Bonfires burning bright, pumpkin faces in the night, I remember Halloween...

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, snap! Guess what, fiends: it's Hallo-freaking-ween! That's right, kiddies, the Day is here, and the fear is near. Furthermore, yesterday... er, today, several hours ago... was a good freaking day. Jenny and I hung out for our 2nd anniversary, and we watched The Princess Bride and had lasagna for dinner. I ate so much that I was going to fluffing explode, so I made things better by helping her to bake chocolate chip cookies (um... somewhat, at least). I had 2, and they were incontrovertibly good. Maybe I'm weird, but if I have more than 2 or 3 cookies in a single sitting, my teeth on the lower right side of my jaw start to hurt, so I took a breather. We took the rest to our friend Kevin's house, since he was having a Halloween bash. We went at about 10:00, and the kid wasn't even there yet. Worse yet, when he did show up, his freaking hair was straight. Straight! If you know Kevin Clutson, you know that God did not intend Kevin to have straight hair! I hung out for a while, but then we started watching Dawn of the Dead (the recent re-make...sigh). I bailed after about a half hour and hung out with Joe, Brad, Kristin, Melissa and Jenny upstairs. And Eliot showed up and ordered pizza. And Bob Mentele was there for a bit. Eh. Whatever.
I'm not sure if this is a riveting narrative or not. But that may be because I left out that an army of the Undead swooped down upon Kevin's house (and a vicious horde of giant spiders, might I add) in search of brains and optical nerves, and we twelve had to stave off their attacks for most of the night. You have to destroy those suckers' brains, man. Brad valiantly defended the eastern approaches until his curfew expired and he had to go home. Fine work, Brad. Joe held his own by the patio for the longest time. My hat goes off to you, sir. I eventually was forced to wade out into the sea of inhumanity with a meat cleaver, hacking and chopping my way through the throng of living dead until none were left standing. Basically... I rule. All told, a fine day, and a bitterly ironic way to throw a Halloween party. Remind me to thank Kevin for a pleasant evening.
But one more thing, just to throw out there as an aside: I can't say that I'm down with people who get their jollies by screwing with others and trying to freak them out or put them down, even if it is a joke. It's just not very nice, you know? I mean, I'm a strong proponent of sarcasm, but I don't go around fanning the flames of discontent with distasteful shows of it. I'm just saying that you don't have to act like a jerk to be friendly with someone... oddly enough. Oh well, my bit is over with. As always, it's been awfully swell talking to you. Later.

Dr. Loomis, you have a call on line 2...

Man! Halloween is tomorrow, kids! The Day of Horror draws near! And it's especially awesome because one of the musical projects I'm in faces our baptism of fire; tomorrow night we perform our very first gig at Lost and Found in Madison, and we are going to annihilate every soul there. Our name is Loomis (you know, Donald Pleasance's character from Halloween, Michael Myers' shrink...you remember, right? We were gonna be Voorhees, as in Jason, but some (cra)punk band from Britain already has the name) and we freaking shred. I label us as a grind band, but that's not quite the case. Certainly, we have many of the stylistic indiosyncrasies of grind, but we incorporate a lot of different strains of metal into our approach. Oh, and lest I forget... we shred. I play guitar and do some cookie monster vocals, Jon Taube plays drums (and occasionally lets out a "pubescent-schoolgirl-in-Hell" vocal), and Zach Johnson and Eric Jackson both do vocals (Zach has the screechier vocal (think Pig Destroyer), whereas Eric rips up the guttural vox (think Nile)). We have 4 originals at this point in time, and we also rip a rendition of The Misfits' "We Bite." Yeah... we shred. But, I don't want to turn the excitement over the coming of Samhain into an excercise in vanity on my part, so remember: rock the Halloween, boils and ghouls. And don't do anything stupid. Just because it's Halloween doesn't mean you have to ruin your life (or others'). Cripes. Just have a good time and be safe. Watch out for the Undead. Later, fiends!

Barg!

I have no absolutely NO idea how I neglected to include Black Christmas in my list of quality horror flicks. What an egregious error on my part! I can't recommend this film enough! It's really the definitive slasher flick, and set most of the devices that would become cliches in later years, but doesn't fall into cliche itself. It's really freaking good. Its basis is the old "When a Stranger Calls"/ babysitter getting threatening phone calls scenario, but it's majorly re-tooled for this story and is told in a college setting. It has such luminaries as Margot Kidder, John Saxon and Olivia Hussey. Do NOT forget to get this movie...if you can find it anywhere. It's fairly old and is out of print, but was re-released on DVD pretty recently; that's how I obtained my copy.
* Note: Black Christmas may scare the bejeezus out of you.
** Double Note: "Barg" is a literary creation of my friend Erin Stamm. I have no idea what it means.
*** Tertiary Note: If you're in the mood for good Halloween music, give this a try:

• Bauhaus (especially the songs "Hollow Hills," "Stigmata Martyr," "Double Dare," "In the Flat Field," and "Bela Lugosi's Dead")
• The Misfits (of course)
• Modest Moussorgsky's "A Night on Bald Mountain" (don't worry, you've heard it before)
• old school AFI (i.e. Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Eyes and Black Sails in the Sunset)
• early '80s Cure (Seventeen Seconds, Faith, "Charlotte Sometimes," and Pornography)
• J.S. Bach's "Toccata in D Minor"
• Siouxsie and the Banshees (pretty much anything, really)
• Joy Division ("Isolation" and "Hours")
• Led Zeppelin (just "The Battle of Evermore," really)
• Sisters of Mercy (Floodland reigns)
• just about any black metal band, but especially Emperor (pre-IX Equilibrium; especially In the Nightside Eclipse), Darkthrone (yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah!), Gorgoroth, Mayhem (pre-Euronymous' death) and Satyricon (The Shadowthrone and Nemesis Divina <"Mother North" freaking dominates>)

Well, that should about do it. Much love, fiends.

Sweet Mary and Her Whistling Brother Irving...

Halloween is 3 freaking days away, boils and ghouls, and how glorious it is! The colors of Autumn are everywhere, and the cycle of death and rebirth continues apace. I totally watched The Legend of Hell House today with some buds, and man...that movie kind of sucks. A lot. But if you're in the mood for some classy (well, good at least) horror films, then check these out...if you dare...

• Carnival of Souls (get the original, not the recent re-make)
• Vampyr (top notch, my friends)
• Night of the Living Dead (stick with the original b & w one)
• The Fog (I don't care what Erin says, I deem it to be a minor masterpiece)
• Suspiria (I hope you're not squeamish)
• Dead Alive (see above; however, it's more comedy than horror if you really think about it...)
• Lost Highway (FREAKING weird, but it's a David Lynch film, so it's to be expected...)

And there's always classics such as The Omen, and The Exorcist, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (as always, the original), and The Changeling (am I wrong and this is not in fact a classic?), or Friday the 13th or Halloween, but you can't really go wrong with any of these puppies. So do yourself a favor. Check 'em out.

Oh, and I don't know how I forgot to mention that I got a terrible haircut yesterday. You see, I had this epiphany a little while ago: I don't look good with long hair. I know I've been told that a million times over the years, but, uh...all of you that have told me that time and time again... you had a good point. My current 'do wouldn't even be so bad if only there was hair on the sides and back of my noggin. And if it wasn't so short that it emphasized how big my already formidable melon is. That's all I really need. Now I just rock my beaver fur Holden Caulfield hat all of the time. Sheesh. A man shouldn't have to resort to Eskimo gear to conceal his shameful haircut. Oh well. It's been nice talking to you again. Well, I s'pose...

Please Bear With Me Here As I Expound at Length About James Joyce

Please excuse the fact that the following entry may sound

like the ramblings of a hopeless hipster. Bear in mind that this is

not the case. I hope.

So I took a perusal at my copy of Ulysses today, and I started thinking about how James Joyce's prose has been described again and again as almost schizophrenic. (James Joyce is perhaps the most influential writer of the 20th century. He broadened the palette of language and introduced new literary devices, most famously stream-of-consciousness, which attempts to trace a person's internal monologue. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, but exiled himself to the Continent in 1904 and lived out the rest of his days in Zurich, Paris, and Trieste until 1941. All of his stories focus on the lives of average Irish men and women, and combined satire with experiments in linguistics and pure narrative. He used symbols which he called epiphanies to create universality in his work. He produced landmarks of literature including Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake. Finnegan's Wake is an ambitious attempt, through dream imagery, to tap hidden racial memories and is a rumination on the cyclical nature of the Universe. But I digress.)

Joyce's daughter, Lucia (whom he was very fond of) was at one point in time a patient of Carl Gustave Jung (around the time Joyce was writing Finnegan's Wake, I believe) due to her mental illness which Dr. Jung diagnosed as schizophrenia. This, as well as the burden of crafting Finnegan's Wake and the pains and blindness he was developing due to glaucoma proved to be too much for Joyce and he had a nervous breakdown.

He visited Jung one day to plead with him to allow Lucia to be released. He argued that she was not mad. "The things that she does with language aren't so different from my own experiments in my writing." Insightful as always, Jung said to Joyce: "You are diving. She is sinking."

I suppose my point is that the great geniuses of any genre are sensitive to realms normally hidden (or concealed, rather) from the lay populace; that is to say, their grasp on the human condition and of reality at large may in fact be greater than that of the average person. Maybe that's a no-brainer, but Joyce's experience reminds me of what Friedrich Nietzsche said: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you." Furthermore, I think that every genius is slightly off of his or her rocker. The line between insanity and genius, I think, is one of productivity. A madman doesn't introduce anything to the world of any use to anyone, and can't return to reality, whereas a genius provides insight and new ideas and can put his (or her) feet back on the ground after having his (or her) head in the clouds. I guess that that is the crux of my thought today, and kind of relates to what I remarked about the supernatural earlier today (Gosh! Far earlier! Practically a day ago!).

Sheesh. I need to sleep; I've already thought a couple days' worth of thinking.

By the way, all of you should check out this group called Minus the Bear. They have interesting ideas, and also some of the best song titles I've ever heard of, i.e. "Damn Bugs Got Him, Johnny," and "We Are Not a Football Team." Give them a shot. Well, I s'pose...

As Part of a Heart-Healthy Diet, the White Lady is Soluble in Terror...

I gotta tell you...Count Orlock (from the F.W. Murnau film Nosferatu) is messed up. That guy's body is HORRIFIED. Total repulsion! Sure, he's creepy and everything, but he's gotta be the ugliest vamp ever. It looks like he was greased by a steamroller at age 46! And he's got a serious case of f'ed up shoulders, let me tell ya. And instead of going the normal route and having eyebrows, he has these caterpillars he decided to put there instead. And those fangs! They're buck fangs! Get this vamp some braces...
But that's not what I came here to discuss. Well, it kind of is, but the main draw is this: I think the White Lady is stalking me. For those of you not in the know, the White Lady is the closest thing to a local haunt that Janesville really possesses. But she definitely suffices. As in most of the legends fitting the "White Lady Archetype," our White Lady lost a child (in childbirth? by some other means? who knows...) and soon afterward became despondent and killed herself. (In Mexico and in Gary, Indiana, she is known as La Llorona, the Weeping Woman. She is supposed to be the ghost of an Indian who had an affair with a Spanish nobleman. When she gave birth to twins, the Spaniard severed all ties with her, and she killed her babies in a river, and went mad, running about the streets of Mexico City in a white, bloodstained dress. She killed herself sometime soon afterward.) Now, she roams about at various locales about town (Oakhill Cemetery, Riverside Park, Happy Hollow Road, the woods around Kevin Clutson's house) in a flowing white gown. She has glowing red eyes, and long fingers that almost look like claws. You do not want to run into her in a dark alley. Or anywhere, I presume.
Anywho, I've mounted a couple of expeditions to find her with various degrees of success (by that I mean that I never found anything conclusive, but weird stuff did happen from time to time...babies wailing and whatnot), and I proposed another one to my friends Zach and Eric. That night, I could've sworn that I saw something white rush out of the corner of my eye outside my front door, and while I was posting an entry later on, I kept hearing odd sounds on my porch. Of course I didn't investigate what they were. I can put on my heroic face in the woods with a group of friends, but not in my own freaking house. That sounds a tad topsy-turvy; I know, I know. I should be more confident in my own abode, but basically: I didn't want to confirm that I lived there to her. Sheesh. I don't want the White freaking Lady to know where my house is. I'll never sleep at night again. It's bad enough with Bigfoot on my trail...
Just remember that when you open the door to the supernatural, that it doesn't always swing shut when you want it to. Sometimes the supernatural thinks the party's just started and keeps bringing in more punch. I know that that's a terrible analogy. My sincerest apologies.
Later, fiends. Don't take any wooden nickels.

Well, I turned into a martian, whoa oh oh...

Man. As Halloween approaches, I find that my mind wanders to the Misfits more often than it usually does, and brother, is that often. I believe that I can claim without exaggeration that the Misfits were one of the greatest groups ever to grace this planet (in Earth A.D. no less). They epitomized a pure punk rock ethos in the creation, promotion and distribution of their music years before Ian MacKaye was doing the same with his own Discord label in Washington D.C. Their sound is instantly recognizable, in the collision of adrenalized punk rock and and 50's-style rock and roll, both in the music itself and in Glenn Danzig's characteristic vocals. Not content to hoarsely shout like so many other punk frontmen, Glenn sounds like the progeny of Jim Morrison and Elvis Presley weened on horror movies, The Ramones, The Clash, The Damned, and of course, Marilyn Monroe. Glenn could croon about the most vile things in the world, but you would be convinced he was singing a heartfelt sockhop love song, especially on tracks like "Horror Business" and "Astro Zombies." And their kitsch value! No one could top the at once morbid and hilarious image that the Misfits presented. Misfits lyrics so very, very often dealt with how tough it is to be a teenager and turn into a Martian, or worse yet, be a teenager and witness the armies of the living dead erupt from their graves. All told, Glenn led the Misfits through six years of great music, finding their path after strange, albeit interesting early material such as "Cough/Cool." The line-up basically always had Glenn (who, at the beginning, played his keyboard through a fuzz pedal in lieu of hiring a guitarist) and and his buddy Jerry Only on bass (he's the one shouting, "1 2 3 4!" kinda like Dee Dee Ramone), but solidified for a while around 1980 with Glenn, Jerry, his teenaged brother Doyle von Frankenstein, and drummer Googy (known affectionately to fans as "the Goog"). They cut their debut LP Walk Among Us after years of EPs and singles and found underground success. This led to them discovering hardcore punk (i.e. Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, 7 Seconds, Circle Jerks, S.O.A., etc.) and their album Earth A.D. It's viewed as the thrash metal bible (which I'm somewhat dubious of) and finds them more ferocious and faster than ever. Much of the humor of past years is gone as they go straight for the jugular (see "We Bite" ) and destroy all in their path. Sadly, this was their last LP, but they issued one farewell single, the classic "Die, Die My Darling" in 1983. Then, the Misfits were no more, and Danzig moved on to Samhain, devilock in tow.
Unfortunately, in recent years, Jerry Only revived the Misfits with his brother Doyle, a new singer named Michale Graves, and a drummer named Dr. Chud. As much as I would want to like them, they don't hold a candle to their former selves. You see, Glenn wrote all of the songs in the 1977 to 1983 era (with input from the others, of course), and furthermore, Glenn was not amused when Jerry wanted to revive the band that he had started. A legal battle ensued that Jerry won, and he was permitted to use the name, but couldn't play any of the classic songs. It's a shame, really. Jerry could've done whatever he wanted, but instead he had to capitalize on the name and produce music (I'm being nice here) that simply does not do justice to the good name of the Misfits. Doyle bailed a while ago, I guess, and has since reconciled with Glenn, and is appearing on Glenn's new solo tour. You can bet that that is going to dominate.
In short, I don't want to go so far as to blast Jerry Only; he was a pivotal member of one of my favorite bands. However, the new Misfits pale in comparison to their first incarnation, and I can't take seriously anyone who claims to dig them. They simply do not hold up as a good group, and it's all the more sad that the name of the Misfits is tarnished by their existence.
You should all check out:
The Static Age
Walk Among Us
Earth A.D.
Legacy of Brutality
Collection I (a.k.a. The Misfits)
Collection II

Rest assured, your socks will be rocked the freak off. Watch out for yetis.

Don't Trust a Sasquatch Farther Than You Can Throw Him...

I went to donate plasma today with my friend Jon, and I realized that it isn't all it's cracked up to be. Sure, I'm no pansie when it comes to needles, but you gotta be honest with yourself: those things kinda hurt. Okay, they're fairly uncomfortable. I'm not sure if it's truly pain so much as I'm really freaked out that there's something the size of a telephone pole stuck in my forearm, sucking away at my life force. Maybe that's a bit melodramatic, but it is most definitely disconcerting at the very least. But, I'm helping save lives and making fifty bucks a week for not an ounce of actual work. I'm not trying to sound un-humanitarian here. Really.
Oh, and we drove past this field next to the woods containing the Ice Age Trail- I could feel Sasquatch's cold stare penetrating the foliage, watching me.....waiting.....

Stop Sasquatch Before He Kills Again

I totally forgot that I have a freaking yeti living virtually in my backyard, and it's been well-nigh a year since I saw him. However....I have a feeling in my bones that I'm gonna run into him again. You see, last year I was riding my bike back home from the library on the othe side of town, through the Ice Age Trail leading to my neighborhood. It was awfully dark out, darker than the pizza I burnt in the oven last night, and I was riding through a fairly dense archway of trees, priding myself on how not-scared I was, when suddenly, from behind an enormous bush immediately to my left.....something emerged. Something awfully big; even bigger than me. You see, I'm 6' 3", and hover around 200-something pounds, depending upon how lazy I am, and this thing was bigger than I was. So, I lost my cool and high-tailed it, burning rubber and leaving a firey trail behind me. I was still 10 minutes from my house when I encountered Sasquatch, but I made there in about 3. I never looked back, 'cause I didn't want to see freaking Bigfoot on my trail; whether it was in fact the fabled Sasquatch or not is immaterial. There was a big freaking...whatever, right next to me, and whether it was some psycho Andre the Giant or a wigged-out Wookie, I wasn't gonna stay to find out. Sheesh. That's asking a bit much, I think. But now, I think he's stirring once more...I'm taking a bus to the library next time.

Man, what was I thinking?

So, this was never meant to happen. Only a year ago, I thought blogs were the domains of spineless emo kids and their ilk, but....they only mostly are. And slutty interns on Capitol Hill. But now, here I am, with one of my own. Sheesh.