Zombie Lapdance

dr.who was always meant to be this jazzy. somebody needs to get me a giftcard for xmas so i can buy this album.

daniel pinkwater changed my life. his book "alan mendelson, boy from mars" is a step-by-step guide for weird kids to survive elementary and junior high school. i followed every step, from studying nifty new ways to trip people, to knowing more than the teachers (and backing up my claims with references), to achieving an air of superior aloofness to mundanity. i think it’s the reason that i achieved adulthood with a sense of personal identity intact.

i’ve read a lot of what he’s written, from "lizard music" to "the hoboken chicken emergency", and now one of his YA novels is online, just prior to the actual print publication. the neddiad has been described as pinkwater’s fictionalized autobiography, but i bet it’s all absolutely true. it’s about a young man who travels from chicago to LA by train and has a series of adventures (indeed his first big adventure) along the way. there’s ghosts, shamans, and the grand canyon.

and because it’s a pinkwater novel, there’s plenty of expository side-tracking about food. food is the universal motivator.

as it happens, my co-worker john who badgered me into watching "the beyond" happens to be wearing a "the beyond" sweatshirt in this moderately chilly weather.

it’s made by chas balun at rotten cotton graphics, a company which primarily sells clothing based on b-movies.

i might recommend the highly artist and tasteful websites of rotten cotton’s t-shirt models isabelle and toxy gene. for tasteful and artistic people over 18.

so i caught the 1978 film "Don" which made amitabh bachchan the star he is today. it’s difficult to describe the 70s sheik which comes to play in this movie. giant bowties. heists involving fake beards. and a cameo by barbara streisand.

it has the aesthetic of a 70s blacksploitation movie, but with new and exciting ethnic-oppression issues! bachchan plays dual roles, a cool, smooth talking gangster, and a betel-leaf chewing yokel with a lilting dialect. betel-leaves are a mild stimulant common to india, and the habit is actually more disgusting than chewing tobacco.

incidentally the remake to "Don" came out this year and it includes jazzed-up martial arts sequences and a slightly less appalling version of that last dance sequence.

i’ve grown bored with sanjay dutt. i’m turning my starry-eyed celebrity affections toward the unanimously proclaimed superstar of bollywood film: Amitabh Bachchan.

i saw him recently in the movie boom which i reviewed earlier. bachchan was easily the best thing about the movie. well, other than the supermodels.

so what makes this man so cool? well, he’s the host of the indian version of "who wants to be a millionare" (translated idiomatically into hindi as "who wants to be bumped up a caste"). he got his start in showbiz because he got a personal letter of recommendation from PM Indira Ghandi. he even served in the indian parliament for a time, before something called "the swedish gun scandal". what is it with indian celebrities and the violence-implication scandals? but these days bachchan spends most of his time apologizing for the bad acting of his son, heartthrob Abhishek Bachchan.

he’s also cool because he’s a senior citizen and he’s still bopping around like a 30yr-old. he followed a similar career path to patrick mcgoohan, where he played an angry young man in the 70s, and then graduated into being a distinguished patriarch. but what’s really impressive is his baritone voice and his flawless command of english. and apparently japanese, german, and arabic.

i bought a dvd because i recognized him on the cover:

but it didn’t look much like he does in the movie itself. and then it hit me, for the cover photo they took a picture of him from the 70s and photoshopped in a modern hairdo and his gray goatee.

AKS had some interesting action and music sequences (including a hypnotically PG strip-club dance), but then right when the villianous assassin transfers his soul into bachchan’s body (the sort of thing that must happen daily in a hindi/buddhist culture), my DVD stopped working. and the DVD down at the video store stopped working in the exact same place. aaaargh!

it’s gross, but it’s the only thing that can keep the flies out of my place of employment.


there’s no actual poison in the traps, just an entrance that’s difficult to exit. and a terrible smell that lures the flies. after a while, the flies themselves generate the smell.

the best part is when the fly corpses give birth to a legion of maggots.

there’s a point in every lucio fulci movie when you realize that it’s just not going to tie together. in the beyond, that moment comes when the ginger-kid displays blank-white eyeballs (no doubt a tribute to little orphan annie) at her father’s funeral. nope, it doesn’t make sense. ever.

in retrospect, this new orleans location-shot supernatural gore-fest is particularly relevant as the most coherent explanation yet for the hurricane katrina disaster: new orleans is home for one of the seven gates of hell. duh.

fulci outdoes himself with the gore in this one. special effect heads get destroyed in every conceivable manner: acid, spikes, hot wax (or something), face-splintering bullets, and eye-popping zombie fingers. there’s popping eyeballs galore! and all of it is filmed so that the actors, no matter their nationality, seem like they’re speaking in dubbed italian.

my coworker johnny motard told me that in every interview, the actors who have worked with fulci say that he’s a total sadist. remember the fulci movie i mentioned earlier, the gates of hell, which also incidentally involves the gates of hell being opened? apparently the scene where a girl vomits up her own guts was accomplished by making her swallow a large amount of guts and then vomiting them up. CGI is for sissies! fulci defended this "effect" by saying that they slaughtered the lamb on set, so the guts were perfectly fresh.

i also caught slither which is finally out on DVD. watch the extras for a full 60min of nathan fillion goofing off.

i heard about this site, Dead Malls.com, on NPR this weekend. it’s mainly a collection of user posts about failing or demolished shopping malls. i spent a couple of hours reading through the entries.

a lot of the entries are fairly prosaic descriptions of failure. a community loses it’s economic livelihood and they build an interstate ten miles too far west, and then the big-box stores syphon off the remaining shoppers.

some of the entries are sentimental tales of a childhood lost, of formative years spent in the mall, with only a boarded-up JCpenny to remind one of youthful innocence.

there are urban explorers who break into the abandoned spaces and post their photos of a decrepit post-consumer world.

the best entries are grandiose narratives of monolithic hubris, cycling down into strange fires, mysterious drywalling where there used to be entire floors, shootings, gangwars, and illicit sex. my girlfriend says that she used to drive past the "prestonwood town center" in dallas in order to get to another mall. one user who waxed nostalgic about it’s decay wrote:

The elevators could be stopped without an emergency alarm sounding and could be restarted from inside the elevator. This made it rather easy to have sex in the elevators or do drugs that required lengthy preparation. When a minor epidemic of teenage heroin use spread across North Dallas, it became hip to shoot up in the elevators and squirt your leftover blood on the walls.

i remember spending the day before christmas eve in the eden prairie mall near minneapolis. it was in the middle of a renovation and there couldn’t have been more than a handful of tenants. it’s tough being a giant shopping center only a few miles from the mall of america. but it was a magical place for me. there were huge echoing spaces, like aircraft hangers. sunlight and melting snow poured through holes in the ceiling. a santa claus sat on his throne beneath a four-story tarp-wrapped scaffolding, surrounded by a few draped strings of lights and bored elves. i found an abandoned power outlet and wrote away on my laptop, an interloper in a creative blank space.

my uncle complained that their tiny little suburb wasn’t getting enough property taxes from the mall, and i thought he was just being a grump.

it’s interesting that people would care for these malls. at one point they were just a cynical commercialization of public space, crassly undermining american culture with their vacuity. but compared to the specter of the big-box stores they seem almost wholesome. certainly with age and failure, the malls can gain some sort of respect.

i was at austin’s northcross mall recently. it’s not quite a dead mall yet, but it’s tenants are fairly low-end, there are many vacant spaces, and the primary inhabitants of the mall are teenage ice-skaters and elderly mall-walkers. it was a comfortable space because of it’s emptiness and it’s relaxed atmosphere. i felt that i could occupy my space, that i wasn’t beholden to the consumer impulse.

i stole a power-outlet near a silent fountain and wrote away at my laptop.

so i found out that the sanjay dutt film i reported on "zinda", is actually a remake of the korean film "oldboy." man, i feel so uncool not having known that. i’m falling behind on my asian-auteur of the week phenomenon. to be honest, i’ve grown bored with gross-out films, violence, and the angry pursuit of revenge. hence the bollywood kick.

another weird remake i saw recently was the bollywood-world version of "fight club." it’s as if someone saw a trailer for the american "fight club" and then pounded it into an indian model. whereas david fincher’s "fight club" was about the alienation and immasculation of a post-industrial culture, vikram chopra’s "fight club" was about some obnoxious frat boys who liked to sing and dance and occasionally punch people in the face. there’s an MTV logo at the beginning of the movie, and the first dance sequence is a fascinating hip-hop/bollywood fusion. the third dance sequence is a salsa/bollywood fusion.

all in all, i’d say that there are just enough wire-work fight scenes and tight pants to make it worth watching the muddled bits of movie between the music.

the latest hotdog review comes from the "food mart" of south first street.

although it has a competently stocked condiment rack, the food mart does not literally have any hotdogs. instead it has an absent-mindedly stashed cardboard box at the bottom of a freezer case with the magic-marker sign: "corndogs: 2 for $1.00".

a minute in the microwave turns the corndogs from rock-hard frozen to kinda warm.

the ample dining facilities outside form a suitably corn-dog atmosphere.

these were not the best corndogs i’ve ever had. the best corndogs i’ve ever had were made fresh at a mall in roswell, NM.

the meat was blandly porkish, a salty fluff of flesh. the cornmeal covering managed a slightly crunchy inconsequentiality. a dollop of mayonaise improved it immeasurably.

the purist in me is ambivalent about corndogs. sure, it’s a meat-tube on a stick, you have to admire the elegance of the arrangment. but it has no culture and class. the simplicity of a corndog is both it’s advantage and it’s ultimate limitation.

South First Food Mart Corndog: C Minus