What if the Internet is an android’s dream,
and we are the electric sheep?
Dick would know at once
our artificial people:
every boy a Roy,
every girl a pleasure model,
trying to pass as real,
inwardly concerned with their design —
“Morphology. Longevity. Incept dates.”
On Facebook,
“More Nolan than Nolan”
is my motto.
If I, in my genuine moments,
could greet my jpeg face
hiding in his electronic words,
he’d go offworld or die.
After all,
“It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker.”
[Author’s note — the film quoted and paraphrased above is Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982), to which this poem is an homage. “Blade Runner” is itself an adaptation of Dick’s 1968 novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”]
“The Strain” is zany, over-the-top, serialized comic book horror that often veers too close to high camp. I keep waiting for either “South Park” of “Family Guy” to lampoon it. It’s sometimes pretty brainless, and it often seems like the product of a group of hyperactive 14 year old boys sitting down to imagine a vampire apocalypse.
But what the hell? The damn thing works. It isn’t as smart or as grown up as the moody “The Walking Dead,” “Fear the Walking Dead” or “Stranger Things.” But it’s got a fast pace, a kinetic energy and an unpredictability that all of those shows lack. It’s just … more fun. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love it. And, as my interest in slow-moving zombie dramas starts to wane, this might become my favorite horror show currently on television.
It’s damned ambitious. The writers here desperately want to show a full scale monster armageddon, and they don’t seem to care much that they’ve got a limited budget or a finite number of extras. (We are told, now, that the vampire plague is spreading throughout the country, and is no longer confined to New York City.)
And it’s still scary. Guillermo del Toro’s screeching, leopard-fast vampire baddies are still unnerving. They’re goddam albino apex predators and they’re repulsive. And I think their appeal is surprising after two seasons of audience exposure. I predicted a while back that this show’s horror elements would lose their momentum, and I’ve pleasantly been proven wrong. (Hey, if you’re a horror fan who loves monsters, you eventually crave story antagonists other than doomed, pitiful zombies.)
Last night’s Season 3 premiere offered little that was new. But it did offer Navy Seals fighting vampires in the NYC sewers, and that was frikkin’ sweet. I’d give it a 9 out of 10.
No, I was never a fan of Olivia Newton John, nor am I old enough to recall her stardom in any great detail. I need to mention “Xanadu” at least once here at this blog, however, as it is forever linked in my mind with the summer of 1980.
This song was played endlessly at the beach by sunbathing teenage girls. They mostly went unnoticed by me, as this was the summer before I entered the third grade, and I hadn’t developed much interest in girls just yet. But thinking of this song immediately returns me to the beach again as a little boy. (My parents sent me there with my siblings a lot, something for which retrospect has taught me to feel thankful.)
I have a lot of memories of going to the beach in the early 80’s — burning sand, screaming for the ice cream man, and sidestepping endless arrays of discarded bottlecaps in the gravel parking lot. (The local teenagers must have done a hell of a lot of drinking there; upturned bottlecaps hurt when you stepped on them.) This was also the summer that my friend Brian’s little brother, Brad, erroneously told me that Han Solo died in “The Empire Strikes Back.” (There were no “Episode” prefixes when the first Star Wars films came out.)
There was another hit by John that can transport me back the early 80’s. That would be “Physical,” which was played and sang ubiquitously in 1981 by the girls in my fourth grade class. (I still remember Linda, who lived on the next street, talking about John in awed tones: “A looooot of people think she is beautiful.”)
But I’d prefer not to think of that song, if I can help it. While “Xanadu” is arguably still fun and catchy, “Physical” is best left forgotten.
Hey, gang — the August 2016 Issue of Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine was released today. Check out my friend Dennis Villelmi’s “Spending and Saving” on Page 4; it’s my favorite poem that he’s authored.
A lighthearted short summer poem of mine, “Bumblebee,” also appears in the issue on Page 8.
You can order a softcover copy of the August Issue for just over $3 right here:
There’s a pretty damn interesting chestnut from from 80’s-era nuclear nightmare films available on Youtube — 1983’s “Special Bulletin.” (The link is below.) I was surprised I hadn’t heard of it. I think most 80’s kids remember ABC’s “The Day After.” That infamous television movie was a cultural touchstone that scared a generation of kids. “Special Bulletin” was produced by NBC the same year, actually preceding “The Day After” by nine months. Instead of a world-ending war with Russia, the feature-length special imagined a single incident of nuclear terrorism in Charleston, South Carolina. (I myself had no idea that Charleston was the strategic military nexus that the movie explains it to be.)
“Special Bulletin” was filmed as a “War of the Worlds”-type narrative, consisting exclusively of faux news coverage, and it’s pretty damned good. (It won a handful of Emmys.) It’s just as frightening today — or maybe more so, given the increased threat of precisely this kind of terrorism from stateless groups.
The acting is mostly good, the directing successfully captures the feel of live news coverage, and the absence of a musical score further lends the movie a sense of realism. The story has a few surprises for us, too — the plot setup is creative and interesting, and much more thought went in the the teleplay than I would have expected. The film asks some difficult questions about the role of the media in affecting the outcome of high-profile crimes like the one depicted. (Would such questions be more or less relevant in the age of camera-phones, uploaded ISIS executions and Facebook Live? I’m not sure.)
I was also quite impressed with some of “Special Bulletin’s” thriller elements. (I’d say more, but I will avoid spoilers for anyone who wants to watch it below.)
One thing that detracts from the format’s realism is the fact that some of this movie’s actors are easily recognizable from other roles in the 80’s (although it’s fun spotting them as an 80’s movie fan).
Most viewers my age, for example, will recognize Ed Flanders and Lane Smith. The utterly sexy female reporter who arrives on location at Charleston Harbor is Roxanne Hart, who later played Brenda in “Highlander” (1986). (She’s still quite beautiful, guys, and she’s still making movies.) Most jarring of all, however, is a prominent role played by David Clennon, who any fan of horror-science fiction will recognize as Palmer from John Carpenter’s 1982 masterpiece, “The Thing.” This is still fun, though — he has that same disarrayed hair. Was it his trademark back in the day?
Believe it or not, I actually can remember Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” being played in the summer of 1979. (That would have been the summer before I entered second grade.) The song came out in September 1978; but I can pinpoint the year as 1979, because this is a vivid summer memory. I heard “Heart of Glass” being played loudly on a hot day by a house halfway down the street I grew up on, and I was playing with the first Star Wars figures I’d ever gotten. (I’d adopted R2-D2 and C-3PO the prior Christmas; they lived among shuffled papers in the top drawer of the bright blue desk that Santa had also brought me.)
Blondie was a big deal. “Call Me” and “The Tide is High” were two other hits that I heard a hell of a lot as a little boy in 1980. You could guarantee those would come up at least once on the way to school on whatever radio station the bus driver played. (The little kids sat toward the front; my best friend Shawn and I had a habit of sitting in the coveted “front seat” behind the driver, who was an adult we really liked.)
If you watch the truly Kafkaesque video for “The Tide is High,” you’ll actually see an utterly bizarre homage to Star Wars, in which Darth Vader morphs into … an upright robotic rat, apparently. I am not making this up. It’s in the second video I posted.
What’s befuddling is that I don’t think I have heard Blondie played since … the very early 1980’s, I guess. Other superstars from the era occasionally get rediscovered. In 1993 and 1994, for example, the kids at Mary Washington College were hit by a horrifying revival of the truly abhorrent ABBA, not to mention a couple of “songs” from (God help us), The Partridge Family. (If you ask me, a meth epidemic would have been less troubling.)
I am now the proud owner of … a goodly portion of all the “Grendel” comics Matt Wagner ever wrote. What you see in the top row are “Grendel Omnibus” Volumes 1, 2 and 3. (I believe I actually shared my review of Volume 1 on this site a while ago.) These would comprise a nearly inclusive history of Hunter Rose, Christine Spar, Brian Li Sung, Orion Assante and Eppy Thatcher. All that remains for me to collect is the fourth Omnibus trade-paperback, chronicling the possibly immortal Grendel Prime and his imperiled charge, Jupiter Assante.
The Omnibus editions do not include crossovers with heroes such as Batman and The Shadow, as those characters are obviously owned by other companies. Nor do they include the diverse dystopian future tales depicted by various artists in the 1990’s “Grendel Tales.” But I am in heaven with what you see below — or maybe hell, considering these books’ central motif.
To top it all off, that hefty tome beneath the comics is W. H. Auden’s “Collected Poems,” edited by Edward Mendelson, with the poet’s work between 1927 and his death in 1973. It’s 927 pages. It weighs 30 pounds, probably. And it is indexed by both the poem’s titles and their first lines. That is what you call a lifetime investment.
The comics will be excellent summer reading; as will Auden. But I’ll focus more on the Briton when fall arrives. Like his countryman, Doyle, he might be best enjoyed outdoors on a gray and increasingly brisk Autumn day.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 