial “Blue Orchid” to launch an LP full of murky piano and percussion exercises. It’s pretty damn brilliant is what it is, and the moment that “Blue Orchid”‘s relentless riffery (punctuated by one of the all-time great “woo woo!”s in rock history) gives way to the mysterious marimba (!) of “The Nurse,” you know you’re in for something special.

Satan is indeed a special record, a ghostly transmission from the submerged Appalachia of Deliverance, inspiring thoughts of Zeppelin III, Physical Graffiti, side three of Exile on Main Street. It sounds like it was recorded in hermetically sealed conditions by a band with absolutely no interest in listening to or following what any of its contemporaries in any medium were up to. Whatever production tricks were employed, it gives the album a vastly more unified, “this is this album” feel than either of the Stripes’ previous post-stardom efforts. There’s a pair of funk-soul rockers (“My Doorbell” and “The Denial Twist”) that will get your head nodding as surely as a either a new Neptunes single or an old Metallica track. The bluegrass song “Little Ghost,” besides being really funny, is also entirely sincere–I could easily imagine my wife’s West Virginian ancestors playing it on the porch a few generations ago. “Forever for Her (Means Nothing for Me)” and “White Moon” are a couple of slow, methodical, haunting ballads that get their rough-hewn, seemingly unfinished hooks in and simply won’t let go until their three or four minutes are up. “Instinct Blues” actually takes the hoary old blues cliches that so bothered me in Elephant‘s “Ball and Biscuit” and makes a real feedbacky corker of ’em. Jack and Meg White’s strange relationship is mentioned more directly than ever before on at least two songs (the Meg-sung interlude “Passive Manipulation” and “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet),” which simply adds to the strange, hypnotic “where are these cats at, anyway?” vibe. “Take, Take, Take,” a perfectly good strutter of a tune, suddenly slams on the brakes, hits the piano and the timpani, and demands to be listened to. “As Ugly as I Seem” is a folk song worthy of Nick Drake–or of Jimmy Page & Robert Plant’s efforts in that direction. Speaking of Zeppelin (it’s impossible not to with this record, and I assure you that that’s a VERY high compliment coming from this writer), “Red Rain” surgically removes the guitar squalls and solos of “In My Time of Dying,” places them in suspended animation, and stretches them across four minutes of fury–right on top of the gentle “As Ugly,” might I add, and right before the timeless, flawless, lyrically fascinating country piano ballad “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet),” which closes the album and God, does it also make you wish record companies released songs like these as singles.

Jesus–to think I almost didn’t buy this record!

This is where Jack and Meg White earn the place in music that critics have been so eager to award them. Album of the year so far, easily.

It

Amy’s Hayden Christensen fixation gave me an excuse to finally watch Shattered Glass last night. I sure am glad I did: It’s one of the most fascinating cinematic examinations of sociopathy I’ve ever seen, and trust me, I’ve seen a lot of cinematic examinations of sociopathy.

The film recounts the true story (perhaps the only true story with which its main character was ever associated) of Stephen Glass, a wunderkind writer and associate editor at The New Republic whose almost superhuman solicitousness toward his friends and colleagues enabled him to mask the fact that he was fabricating story after story out of whole cloth. That’s really the most striking aspect of the film (aside from Christensen’s performance, about which more later): These articles were chock-a-block full of just the most enormous whoppers you could possibly imagine. Glass didn’t just fudge quotes, rely on dubious information, or abuse anonymous sourcing–he was just making shit up, left right and center. People, places, organizations, documents, events, all 100% hot air. And this wasn’t even done in support of something resembling a real story somewhere down deep–Many of his stories didn’t even contain a kernel of truth at the center at all. The lying is so wide, deep, and bold that even as a well-informed viewer who knows exactly what’s going to happen in the movie, there’s still a shock factor at play: “Noooo. It can’t be!”

That’s just the thing: It can’t be, or at the very least it damn well shouldn’t have been. Glass was a master at gaming his magazine’s fact-checking system, one that he apparently helped set up and operate during his early days at TNR. Essentially, much of the fact-checking consisted of comparing a draft of a piece against the piece’s author’s notes; in a display of pretty stunning credulity considering the line of work of the people involved, no one imagined that those notes themselves could be miniature mockumentaries. However, this doesn’t excuse, or even explain, how some of Glass’s bullroar got published. It’s one thing to take a reporter’s word for it when it comes to the existence of a quote, or even a source; but when he’s inventing bills that are supposedly being debated in over 20 state legislatures, or “major” Silicon Valley firms that nevertheless have the kind of rudimentary websites that students are required to code up for introductory electrical engineering courses in college–well, shit, people, how ’bout making some damn phone calls, or using Yahoo, or applying even an iota of common sense? And it’s not just TNR that Glass punked; Glass was probably doubling his salary from freelance work at that time, so maybe a dozen other outlets were suckered as well. Whatever weakness in the system he exploited, it was endemic.

The film itself is as successful as it is thanks to a pair of very strong performances from its antagonistic leads. The much-maligned Christensen is a doozy as Glass, playing him as an abscess of both need and breathtaking duplicity who inspires protective, almost parental instincts in nearly everyone around him even though he’s rocketing past them toward fame and fortune. He reminded me of another out-of-nowhere knockout performance, that of Mark Wahlberg as Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights, especially toward the final third of that film. Christensen’s Glass is basically a big baby, with all the moral development of a toddler. He still sees the entire world exclusively in terms of how it affects him. He’s learned how he should act to please those he needs to please, how to be seen as a good boy; he knows how to hide actions that would upset that image, hide them so well that the thought of him doing such things is inconceivable to those around him; but he does it all so that he can do and get exactly what he wants. And one he’s caught, he simply can’t stop play-acting; one terrific moment shows Glass loitering in the TNR office–even begging his now-ex-boss to watch over him lest he off himself–long after both the boss and we the viewers have assumed he’s exited the building for good. Watching Christensen unravel over the course of the film is like watching a particularly spoiled little brat get caught and punished for doing something malicious–it’s satisfying, deeply so in fact, but at the same time extremely unpleasant. It’s good that the punishment happened, but there’s just something wrong with having to watch it happen at all.

The other terrific turn is from Peter Sarsgaard, who plays Glass’s editor Chuck Lane. Lane was apparently an unpopular figure at TNR, taking over for the adored, freshly fired Michael Kelly without much support from his colleagues; circumstance pitted him against Glass, who to hear tell from those who knew him was the most popular guy at the magazine. Every iota of this sense of impotence (inferority even) finds its way into Sarsgaard’s magnificently muted facial expressions, as disbelief, dread, and rage fight a three-way battle as Lane uncovers the truth. Before Lane ascends to the editorship of the magazine, there’s a wonderful moment early on when, asked to discuss the decidedly dry article he’s working on right after a tour-de-force, almost burlesque pitch from Glass on yet another absurdly killer story, can only chuckle helplessly, “That’s a tough act to follow…heh heh…uh…a really tough act…ha ha.” Sarsgaard plays it perfectly, and his vindication (though hit on a touch too heavily in the film’s final scene) is wonderful to watch, especially because his Lane doesn’t seem to desire vindication at all–showing only a quietly furious desire to get to the bottom of the mess he’s found himself in.

A few other thoughts:

1) I found it amusing that they’d occasionally cut to scenes of Lane returning home to his wife and baby after a hard day’s work. This is the hallmark of the “dogged investigator on the trail of master criminal” genre–I’ve seen it in films as wide-ranging as The Untouchables and Citizen X–but it’s still funny to see it in a movie that’s not about a G-man working to bring down a mob kingpin or a forensic investigator hunting for a serial killer, but an editor trying to fact-check one of his writers.

2) There are some really intriguing games being played here with identity. Judging from the cursory research I’ve done and the 60 Minutes interview with some of the principals that’s included as a special feature on the DVD, most of the major players in this scandal were, in real life, Jewish; in the film, they’re goyischized almost to a man. Glass is played by a man whose last name is Christensen, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what a poster boy for WASPy beauty he is; ditto Glass’s co-worker and close friend Hanna Rosin, an Israeli-born brunette who in the movie is played by a very blonde Chloe Sevigny and is named Caitlin (!). I haven’t seen anything that leads me to believe that these and other characters aren’t being portrayed realistically, but given the film’s preoccupation with how facts “need” to be glamorized to become good stories, it’s funny to watch the usual Hollywoodification at work here.

3) Another identity issue: Is he or isn’t he? There’s a scene in which Glass doth protest too much about how people think he’s gay, said protest occasioned by a meeting with another journalist who, in Glass’s own words, ended up with his tongue down Glass’s throat. That he’s saying this to a manque of TNR‘s Jonathan Chait, who, for the purposes of the film, has been transformed into a young woman, makes it doubly interesting. The movie continuously plays up angles between Glass, Sevigny’s Caitlin, and Melanie Lynskey (still working after Heavenly Creatures! Alright!)’s Chait-esque character that are potentially sexual or romantic, or perhaps incestuous is the right word; in these cases, and in the case of the adoring female high-school journalists who hang on Glass’s every word when he comes to lecture their class on his career, the filmmakers clearly see sex and gender as an issue. Now if I had to make a snap judgement based on Glass’s 60 Minutes interview I’d say he was gay, but if he is he’s not saying; indeed, in his thinly veiled autobiographical novel The Fabulist, he apparently is quite the ladies’ man. What gives? Is it just another level on which, to quote Roxy Music, “what’s real and make-believe” are duking it out for supremacy?

4) Having spent a good deal of time recently immersed in works of fiction that purport to be non-fiction (though obviously with a lot more transparency than Glass’s stuff, and with an entirely different motive), it’s been an odd and somewhat thrilling experience to watch a film that’s a slightly fictionalized account of a non-fictional scandal involving fiction in the guise of non-fiction. Thanks to the Internet, you can still see the very internet-journalism pieces that broke the story (written by Steve Zahn and Rosario Dawson, in the film at least), which itself creates a mental echo with the bogus website Glass created to shore up one of his fabrications. Hall of mirrors, rabbit hole, et cetera.

5) Small moment I liked: Zahn and Dawson fighting over who gets the byline for the article exposing the fraud perpetrated by a writer crazed with the notion of getting his byline out there. Sharp.

6) Please resist the temptation to name your essay about Stephen Glass “Glass Houses.” Trust me–it’s been done.

A fine film. Rent it.

Postscript: I recently ordered a copy of the movie Dahmer, which I think dovetails nicely with this movie. Perhaps I’ll write about that sometime soon.

Pink Floyd Reuniting for Live 8

Meaning Gilmour, Wright, Mason, and Waters.

Rock and effin roll.

I just heard “Blue Orchid” today. Holey smokes! Where’d that come from? AWESOME, and much better than the overrated roots-rock affectations of Elephant, lots of which I just didn’t get. (How could anyone voluntarily listen to “Ball & Biscuit” more than once?)

You know what this new song is actually a lot like? Another two-person outfit: Death From Above 1979. (That’s a compliment.) And in a weird way it will fit into a rock-radio landscape saturated with the Killers and the Bravery (and even the new nine inch nails) in a way that your old-model White Stripes wouldn’t.

Now I’m gonna have to get this record, aren’t I?

That’s okay–I didn’t wanna go to your stinking advance screening of Batman Begins tonight anyway!!!!

Submitted for your approval: a bunch of mp3s designed to make ya break ya shake ya ass.

“Black and White Town,” by Doves

I’ve gone on and on about this gorgeously technicolor “Heat Wave” homage in the past, but I’m telling you, you’ve really got to hear that insistent piano-drums combo and that roll-down-the-windows guitar solo to understand what I’m talking about. Best rock song of 2005 so far, and it’d take a real doozy to topple it.

“only,” by nine inch nails

You can tell how much I still love nine inch nails by the fact that they’re the only people in the world for whom I’ll indulge a no-caps name, aside from e.e. cummings. (Bell Hooks, Art Spiegelman, I’m hitting the goddamn shift button!) This is the most interesting song from the new album with teeth, since (aside from the chorus) it’s the least stereotypically NIN. A great bassline, kinky synths, and a deadpan talking-blues lyrical sense of humor that is a rare thing indeed for Mr. Reznor these days. And oh yeah, it’s FONKY.

“David,” by Gus Gus

There are times when I really miss the more intellectually stimulating Gus Gus songs of old. Listening to this ecstatic, super-sexy house tune is not one of those times. “I still have last night in my body” is one of those lines you’d happily kneecap someone to have thought up yourself. And again, synths. I love synths.

“Out of Touch,” Uniting Nations

Apparently looping a couple of lines from an ’80s hit and basing a whole track around that is all the rage in house music circles these days. Holy shit, that is such an awesome thing to do. If you’re gonna have a formula, let it be a rad formula, you know? This example of this particular moment in music features Hall & Oates playing off a massive four-on-the-floor beat in syncopated splendor. I love it. The video is pretty hot stuff too, in a refreshingly playful and non-nasty way that eventually involves a skinny Euro dude getting the comeuppance skinny Euro dudes tend to deserve. Extra points to the group for getting the idea for the song after hearing the H&O original while playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

“Call on Me,” by Eric Prydz

I put this one after “Out of Touch,” even though this track is widely cited as preparing the way for the that one, because I’m saving the best for last. And folks, this is the best. Seriously, the. Best. Another ’80s loop, this one from Steve Winwood’s “Valerie.” Now, I never thought I’d be singing the praises of anything involving Steve Winwood that didn’t also involve the words “Spencer,” “Davis,” or “Group,” but here we are. This shit-eating grin in song form so impressed Winwood when he heard a white label of it that he actually contacted DJ Eric Prydz and volunteered to re-record the sampled vocals specifically for this track. And as if this sunburst of a song wasn’t good enough, there’s an accompanying music video involving an ’80s-style Perfect/”Physical” aerobics class that is as joyously, gob-smackingly, unabashedly smutty as anything I’ve seen since the Frankie Goes to Hollywood sequence in Brian DePalma’s Body Double. There’s even another skinny Euro dude, but this one has a genuinely happy ending for all involved. Also, legwarmers, and lots of ’em. Go and watch, provided you are not at work or are but don’t give a rat’s ass. (They’ll ask you for registration information–try entering whatever you find here. Thanks, BugMeNot.com!) But mainly download the song. God, is it great.

(One final note: There are many people out there who might find the last few tracks to be maddeningly repetitive junk. So if you see any of them, tell the suckers I said ‘Dance!’)

For the “how’d I overlook this?” file: blogger and gameswriter Bruce Baugh’s wonderfully in-depth review of Zak Snyder’s fantastic Dawn of the Dead remake, written last November. Go ye and read, zombielovers. And while you’re at it check out Bruce’s two new(ish) blogs, now that his old one’s long defunct.

I just wish I was the guy responsible. From the makers of Tom the Dog, I give you Zombie Eat Brains. It’s a zombieblog–nothin’ new, that–but with a difference.

It’s written by a zombie.

Brilliant.

Brains.

From my friend Karolyn Gehrig:

Rebecca Gee and I will be showing recent work at our studio on June 11th from 6-9 pm. Come out, take a look and have a drink with us!

61 Greenpoint Avenue

Room #216

Brooklyn, NY 11222

Take the G train or B61 bus to Greenpoint Ave. Exit and walk one block west, towards the water. The studio is at the northwest corner of Greenpoint & Franklin.

I would especially like to bring this to the attention of all you MoCCA attendees, since this pretty awesome event is taking place on the same Saturday as the MoCCA Festival. Go to the show in the daytime, head over to the studio at night–make a day of it! (Harvey Award ceremony, Schmarvey Award ceremony.)

This post by Curt at The Groovy Age of Horror strongly arguing for specialist rather than generalist horrorblogs got me thinking about the other pop-culture blogosphere with which I’m most familiar (and the formation of which I like to pretend I had a hand in as well), the comics blogosphere. Regarding the horror one, Curt says:

A good core concept should be broad enough that you have lots of stuff to post about, but tight enough to define and individualize your blog. “Horror” is way too generic and amorphous. If there’s one thing the emerging horror blogosphere doesn’t need, it’s a bunch of “horror” blogs. That’s not the kind of horror blogosphere I want to see develop.

This philosophy has certainly worked well for Curt, who’s pretty much cornered the market on horror kitsch/trash/exotica from the bell-bottom era. But in terms of the comics blogosphere, we haven’t really seen a lot of this. I’m sure there are dozens of comics blogs that talk only about Big Two supercomics, but since I’m usually not interested in hearing from people for whom that is their sole point of comic-book reference, I don’t read them. There are some mostly-manga/anime blogs, there’s Egon (all art/alt/underground, all the time, to the exclusion even of the likes of smarter supercreators like Grant Morrison or Alan Moore), there’s NeilAlien (in theory a Dr. Strange fan/news site, in practice one of the best general comicsblogs around), and I suppose you could classify Fanboy Rampage as a specialist blog if comics-fan and comics-creator stupidity is a specialty; but for the most part the comics blogs that I like the best, and also the comics blogs that seem to have moved the blogosphere furthest forward, are generalist blogs. Some, like Tom Spurgeon’s unbeatable Comics Reporter and Dirk Deppey’s seminal

Nice. Nice. Not thrilling…but nice.

In all seriousness, it was fine. Zach Braff is talented, and he’s terrific on Scrubs, the best current sitcom on television. But a) his character was far too one-note; b) Natalie Portman was terrible; c) you can’t have an actor with the commanding presence of Ian Holm in your film and underuse him as greivously as this movie did; d) I have yet to deduce the purpose of the best-friend character; d) congratulations, Zach! You have hip taste in music! The weekly John Cusack Club for Actors Who Love Showin’ Off Their Awesome Taste in Music meeting convenes in fifteen minutes, at the usual meeting place of UP MY ASS; e) a lot of it felt a little gratuitous, like a film student who has a great idea and shoehorns it into his senior project screenplay regardless of whether or not it really works with the tone or technique of the rest of the film simply because he wants to get all his good ideas in there (I know what I’m talking about here, believe me)–the African adoptee, the plane-crash fantasy, the slo-mo party, the people who lived in the quarry, yelling in the rain, the rich inventor friend, the Method Man/hotel scene, etc.; f) you’ve got to have a lot of faith in the might and majesty of the Shins in order to make the liking of them a crucial plot point–I, alas, do not share that faith; g) I know this isn’t the movie’s fault, but I can’t help but unfavorably compare it to Eternal Sunshine literally every time I think about it.

Courtesy Eve Tushnet comes this Christianity Today essay on horror films by W. David O. Taylor. Wait, it’s not what you think! Taylor makes a thoroughgoing attempt to analyze what horror tells us about the world and what constitutes “good” horror, with both a lowercase and capital “G.” Obviously it’s the capital-G part that speaks to a sensibility which at this point is almost completely alien to me. (I didn’t realize how alien until I was forced to attend Mass during my sister’s graduation from a Catholic university last weekend.) This is not to say that I will never object to a film on the grounds that it is immoral–google search this site for Grosse Pointe Blank or Lars Von Trier if you don’t believe me–just that much of this:

In [some] cases you’ll want to be careful. Saint Patrick’s phrase, “the knowledge that defiles,” applies equally to the movies that we watch as to the rest of our lives.[…]some of it is dangerous. Evil is real, and the extent to which horror movies deal with evil, whether supernatural or natural, we want to be careful not to treat it lightly

Dammit.

When I first got the idea for The Outbreak (I first wrote about it, in an email to pal Ken in an email dated Feb. 20th, though the idea itself was maybe two or three days older than that) I thought to myself, “You know, this idea is too damn good never to have been thought of by anyone before.” I did a ton of googling for zombies and zombie blogs, and though I did find some neato zombie-outbreak simulators, I didn’t find anything resembling my idea of an ongoing real-time chronicle of life during a zombie epidemic. So I did my month or so of regular blogging, launched into the revenant stuff, and never looked back.

Today I’m checking my referral log for the site and I come across this messageboard discussion at a site dedicated to the zombie roleplaying game All Flesh Must Be Eaten. It starts with a link to The Outbreak as quoted from this pleasingly favorable plug from Christopher Bahn’s intimidatingly massive linkblog Incoming Signals. It’s a brief discussion, but what it did was lead me to a couple of sites. Sites with the names Slow Motion Apocalypse and Day by Day Armageddon.

You see where I’m going with this?

Oh, well. I knew it was too good an idea not to have been done before. But I’m not all that upset. I’m not going to read too much of those other sites because I don’t want my writing to be influenced by what they did or didn’t do, but simply by taking a quick glance at their site designs you can see that they’re going in a very different direction than I’ve done. They’re much more in a “suited up, ready for war, here are the stats of the assault rifles I’ll be using today” mode than I am. That was an approach I thought about for a bit but quickly rejected. It probably works wonderfully for them, it’s worked wonderfully for some of the zombie/post-apocalyptic fiction I’ve seen in the past, but it just wouldn’t make any sense for me. The notion that I’d successfully become a sharp-shooting warrior even in the face of the undead hordes bearing down on me and mine is just laughable. Much more frightening to me than the thought of having to thrive as a killer is the idea of having to but not being able to, and most likely not even trying. Inadequacy and failure are where I find horror in my own life, and–well, I’m reluctant to get too on-the-nose with how I describe what I’m doing in any of the fiction I write, but, well, yeah. In addition, the mechanics of the plague seem to be much more grim for both parties–SMA, which appears to have been operative for almost four years now, is described by its creator as the saga of the last living human on Earth. Needless to say, insofar as my zombie blog relies on the continuing viability of Blogger (a proposition dicey enough even when legions of resurrected cannibals are not a factor), the situation is not nearly as dire. Finally, from a technical standpoint, both sites appear to be much more elaborate and designed-y than my humble stock-template Blogspot site.

So I think I won’t let the fact that I’m not the Neil Armstrong of Zombie-Centric Online Journal-Style Fiction get me down. And if you’re into that sort of thing, by all means, go and gorge yourself. It’s what the zombies would do, after all.

In other horror fictionblogging news, I spent the morning wending my way through the various sites associated with Dionaea House, and wow. How I’d never heard about this before is beyond me–but you know, between not being able to find any zombie blogs until today and not being able to find a horror blogosphere until a couple of weeks ago, I guess the Internet is just too damn big to know where everything you want is, so I’m not going to let that get me down, either. Instead I’m going to give Dionaea House an extremely enthusiastic recommendation. If you get past a couple-three too-pat moments in the first few pages, you’re in for what is probably the scariest thing I’ve ever read online. (And it looks like I’m not alone in that estimation.) One post on one site in particular is give-you-the-chills, leave-the-lights-on scary. Trust me, you’ll know which one I mean.

Clicking through several of the links posted in comments throughout the Dionaea-related sites led me to other interesting online horror destinations as well. Ted’s Caving Page is ancient in Internet years, having been created and completed about four years ago. It certainly bears the marks of its era–gotta love that primitive htmling!–and it’s not as well-written as some of the other fictionblogs I’ve come across, but it combines deeply specialized knowledge of a particular field and the type of steadily ratcheting fear to which projects of this nature lend themselves so well in what I found to be a fascinating, if not entirely successful, manner.

Fascinating for a different reason is The Confessional, another horror fictionblog discovered through a Dionaea-related comment thread. As you can imagine quite a few readers of the Dioanaea story created dummy blogs and accounts in an attempt to become a part of the story–this in my estimation is one of the coolest possibilities of Internet fiction presented in this manner. Rather than simply riff on the Dionaea concept as most such readers did, however, The Confessional’s Victor Kantius attempted to bridge it into his separate fictional cosmology. Well, either that or shoehorn in a plug for his site in a way that made it look less like a plug for his site. I’d seen his comment in at least one other location (which I now can’t find) than the one linked above, and intrigued, I checked out the site. It turns out to be a pretty good object lesson in the limits of this type of writing. In an attempt to jerry-rig the sort of believability factor that a period of quietblogging on mundane matters or parallel blogging on multiple sites would engender (we’ve seen one or both done with Dionaea, Laylasweetie, even yours truly), Kantius simply backdated several posts to New Year’s Day 2000–a fine enough tactic, if it weren’t for the fact that Blogger didn’t exist back then. His messing with timestamps gets the better of him on what ended up being his last post, one dated February 2006. The technological trickery available to Internet writers can be a valuable tool, but it’s used at the writer’s potential peril.

Three final notes before signing off:

* Reading through recent posts and comments at Laylasweetie led me to believe I was missing a lot. Now I know why. I can’t decide whether to be miffed that you can’t get everything out of the story simply by reading the LJ, or simply floored by the amount of time and effort that is apparently going into it all, but perhaps you can.

* Many a Dionaea commenter noted the similarities between the story and the novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. House came very highly recommended to me, but I quickly found the annoying footnote chronicles of the hipster who supposedly found the main text’s manuscript too obnoxious to take and gave up on the book, even though I found its premise a chilling one. Now I’m thinking it’s time to give it another shot.

* I am currently dogsitting at my in-laws’ house, which though I’ve been here many times is still relatively unfamiliar to me. Last night as I went to the bathroom before bed I was contemplating the few bits of Dionaea I had read, as well as Laylasweetie and other bad-place stories I’d come across. After I finished I turned off the light and started walking back to the bedroom. I turned down the hall and thought to myself, “Gee, it’s dark. Amy must have turned off the bedroom light. But wait, she turned off the light in the other bathroom, too? How could she have done that so qui–” and found myself falling down the stairs I had actually turned down rather than the hallway five or six feet to its right. I caught myself after a few steps, but still, yikes. Add in all the malicious real-estate input I’d had that night, and double yikes. Between this and that wicked attack of deja vu I got after reading Laylasweetie that time, I’m starting to think horrorblogging does things to your head.

Courtesy of the increasingly indispensable Infocult comes another horror fictionblog, Dionaea House. I haven’t gotten any further than the first two or three pages, but, well, delightfully unpleasant. It’s interesting to read fictionblogs besides my own and compare how the “stories” are structured. While I have several narrative signposts in mind, I’m mostly trying to blog the outbreak (lowercase) the way I blog real life–when I feel like it, when I have the time, when I have something to say, when one of the people in my comment threads provides me with material to riff on (this has been particularly helpful in hammering out how the epidemic has affected different regions of the country, for example). Sites like Dionaea House and Laylasweetie, for all that they take advantage of the Internet’s capabilities, seem to me to have a more traditional storytelling structure.

There’s a new horrorblog on the block, name of Corpse Eaters, and I’m already enjoying it quite a bit. Most promising is mononymed blogger Steven’s planned series examining interesting aspects of the Friday the 13th series. No kiddin’!

Also on the horrorblog tip, The Missus discovered a fascinatingly creepy series of posts by M Valdemar’s Howard Peirce on the time he spent living in a haunted house. Once again, no kiddin’!

My friend Karolyn Gehrig is a very talented artist, and she has a new website showcasing her work. I think it will be of interest to horror fans, just to stick with that theme, but by no means exclusively to them. Check it out.

It occurs to me that I should maybe mention when I have pieces out in dead-tree publications. Check out the latest issue of Giant Magazine (Tom Cruise’s beard is on the cover) for reviews of Joe Sacco’s War’s End and Daniel Clowes’s Ice Haven.

Finally, I put some clips from my old gig as an editor and writer at Abercrombie & Fitch’s magazine/catalog/softcore hybrid the A&F Quarterly up on the site as PDFs for your perusal. Lots of fun humor features and tons of interviews, including ones with Frank Miller, Underworld, Brian Bendis, Fischerspooner, Paul Pope, Drea DeMatteo, Craig Thompson, the Dandy Warhols, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Bettie Page. Yes, that Bettie Page. One more time: No kiddin’!