Went to a Dixieland Jazz festival yesterday, which is great because I’m always getting my Dixieland on, can’t hardly stop me, and there was so much rad bad-for-you food.
Adele.
Luckily once you stepped through the food area’s gates you discovered that a simple grilled fair-fare meal with accompanying potato product was as expensive as a down payment on a car. Why is stuff like that always a racket, at every single booth? It feels like it was less of one even as recently as a decade ago. Am I crazy? Anyway, I stuck with a chicken kebab and a lemonade. Healthy choices: This Guy!
… Plus like I said, so expensive that I suspected Rumpelstiltskin was behind the Sun Chips prices. Folklore. Don’t need that. Full disclosure: I ended up dropping most of my allotted money on records later, but I remain confident in my budgeting. Food — in your stomach for a couple hours, tops. Records — years in your ears. Keep sharp and make good decisions.
Cause out on the edge of darkness,
there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country,
come take me home again
Now I’ve been smiling lately,
thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be,
something good has begun
Richard Hamilton.
Oh peace train sounding louder
Glide on the peace train
Come on now peace train
Yes, peace train holy roller
Everyone jump upon the peace train
Come on now peace train
A few weeks ago, I came home triumphantly wielding a near-mint Cat Stevens LP from a trip to a nearby touristy mountain town — only to see in going through my collection that at some point in the past I’d brought that exact record in pretty much the exact same condition.
My organization skills may be in the toilet, but the important thing is, I’m consistent.
Now come and join the living,
it’s not so far from you
And it’s getting nearer,
soon it will all be true
Now I’ve been crying lately,
thinking about the world as it is
Why must we go on hating,
why can’t we live in bliss
I’ve been trying to balance my recent heady busy-ness in the areas of work and returning to school with the activities I love, like country driving, taking pictures, listening to my records, and of course spending time with my mad rad friendohs.
Cause out on the edge of darkness,
there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country,
come take me home again.
I don’t know by what trick or trends in behavior I’ve done it, but, despite recent roller coasters of emotion, anxiety, and obligation, I still just feel really happy and mellow about things in assessing the Spring, even accounting for the ups and downs.
“The Grey Lady of Coburn Manor.” Dorothy Manning (w), Ernesto Chua (p), and Vince Colletta (i). The Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love #4. (March-April, 1972.) DC Comics.
There is now a semi-agreed-upon comics citation style guide. Tell A Friend!
The original Wonder Woman costume must surely rank high in the list of all-time great, iconic comic hero get-ups. Is this part of what puts me off?
Costumed (or semicostumed) heroes such as Wonder Woman and Superman, rather than the villains they fought or the outlaws rampant in crime comics, were the main objects of the Catholic Church’s early [1938] criticism of comic books, censure that began to take the form of a serious campaign against comics.
Bishop Noll explained that the NODL [National Organization for Decent Literature]* objected only to Wonder Woman’s costume. “There is no reason why Wonder Woman should not be better covered, and there is less reason why women who fall under her influence should be running around in bathingsuits,” Noll wrote.
(Hajdu, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008. Print. 75-78.)
I did not save a lick of info related to this pic, but from the moment I saw it, I thought she was about to turn in a circle and transform in to Wonder Woman. If you can help with credit, please do!
I guess it’s true that I never liked her costume much, but I’ve never found it any more all-that-scandalous than those of usual dat-ass suspects such as Power Girl, Emma Frost, or Huntress. (God, I hate Huntress, and there is nothing mysterious about it. She sucks. You will not be seeing a “__ Days of Huntress” around here, ever.) I don’t think I ever gave Wonder Woman’s outfit much thought in print … but I did contemplate it onscreen, watching the Lynda Carter television series. The TV Diana had so many great wardrobe changes, not only with that wonderful spinning-into-Wonder Woman sequence, but with gear tailored to her various missions: remember that slick diving suit?
Separate from my later feelings about Wonder Woman as a comic hero, as an early television role model I had nothing but full esteem for the character, in particular her outfit. I can remember sitting on the tacky rose-patterned velour daveneau on which I’d been conceived and on which I took my afternoon naps — and, depending on where we were living, sometimes slept at night on the hide-a-bed as well (very strange experience, since my parents were extremely up front with me about the couch-conception thing and seemed to find it heartwarming; I had more mixed feelings) — in the early afternoons before I even started school, watching syndicated re-runs of the program and being wowed. If I picture Lynda Carter in a blouse and blazer speaking confidently to a male coworker, I can still vividly feel kid-sweat from playing after lunch melting the sofa’s scratchy, worn fabric in to faint little clumps under my legs. She was so glamorous that she wore earrings everywhere. Everywhere. I loved that shit.
This is definitely a non-issue. The outfit has nothing to do with me shying away from Wonder Woman for the last mumble-muffleth years. Asked and answered!
In any case, Wonder Woman’s costume recently underwent a redesign. That’s her new look up there. I don’t really care one way or the other. I guess I’m a little wary and disappointed, as always, by tampering with classics, even ones of which I’m not a fan — and, in the same way that I was slightly rankled by the initial reinvention of Kate Kane as a Jewish lesbian in the Batwoman comic (Why not make her deaf and HIV-positive, to boot? How unforgivably uninclusive of you, Non-PC D.C.!), I feel not-just-vaguely pandered to. Then again, I like the new Batwoman line now and I am hunky-dory with the matchup of Renee Montoya with Kate. So maybe the costume redesign of Wonder Woman will be another in-my-face situation. Tough to gauge since I don’t know if I’ll come out of this project wanting to read her or not.
Young ladies, you’re growing up now, and it can be hard to avoid peer pressure when you badly want to fit in, but remember — whatever you do, don’t do your hair like Ann-Margret.*
Oh, my god, Lindsay Lohan, what did I just say? I wash my hands of this girl. Like everyone else who touches her. That reminds me: almost time for a penicillin refill …
Don’t let it happen to you — keep it real.
*Reference image of megahot vintage ginger Ann-Margret for the littluns.
The following Cummings poem is not much like his usual at first blush, but is really full of simple wordplay and tricksy manipulation of conventions that conceals a more complex meaning than simple medieval ballad — which is much more in keeping with what you’d expect, yes? “All in green went my love riding” has been set to music and sung by, among many, Warren Kinsella and one of my patronessiest of patron saints, Joan Baez. The most widely accepted meaning of the poem is that it is a subtle retelling of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon. (Variations of the myth here.)
Modesty Blaise.
As far as I can tell, in the version on which Cummings has based “All in green went my love riding,” Actaeon is a merciless hunter who desires to marry Artemis after he sees her bathing. The virgin warrior goddess is furious at this cheek, particularly that he would spy on her and then imply she owes him marriage (she fiercely protected her physical privacy and chastity).
The lovely and talented Marguerite Empey.
Artemis punishes Actaeon by warning him that, if he ever speaks, he will be transformed in to a stag and devoured by his own bitches, which is where it seems Cummings picks up the thread. Here it is.
All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the merry deer ran before.
Fleeter be they than dappled dreams
the swift sweet deer
the red rare deer.
Four red roebuck at a white water
the cruel bugle sang before.
Horn at hip went my love riding
riding the echo down
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the level meadows ran before.
Softer be they than slippered sleep
the lean lithe deer
the fleet flown deer.
Four fleet does at a gold valley
the famished arrow sang before.
Photographed by Neil Krug.
Bow at belt went my love riding
riding the mountain down
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the sheer peaks ran before.
Paler be they than daunting death
the sleek slim deer
the tall tense deer.
Four tell stags at a green mountain
the lucky hunter sang before.
Amber Weber for I.D., September 2008.
All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
my heart fell dead before.
(E.E. Cummings, “All in green went my love riding.” Tulips and Chimneys. 1923.)
He just had to sing all triumphantly, didn’t he, in front of the green mountain? Heart = hart. A synonym for stag. Pretty sure that between the line about stags and the repetition of “all in green,” Artemis changed him in to one of the “Four tell stags” and his own dogs ripped him to pieces.
Liv Tyler.
Also I noticed on this re-read that she dwells longer than I remembered over her four dead does. This makes sense because besides being the ruler of nature and the hunt, she held deer and cypress as her closest animal and plant brethren. The victims of Actaeon’s arrow and his ravaging dogs, those four deer emerge in her description unquestionably as females: they are slender, pale, lithe, slippered — red and rare. Virginal language, am I right? That purity and feminity gives the “Four” power and deserves honor, just as does Artemis’s own virginity, which bathtime-peeping Actaeon and his sleazy, brutish hounds do not seem to understand or respect.
via thechocobrig on the tumblr. fabulous photojournal.
By contrast, in all of the lines which describe his four animals, Actaeon’s “four” appears in lowercase letters — the only Cummingsish punctuation-play in the poem, as the four remain in lowercase despite following periods, which Cummings otherwise obeys with great restraint for the rest of the poem. Actaeon’s four are the four hounds; the miniscule rather than majuscal “f” usage denotes the speaker’s low opinion of them and bodes very badly for them, considering Artemis’s usual respect for nature. The number four, besides paralleling the count of her lost deer, is suggestive of pursuit of living creatures in all four of the cardinal directions, a kind of inescapable squared threat in terms of the swath a disrespectful hunter might cut through the planet of a goddess who considers herself the mother of nature — because of its relationship to “four corners,” “four winds,” etc, the total of four hounds is exactly the right number to appear confounding and problematic. An unignorable affront which must be dealt with.
Abbey Lee Kershaw for Dazed and Confused.
The four hounds may also perhaps be a reference to the Horsemen of the Apocalypse who accompany Death in the Revelation of St. John: the hunter brings destruction to what Artemis is sworn to protect; she is the patroness of life on earth, a mother-warrior figure who gives her attention to springs and deer, and Actaeon is that life’s death, a sanguine, horn-blowing archer with attendantly destructive hell hounds that tear her living creatures apart. An essentially unforgivable encroachment on all that Artemis stands for. Those four lean crouching motherfuckers act as a smirking antithesis to her binding and symbiotic method of mothering the earth, by dismantling and devouring everything they encounter, famished agents of a chaos she is sworn to repel. They tear things up.
In this case, their master, too. Does the punishment fit the crime?
I’ve read that there are allusions here to “The Knight’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I never make it far through those. I know as a happy medievalist I’m supposed to read and adore them and that what I’m about to tell you could get me yelled at and kicked out of the society of nerds who read material that predates van Leeuwenhoek, the inventor of the very lenses the best of the best wear to strain our eyes over the stuff we love, but I feel that poring over Chaucer is something akin to people in a thousand years venerating the script of Rat Race. Great movie, solidly entertaining, good cast with varied backstories, but, like, how dire is reading it to the quest of accurately intrepreting society in this era? Not much. (Commence lambasting, Chaucer-lovers. Change my mind?)
Anyway. If you follow that link to the wiki list of variations on the Artemis and Actaeon story, you can see that different authors have spent time cataloguing the precise names of the up-to-fifty hounds involved in Actaeon’s punishment.
I guess the lesson here is that, if you want even a chance with Artemis, you need to be green in deed as well as dress. Keep your elbows out and for god’s sake recycle, dudes.
Drop Dead Fred (Ate De Jong, 1991), featuring madcap redhead Rik Mayall, who makes it all better and doesn’t condescend to mollycoddle while he does it. I would be okay with him cutting my hair in my sleep, or wiping snot affectionately down my cheek.
I could use him, I think, right now … could definitely use him. Walking down memory lane watching this movie was like being repeatedly hit in the stomach with a club carved of ice. (Is that possible? Someone get back to me if it is.) Awesome. Check it out.
Elizabeth’s world has been turned upside down. Her marriage appears to be over following her discovery that he has cheated on her; but she simply can’t stop loving him. In her misery, her imaginary childhood friend Fred reappears, having been previously locked away from her.
Elizabeth stays with her mother; quite cold to Elizabeth, she intends to put Elizabeth back with Charles, but, in the meantime, makes her into a younger double of herself. Elizabeth works to get Charles back into her life, even turning up at a party (with Fred) that Charles is at. Despite part of Elizabeth being overjoyed at seeing Fred again and remembering their fun care-free times together, all he ever seems to do for Elizabeth is cause trouble.
Elizabeth returns to Charles and starts taking medication* to rid herself of Fred. It is only when taking the last pill that she realizes Charles hasn’t changed at all and that Fred is really the only person she can trust. Unfortunately, the only way she can truly [confront her mother and husband] and rid herself of her fears is to lose Fred for good by realizing she doesn’t need him any longer. (the imdb)
I’m a loner! I’m a crazy, wide-eyed loner on a doomed space mission to Venus to battle the three-headed mega-beast! But on the way back, I caught Cornflakes Disease.
Fred: Why don’t we harpoon Charles straight through the head, drag him back to the apartment, and hit him with a hammer until he agrees to come back?
Elizabeth: “Harpoon him through the head?” That won’t work, Fred.
Fred: Why not? How many times have you tried it?
Fred: I can’t believe we left the party so soon. And there was so much wine left to spit around the place!
Elizabeth: I got upset.
Fred: “I got upset.” God, you’re so stupid. You never leave a party until the very, very end.
Elizabeth: Oh, really?
Fred: Yeah, really!
Elizabeth: What about Cinderella? Remember what happened with her?
Fred: No, I don’t remember what happened “with her.” I deliberately forgot all about her. Uck. She made me puke. I remember the ugly stepsisters, though — they were great!
Young Elizabeth: Did they live happily ever after?
Polly: Of course, Elizabeth.
Young Elizabeth: How do you know?
Polly: Because, she was a good little girl. If she would have been naughty, then the Prince would’ve run away.
Young Elizabeth: What a pile of shit.
Wow [points up]. Cobwebs.
Snotface, look — ink! Let’s write something on the carpet. I know, how about “Mother sucks“?!
I don’t love you because love is for girls and girls are disgusting.
*On the subject of the medication, the best single-panel webcomic I have ever seen. Natalie Dee‘s take on Drop Dead Fred: (click to make it larger)
F’reals, Natalie Dee. You nailed it. To say nothing of the high risk of tardive dyskinesia with Haloperidol, making it a very unwise choice of antipsychotics to prescribe to someone under, say, 30. Total bullshit. (Why am I having déjà vu; I feel like I was just rambling about this to someone recently — Jonohs? Panda? Miss D …? ) Anyway, to wrap up, an in-costume off-set picture by the crafts table:
Like all ladies, I am a sucker for stubble. Unlike most ladies, I brake for suspenders and striped pants, as well.
Awesome! Final picture of perfection via the rocketman. Thanks, buddy — this picture, the hair, and Mayall’s hapless expression kind of made my day.
(All screencaps via Samantha, aka timed, on the lj. Huge thanks for the fun and beautiful pictures. The ice stomach club is nothing to do with your great screencaps. Thank you!)
Batman Confidential, No. 18. “The Bat and the Cat, Part 2 of 5: ‘Insanity Claws!'” by Fabian Nicieza and Kevin Maguire (Aug 2008).
Finally finished up that comic I mentioned buying and starting around a month ago. Things have been hectic lately and I kept forgetting it was in the garage. Like I said, I jumped in mid-series, but I think I can provide a little backstory you will enjoy to explain this panel.
As this issue begins, Batgirl (Barbara Gordon) is hunting down Catwoman (Selina Kyle) because she suspects Catwoman stole her father Jim’s notebook, which doubtless has sensitive personal information, drawings of dalmatian puppies in sunflower fields, and confidential case notes and grocery lists in it — Gordon loves dalmations.
The intrepid Spunky McCheeseball manages to run the kitteh-lady to ground by following her to a scandalous private club meeting. It turns out to be the Gotham Hedonist Society, where everyone goes around nude but for masks and indulges in safe, supervised, kinky insane sex with multiple partners. (Are you surprised in a city known for disguised superheroes and villains that this would become a fetish?) They let Little Red keep her hood but make her lose the clothes. Rules are rules!
She gets the notebook away from her target, and, after some naked wrestling, escapes the club and sadly dresses again, thus ending the one interesting and unpredictable thing she has done for me so far. Luckily, good ol’ loveable Catwoman stalks the drippy gingersnatch to a junkyard and steals the notebook back.
A lively fight and footchase ensues, ending on a rooftop, where the always-misunderstood kitteh-lady reveals begrudgingly that she needs to decode the information in the notebook, which Pippi Purplestocking has discovered is encrypted (thanks a lot, Daddy!), in order to save someone’s life — then promptly gets shot off the roof by a sniper that Batgirl can’t see.
Now I’m looking for the next one in the series. I’ll keep you posted.
I did a stupid thing and decided to skip The Tommyknockers. Instead, I read L.A. Confidential, then Red Harvest, then some subpar book from Jeffery Deaver that was a bit afield from what I usually expect of him.
Image via thegunnshow right here on the wordpress. Girls Like a Boy Who Reads. My cover looks exactly like that but I do not look exactly like him. Check the blog out.
He spells it Jeffery and not Jeffrey, but that is not today’s issue. Also I am mad at him for getting tired of his Lincoln Rhyme characters (you may remember their portrayals by Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie in the film adaptation of The Bone Collector) and moving to this boring woman in Monterey as his new detective, but there was a preview in the back for a new Lincoln Rhyme so he is sort-of back in my good graces. Jury is out: he better not do anything stupid like kill off Lincoln or his hot redheaded girlfriend Amelia. That is still not today’s issue.
Today’s issue is that I skipped The Tommyknockers which I always read over the Fourth of July in order for maximum synchronicity and a karmically blessed Summer, and I thought I’d try something different and not be a slave to superstition, but I think I got a little overly cocky. Right away bad things started happening.
And it’s obviously all because I did not read The Tommyknockers and the blame for this situation can be laid only at the door of that fact and has nothing to do with my own behaviors and weaknesses. (eye roll)
Now instead I’ve read the Gentleman’s generous loan of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and I’m about to make a date with Milo for us to simultaneously begin Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
Pictures come from Une femme est une femme and allthatsinteresting on the tumblr.
ATTN: Spoilers like a bat outta hell. Stop if you’ve never seen nor read Red Dragon and Manhunter and are the kind of person who yells at people on the internet for posting spoilers of things that have been out for decades.
I was relaxing after dinner and I suddenly remembered yesterday’s random Blake trivia — forgot about that!
Okay, soooo, I used this picture yesterday in the “Tyger” post …
… because it comes from Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986). This is part 1 of its Movie Moment because I need to cover technical aspects a different day. Today I want to just sort of compare Manhunter and a more recent adaptation of the same fucked-up and riveting material. Manhunter is the original filmed adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon (1981), in which the writer William Blake plays a very large part of the dissociative disease that leads the antagonist to kill and sets off the action of the novel/film.
Manhunter, the original Red Dragon screen version.
In 2002, a different adaptation, whose title was the same as the book — Harris’s novels have a weird and haphazard history of screen-arrival in Hollywood — was released in light of the success of the year before’s screen adaptation of Hannibal (novel: Thomas Harris, 1999; film: Ridley Scott, 2001), a rather late-breaking sequel to the infamous film version of Silence of the Lambs (novel: Harris, 1988; movie: Jonathan Demme, 1991).
Red Dragon, second adaptation.
A totally different animal, not even attempting to remake in part the cinematic masterpiece that is the color-drenched, painstakingly-framed Manhunter, the alternate more recent film is what I consider a sloppy adaptation of Red Dragon. It is nothing like the very-admirable entry into the Harris genre that is Hannibal, which despite the replacement of Academy Award-winner Jodie Foster with Academy Award-nominee Julianne Moore as the infamous “[Hello,] Clarice” Starling managed, I think by virtue of Sir Anthony Hopkins’ reprisal of the sensationalist character of Dr. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter combined with Scott Free productions’ attachment to the project in the wake of smash-hit Gladiator, to make quite the box office splash. As it ended up, that success was deserved.
Check out Vegetarian Times in the background. No. 1 favorite Hannibal still with A Bullet.
The Red Dragon revamp that followed it the next year, on the other hand, falls short of its predecessors due to cocky casting and the hasty pudding nature of the picture. It is almost unfair to stack it against such a stunning piece of eye candy and psychological discourse as Manhunter. But I’m going to anyway.
“The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed In Sun” — William Blake. Blake’s illuminated print-making process is actually still partially guessed at, as he never troubled to write down most of how he did it. Another post — I promise.
The novel Red Dragon, the first in the Hannibal Lecter series of books by Thomas Harris, has as its main detective not Clarice Starling, but rather a young FBI mindhunter named Will Graham. The book and 2002 film take its title from the antagonist’s personal inspiration (and devil with whom he dances) for his transformation to what he views as a higher being. This is a highly detailed, uniquely gnostic series of ritual murders which the “bad guy” bases around Blake’s work, particularly his illuminated manuscript print “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed In Sun.” The killer calls this multiply murderous, cleansing-by-blood process “Becoming.”
This antagonist is called the Tooth Fairy by the press, a name he loathes, but he’s tipped to the reader early on — by his preferred nomenclature as the Red Dragon — to be a shy and cleft-palated industrial photographic-development-expert named Francis Dolarhyde. Francis is an abused and orphaned soul with an unfathomably deep dark side due to psychosexual torture in his upbringing.
Meanwhile, young Will Graham is a bummed-out “good guy” chilling in Marathon, Florida with his family on the beach, trying to get his mojo back after unhappily closing the toughest case of his career as a profiler with the FBI: arresting former friend and consultant, reknowned psychiatrist, classical music fan, and noted long pig gourmand one Dr. H. Lecter — M.D., Ph.D., hella murderer.
As the action unfolds, the already tightly-strung Dolarhyde — who, as the Red Dragon, writes in supplication to Dr. Lecktor/Lecter appealing for help in his quest to purify his weak flesh and Become, further enmeshing the good doc in the plotohs — finds his demon not only hunted by highly-skilled semi-retired agent Will Graham and the FBI, but also must elude his own dark side’s brutal orders when he suddenly finds himself in an unlikely and empathetic mutual attraction with a plucky handicapped co-worker and falters in his faith in “Becoming.”
This complex character is played equally well by Tom Noonan in Manhunter and Ralph Fiennes in Red Dragon. Noonan gets the edge for creepy wordless scenes such as rasing his head to the sunlight like an animal drinking in vital and engrammed diurnal directives; Fiennes has the advantage in the all-important following tattoo-revelation scene and Red Dragon cry of chagrined triumph at tabloid reporter and luckless human torch Freddy Lounds (Steven Lang, 1986; Philip Seymour Hoffman, ’01: winner Hoffman on that one — ♥ that dude’s freaky energy 4eva-evah).
YOU OWE ME AWE.
Totally disturbing scene.
Tormented by the demon with which he wrestles, Dolarhyde attempts to steal and eat the original Blake painting which has been, in his mind, masterminding his murders. He believes that by consuming the painting, he will stop the voices, visions, and impulses torturing his brain with which he valiantly argues.
He finds himself particularly rising in opposition to the Red Dragon’s orders that he murder Reba (infinitely worthy and perpetually underused Joan Allen plays her in Manhunter while shiny-eyed dope Emily Watson —I know it’s an unpopular opinion but this chick bugs the hell out of me — got the role in the revamp), the outspoken, sexually bold blind woman from the photo labs with whom he has fallen in love.
Punch Drunk Love, Cradle Will Rock, me shaking my head and saying “Boo.” (limited theatrical release)
Dolarhyde is a sadder, sympathetic and strangely more touching, conflicted character than the early Lecter (or even his later and in my book cheaply slapped together Hannibal Rising incarnation) and much more relatable than Dolarhyde’s equally compulsive 1988 series successor, Buffalo Bill — “it puts the lotion on its etc” — are ever portrayed to be, yet because of Dolarhyde’s disorderly mind and act-driven kills, the Red Dragon as a predator has scenes that are in some ways more resonantly chilling than any of the often-quoted histrionics hailing from either star of Silence of the Lambs‘ gruesome sideshow.
As an example, in the above screencap, the Red Dragon side of Francis’s beaten, slavish personality makes the nervous newly-dating Dolarhyde give blind Reba McClane a drink of water from a glass with not only ice floating it but also the anciently misshapen and hideously rotting false teeth of the author of his schizophrenia, Dolarhyde’s dreadful dead grandmother, which dental implements he fits in to his own mouth and bites his victims in a frenzy during his kills. (Hence the hated nickname.) That part is not a-okay with me.
Forensic expert showing an FBI-Atlanta PD task force meeting a plaster mold of Gramma Dolarhyde’s choppers.
Um. Yeah. All that biting and teeth stuff? And the yells from the Red Dragon and his grandmother to murder Reba before he accidentally tells her how they have him trapped in his own mind? That’s fucked up. And oh, god. When those teeth knock against the glass as Reba thanks him, raises it to her lips, and sips, there is not a cringe-free face in the room.
So. In Manhunter, the first jump of Red Dragon from novel to screen, Will Graham is played by William Petersen, and Brian Cox plays Lecktor — not a typo. The film spells it this way. (You may recognize my darlingest dearest awesome Mr. Cox, pictured below as “Lecktor,” from Rushmore, The Ring, or Supertroopers — he is a personal fave from Way Back).
In 2002’s adaptation of Red Dragon, Edward Norton performs the part of Agent Graham with Sir Anthony Hopkins reprising his role as Dr. Lecter. Hopkins did get to have a little fun, for once off of his familiar smug game of “fava beans” and psychological bullshit, because this whelp of a wolf among the lambs has just recently been chained in the Red Dragon storyline.
The Lecter of Red Dragon is still a young and relatively vengeful Lecter, pacing a gym on a harness and leash for mandatory exercise to keep the other prisoners of his psychiatric facility safe (no mask just yet), unthinkably pissed at Graham for having caught him several years earlier, even lunging for him in an unguarded moment of rage — Lecter is not yet completely at home in the role of Fucking With the Po-lice as is the maturing character encountered in Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal.
In spite of Hopkins’ fun stretching his wings, I still feel that Brian Cox plays him with a hair more dignity and better-hinged chilliness than Hopkins does, which gives Lecktor, vs. Lecter, that slender shoot of a just-germinating seed of polish-mixed-with-go-for-broke-ruthlessness which is so necessary for the character’s believable development in to who he is by Hannibal. I think Hopkins saw the chance to finally show the less-controlled, animalistic side of a character he’d been at home playing as an after-the-fact “tyger” — caged and angry but a careful planner — for a long time and jumped, maybe too high, at the opportunity for this gamier potrayal. Just an opinion.
“You think I’m stupid?”
“No, Dr. Lecter. I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“But you still caught me.”
“You had certain … disadvantages.”
“Disadvantages? Such as … ?”
“You’re insane.”
You are correct to recognize Petersen from the original, Las Vegas-set television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Fun fact: for Halloween 2002, the producers deliberately teamed William Petersen up in his role as Gil Grissom, the brilliant but troubled detective able to get in to killers’ minds, in pursuit of a nemesis freaky killer performed in the October 31st episode by Tom Noonan (Francis Dolarhyde, aka the Tooth Fairy) as a nod to their parts opposite one another in Manhunter. Noonan played a demented illusionist, escape artist, and master magician known as Zephyr. Near retirement, the Zephyr still had some scores to settle and a lot of pyrotechnic sleight-of-hand tricks up his sleeve before he was ready to call it a day. The episode actually ends in delightful ambiguity, but I will not spoil it.
Special thanks to wetpaint, a CSI: fansite, for the screencaps.
I used to wonder with great conflict why, having lost someone special to me to a real life version of this type of shit, I am okay with fare such as the Lecter film and novel shenanigans, CSI:, and the like when I am so vehemently opposed to so-called “true crime” and often even discussions of such stuff in company or on the news. I will leave the room on certain topics and I don’t consider that burying my head in the sand — I have seen all I want to see for now of what people will say “needs to be reported” like as some kind of lesson.
Fiennes and Watson in Red Dragon; my professor friend and I looked nothing like this during our deep conversation (below) — I just felt like I had not shown enough stills from it as opposed to Manhunter.
Not too long ago, I wound up one day in deep, private conversation after a where-am-I-going-in-life conference with a former professor I dearly love about Harris’s novels and perhaps Patrica Cornwell’s, or some line very similar, and I confessed that I felt conflicted about my reading of that type of material because of things I’d dealt with in the past. He surprised me by saying he’d also lost a friend to violent crime growing up and despised, as I did, the cult of violence and serial-killer-admiration that seems to grip the tabloid television shows and bestselling non-fiction shelves. Yet he, too, read with genuine enjoyment many series of fictional genre crime thrillers. He said that, like me, he’d often disgustedly questioned himself as to how he kept both opinions in balance, and why he differentiated between hating the one and being all right with the other.
We need this hero.
He said he’d read a great scholarly article just a few years earlier, and I cannot remember the writer he quoted because I am garbage and frankly slugging a margarita on the rocks right now (it’s hot where I live), which forever answered our question for him.
This psychological scholar and literary critic posited that the murder mystery — all the detective thrillers and suspense novels and cop vs. boogeyman films the genre spawns — even with a detailed portrayal of a base, disturbed and seemingly random monster like Lecter or Dolarhyde as their antagonist — far from the feeding of dark fantasy that we anxiously supposed, serves instead a need in humanity to see our fears realized (as we had already done in reality) but the conflict then resolved.
Couldn’t go the whole post without a Silence of the Lambs scene.
What he basically said was that every time he and I watched CSI: and Grissom caught the Bad Guy, or read a James Patterson book on the beach and cheered as Alex Cross brought in his latest nemesis, we were solving our friends’ murders and seeing the people who disrupted our lives brought to task for their wrongdoing. We were gaining our much needed closure. Even people who have not suffered loss but empathetically and logically fear it because they love people in their own lives and understand that the possibility of these lives being taken by cruel injustice is never far away, seek and enjoy that same positive resolution to this basic human anxiety as it plays out in genre crime fiction.
Lecter caged and contained, kept in by the Forces of Good and therefore shut up like a witch in a well of a fairy story. (temporarily in this case but you get my drift) The people of the village are Safe.
It blew my mind, and I almost wanted to reject it because it was so far from my self-loathing castigation, but it felt very true. I know he was right. I am no longer so guilty nor constantly probing myself for some latent and despicable, prurient interest in fictional depictions of things that in real life have caused me pain. I understand now that I am actually acting out in my mind, against a cathartic and safe backdrop, the conflict and agonized anxieties from which I shy away in real reports on the news, and deliberately seeking through a book in my hands a satisfactory resolution which will lay my mind at ease that justice has been reached — and, by extension, that justice can and will be reached in reality.
That strayed pretty far afield from Blake and Manhunter but I’m kind of not sorry.
All of this entry’s screencaps come from kpannier and thewadingegret on the lj; rottentomatoes forums; and personal grabs here and there over the years.
PSA: This arcade belongs to the fucking Batgirl!* And none of you cockmongering assmunchers best forget it. She will mess the shit of all you ne’er-do-well cuntnecks** the fuck up, but proper!!
Ohhh, DC. You and your “leaks” and “apologies” for/of cusswords. Your lust for sales will slay us all.
*Is that anything like “the goddamned Batman?” you wonder. Mmm. Not yet. But delicious, memey-riffic time will tell.
**What is a cunt neck? I don’t know, it just came to me as a good insult. Like it seems it is a comparison to the neck of someone plump and vital in youth but maybe now gone to seed that has become all wrinkly and fleshy and vag-y? It is an insult that I think invites understanding of repulsion and distinct un-sexiness. Not sure exactly. I just know I am being vulgar as all kinds of heck in this post and I am (clap-clap, criss-cross-gesture with hands) ALL DONE for the day! King-size cusses. So done. SeaQuest out!
Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamer,
Bring me all your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.
Don’t say I never gave you anything, nerds. It’s an all Harry Potter edition of Mean Girls Monday, by way of introducing my confession about the final films.
The below series of subtitled screencaps is based on the scene in Mean Girls wherein Regina George is described by various frenemies, classmates, and instructors.
So. Last night, while watching the Lost drive-you-crazy-with-anticipation-before-the-finale special that aired before the Lost legitimate finale with Gorgeous George and the Great Dane, the subject of the upcoming two-part Harry Potter final films arose. The Great Dane theorized that the bulk of the script was just going to be the characters running and hiding in the forest — much like Lost with the jungle, as Geo pointed out which may have started the conversation, or the reverse … I had a lot on my mindgrapes so it’s tough to call.
I folded my arms and, bloated on pizza and keyed up with anxiety for Lost, said flatly: “Look. I don’t care what else happens. All I want to see is Mrs. Weasley open a can of whupass on that fucking bitch Bellatrix Lestrange.”
Geo and the Great Dane laughed at my announcement and I said seriously, “No. I’ve been waiting. I don’t need to see all the little cheesey denouement stuff. Like, seriously? Just Mrs. Weasley spanking that Goth bitch. All I need. I could pretty much just leave after that.”
I then mimicked throwing up a peace sign to a packed theater and added, “Allow me to save you the time, y’all — Harry lives. I’m out!”
See, I know I called you hardcore HP guys “nerds” back there, but I must admit: no one kills a Weasley twin and gets away with it. Not on my watch. Those dudes are crazy-hot. Um, redheaded twins? with magic powers? and, P.S., they basically run the fantasy equivalent of a comic shop? Winner, winner, chicken dinner! So I’m looking forward to seeing some hardcore death-avengeance: Mom-style. Mmm, cursey!
Happy birthday, I guess, to Gates “Dr. Beverly Crusher” McFadden, who turns 61 today.
Still from Star Trek: The Next Generation. “Thine Own Self,” Season 7, Episode 16.
This was the one where Troi must undergo the holodeck test to become a commanding officer, proctored by her pigdog ex Riker, and the first time through the simulation, everyone dies — including the doc, here — but the second time, after really annoying counsel from a predictably arrogant and slimy Riker (get this, he squints and tilts his head lecherously! wow! the moves!), Troi forces Geordi to sacrifice himself and everyone else lives.
Insert some kind of “Riker’s boner” joke here. Pigdog.
Lesson being greater good kind of stuff. That’s what matters. Not the first picture, which I mainly selected because, in it, Dr. Crusher has a typically bitchy look on her face. (I am a big anti-Crusher guy from Way Back, so I approach her scenes with a bias. Sorry.) That was the subplot, actually; the main thing of the episode was Data’s memory crashed and he was stranded on a planet where people thought he had the plague.
Actually, in my search for the above shot, I found the below one, and I take back almost all the mean things I’ve said over the years.
I said goddamn, Gates McFadden. Haters to the left. And this time, that’s me. Happy birthday, madame!
Happy birthday to a very special Valentine Vixen, the lovely and talented Lorrie Menconi, Miss February 1969!
Photographed by Bill Figge and Ed De Long.
Tomorrow is brain-asplodin’ly cute Ms. Menconi’s 62nd birthday. Felicitazioni, bella!
The write-up which accompanied Ms. Menconi’s centerfold, titled “Tuesday’s Child,” focused on her birthday and the implications of her Pisces nativity. You know how I feel about zodiac-quackery (unless what I’m reading is painful, scathing, and insulting, I am highly skeptical), but how can I resist an Italian sister in pigtails? Flap-flap, quack-quack — let’s discuss the zodiac.
Astrologically speaking, Lorrie Menconi has her pretty head in the stars. “I was born on Tuesday,” our valentine Playmate told us, “February 24th 1948. That makes me a Pisces, so I think it’s perfect to appear in the February issue — it just has to be good luck. I guess you could call me a zodiac nut. But so many Piscean characteristics are true of me that it’s hard not to believe in it!” (“Tuesday’s Child,” Playboy, February 1969.)
Exhibiting a prime Piscean trait — talkativeness — Lorrie goes on: “Pisces is a water sign, which may explain why I’m so crazy about living in California. We moved to San Diego when I was very young, so I don’t know what it’s like to live away from the water.”(Ibid.)
“The beach scene here is terrific. But the mountains in northern California are great, too.” (Ibid.)
Damned skippy, they are.
When Lorrie isn’t involved in the aquatic life, she indulges another Piscean fancy — a love of animals. Lorrie attributes some of her fondness for fauna to her mother, who wrote a children’s book called The Pony Who Lost Her Neigh. (Ibid.)
The Pony Who Lost Her Neigh must be out of print now, because all the traces that remain on a fairly deep search are Lee Menconi-Bandh’s copyright claims, first from 1965, renewed in 1993. Bummer. I’ll keep looking.
“All the animals in the story,” Lorrie explains, “were based on our family: my father, my three sisters and me. There was billy goat Harry, pony Susie, porky Marilyn and duck Rosane. I was a turkey — you know, ‘gobble, gobble’ — because I talk so much; there’s that Pisces again.”
Along with her sisters, she works part time at the House of Rattan, a shop managed by her mother. “We sell just about anything you can imagine that’s made of rattan,” Lorrie says.
Ms. Menconi, I can imagine many, many things. That you “sell anything you can imagine” made of rattan is a dangerous thing to say to a person who opens my eyes in the shower because I’m positive that, in the time it took me to suds up my hair, a shark has swum up the drain and is a centimeter from sinking his rows of razor sharp teeth into my foot (yes, I grasp physics and biology and am aware on an intellectual level of the impossibility of such a thing; no, that doesn’t stop me from opening my eyes and getting soap in them).
Rattan flyswatters, minivans, and light bulbs; rattan bikini bottoms; rattan file cabinets; rattan noodle soup; rattan statues of Ra, the Sun God; rattan Audubon guides to bird-watching and rattan flatware to compliment an ornate set of rattan china — all of these, you sold at your mother’s shop, Ms. Menconi? No? Then I cry fie and false advertising! “House of Rattan,” indeed. More like “Shack” or “Porta-Potty of Rattan.” Even “Junk Drawer of Unimaginative Rattan,” maybe. Pfft.
I kid. She was totally cute and is still completely beautiful; further, her family sounds very supportive. Ms. Menconi travels on the convention circuit, and also maintains an official website, where you can purchase autographed copies of prints from her justifiably popular Playboy spread.
A recent, striking picture. Italian ladies got it goin’ on: accept it!
Besides her looks, her adorable enthusiasm for her hometown of San Diego has also clearly held.
“You know, San Diego is called the place where California began, because the Spanish padres founded their first mission here in 1769. So this year, we’re celebrating our 200th birthday. I’m really proud of this city — it’s sunny and warm and beautiful.” (Ibid.)
Her official site is sponsored by the San Diego Beachlife Press.
Again, supersonic birthday wishes and eskimo kisses to the lovely and talented Ms. Menconi, and many, many happy returns!
The Thought Experiment 