•As noted yesterday,
I’m boycotting Joss Whedon and the films he oversees. However, I’m not losing my love for all
Marvel projects, including the swell Frankenstein image nearby [MAJOR UPDATE: Luckily, I'm also not boycotting all Disney projects, since Disney, which also owns Marvel, has acquired LucasFilm and plans to make Star Wars: Episode VII in 2015 -- h/t Chuck Blake, and more on Lucas himself below].
It’s only one of
countless variations on Mary Shelley’s idea, of course: Here in its entirety is
Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein – a
century-old movie adapting a novel from a century earlier. Yet the film is far stranger than the novel,
really. In Edison’s film, the monster
simply ceases to exist at the end, fading into a mirror because Victor refuses
to love him and instead bonds with Victor’s new bride.
•My boycott of today
consists of me urging people to stop subscribing to the New York Times after their opportunistic board editorial opining
that a “Big Storm Requires Big Government.”
Does anyone think the reasoning behind the Times’ opinions is more
sophisticated than an eight year-old’s? FEMA shouldn’t be privatized in the middle of
a storm, but everything can be
privatized. Yes, everything.
At least Mayor Bloomberg declined to muse about whether one
hurricane constitutes evidence of manmade climate change. Gov. Cuomo was not so cautious. Ironically, though, two of the people I’ve
personally encountered here most worried about climate change are spouses of
two of my fellow former John Stossel producers.
One of the climate-worriers in question is John Hockenberry,
himself also a TV producer, and the Frontline
episode he did attacking climate change skeptics itself comes
in for skepticism in this column, which debunks the oft-repeated claim that
97% of active climate researchers believe humans are a significant cause of
global warming.
The column is a neat window into what a statistician friend
of mine says is a pattern of climate alarmists abusing statistics. Make the numbers fuzzy enough and you can
produce an apparent consensus on almost anything – then spin it as if you got
everyone to agree on the worst-case scenario instead of the basics: not merely
that, yes, there is such a thing as a basic greenhouse effect but that doomsday
is imminent.
Statistics abuse is the great, rarely-noted Achilles heel of
the climate fear-mongers.
•A greater danger than rising oceans is of course aging, as
revealed in a comedy clip
of people playing Existential
Crisis & Dragons.
•Also funny – and
also true – is comedic
confirmation that George Lucas is not merely inept but actually evil.
•Oddly enough, David
Lynch passed up the chance to direct Return
of the Jedi. We will never know what
that might have looked like – perhaps a bit too much like Dune. But we do have a short Lynch film from 1970
(over forty years ago, and seven years prior to Eraserhead). It’s definitely
Lynch – and with a hint of Terry Gilliam influence, I’d say.
•Lynch does “vague but ominous” in a fashion worthy of H.P.
Lovecraft, though Lovecraft’s clearest influence on film in general may be the
plethora of storylines out there which, like Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, involve ancient alien evils being
unearthed in Antarctica (including the first X-Files movie, Alien vs.
Predator, and more, arguably including Lovecraft fan John Carpenter’s take
on the John Campbell-based Thing).
•I also associate Lovecraft with the more familiar environs
of Providence, RI, where he lived (when not living in NYC) and where I went to
college. My fellow Brown alum Dan
Greenberg notes a map of Lovecraft’s Providence-like fictional town of Arkham. Since Providence has a Euclid Avenue, I only
wish Lovecraft’s map had included a Non-Euclid
Avenue. Ha!
•I also read the Stephen King short story “Fair Extension,”
about a man who makes a deal with the Devil – and doesn’t really regret the
devastation it wreaks on the life of his best friend. It’s a great, disturbing little portrait of
jealousy.
I read it along with the non-fiction King book Danse
Macabre, his 1981 tome about his overall “Dionysian” philosophy of
horror, recommended by Gerard Perry. I’m
not a King fanatic, but I can understand why so many people are. He’s easygoing and easily digestible but
manages to come up with at least one clever or funny idea per page.
This book includes King’s observations on such important
topics as
the E.C. Comics he grew up with, the question of how ugly you have to
be to count as a monster, the primal appeal of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, why Cthulhu is like a vagina, what Linda
Rondstadt said about the Ramones and hemorrhoids, outgrowing belief in the
tooth fairy, King’s experiences dowsing at an early age, his father abandoning
the family, the big impact Creature from
the Black Lagoon had on him, the advantages of radio for making people
envision the worst (War of the Worlds,
for instance), Ray Bradbury and Twilight
Zone as license to let fantasy run amok without clear explanations, the
radio drama “The Chicken Heart That Ate the World,” the virtues of being an
old-time radio buff, our fear of dying a “bad death” such as accidentally being
crushed by an auto lift with oil leaking onto our faces, The Amityville Horror as a suburban real estate nightmare, a
defense of John Frankenheimer’s mutant-bear movie Prophecy (which I saw as a kid but did not like as much back then
as the original Battlestar Galactica,
which King repeatedly insults), Burt Bacharach’s theme song for The Blob, the fear of troubled places so
important to The Haunting of Hill House
and The House Next Door, the
usefulness of the South for providing Gothic texture in a fast-paced modern
world, King’s college-age encounter (not so unlike my own) with an
unapologetically conspiracy-theory-prone Black Panthers member, the moralism of
Something Wicked This Way Comes and
horror in general, the lingering question of whether horror writers’ innermost
layer is the moralist or the pervert, and how his novel The Stand grew out of his attempt to write about Patty Hearst and
the Symbionese Liberation Army.
•Though I don’t
pretend I can fully justify it, I’m now (before turning back to politics in
earnest) reading a Star Trek: Voyager
novel recommended by another friend, Star
Trek: Voyager: Pathways by series co-creator Jeri Taylor (not to be
confused with Jeri Ryan a.k.a. Seven-of-Nine, without whom there would be no
President Obama for Romney and Gary Johnson to challenge this month, since it
was her husband who dropped out of the Senate race against Obama after kinky
revelations about their sex life, clearing the way for Obama’s 2006 victory).
The novel’s fine so far (though certainly not as cool as this magnificent trailer for
the 2009 J.J. Abrams movie), but it’s a scary testament to how lame and non-iconic
that TV series was that I’d nearly forgotten half the cast. Harry Kim? Kes? A
Klingon named B’Elanna Torres? I mean,
it sorta comes back to me now, but...this fuzziness of recollection doesn’t
happen with Spock or Odo.
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