One stretch of my afternoon commute—specifically, the stretch between the train ride and the walk—is on a shuttle, which is a lot like a bus, except that it’s shorter, there’s less graffiti, and the drivers get to listen to the radio. As of yet (and this is actually true of every East Bay shuttle I’ve ever ridden), I haven’t had a driver whose station of choice is not 102.9 KBLX: The Quiet Storm. You wouldn’t know it from their tagline, “Soft and Warm,” but they’re basically a soul station. Tangentially, they have the world’s worst morning show, and that’s saying something.
At the stop yesterday, while we waited for stragglers from the train to make their way onboard, the DJ played a Michael Jackson song. Again. Because no one’s tired of that yet.
A woman sitting in the back row said, “Turn it up!”
The driver, engaged in a through-the-window conversation with a friend, either didn’t hear or chose to ignore her.
“It’s Michael Jackson! Turn it up!”
He swiveled his head around and gave her a look. “What?”
“Michael Jackson?” she said . “From the Jackson Five? Motown?”
He snorted, but he did turn the volume knob. Immediately, she started clapping along to the rhythm. After a verse, she noticed that no one was joining in. I think she’d hoped this would be a unifying moment for all of us.
“I guess there aren’t any Michael Jackson fans on this bus,” she said. Then she started clapping again.
Later, she announced that due to the quality of the sidewalks in Oakland, she could fall and break her neck any day. Also, that there are too many fat people in America.
Last weekend, while the rest of the Bay Area was burning up in the upper 90s and low 100s, Oakland was as pleasant as ever. To celebrate our climatic superiority, some friends and I gathered at the Mountainview Cemetery for a picnic. We set up on the Potter’s Field, because there aren’t any tombstones and because it’s fun to explain what a Potter’s Field is to people who don’t know.
We’d been there for just shy of an hour when our meal was interrupted by a loud cracking noise. Everyone looked up to see a substantial branch falling from the upper reaches of a nearby eucalyptus tree. I had only a couple seconds to process what was happening and exclaim, “Hey, that’s my car!” before this happened:
(thanks to Christian for the photos)
I reject all claims that this was a case of our downstairs neighbors getting back at us for the noise we were making. If anything, I think they appreciated the company. Or didn’t notice us at all, on account of being dead. This wasn’t about the dead versus the living; it was about California versus eucalyptus trees.
Yesterday, I had to say goodbye to a great friend.
Jackson spent his last morning blind and deaf, but happy to be surrounded by people who loved him. On his way into the vet’s, he took a shit on the waiting room floor, which only seemed fair.
He joined my family as a puppy when I was seventeen years old. As sad as I am right now, I know my life is better for having had him in it.
I miss you, buddy. A lot.
In the hopes of coming off as a healthy, developed person with a variety of interests (I’ve got fucking layers, man), I try to avoid writing back-to-back horror-related posts. But when I came home the other night from seeing Drag Me To Hell, still buzzing on a monster-movie high, I found a link a friend had passed along to me in my inbox, and I just had to respond.
For your reference, here it is: Examiner.com’s seven reasons why the horror genre is dying.
I set out to write a reasonable point-by-point rebuttal, but had to give up. I kept getting too mad. It’s not just that I disagree with the article’s thesis; I disagree with its entire value system. Every point I tried to make started out with quotes and analysis, and then devolved into, “Who the fuck watches movies this way?!”
So I scrapped it. Instead, I’m just going to offer my own list.
7 Reasons the Horror Genre Is Doing Just Fine, Thank You Very Much
Thanks for the concern, but I think we’ll survive.
After months of waiting for the DVD to come out, and several weeks of working up the nerve to actually watch what I was assured would be the Most Disturbing Movie I’ve Ever Seen, I finally made it through Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs last night. Given the amount of hype/controversy this one’s generated, I feel obligated as someone who watches way too many horror movies to throw in my two cents.
The roadblock that I’m encountering is that I can’t think of a single thing to say about it.
Actually, that’s not true. Watching it, many adjectives ran through my brain (among them: “tense,” “absurd,” “dramatic,” “pretentious,” “captivating,” ”pretty,” “gross,” and “dull”), but I can’t assemble them into a cohesive review. I want to say that that’s symptomatic of the film itself not being cohesive–it has one of the most off-the-wall narratives I’ve ever encountered–but I don’t think that’s right. The film is meticulous. I never doubted that Martyrs is exactly what Laugier wanted it to be. I just cannot figure out what the fuck that is. There’s an “Introduction by the Director” feature on the DVD (I watched it after I watched the film, just as a book’s preface is usually the last thing I’ll read) where he expresses his hope that whether you love or hate the film, you’ll at least feel that it was a “cinematic experience,” which I did. So…mission accomplished? I guess?
Did I like it? I have no idea. Probably not. I didn’t hate it either. I’m about 85% sure I’m never going to watch it again, and 65% sure I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone but the most curious. I think the hype surrounding it is unearned, but it’s such a puzzling artifact that I can understand people’s fascination. I imagine that if I was less busy these days, I might develop a bit of a fascination with it myself, but that’s not in the cards.
So I’ll just say this, and then move on with my Netflix queue: It is decidedly not The Most Disturbing Movie I’ve Ever Seen.
Every few months, the folks at the Absent Willow Review give out an Editor’s Choice Award (equal parts bragging rights and cashy-money) to a recently published story. Although it is their choice, they do encourage reader input in the form of an online poll. If you have not already done so, please read my recently published horror story “Sweat,” and if it does it for you, vote for it here.1 Or dig around the site and vote for something that you like more. Believe me when I tell you that this could very well be thirtieth or thirty-first most important election of your lifetime.
1 I know that the idea of voter fraud is enticing, but please resist the urge to cast more than a single ballot. A second vote will function much like Darby O’Gill’s fourth wish.
A couple years ago I was trying to write a novella. It was kind of disfunctional family/kitchen-sinky, populated by angsty, unhappy characters doing their darndest to make one another miserable. Their success in that effort was moderate, but they were excelling at bumming the hell out of me. Their story was vague, turgid, and boring as shit. For whatever reason, I couldn’t convince myself to give it up. I knew it was awful and I hated the act of writing it, but every night I’d sit down at the computer and crank out another thousand stupid words, suffering through every one of them.
Somewhere around the fifty-thousandth word, I knew I should be wrapping things up. Unfortunately, not a whole lot had happened yet. Mostly just a lot of griping and sulking. I’m not sure where I got the idea, but I came up with a solution: apropos of nothing, I threw a monster into the mix. It took five pages for it to eat everyone. Then I typed “The End” and finally let myself move on with my life.
A year later, I dug the novella out of the drawer where I’d buried it and gave it a read. It was exactly as bad as I’d thought while writing it…except for those last five pages, which were actually kind of fun. I dumped the rest and worked them into their own story.
It’s called “Sweat” and it’s up in the April issue of The Absent Willow Review.
Despite my (obvious, I assume) love of the horror genre, for whatever reason I hadn’t actually written anything that qualified since high school. It was a total blast, and I’m sticking with it.
In the shower this morning, I experienced a new kind of headache. It came completely out of nowhere, was up there with the most painful headaches I’ve ever had, lasted all of thirty seconds, and then disappeared entirely. I spent a few seconds squatting in the tub, waiting for the urge to vomit to pass. Then I stood up. When my brain was up and running again, I had the following conversation with myself:
Shit. Did I just have a stroke?
How would I know?
Try to remember something.
I once had a pet rat named Ali Sheba.
Good! Now try to remember something else.
This is stupid.
I smelled no burning toast, and when I checked the mirror, found that my face was no more asymmetrical than it’s ever been. Still, I can’t shake this lurking fear that the next time I see my mother, I’m going to have no idea who she is.
I don’t know much about the ABC, and I don’t like speaking out of ignorance, but it’s pretty clear that selling more beer than garlic fries is a ridiculous reason to fine a business. As a government organization, their agenda sounds pretty self-serving. Conversations I’ve had with friends in the booze industry reaffirm this suspicion.
I didn’t get invited to many parties in high school, and even if I had, I would have had a lousy time. Like many adolescents, I simply didn’t fit in with my kids I went to school with. Like substantially fewer, I was lucky enough to grow up in a city that had (at the time) a large, active local music scene, and that’s where I found the sense of belonging that eluded me elsewhere. At all-ages clubs like the Great American Music Hall and the Bottom of the Hill, I met like-minded kids from all over the Bay Area and formed friendships that have lasted for years. I learned the joy of discovering new music, and that joy in turn taught me the value of seeking out new shit as much as possible. My high school punk band played some of these clubs, and as awful as we were, some of my happiest memories of being a teenager are those shows.
If the ABC has their puritanical-yet-pointless way and these clubs either go 21+ or go under, I don’t doubt that the kids will find something else to do with their time. They tend to be pretty resourceful as a group. But it’d be a shame anyway, if for no other reason that I will be even more puzzled by what the hell it is teenagers today do with their time.
The best part of the revision process is when a story opens up and declares, “This is what I’m about!”
The worst part is realizing just how many more drafts it’s going to take to figure out what the eff I’m going to do with that information.
