Black leather driving gloves and a sturdy collar
Hey. I've wanted to post for ages but life has been so busy happening that writing about it seemed annoying and futile. Hurrah!
So here's the catch-up…
The horror anthology thing will happen. This is blinding news. I am so happy. No, really. I want to leap and sing and run around the room but frankly I'm way too fucked, so trust me, inside I'm dancing. The first one will be published in time for Dead by Dawn in April which - will this is glorious news - I am wondering when I am supposed to find the time. My book has to be done before then, and I have a festival to put together, so if only I could find a sneaky secret day to have in between all the regular days that didn't involve me staying up all night, that would be fantastic.
But I'm not complaining. Well, I am, but I don't deserve to.
As for my book, the first 42,000 words seemed to come pretty easy and now I am writing one word a week. This is a shit rate to be writing at, but inspiration eludes me. I need to do some actual research, like talk to a forensic pathologist and some Toronto natives and then hopefully that will help open up much of what is missing. Also, I wrote the Canadian High Commission and asked about grants to pay for me to go to Toronto to do some research. It would be the coollest thing if they said yes :)
In other news, my parents were over and that was funky. No fighting and lots of my mum's cooking, so yay for that. I survived two weeks temping (hate hate hate hate) but have now been paid so THANK YOU JESUS I can now afford bread.
In the street yesterday I got approached by three spotty wee schoolgirls in uniform, two with their camera-phones at the ready and the third who made eye contact then as I went past, tapped me on the shoulder. See, I knew what was about to happen, but reflexes scuppered me. Almost. I turned and side-stepped, she missed whatever she was trying to do with her flailing hand. I smiled at her and said, tell you what, I'll make you a deal. She asked me what. I said, if you try that shit again I'll peel your face off in strips.'
They left.
If it had been my kinda movie, I would have decked her, taken her friend's phone and captured her bleeding, crying and horizontal for posterity, then chucked the phone at her feet. Sadly I am not that hard, and I bet I'd end up in some kind of unfair trouble for having decked a minor. Little bitches.
Oh and I fell in lust again but as the situation is as doomed, complicated and unworkable as you could ever imagine, I have been very mature and restrained and yeah yeah yeah so that's a moral victory (like I really give a shit) but having walked away from something I wanted to indulge in, at least for a while, more than I can find the words to say, I feel I should get a ticker-tape parade or a medal or at the very least a balloon. It sucks doing the right thing and getting no bloody reward for it. So there's little to do but chew the furniture and watch movies, which I am having to do a great deal since Paul gave me 11 to review. Sob. Four down, seven to go. Which explains why I am sitting at the PC on a Friday night, drinking wine which is not nearly as good as it should be, and watching extraordinarily tiresome flicks which I will eventually get round to giving a kicking in print.
Duncan and I have been having odd conversations. I wish you'd heard them - they were doubtless funnier live than reproduced here. Anyway, we were wittering on about nothing in particular when he said something and then took it straight back, saying 'that's something my dad would say.' So I had to taunt him with 'you're turning into your daaaaad' to which he responded 'well, you're turning into your muuuum' and from there we got on to the idea of all conflict resolution should be done with wrestling, pitting like relatives against each other. For me, the idea escalated into a tag-team scenario because, as I told Duncan 'I have five uncle Bernard's' (this is true, though one of them may be dead) and I quite like the mental image of that. Not a dead Bernard, obviously. Scary though it is. It reminds me of Saturday afternoons watching comedy 80's wrestling with my dad, eating home-made strudel still warm from the oven, and endlessly delighted by the site of wobbly coronary candidates bashing into each other's beer guts. Ah those heady days…
Today's random conversation with Duncan concerned a ceilidh I am vaguely obliged to go to tonight thrown by the Taoist Tai Chi Society. I suspect this will not be as much fun as ceilidhs thrown by firemen or policemen or drinking societies, and in the process of bemoaning this - in the light of the fact that all the participants have just been on a 4-day Tai Chi bender and will be all calm and stuff (calm? What is this calm you speak of?) Duncan decided that unlike decent martial arts when you can legitimately say you are gonna open a can of whupass on someone, maybe with Tai Chi you have to say you are gonna open a small pot of humous on their ass. Hahahahaha
Anyway, I don' wanna go to no steenkeeng ceilidh but go I will. I really am not up to pretending to do the whole sociable thing at the moment, when what I really wanna do is bog off up a mountain somewhere, find a bothy, light a small fire and read and sleep and stare at the stars until I feel better.
I went to see Wolf Creek last night. What follows is a bilious rant. Skip to the last paragraph if you'd like to finish on a happy note.
See, it's a full moon. Now, I'm tidal at the best of times but come full moon I can get a little over-emotional. This extends to wanting to pour boiling fat on the ignorant bitch two rows in front of who felt the need to talk incessantly from during the trailers till the end of the end credits. Well done, you classless whore - has no-one explained to you that when the cinema is dark and there are flickering lights on the screen, your gob is supposed to be shut? I know life is complicated, but maybe we can have this small but oh so goddam significant piece of information beaten into you. Now, your boyfriend was kind enough to get up three times during the film to buy you enough food to keep your face occupied, but as you eat with your mouth open, it was hard to hear the (albeit risible) dialogue over the sounds of you sucking unsuspecting popcorn to death.
But I understand your boredom, if not why you are allowed to live. Still, I did sit outside after the movie to see you and your boyfriend with the lights on because if you ever try to set foot in a DBD screening, you will be turned away and the only hard part about that for me will be trying not to cackle while I'm having you thrown out. Small pleasures….
We are lied to, our whole lives. We lie to each other, all the time and usually because we claim we don't want to hurt someone's feelings. This is very kind of us, and besides, we're not lying, we're just being economical with the truth. But then there are the daily lies that we just accept are always going to be there. Ones like - "sale today only" or "this won't hurt" (my dentist has the bite marks to prove how much I didn't believe him) or "I'll call you"
Or today's favourite…."most hotly anticipated movie of the year…"
By whom? Not horror fans, surely, otherwise poor old Pavlov must have fucking whiplash by now. Horror fans are used to being lied to. We keep getting told that some random film or other breathes new life into the genre or heralds some new golden age or is the most exciting, most frightening, most gruesome, most blah blah blah blah blah.
My hole it is.
Wolf Creek is a shining example of what a film-maker in his 30s hacks up when he gets indigestion from a lifetime of watching better movies. To call it derivative is verging on insulting the movies it shamelessly rips off. The kind thing to do is to be blunt. It's lazy, tedious, formulaic, dull and predictable. It's not even nice to look at.
As far as the press has been concerned, the grown-up papers and non-genre coverage is honest about the fact that it's a piece of sneakily misogynistic shit and should be recognised as such. Unfortunately, the fan boys are out there drooling. And we're back to this fucking gratitude displayed by a section of horror 'fans' who seem to think every film is a godsend and we should be thrilled at what we're given. Why? Wolf Creek has nothing to recommend it. It's a superficial, tiresome waste of everyone's time and because every drooling fan runs out to see it on its opening weekend, falling for the excessive marketing, then it does well and so justifies another studio vomiting up a carbon copy in six months time. Stop falling for the marketing. Bill Hicks has this to say...
"By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they'll take root, I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good. Seriously, no, this is not a joke. "There's gonna be a joke coming..." There's no fucking joke coming, you are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it's the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself."
[For anyone that doesn't know the rest of that rant it goes: "I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too. "Oh, you know what Bill's doing? He's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market. He's very smart." Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking evil scumbags. "You know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar, that's a big dollar, a lot of people are feeling that indignation, we've done research, huge market. He's doing a good thing." Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scumbags, quit putting a godamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet."]
We should know by now that the amount of hype is inversely proportional to the quality of the movie. Simple. Just wait a week, and go then. Please. Please stop validating this shit. You can wait four days. Just four days till the opening take isn't being counted anymore and then go. Then you won't be able to bitch about why there are so many bad movies out there, because you will have stopped contributing to their lifecycle. See, make your own mind up. It's a director you love? A movie you think looks interesting? Then run there with all haste on opening night. But to the hundreds of horror fans that say to me 'yeah it looked shit and I knew it would be bad but I had to see it anyway' I say fine, see it, but FOR FUCK'S SAKE PLEASE wait four days. No amount of message board whining about shit movies is ever gonna make a difference. Do some damage where it counts - reduce the profit. It is utterly adolescent to need to be the first person to see a movie. We've spent a lifetime as horror fans being enthusiastic about the genre, and that's not a love that will or ever should go away but it should not be justification for simpering, obedient gratitude at every piece of monotonous, facile drivel that the industry thinks constitutes horror when for the most part the mainstream industry wouldn't know horror if horror stuck a fucking chainsaw up its suppurating arse.
Aren't penguins lovely?
So here's the catch-up…
The horror anthology thing will happen. This is blinding news. I am so happy. No, really. I want to leap and sing and run around the room but frankly I'm way too fucked, so trust me, inside I'm dancing. The first one will be published in time for Dead by Dawn in April which - will this is glorious news - I am wondering when I am supposed to find the time. My book has to be done before then, and I have a festival to put together, so if only I could find a sneaky secret day to have in between all the regular days that didn't involve me staying up all night, that would be fantastic.
But I'm not complaining. Well, I am, but I don't deserve to.
As for my book, the first 42,000 words seemed to come pretty easy and now I am writing one word a week. This is a shit rate to be writing at, but inspiration eludes me. I need to do some actual research, like talk to a forensic pathologist and some Toronto natives and then hopefully that will help open up much of what is missing. Also, I wrote the Canadian High Commission and asked about grants to pay for me to go to Toronto to do some research. It would be the coollest thing if they said yes :)
In other news, my parents were over and that was funky. No fighting and lots of my mum's cooking, so yay for that. I survived two weeks temping (hate hate hate hate) but have now been paid so THANK YOU JESUS I can now afford bread.
In the street yesterday I got approached by three spotty wee schoolgirls in uniform, two with their camera-phones at the ready and the third who made eye contact then as I went past, tapped me on the shoulder. See, I knew what was about to happen, but reflexes scuppered me. Almost. I turned and side-stepped, she missed whatever she was trying to do with her flailing hand. I smiled at her and said, tell you what, I'll make you a deal. She asked me what. I said, if you try that shit again I'll peel your face off in strips.'
They left.
If it had been my kinda movie, I would have decked her, taken her friend's phone and captured her bleeding, crying and horizontal for posterity, then chucked the phone at her feet. Sadly I am not that hard, and I bet I'd end up in some kind of unfair trouble for having decked a minor. Little bitches.
Oh and I fell in lust again but as the situation is as doomed, complicated and unworkable as you could ever imagine, I have been very mature and restrained and yeah yeah yeah so that's a moral victory (like I really give a shit) but having walked away from something I wanted to indulge in, at least for a while, more than I can find the words to say, I feel I should get a ticker-tape parade or a medal or at the very least a balloon. It sucks doing the right thing and getting no bloody reward for it. So there's little to do but chew the furniture and watch movies, which I am having to do a great deal since Paul gave me 11 to review. Sob. Four down, seven to go. Which explains why I am sitting at the PC on a Friday night, drinking wine which is not nearly as good as it should be, and watching extraordinarily tiresome flicks which I will eventually get round to giving a kicking in print.
Duncan and I have been having odd conversations. I wish you'd heard them - they were doubtless funnier live than reproduced here. Anyway, we were wittering on about nothing in particular when he said something and then took it straight back, saying 'that's something my dad would say.' So I had to taunt him with 'you're turning into your daaaaad' to which he responded 'well, you're turning into your muuuum' and from there we got on to the idea of all conflict resolution should be done with wrestling, pitting like relatives against each other. For me, the idea escalated into a tag-team scenario because, as I told Duncan 'I have five uncle Bernard's' (this is true, though one of them may be dead) and I quite like the mental image of that. Not a dead Bernard, obviously. Scary though it is. It reminds me of Saturday afternoons watching comedy 80's wrestling with my dad, eating home-made strudel still warm from the oven, and endlessly delighted by the site of wobbly coronary candidates bashing into each other's beer guts. Ah those heady days…
Today's random conversation with Duncan concerned a ceilidh I am vaguely obliged to go to tonight thrown by the Taoist Tai Chi Society. I suspect this will not be as much fun as ceilidhs thrown by firemen or policemen or drinking societies, and in the process of bemoaning this - in the light of the fact that all the participants have just been on a 4-day Tai Chi bender and will be all calm and stuff (calm? What is this calm you speak of?) Duncan decided that unlike decent martial arts when you can legitimately say you are gonna open a can of whupass on someone, maybe with Tai Chi you have to say you are gonna open a small pot of humous on their ass. Hahahahaha
Anyway, I don' wanna go to no steenkeeng ceilidh but go I will. I really am not up to pretending to do the whole sociable thing at the moment, when what I really wanna do is bog off up a mountain somewhere, find a bothy, light a small fire and read and sleep and stare at the stars until I feel better.
I went to see Wolf Creek last night. What follows is a bilious rant. Skip to the last paragraph if you'd like to finish on a happy note.
See, it's a full moon. Now, I'm tidal at the best of times but come full moon I can get a little over-emotional. This extends to wanting to pour boiling fat on the ignorant bitch two rows in front of who felt the need to talk incessantly from during the trailers till the end of the end credits. Well done, you classless whore - has no-one explained to you that when the cinema is dark and there are flickering lights on the screen, your gob is supposed to be shut? I know life is complicated, but maybe we can have this small but oh so goddam significant piece of information beaten into you. Now, your boyfriend was kind enough to get up three times during the film to buy you enough food to keep your face occupied, but as you eat with your mouth open, it was hard to hear the (albeit risible) dialogue over the sounds of you sucking unsuspecting popcorn to death.
But I understand your boredom, if not why you are allowed to live. Still, I did sit outside after the movie to see you and your boyfriend with the lights on because if you ever try to set foot in a DBD screening, you will be turned away and the only hard part about that for me will be trying not to cackle while I'm having you thrown out. Small pleasures….
We are lied to, our whole lives. We lie to each other, all the time and usually because we claim we don't want to hurt someone's feelings. This is very kind of us, and besides, we're not lying, we're just being economical with the truth. But then there are the daily lies that we just accept are always going to be there. Ones like - "sale today only" or "this won't hurt" (my dentist has the bite marks to prove how much I didn't believe him) or "I'll call you"
Or today's favourite…."most hotly anticipated movie of the year…"
By whom? Not horror fans, surely, otherwise poor old Pavlov must have fucking whiplash by now. Horror fans are used to being lied to. We keep getting told that some random film or other breathes new life into the genre or heralds some new golden age or is the most exciting, most frightening, most gruesome, most blah blah blah blah blah.
My hole it is.
Wolf Creek is a shining example of what a film-maker in his 30s hacks up when he gets indigestion from a lifetime of watching better movies. To call it derivative is verging on insulting the movies it shamelessly rips off. The kind thing to do is to be blunt. It's lazy, tedious, formulaic, dull and predictable. It's not even nice to look at.
As far as the press has been concerned, the grown-up papers and non-genre coverage is honest about the fact that it's a piece of sneakily misogynistic shit and should be recognised as such. Unfortunately, the fan boys are out there drooling. And we're back to this fucking gratitude displayed by a section of horror 'fans' who seem to think every film is a godsend and we should be thrilled at what we're given. Why? Wolf Creek has nothing to recommend it. It's a superficial, tiresome waste of everyone's time and because every drooling fan runs out to see it on its opening weekend, falling for the excessive marketing, then it does well and so justifies another studio vomiting up a carbon copy in six months time. Stop falling for the marketing. Bill Hicks has this to say...
"By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they'll take root, I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good. Seriously, no, this is not a joke. "There's gonna be a joke coming..." There's no fucking joke coming, you are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it's the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself."
[For anyone that doesn't know the rest of that rant it goes: "I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too. "Oh, you know what Bill's doing? He's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market. He's very smart." Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking evil scumbags. "You know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar, that's a big dollar, a lot of people are feeling that indignation, we've done research, huge market. He's doing a good thing." Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scumbags, quit putting a godamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet."]
We should know by now that the amount of hype is inversely proportional to the quality of the movie. Simple. Just wait a week, and go then. Please. Please stop validating this shit. You can wait four days. Just four days till the opening take isn't being counted anymore and then go. Then you won't be able to bitch about why there are so many bad movies out there, because you will have stopped contributing to their lifecycle. See, make your own mind up. It's a director you love? A movie you think looks interesting? Then run there with all haste on opening night. But to the hundreds of horror fans that say to me 'yeah it looked shit and I knew it would be bad but I had to see it anyway' I say fine, see it, but FOR FUCK'S SAKE PLEASE wait four days. No amount of message board whining about shit movies is ever gonna make a difference. Do some damage where it counts - reduce the profit. It is utterly adolescent to need to be the first person to see a movie. We've spent a lifetime as horror fans being enthusiastic about the genre, and that's not a love that will or ever should go away but it should not be justification for simpering, obedient gratitude at every piece of monotonous, facile drivel that the industry thinks constitutes horror when for the most part the mainstream industry wouldn't know horror if horror stuck a fucking chainsaw up its suppurating arse.
Aren't penguins lovely?
posted by Adele at 12:46 pm
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