To celebrate, I have inexpertly crafted the above poster. I've always wanted to make a tour flyer, so now that's done (would you believe that it has over 30 photoshop layers? I would not).
I'm incredibly fortunate to have an intimidatingly-talented group of writers and musicians performing alongside me at most of these events, and I couldn't be more excited.
All the details are below, and I'll continue to update this post as further details are finalized (all events are also forever housed on the performances page here).
Come out! All events are free and open to everyone!
(And as ever, if you're planning something and looking for enthusiastic participants or readers, please reach out!)
******HOUSE TOUR 2018******
March 29, 2018, 4:30pm
@ Earlham College, EPIC Co-Lab, Richmond, IN Reading and Discussion
April 2, 2018, 7pm
@ Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor, MI Reading and Discussion Event / Facebook event
April 3, 2018, 7:30pm
@ Two Dollar Radio HQ, Columbus, OH Reading and Discussion Facebook event
April 4, 2018, 7pm
@ Wells & Co. Custom Tattoo, Dayton, OH Wells & Co. Presents Simon Jacobs and Cricketbows
with Cricketbows! Facebook event
April 5, 2018, 7pm
@ Volumes Bookcafe, Chicago, IL Reading with Lindsay Hunter, Alex Higley, Rachel Hyman, and Alexis Pope Event / Facebook event
April 6, 2018, 5pm
@ Mission Creek Festival, Iowa City, IA Lit Walk at Mission Creek 2018 @ RSVP (Round #1)
with Hanif Abdurraqib, Shy Watson, Amy Saul-Zerby, Steven Fletcher, and James D’Agostino. Event / Facebook event
April 12, 2018 SOMETHING IN THE BAY AREA WITH COLIN WINNETTE, STAY TUNED Details to come!
PALACES was officially published last month! As such, there are a couple of reviews, etc that you can read if you're wavering (the full list is on the PALACES page elsewhere on this blog):
Thus far, I've done a couple of cool book-related events, including:
A launch at Bluestockings--
Launch crew (from left): Ross Wagenhofer, Cackler, Dan Schwartz, Jeanne Thornton, Freddie Moore, Miracle Jones (photo by Martha Moody, my mother)
A discussion with Leni Zumas (Red Clocks) and Eugene Lim (Dear Cyborgs) at the NYPL--
Eugene Lim, Cackler, Leni Zumas (photo courtesy of Leni Zumas)
Later this month, I'll be performing in Philadelphia at Gina's 45 with Carmen Maria Machado, Colin Winnette, Caren Beilin, and Cynthia Dewi Oka.
I'm also planning a short tour through the midwest (and one stop in San Francisco) for late March/early April (more details soon!).
As ever, if you're interested in learning more, reviewing or covering the book, etc, please get in touch! I am always up for readings et al and would probably love to perform with you.
If you see Palaces out at a bookstore or in the wild, let me know, and send a photo if possible! I am making a list.
ALSO:::: I'm opening for the psych-rock band Cricketbows at Wells and Co. in Dayton and I WOULD LOVE TO DO MORE STUFF LIKE THIS. INVITE ME TO YOUR BASEMENT GIGS!!
INVITE ME TO YOUR HARDCORE SHOWS ! !!
I HAVE A LOUD SPEAKING VOICE!!
*
In celebration of the book's launch, here is some secret behind-the-scenes content from the development of PALACES:
WORKING TITLES (some seriously considered, others not)
NEW MONEY, OLD MONEY FOYER LAWN HIS REIGN ENDS THRONE PUNK ROCK
"AUTHORS WHO THINK THEY'RE DESIGNERS" SYNDROME
*an early cover concept that I submitted to Two Dollar Radio. I still love it but I understand that it's probably too bleak to ever be used (please also note my skillful integration of the TDR logo at bottom-right). I am also omitting the designs that exhibit blatant copyright infringement.
feat. Michelangelo's Death of Bara
SELECT WORDS FROM THE MS THAT MICROSOFT WORD DOESN'T BELIEVE ARE REAL WORDS
Here's a list of some things that I've been excited about this year. This isn't meant to be a definitive or comprehensive 'best of 2017' list or anything (despite the subheadings) because there are a lot of 2017 books that I have yet to read (I am very behind on reading this year): it is merely a list of enthusiasms.
also if you have music recommendations, you should send them to me:
BEST ALBUMS Land Animal, by Bent Knee
--favorite track, "Holy Ghost": I saw this band live for the first time last week and it was unlike anything else; their music is like some muddy dark gospel that someone dug up from the forest and translated for our modern times, just endlessly inspiring and inventive and dense. The band has an incredible camaraderie live, too, like they have their own secret language;
STAO, by Dun-Stao;
--favorite track, "STAO": this is like minimalist zeuhl filtered through black metal and gamelan and chamber music and a million other arcane influences (+ invented language). You should all listen to and buy this EP to encourage this motherfucker to make more stuff;
The Assassination of Julius Caesar, by Ulver
--favorite track, "1969": "a black metal band that just discovered synthesizers and 80s horror movie soundtracks" - Graham;
Stage Four, by Touché Amoré
--favorite track (TIE), "Flowers and You" and "Water Damage": every couple of years TA releases a new, terrific album, and each time it gets a little more melodic and somehow better than the last; this came out late-2016 but this is my list and I mostly listened to the album in 2017. I hope that Jeremy is taking care of his voice because otherwise I wonder how many more albums it can last. Perhaps the most cathartic 35 minutes of 2016 (2017);
Beyond the Fleeting Gales, by Crying
--favorite track, "Well and Spring": it's like being wrapped in a warm blanket, I don't know what else to tell you, this also came out in 2016 but whatever;
BEST MOVIE Columbus (dir. Kogonada)
--A perfect, beautifully-shot, understated movie about the midwest.
BEST BOOKS They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, by Hanif Abdurraqib (Two Dollar Radio); Literally show me a healthy person, by Darcie Wilder (Tyrant Books); Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood (Penguin Random House); Hotwriting, by Todd Anderson (Instar Books); The Grip of It, by Jac Jemc (FSG).
I haven't read the sarah book yet, fuck off BRUTALEST DEATH SCENE IN LITERATURE
Gutted by a tri-antlered helldemon in The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, by Margaret Killjoy (Tor Books). BRUTALEST OFFSCREEN SUBTLY IMPLIED DEATH SCENE IN LITERATURE
Every scene in The Buried Giant.
BEST LIVE ACTS
Bent Knee (@ Rough Trade);
Sick Shit (@ Punk Island);
Touché Amoré (@ Bowery Ballroom, see above, also it was a Bad Anniversary and this helped to make it right);
Patti Smith (@ Summerstage).
BEST EP ON A CD-R THAT I GOT AT PUNK ISLAND Field Goal by Field Goal. BEST ALBUM IN A JEWEL CASE THAT I GOT AT PUNK ISLAND Softcore by Sick Shit.
BEST BAND THAT DIDN'T RELEASE SHIT THIS YEAR
Blackbird Raum (which doesn't mean that you shouldn't take this moment to go and listen to Destroyingor Caspian's side project Scissorbills' THAN THOU, because these things will change your life).
BEST UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton (now with more hovercars) Tyrant by Brandi Wells Lake Humm by Martha Moody
THE OTHER NOVEL I WROTE (String Follow)
BEST YOUTUBE CHANNEL atmospheric black metal BEST BAND NAMES THAT I INVENTED (up for grabs)
House Ghosts (pop punk)
Crop Top (shoegaze)
Golgonooza (black metal)
Alphalpha (regular metal) BEST RISE AGAINST ALBUM
...the one I made up, Hooves, a higher-concept and more allusive version of their mediocre 2017 album Wolves:
*
In other news, if you've found your way here without knowing, Palaces (my first novel), is due out on January 16, 2018 from Two Dollar Radio. I'm pretty excited; there's a whole page on this blog about it, with blurbs et al! If you're interested in learning more, reviewing the book, etc, reach out at jacobs852 [at] gmail [dot] com, as ever!
Booksellers, critics, and librarians can request copies from Two Dollar Radio here (available now!).
The most exciting news: my first novel, PALACES, is going to be published by Two Dollar Radio in January of 2018! You can read the announcement and a short interview with me on the TDR site, and even pre-order the book here.
The book is about power and extremism and property and uncertain futures and a whole bunch of other thorny things. And check out the 70s movie poster-style cover!!
One of my favorite writers, Jeanne Thornton - author of The Dream of Doctor Bantam and The Black Emerald, who I have blogged about extensively, yet not nearly enough - has granted a perfectly-summative blurb:
"In this singular debut novel that reads like a cross between Derek Jarman's Jubilee and an unsettling folk ballad, Jacobs narrates the journey of two Midwestern pilgrims, each striving for ascetic purity both in their possessions and in their emotional lives, as they silently war against the ostentation of the wealthy, the dread expectations of gender, maybe against object permanence itself. It feels like The Road, but with less faith in humanity, and this S. Jacobs is a literary talent to watch." —Jeanne Thornton
It's hard to overstate how excited I am about this: Two Dollar Radio was the first indie press that I ever knew about (my first book was Joshua Mohr's Termite Parade in 2010), and they're based in Ohio, so we have Regional Affinity, and most decisively are wonderful people to work with. Publishing with TDR feels like bringing everything full-circle.
I started writing the book in May of 2013, and did my last substantial edits in April of 2017, so it has been a long road and I'm glad to finally get it out into the world. Most of that time I was consistently working on it, though there were a couple of spans of 2-4 months where I let the manuscript rest. I started writing the book when I was 22, and it has changed along with me: it has all of my formative years within it, as well as my shifting preoccupations. I'm excited for you to read it.
Here's a photo of all the cumulative drafts stacked atop one another, all the way down to when it went by - *shudder* - alternate titles (the very first original draft is handwritten and scattered across a few notebooks):
8 months ago I had a story published in Joyland called "Let Me Take You to Olive Garden" that I'm still tickled with. I think it's indicative of the turns that my writing is taking these days.
What else can I tell you? Earlier this week, I finished another novel ("finished" a "novel"), which is called at this point String Follow (I don't think the title will change) and is about a group of suburban Ohio teens who begin to experience occult phenomenon.
I recently finished Patti Smith's M Train, which was incredible, enormous in feeling, and long overdue. I used to think that if I lived in New York for long enough, one day I would run into David Bowie. David Byrne or David Bowie. Now I'm convinced that if I live in New York for long enough, I'll run into Patti Smith.
And I still walk past David Bowie's apartment on Lafayette sometimes; this photo is old now but it's still with me:
[late-nite update: the title of this post is a Lou Reed reference but I have since deleted the Lou Reed content, may the title live on]
Starting on Thursday, November 10, Sotheby's is auctioning off David Bowie's private art collection, almost 400 pieces in all, with an estimated value of $13 million. Bowie's art collection is famously far-ranging - from Tintoretto to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Bowie's spin-painting with Damien Hirst (though there's no sign at Sotheby's of the rumored "small Rubens" he's mentioned in interviews) - and Bowie himself was an avid painter and critic (he served on the editorial board of Modern Painters for many years; his paintings are gestural portraits in the spirit of Bacon et al). From his departure from public life following a heart attack in 2004 until his unexpected reappearance with The Next Day in 2013, most media accounts of his life depicted Bowie settling comfortably into old age and collecting artwork (it was one of these accounts that directly inspired the first stories in SATURN).
It's fascinating to look through the collection (which as far as I know has never been catalogued for the public, only speculated at piecemeal) and trace certain pieces to their particular eras of fascination in Bowie's ouevre, to find their echoes in albums or costumes.
One example: take the series of minotaur prints by Michael Ayrton (undated); a collection of bronze African heads and masks (here's one) acquired from a South African gallery in 1995; the aforementioned Hirst spin painting from 1995; an orgiastic Jacob Epstein illustration for Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (acquired by Bowie in 1994); Odd Nerdrum's Dawn; Stephen Finer's Head of a Woman: blend them all together, and you effectively have 1995's 1. Outside, a sprawling, atmospheric concept album about mutilation and murder in the name of art, with an artist/murderer called "the Minotaur" at its center, whose cover was a self-portrait by Bowie. Watch the video for "The Hearts Filthy Lesson" and you'll see what I mean.
*
I just finished Trinie Dalton's first story collection, Wide Eyed (Akashic, 2005). It's a wonderful book of charming, bizarre stories full of specific knowledge. In essence it's built from the same kind of thematic association as Bowie's art collection (and his music): deep knowledge of salamander anatomy in conversation with Marc Bolan's "Salamanda Palaganda" to service a larger point about wanting to feel protected and small (in "A Giant Loves You"); fixation with A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween and an attraction to serial killers/predatory men as a desire to find a moment of perfect innocence ("Chrysalis"); bloodied tiles as the ultimate abhorrent image ("Tiles").
*
Luna Luna recently reprinted one of my early stories from Masterworks (a series about reenacting famous works of art), this one on Goya's Witches' Flight, in their Halloween issue. It's one of my favorite stories from the series - if you like that one, you can read the rest here. There will be two final stories in the series, which will be published in Paper Darts in good time.
I also have a story coming up in Joyland later this month that I'm really excited about. Otherwise, I am still trying to get this novel published/finish the next one.
Hello! I’m here
today to talk to you endlessly about Jeanne Thornton.
She is the author, most recently and transcendently, of THE
BLACK EMERALD, a short story collection published this September by Instar Books (their launch title) and the novel THE
DREAM OF DOCTOR BANTAM. Her books have the best titles!
I love Jeanne
Thornton’s writing, in part, because she allows her characters to be mean,
contradictory, arbitrary, and trivial, all of which is extremely important to
me. And because, perhaps equally important, all of her characters have meticulous
bedrooms, and in my opinion, if you know your characters well enough to
describe, exhaustively, what is on the walls, shelves, and carpets of the room
in which they sleep, then you have pretty much risen above any critique that
could be leveled against you as a writer.
TO WIT:
“The Black
Emerald” (the titular novella), basically astounding for these reasons:
begins with an
extremely thorough description of watching a movie/being in love, a movie that
I assume to be invented, but whose explanation is so spookily detailed that I
have to believe it’s real;
has one of the
most perfectly-described and casually menacing fathers I’ve yet read; he only
appears in like three scenes but they are all shockingly, almost criminally
good. Here’s a smidgen:
“She
woke up to the sound of her father knocking on her door. She could imagine him
there: short, balding, eyes big and brown and vulnerable. In one of her
cartoons he would be the screaming victim of a titanic monster, the kind of
uniquely ugly face that it’s too complicated to draw episode after episode, so
it’s best to have the character killed early. It’s more convenient for
everyone."
later:
“And
it was true; he would do it; he would wait here as long as she and her bad
nature let him. He was stronger than her, larger than her; she would die first
when they ran out of food and water; he would be here long after she was gone.
She was weaker than him. She was weak and she let him do this to her. There was
nothing she could do but do the Right Thing, which was shut up, sit as still as
she could, leave three fingers pressed to the throb on the side of her skull,
try to wait until her feeling got cold enough for her to be the adult in the
situation.”
speaking of cartoons
as per the first excerpt, this novella also includes the most vividly imaginable
depictions of artwork and its creation (like, can you conjure a picture of a
house sketched in “clean lines, romantic manga lines, lots of white space and
thick cartoon contours”? of course you can);
Jeanne writes
about magical happenings absolutely straight;
Lava Caves
Road;
happens to be one
of the best and most convincing high school/teenage stories I’ve ever read (I
have read a lot of high school stories), for the following undebatable reasons
(a sublist):
aforementioned
bedroom phenomenon;
I imagine this
as exactly my high school, a southern Ohio to The Black Emerald’s Austin, right
down to Miss Stevens, the kindly and sensitive art teacher;
the following
sentence suite:
“She
wished she was an orphan. No, she didn’t. That was a fucked up thing to think.
She didn’t want to think fucked up things about the world. The world was a
really great place, really, if you just understood why everything happened the
way it did, like God could probably."
a guidance counselor
is impeccably described;
this passage
about ‘love for real’:
“And
Josephine would have to look at her classy art project every day: something
she’d have loved to have done, something far beyond anything she could do for
herself. Eventually this would lead to them getting back together and being in
love for real. There was no better use for school than promoting love for real.
The whole institution ought to be burned down to the extent that it failed to
promote love for real. That was what her stupid peers could never understand,
but Josephine might be made to.”
And that’s just
the opening novella! Later on, “Chairs” is basically a great, unsettling aspect
story (even though it includes sexually entitled college males, which are
probably my least-regarded figures in life); it has an exceptional room and
here is one part of a perfect paragraph:
“He
walked her home after the movie and kissed her on the cheek in the
laundry-smelling hallway outside her dorm room, impetuously, like a darting
mongoose. Afterward she touched the hot place where his outsider's lips had
been while she looked at herself in the mirror, and she wondered at how
suddenly that square inch of her body had been taken over, how flagrantly he
had colonized it, overturned its old codes. She found it charming, in a mildly
disapproving, indulgent manner.”
Like a darting
mongoose! The remapped body! Isn’t it great??? [I had long sentence about
mixing the corporality of the 1st sentence with the broader metaphorical
colonization of the 2nd sentence which I’ve deleted out of mercy.
Isn’t it great???]
Basically, The Black Emerald as a whole has just
like an unstoppable fountain of magical talent and technique going for it that
I am still in the midst of processing, so, yes, check it out and then try to
write a room again, I dare you.
As I mentioned,
this book is also the launch title from Instar Books, a VERY
snazzy new publishing venture with new and varied forms of their books that
‘unlock’ as each title reaches various sales benchmarks. (Right now it’s in
ebook format, which means you can have it instantly,
so that’s motivation, and don’t you want to feel responsible for making that
counter crack 100?)
*
THE DREAM OF DOCTOR BANTAM
I can’t talk
about Jeanne Thornton without also talking about The Dream of Doctor Bantam (OR Books, 2012),
which I think was my favorite novel that I read this year. I’ve talked about it
(somewhat obliquely) in another blog-post,
but I’ll echo what I said there and say that this is a book I love dearly, find
to be shamelessly honest, and would recommend to basically any reader. It has A
LOT of heart and its cultishness is described in such an attentive and detailed
way that it becomes almost tender and inviting, as well as sinister?
I know less than
nothing about Scientology (meaning that in my first read I analyzed the
“Scientology-like cult” of Doctor Bantam much
as I did the “Scientology-like cult” of The
Master, which is I guess like any cult with strange machines), but since I
read this novel I have been paying A LOT of attention to the construction of
the new Scientology center on 125th street in East Harlem near my
apartment (it’s between the public
library and Demolition Depot and appears to be permanently in its final stages of
renovation). This is exclusively because of this book.
Incidentally I
was poking around on Amazon and I found this sentence in the blurb: “In Julie Thatch
you cannot help but see shades of Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander.” I have no
idea who wrote this sentence but I guess the idea is that they’re both punk-y
young non-heteronormative women? Maybe young female punks in literature are so
rare but I don’t think so; in any case if you do like punk-y books of any
variety this is certainly one of them and don’t let Stieg Larsson trick you.
DON’T LET HIM.
*
ABJURATION CLUB
Finally: being a
writer of the internet means there is quite a bit of stuff ‘freely available’
across these digital spaces, but I would STRONGLY recommend that you check out
‘Abjuration Club,'
a monthly Patreon zine by Jeanne (rhymes) in which you get comics, fictions,
random writings, paraphernalia, and excerpts from SUMMER FUN. SUMMER FUN is a
novel-in-progress that Jeanne is writing about Brian Wilson/the Beach Boys, but
rather than explicitly about the Beach Boys the novel is about the Get Happies
(their proxy, much like the 1980 Elvis Costello album), and IT IS WONDERFUL.
Specifically, spread throughout the last four abjuration clubs, here are some
further excellent reasons to be involved:
very vivid
description of desert witch-practice by the narrator;
impractical
artist business cards;
striptease
toothbrushing;
a monopoly game
with Brian Wilson’s proxy-father that GETS DRAMATIC;
etc!
If you’re
appropriately intrigued, you can download the first issue of Abjuration Club
**for free** here,
in which can be found not only an excerpt of Summer Fun (about sadness and paintings and Brian Wilson’s mama),
but ALSO a background/history of The
Black Emerald, which will perhaps lead you into additional, darker forays.
You can download basically any amount each month and in return get all of these
prizes!
I cannot wait to
read SUMMER FUN. It’s going to be phenomenal. I could revel in Jeanne’s writing
for days, and maybe someday you will too?
Without further ado, here is an 8000-word interview with David James Keaton, too long to publish anywhere. (Seriously, it’s been a year since we finished this [11/13/13], and I’m tired of waiting.)
“VIOLENCE LIKE THIS: An Interview with David James Keaton”
I would argue that David James Keaton is one of the best and most heartfelt writers of destruction out there. His stories – deft, maniacally genre-averse, frightening, bloody, and often hilarious – weave around the liminal edge of contemporary fiction.
The first DJK story I read, ironically enough, was this tiny little number called “First Story Ever” in DOGZPLOT around two years back. In about 150 words, we’re pretty much summed up: the violence – impeccably, vividly rendered – the desperate invention, the inimitable tone, and the black comedy that tips off something deeper. If there’s pulp here, it’s only because it makes the blood thicker.
cover rough
His first full-length, a short story collection called Fish Bites Cop! Stories to Bash Authorities (which was released via Comet Press in May 2013), is at once a gleefully macabre, lurid stabbing at virtually every authority you’ve ever resented, and a dangerous, hybridic, romantic and curiously haunted group of stories linked by race, passivity, death, and way too many movies. His first, enormous novel, The Last Projector, is due out Halloween 2014 from Broken River Books. [Annotation: This fucker is OUT.]
We covered every single movie from the 1930’s on. Literally, I counted:
Simon Jacobs: You have incredible finesse when it comes to writing violence - mixing these vivid, visceral descriptions with metaphorical flair, blended with a very casual delivery, a technique that leaves both a lot and nothing at all to the imagination. I cite two examples from Fish Bites Cop!, both from "Killing Coaches," which, appropriately, is about killing a bunch of coaches but has a number of delicate thematic touches; here, the narrator murders the junior high football coach (with a hockey stick):
I stunned him with my first blow to his ear, then I brought that stick own so hard that I fully expected him to split into two more goddamn coaches. Instead, he croaked and pressed a fist into his fractured skull and crawled towards an exercise bike. He actually climbed aboard and started pedaling as if it would help him escape the room. He probably wondered through the glaze of blood in his eyes why the bike wasn't moving as I began hammering the top of his head into a jagged, purple Rocky Mountain skyline. No, more like the Black Hills. (p. 33)
Later, he kills the chain-smoking swim coach:
I showed up barefoot, ready to swim, ready to dunk him and hold my breath for a record two minutes if necessary. He would have been so proud. But he held onto the diving board like a vise, and I couldn't dump him into the water no matter how many knuckles I crushed under my heels. We struggled all the way back through his portable stereo and stack of music, and I ended up squeezing one of his inspirational sports mix CDs until it exploded, then plunged one of the shards into his throat. It was an easy shot, that vein that always swelled up in practice, the one that signaled someone was about to get coughed and bellowed at, a pulsing target as clear as a flashing arrow pointing at that motherfucker's mouth, which is exactly what it was really. (p. 34)
Whoa. How do you construct these violent scenes? At what point, if any, do you decide, "This is exactly as hard to read as I want it to be.” Let’s talk about violence.
David James Keaton: Killing Coaches" is a weird one because it was inspired by at least three to thirty things at the same time. The violent scenes you cited, and all the coach-killing set pieces really, were probably a result of listening to Nick Cave's "The Curse of Millhaven" and "O'Malley's Bar" one too many times, which I would feel guilty about, except that Mr. Cave admitted that "The Curse of Millhaven" was maybe the result of reading Peter Straub's The Throat and "The Juniper Tree" one too many times? So we're down a rabbit hole of influenced influences (here's a link to the Cave/Straub connection), and they're all fair game, damn it! In fact, there's one beat in the story that I kidnapped from "Curse of Millhaven," gagged and threw in a van to dance for me, too, where my narrator says, "I never killed the basketball coach." That's just me showing love for the lyric where Loretta, the Millhaven murderer, after a metric ton of confessions, confesses...that he/she didn't kill the dog. The townspeople had just assumed this. ("But I never crucified little Biko, that was two Junior High School psychos...") I thought that was a great touch, and a hilarious anti-confession after so much bloodshed. So early on when I decided to write "Killing Coaches," I was working off a very real disgust with coaching, my own experience of (not really) being coached (I was terrible at high-school sports), and a recent story in the news where a coach ran some kid at football practice until dehydration killed him. Actually, two stories in the news. During some downtime at a friend's Vegas wedding, we were in the giant NORAD-looking sports gambling auditorium of the MGM Grand, and a news report came on talking about some kid who murdered his high-school football coach. And I said to the groom, "The problem here is the coach unknowingly made that kid lethal with all those drills." Then I said was going to write that story if he didn't (the groom, not the killer kid). But I figured the only way a reader would have any fun reading any of this stuff would be if the actual murders were funny, or at least interesting. So I worked hard on each killing scene. The idea of someone confused enough to peddle to safety on an exercise bike cracked me up in a Looney Tunes kinda way. And the swimming coach's demise was probably the most densely written because it was a bit of a tribute to The Bad Seed (the 1956 movie, not Nick Cave's band for once). In it, the evil little girl played by Patty McCormack cracks a classmate's knuckles with her tap-dancing shoes when he's trying to climb out of a lake. The "half moons" of the metal "taps" of the shoes show up on the boy's dead hands, and that's the first smoking gun that implicates the little girl. In my story, the half moons are replaced with a sliver of CD, and maybe a literal smoking gun to go with the smoking coach. But the real gag is there's no way this guy will ever let go of a diving board, even if he is full of smoke instead of blood. Speaking of gags, it was the more overtly humorous aspects of this story that almost kept it from being picked up by Plots With Guns (back when the story was called "Dewlaps,"), and the original last line was changed at the insistence of editor Anthony Neil Smith because it couldn't be read without hearing an actual rim shot. I was sneaky and put that line back in for this collection, but I did move it to the middle, as the sincere aspects of the story took over like the needy creatures they always are, and that's how it has to end now. But I did rescue that line. We must not leave anything on our plates! There are children starving all over the world who would kill for an extra punchline. Something just occurred to me though, with all the talk of bad seeds and little Patty McCormack and Loretta in the song with her eyes that ain't green and her hair that ain't yellow ("it's more like the other way around"). This narrator should be a girl, too! I'm going to change that. Can I change that? Girls play football now, right? Only one spot in there I'd have to change from "he" to "she" really. Damn, that's going to bother me forever now.
SJ: It's a stew. I'll be parsing this later, but while we wait: what's the most effective scene of violence you've ever encountered in a movie/book/etc ('effective' being, as always, open to whatever: believable/convincing/efficient/brutal/squeamish-making, etc.). My mind jumps to the bar scene in A History of Violence, the bit where Viggo Mortensen shoots one of the robbers in the head (is there any word goofier than 'robbers'?). There's something totally un-glamorized about that headshot - the 'robber' is lying on the floor, face-down, with his knife in Viggo's shoe, and Viggo just whirls around and pops him. There's something different in how the blood appears on the floor, like, a 'glob' rather than the 'spatter' we're so enamored with nowadays - that seems somewhat meatier than what we usually see, because, yes, he just shot this man in the face (which we see the results of later), and this meaty combo has caused the scene to stick in my mind as being very unique and effective at making the audience understand the violence - quick, but absolutely brutal. The same goes with the bath scene in Eastern Promises (Viggo Mortensen, David Cronenberg, I sense a theme), which is great for a whole host of other reasons, but when he's crawling away at the end and the camera is crawling with him in that long shot, and he breaks the guy's arm and just stabs him right in the eye, no drama, no nothing, the way the blood just immediately starts flowing and pooling seemed very unique. That's another thing: whatever happened to pools of blood? What's with this splattery effect that we love so much nowadays? Everything is headshot: wall splatter, headshot: wall splatter.
DJK: Yeah, Cronenberg was doing something different in History of Violence for sure, at least in the diner scene. He sort of forgot about whatever he was doing later, but that's okay because you brought up Eastern Promises and holy shit, naked fight! That's why I also found the steam-bath brawl in Eastern Promises so wonderfully cringe-worthy. You have to find a male actor brave enough to let some genitals flap around, but when you do, it's hard to beat that level of vulnerability. Nice work, Viggo. They're always stripping down women in slasher movies like it's nothing, but rarely do men get the same treatment. So here's to Mr. Cronenberg for making the boys flinch, too, like they should, of course.
Okay, I'll do a movie, a book, and a song, since Matsumoto in Black Rain said, "Music and movies! All America good for!" (a movie that I'll always remember as the first realistic decapitation I'd ever seen, of one of the stars, no less!). Matsumoto would have said books, too, but he was enduring a shouting from ugly American Michael Douglas. Now that I think about it though, that movie's message was Americans need to lighten up on the violence and just bring in the bad guy, in a suitably dramatic, renouncing-the-violence fashion. Anyway, movie first...
Since it's movies, I should probably break this down further into the goriest, the most disturbing, and the most effective. Because it's fun, your question is way too interesting, and I'm clearly circling it to buy some time (this is the problem with typing as fast as you speak).
Goriest scene, yeesh, it's not even close. It's got to be the lawnmower scene in Braindead, aka Dead Alive, by Peter Jackson. But that scene is hilarious and plays like a pie fight, so it doesn't really disturb. Probably "effective" though, if the intention was just to gross-out, and also effective if it set out to be the goriest scene of all time, which it must be in terms of pure volume of goo.
The most disturbing bit of movie violence, at least to my young mind, was in David Lynch's Wild At Heart. In a flashback, we see Nicholas Cage (remember when he wasn't so silly!) as Barry Gifford's "Sailor Ripley" (close enough), and him and his girl Laura Dern are confronted by a crazy guy with a knife with the unlikely name of Bob Ray Lemon. That's the guy's name, not the knife. That's a great name for a knife. And they fight. And Sailor and his Elvisidal Tendencies win the day. But I hadn't been prepared for what happened right after the fight, where Sailor proceeds to take apart Mr. Lemon's head on the hard floor with a series of crackcrackcracks. The scene goes on way longer than you expect, and just like History of Violence where Cronenberg inserted those extra couple seconds to linger on the effects of a bullet to the face, to effectively rub our faces in it, Lynch says, "Hey, kids! Here's what happens to a human head when you do those action-movie moves you love so much." And it was shocking. I remember my roommates back at undergrad in Bowling Green talking about this scene quite a bit, and it was pulling teeth to get them to watch any of the weird stuff I would bring home, let alone talk about it later. But I distinctly remember my one roommate Gary confide one night in his Southern-Ohio accent, "I think about that scene a lot, man. That's probably what would happen if you did that to someone's head." So something different was happening with that scene. The problem is who can assign the word "effective" to anything Lynch does, when it's impossible to pin down why he does anything? That movie was slammed as being gratuitous, and that feels like cheating, right? But I'd argue that anyone who films the aftermath of a car wreck, as he does later in that same movie, and presents another cracked skull to us in such a sad, beautiful way, gets the benefit of the doubt here.
But if I had to pin down what was the most disturbing violent moment in any movie I've seen, even though because of my own immaturity I'm equating "disturbing" with "effective"...actually, no, I have to separate the two. Otherwise I'm only talking about stunt movie masturbations like A Serbian Film and Freddy Got Fingered like a goofball. Effective has to mean real, right? So maybe Get Carter, when Michael Caine stabs poor Albert near the toilets in the alley. That scene was effective in making me feel guilty for rooting for the guy. Keep in mind, back then anti-heroes weren't a dime a dozen like they are now. But at the risk of sounding like I'm having my cake and not eating it, too, I do think the unseen goes a long way here, like the off-camera moments of Funny Games when the worst things happen, or showing that execution through the blue eyes of Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, especially when Lawrence is executing a murderer that he himself saved earlier when he pulled him out of the Nafud Desert amid all the grumblings of "Why are you going back for that guy? God wrote shit that way." Damn, did that feel awful, hearing the gunshots and watching his eyes, after the extended sequence of him saving that man. And to hear everyone shrug, "See, it was written," afterwards still saddens and infuriates me every time I see it.
Okay, most effective violence scene on the page is still going to have to go to the fence post popping through a bad guy's throat in Firestarter. For two reasons. One, I was way too young when I found that book in my dad's stash of forbidden paperbacks. And two, Stephen King has the line, "...with a wet punching sound that Andy never forgot," which sounds pretty much like an order from the writer to never forget what he wrote. And it worked! Because kids do what they're told.
Most effective bit of violence in music is going to have to go to nine hundred or so Nick Cave songs. Extra points to make it shocking and funny, too, like the killer in "O'Malley's Bar" crooning, "With an ashtray as big as a fucking really big brick, I split his skull in half..." That line right there is why there's a five-pointed, big-ass ashtray in the climax of FISH BITES COP!. And a starfish stabbed in the sand on the back cover.
SJ: I read The Shining when I was 11 or 12 years old - I think, to date, the only Stephen King I've read - and the only sentence I remember is when Jack enters room 237 or whatever and sees his dead student (?) lying naked in the bathtub: "His penis floated limply, like kelp." That's all I got. A different kind of scarring. And speaking of flapping genitals.
There's a lot to be said for the directors who are willing to hold a shot. That lawnmower scene in Dead Alive; volumetrically speaking, I think you might be right in that it has the most gore - however, I remember when I saw Cabin in the Woods last year [Annotation: 2012], when they release all of the monsters, I thought that was the most blood I've ever seen in a movie (that's what I told people, "it's the most blood you've ever seen in a movie!"), where the walls are literally painted over and over again with layers of blood; I think that movie was self-consciously trying to try and top the volume of gore from that lawnmower scene (although the lawnmower scene has the carnival music going for it; those are also some of the highest-powered spinning tools I've ever seen - they take a lot of abuse). [Annotation: I think the Evil Dead 2013 remake has a higher volume of blood than CITW, because it rains blood.]
I have one more question about gore. I'm going to cite another example of this terrific violence in Fish Bites Cop!, in "Greenhorns." This is a great story: in some way, it pretends to be a zombie story but is so different from any other zombie story, in that THEY ARE FUCKING UNDERWATER, which is perfect in that it feeds from current zombie tradition but also twists it into an entirely novel conceit: as one character says, "They walk. It's as simple as that. ... That's the one thing they do. All day, even when it rains. And if you walk long enough on his planet, you're gonna hit fuckin' water. Thicker than Tanners, thicker than Opies in the off-season..." (p. 67)
All told, Fish Bites Cop! feels like a subversion of genre-tropes, but we'll either talk about this later or we'll ignore it because genre-discussion is always frustrating and mostly fruitless. Anyways, in this marvelous little story there's a scene where one of the eponymous greenhorns gets torn apart by a group of underwater dead; it's tough and I won't write all of it out here but basically he just gets torn limb from limb, and there's a marvelous set of paragraphs that goes:
Jake watches in silence as Josh is painted like a Jackson Pollock onto the deck next to everything else that gets gutted for bait. A cube of cod bounces off Jake's boot.
Jesus Christ, Jake realizes. No wonder he won that contest. He was barely chewing.
Jake stays quiet, right up until one claw punches real deep and he gags at the white bomb of milk exploding from Josh's innards, bleaching the deck with proof of his ultimate victory at the Gallon Challenge. At the time, Jake couldn't believe he kept all that milk down, even accused him of cheating. He'd read somewhere that consuming a gallon of milk was impossible.
And they were right, he thinks wildly. You adjust the time limit to the next day and everything comes back. (p. 65)
It’s not hard to appreciate everything that's going on here: you have a brutal and hard-to-stomach (pun) but perfectly imaginable scene of violence, coupled with revelations brought back from the story's other reaches, that "everything comes back" - the thematic flashes I mentioned earlier. You mix them so well with the violence; it turns these scenes into something beyond just action; it's goddamn poetic. I guess this is a process-based question: how do you assemble a scene like this? I mean, line by line. (Jesus, my questions are longer than the answers.)
DJK: Oh, crap, I remember that "kelp" line, too. I love that book. No adaptation has given it justice. They should stop trying really. Speaking of Cabin in the Woods and The Shining, isn't there an elevator full of blood homage in there? Hilarious, but just like the majority of the creatures on the board, Cabin in the Woods wouldn't really work if they chose anything else. Imagine the Elevator of Blood movie. Or the Merman movie, for example. Couldn't they just stay out of the water? I know, I know, that's not the point. Great movie though. I keep waiting for someone to make a meme of those two technicians on their golf cart with the popular line "You Had One Job" written across their faces. They really did have one very complicated job. And they fucked it up. Someone do this so it can be my computer background. I'm tired of the picture of the shuttle explosion. Kidding! It's a video of the shuttle exploding. But you bring up a good point, which is how can we measure the blood effectively? They should probably weigh it, if anything, because sometimes movies cheat and seem to have a river of blood or a lake of blood...but it's way too watery. Blade 2 for example. The Descent though, now there's some thick bloody blood. Real blood sticks to the ribs, inside and out. Man, I want to watch The Descent again right now.
I'm glad you brought up "Greenhorns" though because I'm very proud of that story (and it languished with a shady publisher a while back when I was naïve and threw stories at anyone slinging contributors' copies and nobody ever got to read it, so I was excited to put it in this collection). But this story was my love letter to the television show Deadliest Catch, which I worked on for a couple years when I was close-captioning. I worked as a captioner during the whole reality-television boom, and I still maintain that this show was the least corrupted (at least until around Season 5). So "Greenhorns" was kind of about the corruption of manual labor by the TV, and a bit of monsters. When I first started the story, it was based around the idea of what crazy things might be in that cage when they pulled it up over the rail of their boat? I could think of a lot of crazy things, but the idea of the ocean floor eventually being covered with dead people (it would have to be, since they never stopped walking, right?) let me concentrate on other aspects of the story. Then I realized it really was all about a job being ruined by the cameras, and what can happen to the human body every time that little red light blinks on above the lens and people start dancing for their dinner as fast as they can. That particular scene with the belly comes after a series of eating contests (and milk-drinking contests, which the internet tells me are notoriously difficult and disgusting), wrestling matches, and brawls, etc., which the "greenhorns" are coerced into at the beginning of the story by their potential captains. At first, the guys think they're simply looking for strong men for their crab boats. But then it starts to become clear that this was just a way of fattening them up. So I knew there was going to be a scene where one of the greenhorns was opened up for bait (kind of required if you're pretending to be a zombie story, definitely required if you're pretending to write a Deadliest Catch story), and I had to think of ways to make that interesting. So I thought, "Hey, the stomach contents should reveal something!" That way, it's not just gore but an answer. In this case, two things are revealed. One, Josh doesn't chew his food enough. And two, the fact that his stomach is full of milk means that he really did do the impossible and drink a gallon of milk back at the bar after all (the internet is furious with me at this very moment for even suggesting that's possible. Milk is apparently Kryptonite in mass qualities). Also, it's white, a different color than blood! So the scene's a little more interesting, to me anyway. White is gross, right? Big milk bubble. Bloop! So that shook the scene up a bit. And then the scene can close with a zinger or a punch line, in this case a line that suggests that drinking a gallon of milk is impossible after all, because it did come back up. Technically.
So to answer your question, that's kind of how I mapped out that paragraph. First draft came out a bit garbled. The milk gag was there as the end of the scene, but it didn't feel like enough was going on, so I got in the other character's head and wrote it again and crammed in more shit! So now I got Jake thinking about the chunks of cod, and the milk revelation, it all went smoother. And now, so that maybe people can get to know him a little more, Josh gets that last line instead of me.
SJ: One minor obsession of mine is with the varieties of blood to be found in movies. This might stem from the ratings-obsession of my early movie-watching days, when I would parse what markers of violence distinguished PG-13 from R, etc, and tried to figure out exactly where that shaky line was drawn (I've seen This Film Is Not Yet Rated probably 30x). On that note, I saw The Conjuring a few weeks ago, which was solid and pretty scary. [Annotation: August 2013.] I remember reading something ahead of time about how James Wan said he wanted to throw away the Saw stuff for a change and "just make a PG-13 horror movie." But then, unfortunately, he just made the damn thing too scary for PG-13, so he got stuck with another R. (You can tell that he's trying though - notice how in the movie no one ever swears, and the blood comes only in indirect, filtered doses [through a sheet, from a ghoul, etc]).
But speaking of blood, it’s always satisfying when someone does something a little different. Have you seen Stoker? I watched it yesterday. [Annotation: August 25, 2013.] Chan-wook Park does violence just perfectly, holding back just barely enough. That movie (his first in English I think) is mostly just mediocre sinister psychopathis, but there is one scene where a guy gets shot in the head at medium/close range with a hunting rifle, and there's a shot immediately after where you see his blood splattered on the wall and hear it hissing as it steams/runs down the wall. I've never seen anyone do this before, but I thought it was great and by far the most convincing part of the movie. There was also a really nice blood cloud-spurt, a bit later on, when a dude gets knifed with some garden shears (there are also flowers; it's a very poetic shot). If I ever made movies, I would focus very heavily on the blood. As you said, we want none of that watered-down shit. We want the soup.
Anyways, this is actually a question about subtitles. You were a closed-captioner for a time - did writing out all those movies and TV shows contribute to your writing at all, in terms of seeing how dialogue/pacing/etc. was constructed?
DJK: I enjoy how we're focusing on blood. It's a much better conversation than the usual hand-wringing over violence in media begetting violence in real life, etc, etc. I'm always amazed at that discussion actually. Not to sound all Marquis de Sade or anything, but my own take on it is...I don't care. Wait, that sounds harsh. How about, "I couldn't stop it anyway, so best not to dwell on it." Yeesh, that sounds even more alarming. Okay, how about this then, "I only had one semester of psychology. Why are you asking me about science? [adjusts monocle] Did you ask that painter to solve that math problem with an egg?" But you know what I mean though? I'm typically horrified by writers with a large platform to pontificate about anything. I prefer my writers barely functional, acting badly, walking contradictions (or wheelchair-bound contradictions), or simply embarrassing off the page. Beautiful art by ugly artists! That's why they had to start writing, right? To communicate or act out? Because in public they were cringe-worthy monsters? Or maybe my aversion to writing advice and societal responsibility is being effected by my new online attention span (hopelessly short, thanks, lobotomizer!). Anyway, this is why I'm so happy we're talking about blood! Seriously. Sploosh! How weird is that shit?! No other substance saturates our books, movies, and Nick Cave songs like the ol' kroovy. For a year, all movies should be saliva-soaked instead of blood-soaked. Just to see what that would do. Or at least so we'd be horrified when it switched back to blood again. Like we were when the The Wild Bunch first came out. I just don't care if it's bad for us. Leave that to the professionals to decide. Or at least tell us how many buckets we can ingest. Until then, give us our soup!
I also was fascinated by This Film Is Not Yet Rated (especially the soccer-mom detective). I kept thinking of Egoyan's Adjuster, too, where the woman had that strange Canadian censorship job with the hilarious categories? That movie was a great example of taking the piss out of "responsibility." I haven't seen Stoker yet, but my friend Nate liked it. And you say the blood is done right. So that's good enough for me. And, hell, Oldboy is a masterpiece (which you know Spike Lee will fuck up by Americanizing). [Annotation: He did.]
But to answer your question about closed-captioning. I'm not sure if I learned anything about pacing or dialogue from the corrupt "reality" shows I captioned which made up the glut of my work day, except maybe learning from The Deadliest Catch that the floor of the ocean is covered with an amazing variety of scurrying, claw-clicking abominations. (They drop a box in the ocean, it comes up covered in crawling horrors. How is this not shocking anyone on those boats?) But, honestly, that job really was like going back to school. It sounds ridiculous, but I finally learned grammar and had some very basic rules of composition hammered back into my skull, not that you'll see any evidence in this interview. But the feedback from the television shows and movies I worked on was essential for me to get closer to typing as fast as I can think. Not that I'm saying you shouldn't revise and just type quickly and without consideration and nobly fretting over every little pretty word like it's a baby Panda (hairless, blind, and borderline worthless by the way). What I'm saying is we're dying, so we should type as fast as possible.
SJ: That reminds me: as is pretty obvious from our conversation thus far, your writing is full of movies: esoteric trivia, fastidiously remembered minor scenes from movies no one's seen in at least ten years, lines of dialogue - there's a lot. For example, in "Bad Hand Acting," there's a fairly involved conversation among some cops clustered around a dying man talking about the forms of "hand acting" in movies, a part of which goes:
"You know what other movie [Sigouney Weaver's] hand is in? The Ice Storm. There's a shot of it plucking some car keys out of a salad bowl, the keys of the man she's having an affair with, get it? And her fingers do this twirl with them that is just ridiculous. Fuckin' hot though."
"You know what that twirl means, right?" Little Cop asks. "Betrayal. Deception. Try to get that across with only one finger." (p. 26)
I read somewhere else that you always have movies playing in the background while you write - how the hell does that work? Don't you get distracted? Are they always movies you've already seen? Don't they bleed into one another, or is that precisely the point? Were you on an endless loop of Sigourney Weaver, keyswapping, Elijah Wood-electrocutions and teenage-Toby lust when you were writing "Bad Hand Acting?"
DJK: Yeah, the misdemeanor that is Bad Hand Acting has been an obsession of mine since high school, when I first saw the Bruce Springsteen video "I'm On Fire." I knew there was something wrong about the way she handed Bruce her car keys, the way her hand hung there way too long and fluttered out of the scene. Then I saw Angel Heart, and there's a scene where Mickey Rourke is rooting around in a drawer for some clue, and his hand was drifting around and acting weird, like total Addams' Family disembodied "Thing" weird. Then I saw Jacob's Ladder, and there's this scene where Tim Robbins' hand swims and fusses around a drawer looking for clues, and I was ruined forever. Not just ruined with Adrian Layne movies (he directed both Jacob's Ladder and Angel Heart, and I love them both), but ruined with being able to watch any scene that only showed a person's hands. It's an art form, making your hand act normal. Amateurs shouldn't even try. And in the movies, they usually fuck it up. So when I was writing a story about a guy paralyzed except for one hand, I thought "Now there's a challenge. How does a guy in bed who can only move one hand not ham it up and overact with those digits?!"
Bad Hand Acting can be dangerous, too. It's probably the reason for 97% of 4th of July fireworks accidents, because people fall in love with the cinematic way their hand looks when it's lighting a fuse.
But to answer your question, I didn't have The Ice Storm or Alien 3 on a loop when I wrote that story. I just remembered the egregious moment with the keys in The Ice Storm and plugged it into the characters' mouths. Actually Alien 3 might have been on because I've seen it probably 50 times.
And that's the answer to the other question - if I have a movie on when I'm typing, you're right, it does have to be something I've seen before, typically something I've seen a lot. Almost always '70s or 80s movies then, since I've had more years to rewatch them. '60s movies don't connect with me as much, but oh, man, do the '70s feel like home. Even though I was like zero when those movies were big, there's just something about a '70s movie that feels right. Like being a little kid and lying on the carpet with my dad when he listened to his Elton John records. Those movies are hazy comfort food. Movies for longer attention spans, and they look soft like film, real film, like movies should look. Not like this crisp, glossy digital ass we're going to have to endure from now on. Those aren't movies. They're shiny kids' stuff. And they smell gamey. That's my new word to describe these high-def digital video-game monstrosities that pass as motion pictures these days. Gamey. Makes you want to yell at the screen, if the line wasn't such a movie cliché, "What do you think this is? Some kind of a game?!" Hand shaking and pointing at the projectionist all dramatic.
SJ: When I started watching movies in a 'serious' way (i.e., obsessively cumulative; I like to make lists), when I was 14 or 15, someone (probably my mother) told me to "start with the ‘70s": when I first saw McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which I think comes from the land of 1971, I remember thinking, "I didn't know they were allowed to have nudity in movies back then," which was a ridiculous thought, but still formative for me as a viewer.
I saw recently this modern-dance production of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and - as you can see in that clip - as per our previous discussion one of my favorite elements was the smearing and splattering of black tarry paint-stuff all over an otherwise pure white set. Obviously this has been a technique since the beginning, but still - there's that apocryphal story of the chocolate-syrup blood in Psycho, and I imagine they had a lot of fun coming up with blood-substitutes back in the b/w days when the color didn't read so long as it was dark. Your writing, I think, is inventive and experimental in the same way - like brand-new ways of making blood.
You recently sold a giant novel, The Last Projector, to Broken River Books, which (presumably) you are in the midst of revising. [Annotation: NOPE, this interview languished so long that the book is out.] How will this work alongside the others? Is it going to pop its neck through the fencepost of the literary/lurid divide like the rest of your stories? OR ARE WE JUST AWASH IN NOSTALGIA.
DJK: This is fascinating to me that your mom said to start with the '70s. I wonder if this is the way everyone should do it. I started with the '80s - because that's when I was hatched - but your mom was thinking in three dimensions here. Or thought you had some catching up to do, and she's right. Okay, maybe being born later means you missed nine or so movies in the '60s, maybe three movies in the '50s. And that one in the '40s, and fuck Wizard of Oz. But as far as me and your mom are concerned, the '70s is where movies started.
Your response to nudity in movies "back then" is kind of what happened when I saw The Graduate (1967, one of the nine not-to-be-missed). Now there's a movie with literally just tiny flashes of naked but I felt kind of sheepish watching it as a kid. It sure felt a lot more naked than it really was. The Deep, too, a.k.a. Wet T-Shirts Enter The Public Consciousness movie, which probably horrified me more when Jacqueline Bissett got painted with a chicken claw in some dangerous places. And those movies were Rated PG! More skill on display for sure, when you can take little to no nudity, or chicken claws, and make us feel dirtier. Try The Chicken Claw Challenge. Watch The Deep and then Angel Heart and compare your squirm levels. One is a hard R and all sorts of violent. One looks like it should be a nice vacation. But I think The Deep wins, claws down. Yeah, McCabe and Mrs. Miller though, that was Rated R, too, right? I call that movie Deadwood: The Prequel. Deadwood owes its life to it. Deadwood makes every move that movie made. And it's my favorite Robert Altman movie by far, not just because of those giant fur coats. And the way he pulled back from every scene (the thing everyone loved about M.A.S.H., too, but it's so much more effective here), made those splashes of violence all the more shocking. Something about a bit of violence seen from across the room has so much more impact to me. Nowadays the camera is up everybody's ass or following the bullet through the spleen (actually that was probably the best part of Three Kings), and that distancing which invoked realism is lost for the sake of...realism. Or something.
mccabe
But I'm so glad you brought up chocolate blood because here you are in my head again. There's this guy on Twitter that I follow - mostly to read his meltdowns and watch his number of followers roll down like an odometer - but every so often he nails it. And he was talking about Kill Bill and said something about "Fake black and white, I can't put my finger on it." And I thought, "Yes! That sequence always bugged me, and I don't know why." But today I figured it out. It's the blood. The blood is like water because it was supposed to be in color (I heard the B&W was an 11th hour switch to save the rating), and in color, the blood looked like blood. But as Hitchcock could have warned them, once you switch to black-and-white, you have to bring in the chocolate syrup to make it black. Which is why the most ambitious sequence in Kill Bill Vol. 1 totally looks like a lighthearted water-balloon fight.
Yeah, The Last Projector, the giant book formally known as Spunkwater, based in part on the unsold screenplay of the same name, which mostly dealt with a crazy guy masturbating into Venus Flytraps. My favorite story regarding that screenplay is when some studio almost considered buying the damn thing - they were printing it out in their offices, and this guy calls and says, "We're printing the script." "Oh, great. Great news," I say. "No, I mean we're still printing it. We've been printing it for awhile." "Okay?" "So we'd like to know...have you written a screenplay before?" At the time, I thought he was making fun of formatting issues or something, but, nope, it was because, if the one-minute-per-page formula for screenplays is to be believed, my movie would be six hours long. I think that formula is probably bullshit most of the time though. Once Upon A Time In The West should have been an hour then, right? But it was probably dead-on with mine because most of that original script was juicy, big-ass speeches!
But I do hope it wriggles around on the fence dividing the genres, but you're definitely right about nostalgia. It's so awash with nostalgia that it's like that wave of blood that rolls off the elevator in The Shining. If that blood was nostalgia. And the color was all wrong. This book had been in the hands of a half dozen agents and publishers for the better part of a year, half of those with painful "maybes" morphing into "Nah, not for us." My favorite correspondence was the "Send the first 50 pages. Send another 50 pages. Send another 50 pages. Send the final 50 pages..." And I had to say, "Wait a minute, the 'final' 50 pages? Uh, you're only about halfway, my friend!" And..."Not for us." So I was despairing, and having nightmares about cutting it into three books like I had to do with my graduate thesis (turns out there's not just a page requirement at Pitt, but a page limit?! Who knew?), so when I was at the Books & Booze reading in St. Louis, hanging out with Jed Ayres and J. David Osborne, and we were drinking on the rooftop of some hotel from a Wes Anderson movie (I mean Paul Thomas Anderson, I mean Paul W.S. Anderson, whoever), Mr. Osborne told me about his plans for Broken River Books, which was sort of rising from the ashes of the amazing Swallowdown Press, and how they were going to conquer the globe. I don't know if it was the giant fake moon over his shoulder during this speech (not kidding, giant fake moon), but I was convinced. So I pitched him my novel in a sort of "This is why you don't want anything to do with this" reverse psychology way, and this must have worked. So the novel is due out in the summer of 2014, and it's got all that First Novel-itis people probably expect. Lot going on. It takes place in my version of the '80s. Which in my brain is kind of now. And it's full of movies and blood and unhealthy projecting.
Broken River Books just recently released their first five books, from some phenomenal authors, which goes a long way to easing my mind that all that pillowtalk with J.D.O. and Jed on that rooftop was for real. They've got The Least of My Scars by writing juggernaut Stephen Graham Jones, which has already been optioned for a movie, Peckerwood by Jedidiah Ayres, his first novel, also being eyed eagerly by other forms of visual media, but I'm sworn to secrecy about that, Street Raised by Pearce Hansen, resurrected by Osborne so it finds the audience it deserves, Gravesend by William Boyle, which was blurbed by Megan "Dare Me" Abbott (!) who compared it to Lehane and Pelacanos, and finally some disreputable abomination called XXX Shamus by a "Red Hammond," which is some famous big-shit author who wanted his/her name taken off of it so that his/her family would still love him. Or her. [Annotation: It's Anthony Neil Smith.] Several of these are notorious books that were kicked around writing circles for years, where people hear the name and they've already read big bloody chunks of it, so Last Projector is a perfect fit. It's been kicked, too. Kicked enough to finally bite back. I really want you to read it actually. It's so full of '80s VHS tapes that it should have a warning about leaving it in your car.
SJ: We've already talked about him a bit here, but Chan-wook Park (of Oldboy, Stoker, etc) has a bit of that pull-back-for-the-violence going on in the Vengeance trilogy. Part of the reason I think that technique is much more effective is because there's, inversely, less room for filmic trickery and effects - you have a stage to let things play out on, and there's less sense that someone's trying to pull one over on you. Effective violence - we're back again!
Rosemary's Baby has got to be one of the nine of the 60s, right? I was a late bloomer to that movie - I just saw it recently, and, tonally, it's just perfect all the way through. There's not an off-note in that entire movie.
In an effort to contain ourselves, finally, here's a deceptively simple question: what, in your daunting mental recollection, is the most suspenseful movie? Please limit your response to three movies.
DJK: I think you're right with your pulling back theory. And, yeah, Rosemary's Baby probably gets to be in there if only because that's got to be the most realistic depiction of a dream state I've ever seen on film.
Most suspenseful, huh? That's a tough question. You're wise to limit this to just one movie. You ask someone "What's the bloodiest movie?" and they can answer that no problem. Suspense though? That's a different animal. With suspense, I'm sort of in suspense while I'm waiting to see if I'll hate a movie. I call that Suspense of Disbelief, and I might put that on a T-shirt!
Most suspenseful though...oh, man. Off the top of my head, I just want to list suspenseful scenes. The bathtub sequence in Training Day springs to mind (better than that entire movie), the middle third of Walter Hill's underrated Trespass, the first third of ol' M. Night's Signs (yeah, I said it), the opening sequence of the underrated Dawn of the Dead remake, the tense Irish/Italian sit-down in State of Grace when they argue about whether Ed Harris said to shoot up the place if he "did" or "didn't" call, the Drexel/Clarence showdown in True Romance, the opening scene of 28 Weeks Later (sure, 28 Days Later is the better movie, but nothing in that movie can touch the opening sequence in the house in 28 Weeks Later when the hero bails on his wife. Oh, Bickle's awkward date with Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver (which is 100 times more squirm inducing than the famous bloody ending), the beautiful blue-collar fetishizing safe-cracking scene in Thief - oh shit those were all "T" movies. The first and last action sequences in Children of Men both felt incredibly dangerous with clutch popping and world-gone-mad gun play that had consequences, the weird low-speed chase in Way of the Gun, every single conversation with the HAL 9000, the opening scene of Narc on the playground, every sex scene in Teeth...
So limiting it to three is definitely a good idea. So let's do this. I'll say movies that have one word, two words, and three words in the title. Then limit that to three each. So for the one-word titles. I want to say Memento, because of the suspense it creates by forcing that short-term memory on the viewer, but that one's too obvious. How about Aliens, Friedkin's comeback, the glorious Bug, and Oldboy. For the two-word titles. Rear Window because of that distancing thing we're talking about, of course, Sexy Beast because of the human time bomb Don Logan and his complete stranglehold on that movie, and Open Water, which had no money, no actors, and I was on the edge of my nuts the whole time. And for the three-word titles, Dog Day Afternoon (something about opening with that Elton John song, then having ZERO music for its sweaty, real-time duration), The Road Warrior (has there ever been a more lean, pure cinema experience as that final chase?), and The Mosquito Coast. Like those ice blocks sliding out of the mouth of his invention, a nerve-wracking slide to destruction. Man, the infectious arrogance and doom of that character. Harrison Ford will never do a movie that good again.
Actually, forget all that. The most stressed I've been watching a movie lately was We Need To Talk About Kevin. Knot in my stomach the whole time, knowing where it was going to go. Actually, fuck all that! Wages of Fear. The beautiful simplicity of that plot (trucks hauling nitroglycerin, driving really slow through the jungle), mixed with the fact that Sam Peckinpah swiped a ton of imagery for his most famous westerns. That's my final answer. No, wait, I want to say The Corndog Man instead because more people need to know about it - a movie made up almost entirely of stressful prank phone calls. Luckily it also contains Howlin' Wolf music to calm you back down. Wait, what am I even talking about. It's John Carpenter's The Thing, claws down.
Okay, one last bonus answer since you got flashback to '70s movies on your tender young mind. Back in the late '70s, Little Davey snuck out of bed and sat halfway down the stairs to watch as much of the movie Rollerball as he could. And it had quite an impact. The way that movie opens exactly like a game, no exposition, just those scenes on the track with those air horns. I was thrilled and horrified by what I saw, and because I was caught before that opening sequence was over, I just figured the whole thing was a game. And back then, before DVD, before VHS really, I would have to wait years for another chance to see the whole thing. So there's some real suspense for you, waiting a decade to finish a damn movie.
