Category Archives: Entertainment

When I was a child in SC, I knew the sun rose in the east, so when I looked in the direction of the rising sun I knew I was looking east, and when I looked east I knew I was looking in the direction that the sun came from.  I knew also that the ocean was off there in the east too, but we never went there.

When we moved to California I knew the ocean, the Pacific, was in the west; from the top of a near by mountain I could see the ocean off there in the west.  So I knew west was where the ocean was and that the ocean was in the west.

But then I moved to Santa Barbara, California and I have been screwed up ever since as to where east and west and north and south are exactly.  Santa Barbara is located on a bit of land that juts out into the Pacific.  You can see on a map that, if you are standing in Santa Barbara and you decided to face the ocean, you are not looking west, you are in fact looking south!  

I don’t know how the hell the ocean stopped being in the west, but it did and ever since then I have been screwed up.  Since I continue to think the ocean is in the west, I am also confused as to where north and south are exactly.    I got so confused and upset by my confusion that Carol bought me a little compass to carry around if I became upset about not knowing which direction I might be looking.  That was a good idea.  But I lost the compass.

I have been thinking about directions because I hear on the radio that the Big Fire is moving north east.  So when I turn around and the ocean is at my back and I am looking at the mountains—and I don’t know how this happens—I am actually looking north.  It is good to know the fire is moving north because that means it is not moving south which is where I am located.

Maybe because of the fire, I will finally figure out which direction the ocean is, here in Santa Barbara.

 In the meantime, I don’t think I will look up at the sky again this month because I am sick and tired of that cloud of smoke.

I was somewhat irrigated, though not troubled precisely, to find creature features categorized with “horror” films somewhere in my reading around on the web.  Of course, one can find any manner of idiotic statements on the web.  So while I doubt most would include creature features in the horror genre, I must say for the record that creature features are not horror movies.  If one places creature features in the horror genre, one fails to recognize that creature features are largely childlike and innocent, as befits their ancient and mythic origins. 

As I said, creatures in creature features are just bigger versions of “naturally” occurring regular creatures or, as I said, more than a usual number of some such creatures are featured, such as the many bees in the movie, Swarm, with the hard working Michael Caine or the many bats in the movie, Bats!” starring Lou Diamond Phillips or the movie Ants, with James Arness, who went on to become Matt Dillon. 

A classic creature feature, with just one creature in it, is King Kong.  King Kong is just your normal ape blown up a couple thousand times, and only the most salacious minds would find anything non-innocent in the inter-species relationship between the big Ape and his love interest, as originally portrayed by Faye Raye.   Clearly the big Ape has a crush on Faye; and that’s the limit of it, anything other than that being strictly impossible and certainly life threatening to poor Faye.  Now had the big Ape tried to get to third base or something—well, that would be horror.  But he doesn’t and that’s why I say creature features truly defined are innocent and rather childlike.

All sorts of fortuitous things pop up.  I don’t know how many times a group of people being pursued by some creature come to the edge of a huge canyon that they can’t get across, till somebody discovers a fallen tree trunk spanning the gulf.  And then we get to watch as people crawl across the gulf on that tree, with some people, minor characters of course, inevitably falling in.  Or if they don’t find a tree, they all just decide to jump into the gulf since there is a river down at the bottom of it, and they all land in the river and then they go over a waterfall.

One very childlike moment occurs in the classic Tremors.  I know I have insisted that creatures in creature features are just normal creatures writ large, and some might claim that the creatures in this film—affectionately called “graboids”– are not naturally occurring.  I would argue however that they are nothing but overgrown and highly implausible worms capable of traveling at speeds of up to 20 miles an hour in the ground no less.

But the characters in this movie, among them the actor Kevin Bacon, while being pursued by the graboids figure out that they are safe if they can get on a big rock.  Unfortunately they get stuck on a big rock in the middle of nowhere, BUT, fortuitously and implausibly, they find 10 or 12 feet long pieces of plastic pipe, having been abandoned out in the middle of the desert for no apparently reason.  These pieces of flexible pipe the characters then cleverly use to pole vault from one rock to another on their way to their escape vehicle.  Something about the image of these people pole vaulting one after the other from rock to rock in the middle of the desert while being pursued by graboids captures for me the childlike innocence of the true creature feature.

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This German poster for Tremors–Rocket Worms–may serve as evidence for my claim that the graboids are worms writ large. 

I think creature features are a genre in their own right.  If you think about it, you will see the form has been around in different forms for a damn long time.  Take, for example, Jonah and the Fish (certainly a creature of some kind); or that Minatour of Greek myth; or Grendel in Beowulf.  This makes a good deal of sense since human beings have long been around creatures with whom they did not necessarily get along all that well, like lions, and tigers and such.    As well as razor backed feral pigs that would sneak into peasants’ huts and eat any infants lying around.  Also, of course, we eat the creatures and perhaps within us remains some atavistic fear that the animals will decide to strike back.

Creatures in creature features are frequently just bigger forms of the actual creature.  For example, I do believe there was a movie with James Arness called Ants!  I think ants qualify as creatures even though they are insects.  These ants were just like your normal ant in every respect except that they were enormous and could bite a person in two with their pincer like jaws or perhaps they are called mandibles.  If the creatures are not larger than usual there are more of them than usual.  This is true of the movie Bees!  Here huge swarms of so called killer bees attack entire cities. Another as I recollect is called Bats!—perhaps that’s not the name—but it might as well be since it features Lou Diamond Phillips and many bats.

So at the risk of over generalization, creature features feature creatures that are either much bigger than the usual creature or many more of the creatures than is usually the case, all acting in concert to destroy as many people as possible.  Among the bigger than usual creatures, along with ants and other insects, one can find any number of snakes.  In this light, it is hard not to think of Jennipher Lopez going down the Amazon in a wet tee-shirt and being attacked by an enormous Anaconda, as big around as your average Winnebago.  This was one heck of an anaconda.

This creature feature is worth mulling a moment since it contains a few of the other basic elements of a creature feature.  For example, creature features frequently feature groups of people acting in concert either to attack the creature (as in the Case of Lake Placid, featuring an enormous alligator) or to defend themselves against it, which usually happens when they attack it.  Given a group, some character development, if of a stereotypical variety, is possible, thus tending somewhat to humanize the genre.

Mostly the group consists of males, but usually there are one or two females, like Jennipher Lopez, to add a possible Romantic element or at least a tasty treat for the creature.  Usually also there is a person who detects the creature and is considered a nut by others because they have not see the creature, or there is a nut, some sort of mad person, driven to pursue the creature up to death’s door and beyond, possibly because the creature threatens or has in fact eaten his girl friend.  In any case, this highly motivated person usually leads the group in its mad pursuit of or hasty retreat from the creature.

I ruminate on the creature feature—and may continue these ruminations at a later date—because last night I finished watching The Host, the first South Korean Creature Feature I have ever watched, though purists may say this is not a true creature feature, since a true creature feature must feature a creature than actually occurs in nature, and the creature in The Host is some sort of weird-assed mutant creature vaguely resembling a horny toad with a rotor rooter mouth and monkey tail.  But I am not a purist and willingly admit mutant creatures into my pantheon of creatures, though I might draw the line at creatures from outer space.

Brother Dan came by some time last week with Puccini the Dog and the three of us walked and talked (I talked mostly and the dog didn’t talk at all) our way out to the beach.  The walk to the public access spot on what is called Elwood Beach takes 25 minutes maybe.  I used to go out that way quite a bit especially when I had my bike.  I rode out that way all the time and took a couple of interesting spills that involved going head over heels over the handle bars.

But I bet it had been more than a year, maybe even two since I last walked out there.  I had heard construction was going up on the bluffs and I didn’t want to see it.  It’s a place people go to walk their dogs or just to get out a bit.  On a Thanksgiving afternoon, you will find all sorts of people out there trying to walk off the Thanksgiving bloat.

So I decided to walk out there today again by myself.  I don’t know why exactly.  I guess because the day, with the Big Fire, had started out pretty gloomy, but then the wind started up a bit and blew that stuff away and it got pretty sunny.  So I decided to take a walk.  I need to appreciate my surroundings more.  Not everybody can walk to a beach 25 minutes from their place.

So here’s a picture from the bluff above the beach.  That’s looking sort of south, I think, back towards the University.  Pretty empty.

And this is one to give a sense of scale.  If you look really close you can see a bit of white near the middle of the picture.  That’s a person walking along.
 

 And then if you turn around where I was standing, you can see the mountains off there in the distance a bit.
 

And this is a Google map that shows where I stood while taking the pictures above.  I stood almost directly inland from the little camera there in the picture.  That camera indicates that where I was standing is a known picture taking place.

And if you have the time and energy, you can click here and go to a site that has other pictures taken from almost exactly the spot I stood.  But by another person.

It’s a bit spooky, but one day I read that Ingmar Bergman has died and the next I read Michelangelo Antonio had died.  I first saw Antonioni’s films about the same time I saw Bergman.  He, Bergman, Fellini and later Godard were my introduction, back in the last half of the 60’s, to European films.

I was not fond of his stuff.  It was really boring.  Over my head I guess.  I remember one scene going on forever and ever of a fan going back and forth and casting a shadow on the wall.  And in one movie some people are off on this rocky island looking for someone who has disappeared and they search and search and talk aimlessly and after a while it’s like they forget what they are doing.  As I recollect the missing person is never found.

Later on he did Blow-Up.  That was better maybe because it was in color and had a tiny element of suspense and as I recollect The Who were in that one, for some reason or other, breaking up their instruments.

Bergman, and Antonio, and Fellini—though he was more energetic—all seemed to be about something called “alienation.”  You used to hear a lot about “alienation"; clear up into the 70’s people talked about it.  But then for some reason people stopped talking about it and I have seen the word little used since the 80’s.

I guess things change.  Those Europeans were hit pretty hard by WWII if you stop to think about it.  A whole culture, and way of life, had proved in some horrible way completely rotten.  The Nazi’s turned the whole thing inside out.  And afterwards it was hard for some people to stomach.  They looked back and saw that they and their fellow country men had been conquered and after they had been conquered they had gone along, one way or the other, with the Nazi occupiers.  I mean what could they do?  Not much, maybe nothing.  But after, it must have been hard—at least for some thoughtful people—to remember, and hard too once it was all over to rebuild over and around a disaster.

Any way, I think that experience had a good deal to do with the bleak outlook of some of those strange European directors.  But those guys—mostly guys—are dying off; they had their “day in the sun” so to speak, though most of them would have been uncomfortable out in the sun.  I read somewhere lately that the generation who lived their formative years in the Great Depression is also dying off.

It’s a bit spooky.  Especially to think I first saw the films of these guys–what?–about 40 years ago.

Come to think of it, though, if American Airlines was running the transporter service, I don’t think I would use it.  They can’t handle airplanes much less something as complicated as a transporter would be.  As it is, if you can drag your sorry ass to the airport at five AM when it is still pitch black to get your plane scheduled to leave at seven, there’s a big if as to whether it will leave at seven or if it has been rescheduled or if it has been cancelled completely.

And then after your have been x-rayed enough to cause cancer and you finally do get on the plane, there’s no telling how long you will sit there until they decide it’s time to go, and then when you finally taxi out to the run way, there’s no telling if they will announce that you have to go back to the gate because they forgot a flight attendant or one of the engines fell off, and then when you go back to the gate and then taxi back to the run way to wait your turn to take off you pretty much have to give up the idea that you will make your connection at Dallas or Atlanta or wherever the hell it is you are supposed to make a connection.

I mean if American Airlines was running the transporter service, I would sure as hell take out a lot of transporter insurance because there would be no telling whether they would transport me to the designated location in one piece or not.  Maybe part of me would end up in Dallas and another part in Atlanta, or all of me would end up somewhere in the middle of the frozen tundra in Alaska. And you could leave it to American Airlines not to have a secure transporter service, so weird hackers out there would be hacking into the transporter beam and stealing body parts for sale in South America, so you might end up in the middle of the frozen tundra without your liver or something.  Though transporting would still be 200% safer than driving which tells you something about how unsafe driving is.

And of course they would find some way to rip you off.  Like there would be first class and coach transporter service.  If you transport first class, you get your own private little shower area and a transporter booth with a curtain on it so nobody has to see you in your nakedness.  Oh, I forgot to say, you have to transport naked because there had been problems with people transporting with their clothes on; the fibers on their clothes got mixed up with their body hair, so some people ended up with like polyester body hair.  And at first as an added bonus extra, when they transported you, they did not transport like viruses and bad bacteria that might be in you.  But this was only if you paid first class.  But then the government said everybody had to be transported naked and have all their viruses not transported for fear of spreading a plague or something.

So if you transport coach, you end up naked in this like huge gym locker room sort of place with thousands and thousands of people all milling around naked and looking for the baggage claim area, and of course, there’s no telling if your baggage will arrive or not, or if when you get it, it will really be your baggage or if maybe your clothes all shrunk or expanded in the transport.  So, if your baggage doesn’t show up you can just stay there in the huge locker room and wait, or you can buy one of the plastic jump suits American Airlines will sell you for about 1000 times what it is worth. 

Of course if you transport first class, you have your own private little locker room and the plastic jump suit is free.  Anyway, I wouldn’t transport American Airlines for sure.

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I added five minutes from one of the cassette tapes WB sent me.  The sound is not so hot but it’s interesting to hear his voice. 

Was it last week some time?  But I was at the club exercising and listening to the radio, and as I did so a commercial comes on saying: basically, buy our beer for the 4th of July because it’s the middle of a long hot summer.  And I go, what the hell.  How can it be the middle of the summer already?  So I had to look it up and in the USA at least summer begins on June 21^st or 22^nd, depending.  So how can it be the middle of the damn summer when it’s not even the 4^th of July yet.  Maybe they were just trying to freak people out, like, Oh! My God.  The summer is half over already and I have missed most of it, so I should get really drunk and drown my grief.

At the beginning of every summer, too, I look out the window think damn, but it’s still light outside and it’s like 830 pm or something.  But every summer I miss the solstice, the longest day of the year.  I will think, pay attention to the solstice.  That’s a special day.  But I miss it every time.  Usually, the day I look out the window and think, damn but it’s a long day, is the solstice, but I am unaware of the fact that it is the solstice.

Maybe that’s because the whole solstice thing confuses me.  It seems to me that the solstice shouldn’t be at the first of the summer, but right in the middle of it. But it’s not the middle and so I miss it every time.  It just doesn’t seem right that from the solstice on it’s all down hill into darkness.

Last night they set off fireworks at the nearby park.  They are so close by we don’t have to leave our place.  We go outside and set up folding chairs on the sidewalk around the main parking lot of the condo development.  Usually, I don’t go out to watch because it upsets my routine.  But last night I did.  Carol and I sat in our folding chairs with our neighbors, Joy and Bill, both in their seventies I think, and long retired.  Bill plays golf all the time and Joy does lots of volunteer work of different kinds. 

Another neigbhor came up and stood right next to me, and Joy and Bill were right there too, so I had to pay attention not to fart since I had pretty bad gas, and was sort of torn between getting up and going off somewhere to fart in private or just sitting there and watching the fireworks.  I decided to watch and after a bit the urge to fart went away.  Looking at the fireworks, I wondered what the big deal was and remembered they had been more of a big deal back when I would get stoned and watch them.  But I don’t do that anymore.  So I started feeling sort of sad and nostalgic looking at the fireworks.

This year they had pet friendly fireworks with not as many big bangers mixed in.  Those fireworks just drive the pets crazy.  Our neighbors a while back had a dog named Teddy.  One time when the fireworks went off, he shat and pissed himself all over the condo.  So every year when the fireworks came, they had to pack the dog up and move him out of the area.  That was one unhappy dog.

 I have added a couple more sections to Tingle Territory:

Early Tingles

William Berner Tingle, 1892-1946

In preparation for the zombie movie, I didn’t eat any lunch so I could get popcorn and a Pepsi.  They got me on the upgrade things.  I ordered a medium Pepsi; but for 5 cents more I could get the monster size so I did that.  I don’t know why but when I buy pop corn, I want to eat it during the movie.  So I just sat there while they plowed through a bunch of features of coming attractions before I would allow myself to touch the popcorn.  Which I did as soon as the movie started.

I must have drunk all that Pepsi.  Anyway, with about 20 minutes to go in the movie, I feel as if I have to pee real bad.  I sort of shift myself around in the seat thinking somehow that will help but of course it doesn’t.  So right when the climax is coming up, I just have to go pee, so I race out of the theatre and run in exactly the wrong direction.  When I bump into a wall I figure out to turn around and head back the other way, and relieve myself and get back just when the climax is over.

Which didn’t matter much, since I knew what it is going to be.  I could fill in the blank pretty easily; just one person whacking one of the zombies….

On my horror-meter, I would give this baby about a six on scale of one to ten, ten being best.  Good production values throughout—this has to be said about horror movies since many of them have awful production values.  Pretty tasteful gore, nothing outright sadistic.  Hitchcock jump cutting during the violence sequences added an effective note of chaos while blunting a bit gory details.

But overall it just wasn’t as good as the first one, 24 Days.  The plot line didn’t set up the characters in a way they might develop.  The reviewer for the LA Times said the movie was sort about the way government screws things up, a kind of post-Katrina commentary on bureaucratic indifference and generally bungling.  Actually, the government had a good plan for the particular situation; in case things get out of hand, kill everybody—which they did with guns, bombs, and poison gas.  I guess you could call this bureaucratic indifference.  But kill everybody is always a pretty good plan.

Oddly, the problem wasn’t with the plan, but with the way the people down on the ground screwed up the works.  The devil is in the details; and down at street level, details screw the plan.  For instance, the government has under lock and key a carrier of the disease; she is like a typhoid Jane and they have her locked away pretty good, except that one of the people who works for the government, who survived the first round of the virus, is the Husband of the Typhoid Jane.  So he manages to use this key he has to get in to visit his wife—whom he had previously abandoned when they had been under attack by the zombies—and of course all hell breaks lose.

So what’s screwed up here?  The government plan.  Or the idiotic things human beings do when motivated by such things as love or hate or guilt or anger—The movie has a bleak out ending—the kind I prefer actually, but not because the government screws up but because a sister loves and wants to save her brother….

So what’s the message: people are either bungling cold bureaucratic monsters or horribly bungling human beings?

Or Zombies.

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As the above shows, Zombies usually have really bad skin and bad oral hygiene. 

I was so depressed this weekend, I went to a movie at the movie house.  I go to a movie in the movie house maybe once every year or so.  Mostly I go alone.  I don’t know when but I got used to going to movies alone.  Carol doesn’t like the movies I go to.

For example, this time I decided I would go see 28 Weeks, the sequel to 28 Days Later.  28 Days was a zombie movie, my favorite sub-genre within the big genre called “horror flicks.”  There’s nothing like a zombie really for making a deep social or allegorical statement of some kind.  Zombies usually look a good deal like human beings except they are dead.  So if you get zombies, not only to look like human beings, but act like them, then you get the implication, symbollically, that we the living people are like the zombies and are ourselves among the living dead.

And if you think about that too much you might start to thinking—as I sometimes do—that this statement is more accurate than not..  But it’s hard to identify with a zombie completely not because it is dead but because it is living.  That’s the horror of the zombie, not that it is dead, but it came back from the dead.

People are just not supposed to come back from the dead.  That’s all there is to it. 

Why the zombies come back isn’t always that clear.  Myth has it the zombies come back because hell is full and can’t take anymore customers.  But sometimes they come back because of some environmental pollution.  Radiation maybe.  In 28 Days they come back because scientists were screwing around with some monkeys and developed this virus that turns the monkeys into raging beasts that want to do only one thing: kill whatever is right in front of it. 

Damn those scientists!  And there never ending screwing around!

So to be technical about it the zombies in 28 Days are not zombies because they don’t come back from the dead.  Rather people get infected by the virus and then they run around killing each other in mad monkey like mahem.  Indeed, for some reason, while they seem pretty intelligent, the infected like monkeys don’t use tools to kill each other—just their hands and then their teeth.

Like your regular zombies, these monkey virus zombies have only one thing on their minds: to kill.  And your regular zombie has only one thing on his or her mind: Eat Brains.  So in this way the monkey virus zombies and your regular orthodox zombie are alike; they both have one thing and one thing only on their minds.  They live to eat or at least to chew.  In this way too, they are like human beings.

I messed up the “gold mining” in the video game stuff.  The big game seems to be “World of WarCraft or Wow”; about 6 million people play it.  It’s a strange game—people don’t compete against each other.  It’s one of those games with levels; this one has 60 levels.  That’s how you develop a character, by going up levels.

But while the game is not about competing,  some sort of ego thing seems involved in character development.  Developing your character requires spending a lot of time online, and people with jobs have a hard time putting in the time.  So they pay people in China for the points—or whatever they are called—these people get while playing.  The people in China work in video game sweat shops; they get two or three dollars a day to play the game 12 hours a day.  Sometimes they live in dorms located in the sweatshop.  These are mostly young people happy for the 2 or 3 dollars a day.

So if you are a rich guy or gal living in the west you contact one of these sweatshops and send them money via PayPal, and they get one of their workers to pass points to you online because somehow it is possible for one character to walk up to another and give them virtual money online.

The owners of “WoW” are upset about this not because of the exploitation involved but because “WoW” is supposed to be a fantasy game and this gold mining stuff lets reality in through the back door.

A subculture has sprung up around WoW, involving T-shirt sales, music and such.  And on U-Tube you can video made about the game.   There’s even sort of a U Tube video show called pureponage (or something like that).  You can find a pretty good episode called WoW is a Feeling, about a guy who goes nuts playing the game.  And South Park did a good parody of the game.

If however you are looking for something more familiar and evocative of the days of your youth, you might want to check out the bits on pieces of Un Chien Andelou.

Like this is all totally strange to me.  I sit there listening to the students give their oral reports and I have no idea what they are talking about.  One guy is writing on these games because his younger brother became “addicted” and wouldn’t do anything but play the game.

I wish Borges were still alive so he might write some sort of story about all this.