I’m semi-watching an awful movie called Get Hard, in which Kevin Hart teaches Will Ferrell how to survive in prison. Yes, that is the premise of a mainstream film. I don’t even wanna consider how much money someone spent on this production.
There are wayyy too many rape jokes — in fact, the opening sentence of Roger Ebert’s review is: “If you love rape jokes, ‘Get Hard’ is your movie.” Ebert’s whole take is brilliant. As he emphasizes, there is also plenty of homophobia and debatable racism.
Poster for Get Hard.
And yet… Get Hard is kinda funny. For instance, right now there’s a great scene where Kevin Hart plays a bunch of different prison stereotypes in a ridiculous turf dispute in the yard. Sure, it’s bigoted in several ways, and misogynistic, but I’m not gonna lie and say I never laughed.
The USA Today blog Entertain This lists “You’re not easily offended” as the #4 reason to see Get Hard despite its problems, elaborating: “Instead of being a clever satire, the movie mostly presents rude and over-the-top jokes. Once in a while, however, the gags are funny. Like, laugh-out-loud funny.” Welp, yeah. Basically.
I rewrote an HP Lovecraft quote to be simpler to read:
“It’s easy to imagine an occult force that sustains itself by sucking the life out of normal living beings — a parasite, possibly one without physical presence. This parasite may even commandeer the host’s body. It might be malevolent or it might be more like the tick I found on my dog yesterday: just hungry. Regardless, any entity of this kind is unnatural. We all have a responsibility to get rid of it.”
Lovecraft: very suspicious of the unknown. Shirt for $19.99 on Sigh Co.
The original:
“One might easily imagine an alien nucleus of substance or energy, formless or otherwise, kept alive by imperceptible or immaterial subtractions from the life-force or bodily tissue and fluids of other and more palpably living things into which it penetrates and with whose fabric it sometimes completely merges itself. It might be actively hostile, or it might be dictated merely by blind motives of self-preservation. In any case such a monster must of necessity be in our scheme of things an anomaly and an intruder, whose extirpation forms a primary duty with every man not an enemy to the world’s life, health, and sanity.” — “The Shunned House” by HP Lovecraft
Lovecraft’s style is exhaustingly baroque — to be honest, I’m mainly reading his short stories because my boyfriend likes them — but his ideas are fun. They complement The X-Files well. Like Agent Fox Mulder’s investigations, Lovecraft’s plots end in sinister mysteries unsolved — sometimes even unseen.
It’s ironic that the paperback I’m reading has Dali-esque tortures on the front cover, because Lovecraft’s specialty is obliquely describing horrors that his characters claim are beyond comprehension. The author is happy to depict the action, but only up to a point. There are certainly never spikes in anyone’s eye sockets.
For example, in a story that he ghostwrote for Harry Houdini, Lovecraft’s protagonist encounters reanimated mummies with animal heads spliced on top of their bodies. Relatively tame stuff, right? It probably felt scarier to his contemporary readers in the 1920s and 1930s. Anyway, later the poor fellow sees a creature whose attributes he feels completely unable to verbalize.
Many Lovecraft heros can’t communicate what they’ve endured, only the events that preceded the tautologically unspeakable occurrence. Or they go mad after witnessing it. The protagonist is rarely physically injured, although side characters die sometimes, as in “The Shunned House” (which I quoted at the beginning).
The word “abyss” is the sort of vocabulary that characterizes Lovecraft’s prose. Deep dark eldritch depths, etc. To his credit, Lovecraft established some of the cliches — he was hugely influential; watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and it’s obvious. I object to his roundabout wordiness but I like his obsessions. The aesthetic is enjoyable, and although Lovecraft usually can’t frighten me, he scratches a particular creepy itch. All the best horror writers know, what is not revealed is much more interesting than what’s laid out in clear photographic detail.
So, how does rehashing well-known Lovecraft themes relate to the quote at the beginning? His moral assumptions are so… antiquated. (Let’s not even talk about the racism. Zoe Quinn and The Awl can handle that.) In “The Shunned House”, he — well, his character, but every Lovecraft protagonist is a front for the author — asserts that the occult parasite is evil, acting contrary to the rules of the regular world.
But predation is the most normal of all normalcies. Organisms devour other organisms. Noxious spirits leach energy away from nearby humans. Whatever.
Life varies. But nature is nasty, brutish, and perpetual in its cycles. Lovecraft clutches an idea of biological order not based in history or simple reality. I suspect that Lovecraft is worried by what he can’t control… which is relatable. He doesn’t tap into my specific id when extolling his fears, but he must be sourcing from someone’s. I do wonder if Lovecraft genuinely feared the phenomena he wrote about, or if he was conjuring plotlines based on subconscious impulses.
I claimed that I wasn’t a podcast person, but I was wrong. As it turns out, I enjoy listening! This is a well-timed discovery because I just acquired a commute.
Most recently, I played an episode of Neighbors while walking the dog. Neighbors is about connecting “ordinary” people — of course, the hidden point is that each of us is quite special. (Trite but true.) The episode “Purpose” is part of Neighbors’ series of interviews with homeless people, called “Sans Houses”, which producer Tasha Lemley has been conducting since 2006. I was particularly struck by Cowboy, who recited this poem:
“The old man used to speak
of the portraits he’d seek,
now he lives in a room
where they pay by the week.
His saddle’s all tattered;
his pony’s gone lame;
his bones always ache
when the sky feels like rain.
I know his last mountain’s two flights of stairs
and his saddle’s turned into an old rocking chair.”
After reciting the last couplet, Cowboy said, “I don’t wanna be like that, you know? I don’t wanna lay up in that room and die layin’ up in the bed. You know, I wanna go out in a gunfight or something.” A little later he explains, “I’ve always been active, in whatever I did. If it was wrong or right, I was active doin’ it, let me tell you what!”
I love that line. “If it was wrong or right, I was active doin’ it, let me tell you what!”
Let me tell you what: I’ve only listened to one episode of Neighbors so far, but I deem it worth my aural attention.
Australian journalist Andrew McMillen has a weekly newsletter called Dispatches, which I subscribe to. I can’t remember why I signed up, but I assume it was because McMillen wrote a good story and the link was at the bottom.
Dispatches suggests long-form articles about a wide variety of topics. For example, one of my favorite installments features fascinating stories about how terrifying “pet” chimps are. McMillen also regularly enthuses about music and podcasts. Arguably the newsletter has something for everyone.
I don’t usually listen to podcasts, but I like McMillen so I tried the inaugural episode of his new venture. Penmanship is a podcast about Australian writers and other publishing-industry professionals. In the first episode, McMillen interviews Trent Dalton, an acclaimed journalist who is suuuper hesitant about defining himself as a writer, even though the word “writer” is part of his email signature (lol). If you’re a meta-media enthusiast like me, the story of Dalton’s career and his thoughts on magazine-creation are quite interesting.
However… the episode is too long. One hour and forty minutes is a lot of time to expect from a random stranger. If I didn’t feel a personal connection to Andrew McMillen — thank you for responding to my emails! — I never would have tried this podcast. But I’m not a podcast aficionado, so my opinion doesn’t carry much weight. Pete D’Alessandro, producer of the podcast 2 Degrees of Alie, writes on Mic, “If I’m selecting which podcast to listen to next and yours is two hours, I’m gonna have to get back to it.” Limiting yourself to forty-five minutes “roughly triples” the chance that he’ll tune in.
I think the kind of interview that works for a text story is very different from the kind of interview that works for audio. When you’re writing an article, you want to let the interviewee ramble freely, because that increases the likelihood of fascinating tangents and pithy quotes. When you’re recording an article (so to speak), you want the answers to be succinct and punchy, unless you plan to edit heavily later.
In my view, the interview with Trent Dalton would make a better listening experience if A) it was shorter and B) it had a narrower focus. Instead of overviewing Dalton’s entire work history, the episode could have focused on his time at the magazine QWeekend or his experiences interviewing celebrities. The scope was perhaps broader than it needed to be.
All that said, I enjoyed Penmanship, and I plan to listen to future episodes. In fact, I’m hesitant about posting this review, because I don’t want to discourage a project that I think will be really cool. Any new endeavor involves a learning curve, so I expect each new episode of Penmanship to be better than the last. (No pressure, right?)
Over email I asked McMillen what he plans to tweak going forward, now that he’s finished the first episode. McMillen answered, “I’m brand-new at podcasting and keen to get better. I’ve got three other interviews recorded, and I’m very happy with the contents of each, but I know that I need to improve my ‘radio voice’ by loosening up in front of the mic when recording my intros and outros. That’s my goal for now: becoming more comfortable as a host, rather than just a guy reading a script into a mic, which is basically my role in that first episode.”
Loose Meat Sandwich is a quarterly zine produced by Teflon Beast, an art/music collective based in Austin, Texas. They sent me a PDF of the first issue to evaluate.
I pretty much agree with Teflon Beast’s self-description of the publication, in which they invite readers to “feast your eyes on colorful faces and read the humorous rants of an iPhone madman.” I especially enjoyed the latter experiment, a nonsensical poem “generated using iPhone’s auto-correct on email.” This method is the “tech-savvy cut/paste method for today.” Sample lines:
“Definitely not the only hologram
We’d love to jog in light
Addictive hmmm the gouged out agreement on the phone
Wedge kit for the next administration”
Weird, huh? The illustrations were also very pleasing: bright fruity colors and psychedelia. I would recommend Loose Meat Sandwich to pop-art fans and noise-pop enthusiasts. (Tbh, I skipped most of the music-related stuff. Not my scene.)
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