SPOILER CITY AHEAD
I mean it in the nicest way possible when I say that I LOVE the stories that I’ve read about people who threw retro parties for the May 21, 2017 premiere of Twin Peaks: The Return with cherry pie and coffee and cosplay—and then their soiree went sour when the show started and they got walloped with David Lynch’s art.
People have been wondering why I’m in such a good mood lately. They tell me that there’s a glow to my skin and an extra spring in my step. They ask me if I’m in love or if I’m enjoying the spring weather or if I’m on prescription medication.
I honestly have no idea what these people are talking about. My best guess is that I’m just happy that there’s a really nice new Blu-ray for the 1941 movie, The Invisible Ghost, put out by Kino Lorber.
Continue reading “Getting Lost With Bela Lugosi and The Invisible Ghost (Blu-Ray review)”
Calder Willingham
To Eat a Peach
Mayflower-Dell, 1966 reprint (original printing 1955)
Calder Willingham is a sarcastic creep and that’s why I like him. This is a novel of summer camp sexual tension as written by the biggest jerk this side of Pluto and it’s deeply funny. No “couple” here belongs together (I put “couple” in quotes because most of these pairings never quite get the plug to reach the socket). The thirtysomething married woman who lusts after a 19-year-old slab of brainless beefcake who merely thinks that she’s acting like his mom could be the most hopeless case. Then, there’s the 46-year-old camp second-in-command who can’t stop thinking about the shapely teenage girl who’s there to mind the horse stable. Meanwhile, when that girl isn’t riding horses daily (double entendre alert!), she’s got an adversarial-slash-flirtatious thing going on with a frustrated bohemian kid who writes the camp newsletter and suppresses his godless, anti-authority, ticking-time-bomb personality for the job. When sex does happen here it’s… nothing much. Just meat slapping against meat. It’s a climax that isn’t much of one. How things change (or not change) afterward is what matters. It’s what Willingham, that jerk, leaves us trying get a grip on at the end.
This is one of the good “dirty books” of the 1950s. It was too puerile to be seen as serious literature, but too well-written, too full of character and with not enough raw sex to be pornography. Some readers in the 1950s probably kept this hidden from polite company. In 2017, its wicked sense of humor keeps it readable. I blew through it in two days.
A Brony Tale (2014, director: Brent Hodge)
I have never watched a single episode of the long-running My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic TV series and after viewing this documentary about its rabid fan following of adult men of all ages, races, waistlines and degrees of baldness, I am now terrified of catching even a glimpse of it.
My big fear: WHAT IF THIS SHOW IS AS MIND-BLOWING AS THESE PEOPLE SAY IT IS? What next?
The film section of this mess is now DONE. Mostly. The information is all up, but I’m not happy with main pages, yet. I would prefer the Genres page to have a custom sidebar, but my WordPress theme is kind of a bitch about that. It’s possible, though. I’m working on it. And I don’t know what I’m doing, so it may take some time.
The main page could also stand to be a little more smooth and look less like a Geocities site circa 1996. Working on that, too.
But the writing is all here. We at The Constant Bleeder are now grilling hamburgers. We’re like a restaurant that’s open, but our sign isn’t finished, yet.
Also, Find My Typos, Win a Vinyl Record.
Coming up next: a MUSIC column called Music Makes You Dumber. (EDIT: Scratch that. I’ve decided to just put the music stuff on the blog.)
WEBSITE PROGRESS UPDATE:
Things are coming together. I’m feeling good. How about you? Did that spot ever clear up?
For about three hours each day, I do what’s essentially a data entry job on this site, linking pages, uploading images, copying, pasting and editing. I fire up a Blu-Ray commentary track or some music (the TURBO KID soundtrack is doing me good lately) for background entertainment and I chug along. The film portion of the site should be done in about a week, likely sooner.
The ONLY problem I’ve noticed is that in Internet Explorer, random images here show up as very tiny. An image that’s normal-sized in every other browser shrinks down to something less than a thumbnail on IE. I don’t get it. Research hasn’t helped. I’ll look into it more, but I have a half a mind to just decide that Internet Explorer sucks and forget about it.
I’m a Google Chrome man. Chrome is the browser of cool people, I say!
Only dorks use Internet Explorer! Let’s spread this around.
And speaking of life and death problems…
Jack Clark
Nobody’s Angel
Hard Case Crime reprint, 2010
I’ve never driven a taxi in my life, but this novel makes me feel like I’ve been doing it for ten years. And I mean that in a good way. This story of one sad cab driver who stumbles into TWO different murder mysteries while he makes a living on the streets of Chicago is a travelogue of the city, as well as of the job and of the narrator’s frayed nerves. Jack Clark writes prose full of coffee and misery and moonlight. He was a taxi driver for thirty years and as in all of the coolest fiction, this is a writer writing about his own life, just under the thin guise of the crime genre. Meanwhile, you don’t care much about the murder mysteries. One involves a standard prostitute-snuffer who prowls the streets in a van at which our narrator only got a quick glance (barely remembers a thing); the other is someone who’s out killing cab drivers. Jack Clark builds no house of cards, nor does he intend to do so. There are no compelling clues. And our narrator is no detective. His idea of sleuthing is driving past a murder scene a few times and most of his ideas turn out be wrong. It’s no matter, though. Here, the dead bodies are less important than how our narrator feels about them. The investigation, like a taxi, is a vehicle for traveling the byways of his soul and it’s not the nicest neighborhood. To his great credit, Jack Clark also brings in one more brave and important dose of reality here: Sometimes some mysteries go unexplained.
Valentine’s Day is coming and there’s nothing that we can do about that. Nobody likes it, but we still keep Valentine’s Day around for some reason. It’s the black jellybean of holidays. It’s the Jay Leno of holidays. Actually, it’s less a holiday than it is a billing date on which proof that you’re a good husband or boyfriend is due.
Even if you’re with a cool girl who says that she doesn’t care about Valentine’s Day, you’re gonna feel like a real tool if you don’t do ANYTHING. There’s a 100% chance that one of her friends has a stupid boyfriend who went all out with a truckload of roses and a $300 bottle of Chardonnay at Le Sacre Bleu, leaving you looking as useful as a bag of old banana peels by comparison. If you ever work in a restaurant on The Big Day, you see as many miserable couples as you do happy ones. It’s funny after awhile. For a day devoted to love, Valentine’s Day doesn’t get much of it.
Continue reading “My Kinda Holiday Movies #1: Valentine’s Day”
I thought that I would have this website completed by now, but NOPE. I bought the domain name and the web space last November and I’m still learning on the job.
I’m still having bad ideas, working on them for several days and then trashing it all when I figure out that it stinks.
I started out with NO vision for this site, but one is slowly cohering by trial and error. When it’s finished, I’m hoping that this Constant Bleeder bullshit is something decent. We’ll see.
In the meantime, here’s a piece about a good book that I just read:
Ann Sterzinger
The Talkative Corpse
Hopeless Books, 2013
In this novel, a 40 year old educated man toils in minimum wage helljobs in Chicago circa 2011-12. Also, his girlfriend dumped him and he’s late on the rent for his shitty apartment.
Life has been kicking this guy in the balls ever since the internet killed his old newspaper job. Anne Sterzinger’s John Jaggo is a man under EVERYONE’S boot heel. Is he The World’s Biggest Loser or is he a kind of tarnished saint who suffers for the sins of modern living? Sterzinger argues the latter. This book is his journal, written to be sealed up, buried and discovered by people in the future. If Jaggo’s given up on happiness now, he’ll take immortality in a hundred years or so. He writes like it’s the only thing that keeps him sane.
It’s an essential perspective on the follies of the early 21st century. Sterzinger knows the sting of fluorescent lights, the horror of customer service and the terror of shitbag bosses at low-level office computer drone jobs like John Steinbeck knows Salinas Valley. Her narrator is articulate (and funny) in a well-read way. He neatly disembowels the Occupy movement (Jaggo attends a demonstration and finds it less than inspiring, to put it mildly), while also having little fondness for the fruits of capitalism.
And while everyone today has something to say about technology, Sterzinger is among the very few to talk frankly about how it’s taking away our jobs. Whatever the hell it is that you do for a living, there’s someone somewhere working on a machine, a website or a program to make your job, or even your entire industry, obsolete.
Capitalism considers the working class to be cattle, at best (and a burden, at worst), and Socialism has slid into laughable irrelevance. Most people into Socialism in 2017 are privileged bumblers. Socialism needs a strong and galvanized working class to make any sense at all. Today’s working class ain’t buying it. They’re not on board. They don’t care. They’re too busy bracing themselves for their jobs to become worthless while the rest of the world enjoys the technological innovation that made it happen. For Socialism to be relevant, the working class needs to feel relevant. And that’s the exact opposite of what’s happening.
Some in Generation X got hit extra hard with this. They went to college in the very last moments that a degree in the Humanities was still considered worthwhile. They graduated into a precarious job market and so heavy in debt that a suspicious mind might think that said debt was the sole reason why they were lured into college in the first place.
On the upside, Ann Sterzinger is doing HER job as a novelist to document all of this shit. THE TALKATIVE CORPSE is a book about one sad man in 2011 and 2012, but it feels like the end of the world.
But it’s NOT the end of the world.
The brilliant stroke of this book is that it’s presented as an ancient artifact discovered by the people of an unimaginable future (their presence felt faintly in an introduction and a few scattered “translator’s notes”). Every tragedy is undercut by how its main character, and all of us, are now dust. You and I are far-gone fertilizer here, no matter what our problems or status. It’s poignant and in a way it makes us all laughable.
It’s a book that gives us exactly what we deserve.
Yep, all 1,060 of them. They’re not linked from anywhere yet (so you can’t find them), but they’re here like bats nesting in a cave. Now, I will organize them in their own neat and tidy section, which shouldn’t take too long (I hope). I aim to have this site in spiffy shape by mid-February so that my nightmare can end and your nightmare can begin, dear reader.
In the meantime, here are links to five recent movie pieces of mine:
Hard Boiled (the John Woo shoot-’em-up landmark, which I saw this week at the Alamo Drafthouse)
The Sadist (the 1963 Arch Hall Jr. classic!)
Traffic in Souls (exploitation 1913-style)
Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man (70s Italian cop sleaze-o-rama)
My Man Godfrey (because we here at The Constant Bleeder like old screwball comedies, too)
Kenneth Davids
The Softness on the Other Side of the Hole
Grove Press, 1968
Maybe YOU could resist a fifty-year-old paperback called The Softness on the Other Side of the Hole that you found in the vintage rack at a used bookstore, but I couldn’t. It was $3. The great title was worth at least $1 of that; the bizarre description on the back cover was worth the other $2 and more.
It gets flying right from its opening sentence when our hero, a homeless 72 year old hippie, innocently smokes a joint in the stall of a women’s restroom and a guy in the adjacent men’s room starts to flirt with him through the wall on the assumption that he’s speaking to a woman. Our geriatric pothead likes girls (or used to back when he could get the job done), but he eventually plays along because…
1) he’s high as a giraffe’s eye,
2) he’s a nice old man who likes to make people happy,
and
3) author Kenneth Davids has no interest in making a lick of sense (our 72 year old man somehow convincingly affects the voice of a woman in her 20s as he chats through a glory hole). Davids writes like he just took a couple monster bong hits and then went to type some stuff (and he probably did). He rambles, treats periods and commas as optional, and is most interested in ruminating on loneliness, aging, and drugged mind states–and building up to a taboo plot twist that’s the last atom bomb gross-out after some creepy sex acts and nightmare phallic drug hallucinations.
It’s trash, but it’s a trip. It was put out by the old Grove Press and it plays like psychedelics-sprinkled pornography for a few quick chapters, especially when the old man gets lost in the fantasy that he’s a girl, and then it makes left turns into places where the most shameless boners won’t remain standing.
I give it a thumbs (and ONLY thumbs) up.
