And a Zombie will save them

At least I hope so. While I wait for people to answer my questions I figure I'll take a minute to talk about a thing or two.

As those that know me will know, I love movies. Movies are second only to books for me as far as entertainment goes. I see a lot of movies and I do mean a lot. It will also surprise no one (as I will often rant about my feelings concerning genre snobs and their ilk) that I also love horror cinema. I don't say that with a disclaimer attached. I love horror cinema. Not all of it of course because just like everything else, most of it is bad and just like everything else it goes in cycles and follows trends. These cycles and trends are often not my cup of Mexican beer.

The high points make me all manner of happy (the "Golden Age" of the 30's, the rise of Hammer Studios, the ridiculously intelligent things like Psycho and The Haunting from the 60's, the very very beginning of the slasher craze) while the low makes me sad for the genre (the slide into total camp of the forties which while entertaining in itself was shameful considering, the middle and end of the slasher craze, the remake boom, the Japanese remake boom, and everything from the current "torture porn" thing with the sole exception of the first Saw). I could write pages and pages about this but no one would care so I won't.

Anyway, I'm hoping that with the obvious death of the torture porn thing (I don't know who made that name up but that's what all the reviewers call it so, whatever) the next wave will be started next Friday, continued the Friday after that and picked up on for a while.

Rob Zombie please save me from bad horror films.

His remake of Halloween opens this weekend. Normally I would be screaming for his head on a platter but he's Rob Zombie. I've read lots of interviews and he has a real respect for and deep knowledge of horror cinema. He actually called John Carpenter before signing on for this and Carpenter told him to make it his own. My hope is that he will fire on all cylinders and blow me away.

The week after, a movie called Hatchet opens up. It calls itself old school American horror. Please don't let me down. If both of these movies take off it could mean a rebirth of good horror movies after a pretty vicious dry spell. Even if you don't care (very likely) keep your fingers crossed for my sake. The hard part about liking all genres is that you have more things to suffer through when the cycles and trends go south.

Let us pray that Brother Zombie will deliver us to evil. Amen.

Oh and in other geek news, Matt Wagner has a new Grendel series starting in November. Just typing it makes me sexually aroused. Also I have a sentence for you:

Warren Ellis has a new series out called Doktor Sleepless: Future Science Jesus.

If that sentence doesn't do it for you then you may already be dead.

I am Leechor, Evil Master of Power Suction

1. Leave me a casual comment of no particular significance, like a lyric to your current favorite song, or your favorite kind of sandwich, maybe your favorite game. Any remark, meaningless or not.

2. I will respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.

3. Update your blog with the answers to the questions.

4. Include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in your own post.

5. When others respond with a desultory comment, you will ask them five questions.

Questions by Damo/CS/I don't update my blog or sign into ICQ anything like often enough.

1. What's your full name, and is there a story behind any of the names you were given?

Brace yourself for mediocrity:

Earl Stephen Collins. My first name came from my father. He hated it and didn't want me named after him but my mother was adamant (re: wouldn't shut up about it) so he agreed to name me that on the condition that they then pick a middle name for me (he had none) which would be what everyone called me with no exceptions. He did not tolerate people calling me by my first name. When translated, my name means something like Crowned warrior prince. I dig it. Except for the part where the name that everyone calls me is from a guy that was killed for his beliefs. Perhaps not the best way to pick a name for a child.

2. What are your favourite homemade and take-away foods, and how long have you loved each?

Homemade is far and away Mom's chicken and dumplings. I would kill a man that got between me and the kitchen when she makes it. Take-away I'm going to have to say steamed Maryland blue crabs (it counts as take-away says I). If you get them from the right place then you will know what love tastes like. Ask anyone that's tried them.

I have loved each since the first time I tasted them. Just like your sister. I'm kidding! Jeez, you touchy bitches..

3. Desert island jukebox: You're sent on a retreat to a body of sand in the middle of nowhere with two palm trees and a hammock; what CDs did you pack (your wallet holds... let's say... ten)?

I object to this question on the grounds that is is cruel and unusual!

*shakes fist*

I'm going to assume that I'm not going to be stranded there forever but only for an extended period but still, ridiculously hard question. Do I pack music to fit the locale or do I just take my favorites? Do I try to offset the locale in some way? AAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!

OK, in no particular order and I'm not going to explain why, here goes:

1. The soundtrack from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
2. Led Zeppelin - How The West Was Won, Disc 1
3. Nude on the Moon - The B-52's Anthology, Disc 2
4. Faith No More - Either The Real Thing or Angel Dust. I'll flip a coin when it's time to go and choose then.
5. Johnny Cash - At Folsom Prison
6. Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
7. Alice in Chains - Dirt
8. Pantera - Vulgar Display of Power
9. Thelonius Monk with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall
10. Depending on my mood, a really great Elvis or Beatles collection/best of/whatever.

4. What's your biggest achievement / proudest moment? Why? (if you can't come up with one, the question is "Why do you suck?")

I'm going to blow smoke up my own ass now and say that my biggest achievement is either reading my first novel at age three or first testing on a college level in sixth grade. I really am as smart as I say I am. Suck it.

5. Why oh why did you quit smoking?

You see even though I am ridiculously smart I am also capable of insane depths of stupidity. Case in point. I realized that smoking made me more relaxed and that I genuinely enjoyed it so of course I had to stop doing it and then go through the hell of withdraw followed by 2 and a half years (and counting) of almost never ending cravings. It's a wonderful display of exactly how much I hate myself really and thanks ever so much for reminding me.

Bitch.

Yep

I had this whole insane rant typed up and ready to go when it hit me that I shouldn't and won't subject my friends who come here to my barely contained mental illness. I really just want to let the few that care know that it's bad today and looks to get worse before it gets better.

If you pray, then pray for me. If you don't then think happy thoughts or ask your overlords on the mothership to beam me down some peace. Anything you can spare.

Thanks.

My drink and the getting on of same

These days I'm mostly a social drinker. Saturday nights when I play poker I'll one or two beers to loosen up, three if it's been a really awful week. Some weeks require more than this. A lot more. After swapping calls and texts with a few people during the week we decided that this last week was one of those. A true shit week that seemed to have it in for us all. Clearly it was a sign. We needed to blow off some steam. To grab that pressure release valve and haul that sumbitch around hard and fast.

We quickly devised a clever and intricate plan which I will now share with you.

The Plan

1. Go out.
2. Drink.
3. Drink quite a lot more.
4. Give it a good hard think.
5. Decide on having more drinks.
6. WOOHOO!

It's a work of genius isn't it? You'd think that it's too elaborate for us to pull off and let me tell you we had our doubts. We thought it might be too big, too grand an adventure. I'll admit it, we were scared. But did that stop us? No! We bravely set out to make The Plan a reality.

My friends I am pleased to announce that we were successful beyond our wildest hopes.

I haven't been that hammered for long and long and, Maker bless me, there wasn't the slightest hint of nausea which is weird because we were packing away a wide variety of food. Highlights included the crab dip, jerk chicken, a variety of chicken wings and what's a party without some deep fried cheese? The Old Man was looking after me for sure and many thanks you wily and magnificent bastard. I haven't laugh that much or that hard for a very long time and I really needed it.

Note: when you're completely faced, never play pool against the designated driver. He'll cheat. Somehow when I was trying to break he made me miss the cue four times in a row. Sneaky git.

Anyway, I wouldn't normally bore you lot with a drunk story but I don't have many good nights (or days for that matter) and when I do I like to share. Also, I heartily recommend that everyone get a friend that you can collapse into a drunken heap with, arms and legs twined together like a string of Christmas lights that have been sitting in a box all year, and go to sleep with without any of the bullshit sexual tension that normally keeps people from that kind of thing.

Bonus: zero hangover.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should

I've been thinking recently about how much faster I used to read compared with how fast I read now. I've been telling myself that I do it on purpose so that I can better appreciate the words and what they mean and what they might mean and this or that string of words is something to be savored slowly. Better, thought I, to walk through the lovely garden to better see and examine all the flowers individually than to run through so I could see the next garden because it too is lovely and perhaps the one after that is more lovely still. This is what I've been telling myself.

This morning I started wondering if it was actually true.

Did you know that if you tell yourself something over and over again eventually you can convince yourself that it's true and you will believe it even if it isn't? I read a study a couple of years back that found that every person in the world has memories of things that never happened owing to this type of thing. All of us. So I wondered about this in relation to my reading (thinking about it in relation to every memory I have will do nothing but drive me further down the road to crazy town) and decided to put it to the test.

I snatched a book off the top of a stack this morning and dove in with the intent to read it fast. Fast fast. Like old times fast with the pedal to the floor like the devil was on my tail.

Oy.

A couple of hours later I was done and realized I hadn't enjoyed it much. Not nearly as much as was warranted. I felt kind of bleh and my eyes hurt. It's late at night now and they STILL hurt. Bad idea all the way around. What the hell was I thinking? It seems so idiotic now. I can't ever read the book again for the first time and my eyes hurt all the live long day. Nitwit.

Anyway, I told you that to tell you this:

Walk, don't run.

Stop and look around sometimes.

Sit down and think on it for a good long while.

There's no need to race especially if you're the only one on the road.

Enjoy your journeys even when it means you're going to have fewer of them.

Good night.

Five Things IV: The Revenge

It occurs to me that I like things. A lot of things. Sometimes when I'm filled with the desire to punish myself I'll try to talk to people about some of the things I like. Turns out that even when people like things that are awesome (everything I like is automatically awesome based on the fact that I like it) they are still morons. Is it enough that they like awesome things? No, no it is not. I give you:

Five things I like that I hate the other fans of

1. Tool. We've talked about Tool before and you know that of all the bands actively making music today they are my favorite. Their other fans are mostly annoying idiots. To say nothing of the usual shit you have to hear after the release of each new album, IE, that they've started to suck (this is not, of course, unique to Tool as it happens to every band ever) which is annoying but not as annoying as those that continue being fans.

They completely miss the point which is impressive because there tend to be several points and they tend to be pretty fucking big. I don't even know that much about musical theory but I know that Tool does and that they push boundaries on virtually every song. Each member is highly skilled, particularly the drummer who is on a whole other level and the singer wields his voice like an instrument. A lot of singers claim to do this but very few actually do. Their disregard for conventional songwriting and the ridiculous amount of layers to the songs and hot damn is this shit amazing.

Then you hear someone talk about them and it's idiotic nitwittery at its finest. No appreciation for any of the subtle work involved, no understanding of the lyrics. Nothing. At the other end of the spectrum are the freaks that will tell you that they astral project and meet Adam Jones in the astral plane where they make sweet monkey love for days at a time.

I'm sorry, what? OK you twits, do less drugs. Ugh, I fucking hate them all.

2. Neil Gaiman. I've been a Gaiman fan since way back when he took over Miracleman from Alan Moore (this series is easily one of the best ever, bar none) and I've been hooked ever since. Black Orchid, Sandman, Books of Magic, the short stories and the novels and oh my is this guy the best story teller of this generation? He just might be.

I've run into other fans from time to time but when he came to a local convention and did some panels and signings I got to see lots of his fans right up close. It's not pretty. They tend to be one of two types, either a drooling Sandman fan or a drooling American Gods fan. Emphasis on the drool. The Sandman fan can also be a Death fan complete with an outfit to match and bad hair dye and eye makeup and both types will go on and on about their chosen obsession and after listening to them for several minutes you realize they haven't actually said anything.

It's like they try to make the rest of us look bad.

There he was sitting on the stage and being charmingly British and they asked a bunch of insipid questions and the rest of the crowd was hanging onto each word because it was the same question they were going to ask. Refer back to people missing the point by a country mile. If you get into a discussion about the influences of different Sandman story lines or his obviously large knowledge of myth and folklore that displays itself in his prose writing you get blank looks from these people. I don't want to hate, they MAKE me hate.

3. Fight Club. Now I enjoyed both the book and the film but unfortunately so did a bunch of other people. Mostly middle class white kids that didn't understand either book or movie and then thought that being fans of one or the other made them transform into tough guys. Sorry suburban white kid, you're still a fucking douche that couldn't win a real fight if the other guy was tied down.

For years I was subjected to hearing these idiots quoting Tyler Durden and puffing out their chests and if you ever actually ask one of them if they realize that the story isn't really about Tyler Durden at all you'll get nothing but blank or confused looks. I wanted to punch every one of them that I came in contact with so bad that thinking about it made my pant covered area tingle.

No offense white folks but most of you are seriously, SERIOUSLY fucking irritating.

4. Literature. When I say literature I mean the kind of books you have to read in school. You know the stuff, gets its own section in most book stores so it doesn't have to rub elbows with regular or, God forbid, genre fiction. The other people that like this tend to fall into one of several categories and all of them are annoying on a level that makes me itch for violence.

There are the people that read it but don't understand it yet act as though they do and are vastly more superior than other people. These are easy to spot because they can't actually have a conversation about literature but they'll still attempt to look down their noses at you after you've discovered that they are brain dead.

Then you have the type that will only read literature and would never dare stoop to reading anything else. These are the bulk of them from what I've seen and if one of them accidentally reads something else and it turns out to be good then they all adopt the writer as one of their own but will still be snooty about the way that they "slum" in the wretched ghetto of genre fiction. Ray Bradbury is one example of this.

The thing about both of these groups is that a lot of them will only read the most famous stuff and disregard the rest. For example they will read Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm but not The Clergyman's Daughter or his essays or they will read Heller's Catch-22 but none of his other books. This makes zero sense to me and I can never get a good explanation out of any of them. If you say that Writer A is great and that their Book A is great then why wouldn't you actively seek out their other work? How far up your own ass is your head buried? Can you actually taste your own esophagus yet? It doesn't make any damn sense!

5. Oxygen. Everywhere I go I see herds of useless people sucking up all the oxygen. Do they appreciate it on the level that I do? No. But there they go, using it all up and continuing on with their lives.

Fuckers.

Guess who's still a geek

If you said me, you're right. I know that some of you enjoy reading and some of you enjoy it in any form so I thought I'd drop an update on some very good comics that I have either just discovered for myself or have started getting monthly. As usual if you are one of those idiots that looks down your nose at comics and the people that read them then stop reading and kindly fuck off. We don't want any of your ignorant snobbery dripping on our comics.

Y: The Last Man

This is a title that has been around for a while now and I picked up the first collection, loved the hell out of it and decided that they would all be mine. Oh yes, they will. This is an award winning and ridiculously acclaimed story that starts with the deaths of every male mammal on earth except Yorick Brown and his monkey. Vertigo puts this out monthly and is supposed to run for 60 issues. Like many Vertigo titles there are no capes and super powers here but there is a fantastic story that is packed with layers and layers of yum. Highly recommended.

Buffy Season 8

Buffy the Vampire Slayer went off the air several years ago and a part of me died that day. The show was always one of the most intelligently written on TV and I missed it immensely. JossWhedon then announced that he would do season 8 of the show as a comic book series. After the spontaneous orgasm passed I started getting it. It is everything that the show was and more. There are no budget constraints so the only limit is Whedon's imagination (which followers of Buffy, Angel, Firefly, etc will tell you is abundant). His writing is still sharp and it was great dropping in on the characters again. So far 5 issues have come out and originally it was supposed to go for 20 or so but the ideas just kept coming and now has ballooned to 50+ in short order.

Keep them coming Joss. As long as you do it I'll keep buying it.

The Boys

This is the new series from Garth Ennis (Preacher) with art by Darick Robertson (Transmetropolitan). Let that sink in for a minute. You want it now don't you? I knew you would. Anyway the series is about a CIA backed squad in a world where heroes are plentiful (more so than in a "normal" comic universe) and they sometimes need to be watched, kept in line or even killed. Not the villains mind you, the heroes. Ennis has said that this book will "Out-Preacher Preacher" and if that doesn't do it for you, you're dead inside.

It was first published by Wildstorm (owned by DC) but was dropped after 6 issues due to what they thought of as antisuperhero writing. I think they missed the point. It's more a deconstruction of the superhero myth (kind of like Miracleman but not as, y'know, Alan Moore) than anything else. They agreed to let them take the book elsewhere and publication has resumed this month with #7. A collection of the first six issues is out now. Go get it.

Fell

This is the new title by Warren Ellis (HellBlazer, Transmetropolitan, The Authority, Planetary, c'mon, it's Warren fucking Ellis) about detective Richard Fell. He is one of "three and a half" cops working in Snowtown which is like the worst crime city in the world multiplied by 10. It is strange, it is weird, it is surreal and you absolutely should be reading it. It is so much more than I can explain to you here. The first collection with the first 8 issues is out now and the series is monthly.

And now a few mainstream things that I'm into even though I'm not going to get back into the mainstream ever. Follow me, it'll make sense in a minute.

Matt Wagner (Grendel, Mage) has done two limited series in the early stages of Batman's career. He takes a very pulpy kind of attitude but with a very real Matt Wagner angle to it. If you understand that then you'll love these. None of the bad guys you know and love (Batman has always had the very best rogue's gallery) have appeared yet but I think if he does another one that they will start popping in.

Both minis are collected and they are Batman and the Monster Men and Batman and the Mad Monk. Both up to the high standard that anyone would expect from this giant of the field.

DC has also started two series based on their biggest icons but they are series that aren't really inside the normal universe of either of them. For both they have brought together one well known and respected writer and one well known and respected artist and let them loose to do their thing. The results are All Star Batman by Frank Miller (!!!!) and Jim Lee and All Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely.

The Batman series is very much a Frank Miller Batman series and is set, it seems to me, very much in his Dark Knight universe and not in standard DC continuity. He's gotten some flak for his portrayal of this or that thing or character but what the hell did you expect when you saw a Batman book with Miller's name on it? Nitwits.

The Superman series won an Eisner award and is so good it'll make your toes curl. New life into the Man of Steel? Believe it.

There you have it, for now. Get you to a comic shop and get some or all of these grabtacular things. Go on, I'll wait.