Category Archives: Entertainment

Brother Steve raises a technical question.  In the instance of the Zombie Strippers, how does the zombie virus know a person’s occupational status so that it might infect that person?  This implies a mighty intelligent virus, and Brother Steve imagines a scene worthy of Monty Python in which Eric Idle, in drag, asks people if they are strippers before passing along the virus to them.

This, while humorous, would make I suspect for a rather slow movie. 

I suspicion then that zombies, in Zombie Strippers, become zombies by the more traditional means of first being bitten by a zombie and then becoming one.  Traditional Zombie lore is very consistent on this point; if you are bitten by a Zombie you become one, no matter what you do.    In one film, a person, bitten in the forearm, had the foresight to cut off his entire arm in an attempt to halt the spread of the zombie bug throughout his system.  But even this radical attempt at cure, as I remember it, did not work.

Being gummed by an elderly toothless Zombie does not lead to zombieism; the skin must be broken.

Zombieism when passed in this form does not require the introduction of a hyper intelligent virus capable of knowing a person’s occupation.

But lacking the virus as an explanatory system, we are left with the problem of the first or final cause.  With it, we know where zombieism came from; the government did it.  This implies, however passingly, a critique of government as run by a bunch of callous indifferent idiots who risk the lives of all citizens in pursuit of some impossible scientific solution to something or other.

One is put in mind, for example, of that giant particle accelerator—17 miles long—in Europe that is going to be fired up some day soon in an attempt to duplicate astral events immediately after the big bang.  People are concerned—and scientists don’t deny the possibility—that banging particles together as they intend to do might produce a “black hole.”  The scientists, however, argue that even if this does occur the “black hole” will not be long enough to eat up the whole earth since it will last far less than a billionth of a second.

Romero, however, in his zombie flicks offers no explanation at all.  The dead simply get up and walk.  I prefer the non-explanation.  It suggests merely that something has gone terribly wrong or that there is stuff out there that we will never understand.  In Dawn of the Dead, one character (with no particular authority—I mean he does not necessarily speak for Romero, says cryptically, “The dead walk when hell is full.”  This is suggestive but scientifically speaking entirely speculative.

Traditional zombies in black and white…and demonstrating slow, wooden movement. 

I watched a movie called “Day Watch” made in Russia by a Russian director named Timur Bekmambetov, based on the best-selling sci-fi novels of Sergei Lukyanenko.  All the characters speak Russian.  The special effects are pretty good mostly because there seem to be a good number of buildings in Moscow being blown up (and recorded on film as they do so) and because your basic Russian stunt person is willing to risk his or her life for a buck.

But I actually thought about this movie a little after I watched it.  It has some elements of horror in it, though remarkably little blood and no gratuitous torture stuff like Hostel (though that was an OK horror film); but mostly I would call it fantasy.  The forces of light and dark are fighting it out for the soul of Russia.  Actually light and dark have a truce but they keep breaking it.  Sort of like the Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union.  I would say in fact exactly like.

The forces of light seem to be the “Russian people” at their best.  If they weren’t characters in a fantasy movie, they would be good people like doctors, or teachers, or religious persons who believe, as all good Russians do, that life is suffering and all they want to do is get through it without hurting others too much.  The forces of dark look like decadent Euro-trash heavily influenced by Capitalism.  They want stuff and cheap thrills.

So unlike most of American horror film, this one is actually about something. 

Finally, I guess, the forces of light win.  This is not a Gnostic world.  But more old testament.  In the closing scene light and dark make a bet, just like God and The Devil in the Book of Job.  Light wins the bet and exclaims, “Your mama!” at the defeated force of dark.  This is not very Biblical, true, but maybe something was lost in translation.

Sadly this happy ending is clearly an act of wish fulfillment.  The main character, who has really screwed up, can only set things right by getting this piece of magic chalk that allows a person to correct a mistake previously made.  So the main character goes back to where he lived as a child and writes on the wall of the apartment, Het, which means in Russian, no.  He writes no because in this place many years before he said “yes” to his mother when she asked if he wanted to become one of the supernatural beings.  That was the mistake that set everything in motion that led eventually (in the film) to all of Moscow being laid waste by the forces of dark.

Interestingly, the year the character said yes and should have said no was 1992.  It says so right there on the screen.  1992.

Why 1992?  Well that’s the year Russia sold its soul to the Devil.  As I said though the movie is fantasy because its whole logic is informed by wish fulfillment.  There is no way to go back and say Het to 1992. 

Below according to one website here is all the stuff that happened in Russia in 1992.
 

In 1992 Russia acquired the former USSR’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council as its defacto successor and also took over all Soviet properties and embassies abroad. In Jan. 1992 Russia became a founding member of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) following agreements reached in Nov. 1991 with Ukraine and Belarus. Also in Jan. 1992 Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar announced plans for price liberalization that resulted in rapid price increases while the central bank began to extend further credit to support industry and trade. Following Russia’s initiative, which resulted from the effects of the common currency and each republics implementation of trade barriers to protect their industries and goods, the other CIS republics followed suit. Russia also imposed export quotas and taxes which resulted in exporters leaving their hard-currency earnings in foreign offshore banks while imports were also centralized. On March 31, 1992 the 18 of the 20 sovereign republics signed a federal treaty that established the Russian Federation, with Tartarstan endeavoring to gain a separate agreement with the federation and Checheno-Ingushetia announcing its independence. In June 1992 Pres. Yeltsin and Ukraine’s Pres. Leonid Kravchuk reached an agreement over the former USSR’s Black Sea Fleet in which command was to be withdrawn from the CIS, the point of contention and be placed under a joint Russian-Ukrainian command for three years. Also in June 1992 Russia recognized and sided with the Transdnistria republic separatists from Moldova. In July 1992 Russia signed high-level economic and military agreements with Belarus. In Sept. 1992 Russia and Georgia signed an agreement that recognized Abkhazia as a part of Georgia while the Russian Parliament under the speaker, Ruslan Khasbulatov threatened to annex South Ossetia, another conflict spot in Georgia. In Oct. 1992 Pres. Yeltsin banned the Parliament’s (Supreme Soviet) private army following Khasbulatov’s continual demands that the government be subordinate to it rather than the president. In Nov. 1992 the Constitutional Court ruled that the Communist Party ban was constitutional, following the Communists claims that the 1991 ban was unconstitutional. In Dec. 1992 Pres. Yeltsin made various deals including the slowdown of market reforms with the influential Civic Union, a center-right coalition of four groups, in an attempt to halt demands that the government resign. However, on Dec. 9, 1992 during a session of the Congress of the People’s Deputies, Pres. Yeltsin and the Congress clashed over their failure to endorse Yegor Gaidar as Prime Minister with Pres. Yeltsin describing the congress as a "fortress of conservative and reactionary forces." On Dec. 12, 1992 Pres. Yeltsin and Ruslan Khasbulatov agreed to a national referendum on a new constitution to be held in April 1993, that many of Pres. Yeltsin’s emergency powers be extended until the referendum, that the Congress could nominate and vote on its own choices for Prime Minister as well as the President’s nomination and that it also had the right to reject the President’s nominations for the Defense, Foreign Affairs, Interior and Security ministries. On Dec. 14, 1992 Pres. Yeltsin nominated Viktor Chernomyrdin as Prime Minister which the Congress confirmed. On Dec. 29, 1992 Russia and the US announced they had agreed on the terms for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) pact which would reduce each country’s nuclear arsenal by two-thirds. Also in 1992 Russia signed a bilateral treaty with Britain and Pres. Yeltsin pledged to abandon military support for North Korea following his visit to South Korea.

A while back Brother Steve wrote a comment on the blog:

Nick, did you get the latest Occidental mag? It has that picture with you and Rex in it…..and your enlighting colon remarks….from the guy whose Fang contribution was about farts, as I recall.

The Oxy mag, to which he refers, is this thing that comes out twice yearly with the class notes in it.  I had thrown it out but retrieved it from the trash when I read his comment.  I had thought they wouldn’t print my colon remarks.  I was in a bad mood when I wrote it:

So I tested positive on the fecal matter test and they practically forced me to go in for that colon thing where they knock you out a bit and stick the tube with the camera all the way up there.  I was sure I was dying.  So I was lying there with my bum in the cold air and asked the nurse lady plaintively what might cause blood in the stool, and she said the particular fecal matter test I had taken gives all sorts of false positives.  “Great!” I thought sacrastically.  Afterwards the doctor said I had a normal looking colon for a 61 year old man.  I guess that’s good.  So my colon is aging along just like my face, except that I can’t see it.  Which is good too I guess.

 Nobody writes a class note like I do: the other folks write about what they are doing or what job they have or how they bumped into each other on a trip to Hawaii.  I write about my colon.  I can’t help it.  I have an anal humor streak.  Sometimes I will be in the corridor with colleagues and get them into laughing and when I go into my anal humor mode, some of them actually just leave, more or less politely. Well, got to go now.

I am honestly befuddled.  I mean what’s so offensive about talking about farts and shit.  I mean anal humor—Swift did it all the time.  It’s positively Rabelaisian.  By which I intend to indicate that there is an honorable anal humor streak (or should I say skid mark) running throughout some of the greatest of Western literature.  Jeez, I am in a long line of analists.

Sometimes, people say, Please, Nick, not while I am eating.  I think this is absurd.  What better time to talk about anal matters since people are stuffing food into the tube from which turds will eventually come at the other end?

 Recently I was writing a song the punch line of which was:

We’re born in blood and feces; we die in our own shit.

Nobody ever said you have to like it…

Well, I do have to admit that song is not likely to reach a mass audience.

Brother Steve, in his comment refers to a little article I wrote for the college humor magazine.  It can be found in these pages at.

As her mother nears death, Carol has been trying for a week or so to pay attention and integrate, as she puts it, the good things of her mother into her self.  To acknowledge them, I guess.  She seems to mean by good things: good memories.  Moments of affection or tenderness or intimacy, or like the time her mother got angry at a waitress for refusing to give a new cup of coffee to a black man when the cream he poured into his first cup curdled.

I tried doing this, remembering the good things, happy moments of intimacy or affection of Mother Joan and drew a blank.  Zip.  I couldn’t think of a single moment.  True, I am pretty damn forgetful, but surely you would think I would remember something “good.” This failure may indicate I have amnesia or am simply one of those selfish, ingrate, no good children of the kind Joan seemed to indicate I was.

I mean yes of course I appreciate the fact that she wiped my disgusting filthy little ass when I was an infant, and I appreciate having been fed too of course.  She didn’t have to do that, I guess.  But what Carol is thinking of and what I am trying to remember is something that has less to do with the mother as mother and more to do with the mother as person or something as other than mother, though in Mother Joan’s case about the only excuse she had for the person she was—was, well, being a mother.

And I guess I must have been turning all this over unconsciously because as I was walking across the golf course the other day back from my daily walk to Ellwood.  I was crossing the seventh hole I guess, I suddenly out of nowhere remembered that Mother Joan liked stupid robber stories.  I think she read every scrap of the daily paper, the Union/Tribune or Daily Nixon I would call it, and she would find these stories about stupid bank robbers.
 
The stories seemed to tickle her, though I can’t remember her having laughed while telling them.  But she would tell them to us or maybe WB and once when I was talking to her I realized she knew a whole bunch of stupid robber stories.  These stories are of course about stupid robbers, or stupid bank robbers.  Those were the one’s Joan preferred.  The bank robber say who goes charging into the bank, fails to notice that the glass door is shut, hits the door and renders himself unconscious.  And the door is closed, of course, because the bank is not yet open…because, of course, it was closed down over a month ago.

And then there are the variations on ridiculous “demand” notes, like the one where the guy writes a demand note and signs it, along with a contact number.  Or the one where the bank robber sees there is a reward out for him, and decides to turn himself in for the reward. 

Anyway these stories seem to tickle Joan and I guess it was good to see something tickled her because come to think of it I can’t remember her ever laughing or at least I can’t remember the sound of her laugh.  

As it turns out a web check reveals a large number of sites devoted to stupid criminal jokes.  But Mother Joan was devoted to the sub-genre of the stupid bank robber joke.

When rock stars start singing songs about being rock stars and comics start telling stories about being comics they cross some sort of perilous divide.  Such seems to be the case with Lewis Black.  I don’t know when I first became aware of him; three or four years ago maybe.  He’s a pretty funny guy in the social and political vein who swears a lot.  Some of the material is really solid in its own right but a good deal of the humor lies in his delivery.

He gets pissed and right there on stage looks as if he is going to suffer an apoplectic fit, this from a guy who recommends that kids distract themselves by whittling. Part of the deal—part that’s funny—is the impotence of his rage. He starts sticking out his hand with his finger out as if he is making points.  But the finger is crooked.

The last time I saw him on TV though he had started telling stories about being a comic.  Seems he had been invited to be the MC, I think it was, at some white house affair.  Now half of his bread and butter is attacking Bush and the current administration, so there he is in the white house, or some official white house place, standing right next to Chaney and Bush and he has agreed not to lambaste them.  Afterwards, his parents, whom he has invited to bask in his glory, will hardly speak to him.

So he acknowledges having made a mistake and goes on to tell the audience what a comic is.  A comic is a person who goes out into the audience with a flashlight and sneaks up behind every person who is there, and pulls down their pants, and shines the flashlight up the person’s asshole, and upon examination proclaims that the person’s asshole is shit free! 

This suggests that being a comic is pretty dirty work.  It also suggests that the purpose of comedy is to make people laugh and as they do so to feel, at least momentary, because they are in the know and can laugh at the idiots being mocked, that they have a clean conscience.  But of course Black implies, nobody really has a clean conscience.  So if we think, even momentarily, that we have clean consciences or assholes then we too are idiots. 

 We are just knowing idiots laughing at unknowing idiots.  What this means is that Black has grave doubts about the function of comedy, his role as a comic, and about the audience that he seeks to make laugh.  Maybe part of the problem is the material.  Any idiot can make jokes about Bush.  It’s almost too easy, since Bush has lowered the stupidity bar so damn far.  So people can yuck it up at Bush and feel momentarily superior to the moron and his moronic minions who are driving the country to rack and ruin.

Cheap laughs degrade comedy.

In any case, I am worried about Lewis.