Category: Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

As someone who has taught in my fair share of university creative writing programs, I read Ryan Boudinot’s Things I Can Say About MFA Programs Now I No Longer Teach In One with a certain amount of recognition. You see, I, too, have experienced the disappointment that is students asking for books that don’t require as much though. Similarly, I’ve felt that pang of irritation when students complain they don’t have time to write. I have dispaired when students read great books and dismissed them. Pissed me off then, pisses me off now. It doesn’t stop me from recognizing that Ryan Boudinot is a goddamn condescending motherfucker who is talking a big ol’ pile of shit, though. ‘Cause he is. His article may actually be the dumbest collection of things I’ve ever seen someone write about writing on the internet. Which is saying something, really.  

Some friends were posting John Cleese quotes to my twitter feed this morning, which put me in mind of my trip to the UK at the end of 2013. One of the things I was really excited about was going to see the Globe theater – not the original, but a pretty awesome remake – ’cause I’m a moderately enthusiastic Shakespeare nerd and ’cause I knew, from family members gong there previously, that they made a pretty awesome range of Shakespeare related shirts. My favourite part of the tour, however, had nothing to do with the Bard and everything to do with Monty Python. To whit: When the Globe Theatre was rebuilt in London, a service was offered whereby you could have your name on a tile in the courtyard, for a donation to the project. Cleese and fellow python Michael Palin both signed up for tiles, but Palin’s was spelled wrong. Cleese paid extra to ensure it would be spelled “Pallin.

Taylor Negron died earlier this week. Odds are, if you’re aware of his work, it’s in the form of recognising him as one of those “hey, it’s that guy” actors who appeared in iconic bit parts. You never really learn their name, you just recognise them when they appear on screen and, occasionally, fire up IMDB on your phone so you can figure out where you know them from. You learn interesting things when people pass away. In Negron’s case, I learned that he spent a lot of time as a storyteller in addition to being an actor, and the man is kinda spectacular in that role. Case in point, this piece done for The Moth, a live story-telling event devoted to true stories. If you’ve got fifteen minutes free, give it a listen. I swear to god, you won’t regret it:

Quickflix has a copy of Cast a Deadly Spell available as part of its movie streaming package. This is worth the $9.99 I give them every month right now. It may even be enough to tempt me back, from time to time, once Netflix debuts and (hopefully) offers a slightly better range of streamable media that works better with the Chromecast. Why has this got me excited? Back in 1991, HBO released a made-for-TV movie titled Cast a Deadly Spell featuring Greg Ward as down on his luck PI Harry Lovecraft in an alternate era 1948 were magic is commonplace. It hits all the film-noir tropes right down the line, with Julianne Moore as the torch-song singer that Lovecraft loves and Clancy Brown (AKA The Highlander’s Kurggan) as a corrupt nightclub owner who used to be Lovecraft’s partner. If you’re the target market for this film, you’re already salivating from that short description. It hits all the right notes for a cult classic

Very occasionally,  you come across books that fit your interests so very perfectly that it’s almost like the author had you in mind when they wrote it. That’s pretty much the experience I had when I first heard mention of Christ Fausts’s Hoodtown, a novel in the hard-boiled tradition that’s set in a ghetto where the predominant culture has been heavily influenced by masked Lucha Libre traditions. It’s a world where people swear by El Santo, where a serial killer horrifies a community by stealing the masks of his victims, and where the hero is a burnt-out old rudo named X whose been trying to live up to the mistakes of her past. Seriously, people. Noir and Mexican masked wrestlers. The only way this book could have been more my thing is if it came personally autographed, made me nachos every time I started reading it, and offered to bring back WCW so we could kickstart the Monday Night Wars.

I used to be the vocal part of the #TrashyTuesdayMovie experiment over on twitter, but a lot of the logistical and planning behind the series of films we watched was done by my former flatmate, Adam. He took a kind of evil joy in finding terrible-but-interesting films and grouping them into themes, then sat there and took pleasure in the nervous breakdowns I suffered via twitter as we sat through shit like Zombie Lake and House of the Dead. He’s also the guy who started putting together the wiki recording each week’s set of tweets, which is half the reason I can remember some of the stuff we watched and how I felt about it at the time. Sometimes, after a while, the trauma just makes you numb. The thing to keep in mind about Adam is this: he already owned a large number of these films. Not because they were bad – despite what people thought, we weren’t interested in films without redeeming

THE HYPOTHESIS Ladies and Gentlemen, I posit that you will not find a clip that packs more 80’s music video cliches into three minutes than Cameo’s Back and Forth, released in 1987. THE EVIDENCE This has it all: big hair; bad fashion; Flashdance leotards; synchronized dancing; a vaguely glam metal guitarist performing a home invasion where he plays riffs at people. The only way you can cram more 80’s into this thing is the addition of a Corey. I DARE YOU TO PROVE ME WRONG In fact, if there’s something more 80s out there, I really want to know about it. Links in the comments, people. Links in the comments.