“Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable, procures success to the weak, and esteem to all.”
— George Washington
Happy Fourth of July weekend, everybody!!!
Hey, British Mates — 239 years is a long time!!! If you come to America this weekend, we all party together. We even forgive you for those 1812 shenanigans!!
Photo credit: “George Washington Crossing the Delaware,” by Emanuel Leutze
Believe it or not, “Hellraiser: Deader” (2005) surprised me at first for being unexpectedly good for the seventh film in a franchise. We’ve got a detailed, original, creative horror story setup, we’ve got some quite good makeup effects, and we’ve got Romania as a great atmospheric location. I was having a good time.
Just past the halfway mark, however, this movie descended into confused plotting and incomprehensibility, half-heartedly depicted by bland directing and bad acting. (The lead actress here illustrates for us that not every pretty girl can be an Oscar contender.)
Fans of the franchise, take note — this is only a putative “Hellraiser” movie. The iconic “Pinhead” makes a couple of perfunctory appearances; the other “Cenobites” appear once, I think, in background. A quick check of Wikipedia confirmed my suspicion — this was originally a standalone horror movie script, into which these characters were inserted (and pretty tenuously in terms of plot). Clive Barker had no creative involvement whatsoever.
I’d give this movie a 3 out of 10 for an interesting first half, and I’d recommend you skip it.
You know what? Go watch “From Within” (2008). That’s a good horror yarn that gets too little press.
There has simply been way too much pathos of late among the blogosphere’s poets. In the past few days, our own little online circle has labored to describe houses full of empty picture frames (Dennis Villelmi), nightmare airports (me), sick children (Anna Martin), and even Old Yeller (SAZL).
It’s summer. Let’s lighten the mood. “Bumblebee” was first published by Every Day Poets in September 2013.
It’s a poem about a bee. No, the bee is not a metaphor for childhood guilt or lost loves, and, no, it does not attack the narrator like one of Cthulhu’s minions. (I’m not always such a surly duck.)
Anyone who catches the Kevin Smith reference in this blog post will be made an honorary correspondent. And that’s a coveted distinction. Just ask Len Ornstein about his newfound fame and renown.
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“Bumblebee,” by Eric Robert Nolan
Bumbling along a bit close to me
Is busy Mister Bumblebee
He inventories dandelions
With prodding, plush black legs.
I inventory carcinogens
With unfiltered cigarettes,
My legs, in bluejeans, lazily
Crossed in the grass.
He buzzes, I puff.
A mute truce transpires
I won’t stomp if he won’t sting.
Just two fellas
Mindin’ their own business.
© Eric Robert Nolan 2013
Photo credit: “Bee In a Dandelion,” Busangane, own work, via Wikimedia Commons.
Season 6 of “The X Files” is probably the best season of the series, in my honest opinion. It deserves a perfect 10.
The mythology episodes (and their conclusion in the “Two Fathers/One Son” story arc) are the best ever – a perfect blend of science fiction, horror, mystery, suspense and spy thrillers. It’s fantastic the way Chris Carter gave us convincing special effects for a 1990’s tv show.
Standalone episodes were also at their best, with gems like “Drive,” “Milagro,” Arcadia” and “Monday.”
The only failure was the truly horrible episode, “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas.” It was truly as stupid as it sounds. It just can’t drag down the otherwise amazing season, though.
“The X Files” was in its heyday during Season 5 – this deserves a perfect 10. There were a slew of fantastic mythology episodes, and the standalones included all-time classics such as “The Pine Bluff Variant,” “Folie a Deux” and “Bad Blood.”
There was only one misfire – the draggy and unsatisfying “Chinga.” And even that was at least watchable, thanks to onscreen chemistry between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.
Great stuff.
“Roses Are Red” is my fourth entry for the 5-Day Poetry Challenge:
“Roses Are Red,” by Eric Robert Nolan
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
This poem doesn’t rhyme,
Motherfucker.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2015
Photo credit: “Rosa Damascena Rozino Village” by Plamen Agov • studiolemontree.com. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
After a shaky Season 1, the second season of “The X Files” showed it coming into its own and becoming the classic sci-fi horror show that I remember. I’d give it a 9 out of 10.
The program got scarier, tighter, and better directed. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson settled into their roles, and became the unique characters fan loved, and their trademark dry banter and sexual tension finally appeared. The overarching plotlines and themes also more or less really made their first appearance in Season 2. The conspiracy and “The Project” finally take shape, with characters like Alex Krycek, The Well Manicured Man and Bill Mulder becoming part of the story, and the sadness and sense of tragedy that pervaded the series became a part of most of the show’s episodes – even the standalone monster-of-the-week episodes.
There were really only four misfires — “Little Green Men,” “3,” “Firewalker” and “Fearful Symmetry” were weak. The rest of the season was quite good.
Some of the eps, like “F. Emasculata,” “Aubrey,” “Irresistible,” and “Our Town” were genuinely scary. Just about any fan of the show will name the hilarious “Humbug” as a classic. And the mythology episodes, while not always frightening, were at least great sci-fi thrillers – especially the fantastic and perfect classic eps, “Colony” and “Endgame.”
Great stuff.
I wrote this a few months back; today it is my third entry for the 5-Day Poetry Challenge. [EDIT: the formatting is fixed!!]
“hens staring upward,” by Eric Robert Nolan
Please
stop
fleeing me so frequently at Atlantic City.
It happens every night now.
I
look
over at the slot machine you occupied and only see
some strange man, finer than I am, and industrious.
All the ringing bells announce
his inauguration.
All the flashing lights
strobe his sharper features.
It makes me wake and makes me
artlessly craft a
hard discordant poetry.
Remember Atlantic City?
We took a flight despite its easy drive.
It’s a funny word, “flight.”
It can mean
to seize the sky as the cardinal might
and the hen cannot –
the conquest, the flashing red ascent to sky and space.
Or it can mean departure,
as one escapes from another.
Just
about
three times a week
I am at that strange and nameless airport in my sleep
where the planes will not take flight.
High white walls vault up.
The hangars all are locked and vacant.
Clocks speed backward.
Incoherent porters
clutch and curse at suitcases.
The bathrooms smell like beer.
Other would-be passengers
harbor nascent aneuryisms.
Children chatter like hectic apes.
Their fathers all are drunk, their mothers
suffer black and scandalous sudden miracles in the airport lounge,
each reaching orgasm
at the taste of stale sandwiches.
Convulsing, their eyes roll back
Their slow moans hasten into screams,
Their slim arms raised, but
Indolent husbands with rictus grins
will only clutch at their jackets,
at hidden iron flasks.
All the long lines lead
only to exits.
All the flight announcements
are harshly lit in dead and inscrutable languages:
strange Aramaic,
or Latin’s various precursors:
embittered early Germanic and
jumbled Etruscan.
Only two words are clear:
“DEPARTURES HERE.”
I need to fly to you.
I need to see you in person but
the attendants in my nightmare all
are comatose at the counters.
Sleeping pilots sag in chairs.
In an airport bar,
the dead slouch over snifters.
A bartender is bones.
Down a white corridor
A stewardess in sing-song voice
will wrongly remember a verse and reduce
Dante to gibberish.
Shakespeare is made as profane
as a syphilitic kiss.
On her lips, Eliot
becomes a barking dog.
My ticket is illegible –
its scrawled words
read like the bray of an ass,
or my own words.
You left me once.
Now stay
in the various safe and certain places free of sadness found
in the attention of better men.
Please, Audrey.
Please.
It was human for you to leave me once
But cruel for you to do so
over and over and over in my dreams.
Upon waking I can only console
myself with stilted meter
and the misspelled names of cities.
I
am
unsaved by my similes,
mere alliteration and unmeasured verse in an amateur’s awkward
clutch of unkempt metaphors,
the thinly veiled and even conscious
failed emulation of Auden,
the maudlin, the guttural hen
aspiring to such song as only the cardinal is capable.
Your
last
words to me are now familiar nocturnes.
Stars will nightly light your verbs.
Every waning moon will arc
over your exact nouns and careful platitudes,
Your eloquence in leaving me,
The precision in “goodbye.”
The flashing rebuke in the narrowing blue
of your eyes is concise.
The blue-black and deepening, freezing dark violet
of heaven will always observe your departure,
your ordered logic.
Its witness is the vacuum.
Its witness is the endless expanse of space.
I
write
but my words
are only hens with dull black eyes –
hens staring upward –
beholding the sky and its occasional
darting scarlet of cardinals in flight.
I
love
but my words
are only untidy, unmannered motifs –
as devoid of hope or order as
feral children in the snow, starving in a March forest.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2015
Photo credit: “Helsinki-Vantaa Airport departure hall 2, international terminal,” self-published work by Antti Havukainen, via Wikimedia Commons
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I am cheating
on the 5-Day Poetry Challenge
merely by adding
line breaks to a sentence.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2015
*****
(I suggest that this piece works on a number of levels, most notably the levels of “suck” and “I am really busy today.”)
Let’s try this again … after wrestling with formatting issues, I have somewhat better presented my first entry into the 5-Day Poetry Challenge:
“You’re a Broken Phonograph,” by Eric Robert Nolan
You’re baggage.
You’re a scratched penny on a gravel street.
Your memory is a cheap souvenir from an ill-advised journey that is wished forgotten. You were purchased drunk on a mercilessly hot noon at a roadside stand. The vendor resembled Browning’s “hoary cripple” — all eager eyes and veiled laughter. His smile is frequented by gold teeth — intermittent shining sentries on a rampart grin. His front pockets are stuffed with bills, like twin plump denim ticks; their fangs are dollars’ corners. Your overpriced bauble shines at midday, but every additional dusk renders it lower into dulling shades of deep sepia. The paint flakes off — it falls to the windowsill now like the dead wings of moths. The wise advise its removal; the paint is toxic.
Your image is the aged face of a staid statesman on a stamp, an unremembered lawmaker.
You’re a broken phonograph.
You’re a photo of a burned out building.
Your presence is a preening blackbird at the lawn.
You’re quick to open your legs, but slow to close your mouth.
You’re easy sex, but difficult company.
You’re a cheap date, but a costly acquaintance.
No matter where and when another man will lie beside you, you’re alone.
Your future is all awkward mornings, sunsets that are calls to arms, disenchanted midnights, men misunderstood,
“friends of friends,” “friends” instead of lovers, men recommended, men paid for,
their loins emptied first, their hearts emptied after, both by your mouth,
men slipping out, at sunrise, stealthily before you wake, like cats smelling better breakfast elsewhere.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2015
Photo credit: “Musee Baud,” 2015, by Rama, via Wikimedia Commons
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 