The Drunken Odyssey: Recent Episodes
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Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
Barking Angels
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “In My Moondreams” – Brian Wilson
- “Rolf” – Fabio Frizzi, John Richard King
- “Where Are You? I Love You” – Francis Bebey
- “I-405 Rules” – Sparks
- “Lost Is My Quiet” – Chris Cheek
- “When the World’s on Fire” – Marc Ribot
- “The Storm” – Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru
- “Fasih (Akustik)” – Senyawa
- “Roll the dice” – Smerz
- “Mats” – Geir Sundstøl
- “Sally Awakens for Dinner to the End” – Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons
- “Slip Stream (Live)” – Esthesis Quartet, Bill Frisell
- “God Only Knows” – Brian Wilson
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473 & 666) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
One of the prevailing conspiracy theories in this country’s history has been how a secret cabal of some kind—rich people, aliens, subterranean terrors, etc—has really been in control of everything happening and that whatever else we see is just spectacle. But for those doing the controlling, the spectacle does have to get boring after a while and so they need to create their own spectacle in order to liven things up. Absolute power must get dull after so long. At that intersection of spectacle and conspiracy is the first issue of Exquisite Corpses by James Tynion IV, Michael Walsh, Jordie Bellaire, and Becca Carey.
At the heart of America’s history and presence on the world stage, there has been a group of thirteen families running things. While each family rules over one state—one of the original thirteen colonies—only one is allowed permission to operate the country at their whims. To choose which family gets this control, a game is conducted every five years that they must all participate in: each draws a card with a weapon and puts forward a killer to represent them that uses that weapon. These killers are dropped into a small town and the last one standing is given one hundred millions dollars and a new identity to live out while their representative family rules the country. While Halloween in Oak Valley begins, the killers have been quietly transported in under the noses of the people who live there.
While Exquisite Corpses is a high-concept spectacle, the method of its creation is even more interesting. For an independent comic, it’s the only one I can think of that is using a writers room to create its story. While Tynion IV is the writer credited here—him and Walsh created the world’s lore and characters—but the story itself was the result of a group of a dozen creators coming together and setting everything else up. As a means of telling comic stories, it’s a more novel approach as we’re used to writers, artists, and editors working in tandem to get a completed story. But what Exquisite Corpses is doing is more akin to a television writers room where ideas can bounce off a dozen different people with different perspectives and come out with an even stronger story that the original creators may not have initially conceived.
Opening up the creative process in this way, we can see more hands, but we can also see more directions that a story can go. Comics have always been collaborative since the first artist and writer pairs became the norm in monthlies, but a more large-scale collaboration can keep things all the more interesting—I’ll always remember the writers rooms in the first few seasons of The Simpsons—and allow more writers the chance to work in comics. This method feels like one of the best ways to work up talent in the medium and it makes me wonder how many more creators would want to try this kind of method.
Get excited. Get together.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Episode 675 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
On this episode, John speaks with Tom McAllister about writing burnout, writing prompts, revision, and discovery, as well as Tom’s wonderful new collection of flash memoirs, It All Felt Impossible.
Tom McAllister by Matt Godfrey.TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
Check out Jeff Wilfong painting live at the Timicua White House in Orlando on Thursday, June 12th, Friday June 13th, and Sunday, June 15th.
Follow Jeff Wilfong on IG.
For more events at the Timucua Arts Foundation, go here.
If you’d like to support this show with a monthly subscription that will feature bonus content, please see TDO’s Patreon page.
For excellent tattoos in the Orlando area, check out The Tattooed Society.
Episode 675 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
My life flashed before my eyes. That first time seeing Howard the Duck, Roadhouse, and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. That time I got my outward retainer stuck in my left eye. That time I stuck a wad of aluminum foil in the microwave to see what happened. These are the things one thinks of before one dies. The bullet blasted off from the revolver in the Banana-Man’s hand.
I knew it was curtains for me.
— To be continued.
Speaking of revolvers, tonight’s movie is 1973’s Revolver from director Sergio Sollima. It stars Oliver Reed, a man who kind of terrifies me. I remember he was once a guest of the Merve Griffin Show along with Charo and Orson Wells. Reed claimed to be descended from Russian Royalty and stated how much he loved American hamburgers. It almost seemed like he and Orson Wells were about to come to blows, but then Reed told Wells he was brilliant.
The focus of our movie is Vito Cipriani (Oliver Reed), a tough-as-nails prison warden stopping a prisoner from slicing himself to death. Vito’s life isn’t all bad though. He’s got a pretty young wife named Anna (Agostina Belli) waiting for him at home. Unfortunately, he shows up home one night and there’s no sign of Anna. Vito then gets a phone call from some criminals telling him that they have his wife. If Vito wants to see his wife alive again, he’ll need to break a low-life thief out of the prison, a man named Milo (Fabio Testi).
Milo is a self-proclaimed born criminal, but he’s charming in his own way. Vito can’t get any answers as to who Milo’s associates are or why they want him out of prison. Vito doesn’t go to the police and instead beats the crap out of Milo in order to send him to the infirmary where there’s little security. A few loose boards in the bathroom and Milo is on the lamb, but he doesn’t get too far when Vito pulls him into a car at gunpoint. Milo still insists he doesn’t know who wants him out of prison or for what reason.
I have to admit, this movie loses me after a while. For instance, the first set of kidnappers get fired only to be replaced by a well-dressed man who I assume is from the mafia. Also, this guy is connected to some Italian folk singer who was once best friends with Milo before he left a life of petty theft for a music career. In the search for Anna, Vito and Milo illegally cross into France as they’re now wanted by the law for the whole prison breakout incident.
Vito finally reaches out to the criminals and an exchange is set, but the kidnappers just start shooting at Vito and Milo. Vito comes to the conclusion that the kidnappers wanted Milo out of prison so they could kill him. If that’s all they wanted to do, why didn’t they just do an honest exchange? Vito gets his wife back and Milo gets taken away suspecting nothing until he gets a bullet in the back of the skull. Wouldn’t that have been easier?
Photo by Leslie Salas.Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, episode 599, episode 642, episode 643, episode 644, episode 645, and episode 670) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
X. There is a history of knives used in ritual exorcisms. The blade is a spiritual scalpel removing the demonic tumor. Similarly, some traditions use knives to keep the mischievous and evil away. A knife in one’s pocket will leave the bearer too heavy to be carried away by fairies. Being physically ill is a sign of spiritual maladies. The sick are inclined to put knives under their pillows to ward off demons. The grieving in some cultures refused knives, even at meals, in the house of the recently deceased. This was so as not to harm the spirit of the loved one.
Possession and Other Spiritual Maladies
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “I Get High On You” – Sly Stone
- “Image and Style” – Joe Goddard, Suku of Ward 21, Dynamite MC
- “Hot Roy” – Peter Murphy
- “Andromeda” – Preoccupations
- “Transition” – Laibach, Human Voice Ensemble
- “BLK ZMBY” – Billy Woods, Steel Tipped Dove
- “Singers and Swallows” – Tusmørke
- “Drove Up from Pedro” – Mike Watt, Carla Bozulich
- “Music for Chameleons” – Gary Numan
- “Introitus” – Sven Helbig, Dresdner Kreuzchor, Staatskapelle Dresden, Martin Lehmann
- “Exit Man” – Sereptie
- “Capricorn” – Esthesis Quartet, Bill Frisell
- “Credo” – The Electric Prunes
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473 & 666) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
Did you think that was all I had on that particular run of Harley Quinn? Oh no, the pile is too vast to cut things off after only seventeen issues—this goes so much deeper than that. And for Stephanie Phillips’ run, that means we get to see how much more she can do with the character absent of the various events that coincided with the first stretch of issues she produced. But this time she’s joined with another team in Georges Duarte, Romulo Fajardo Jr., Simone Buonfantino, Matteo Lolli, David Baldeón, and Rain Beredo to round out her final arc.
When we last left Harley, things were in a bit of a state. Her, Batwoman, and Kevin had just prevented Verdict from blowing up city hall, but during their celebrations, her prison transport was intercepted by a duo of villains—the same duo that begin this arc chasing Harley down. But the hunting is less for murder and more headhunting—Luke Fox, better known at times as Batwing—needs her for a mission to the moon to retrieve a sample of unstable matter. And of course, because of reasons, this goes horribly wrong before the sapient matter is finally subdued by the team learning to work together. As a reward, Harley heads to Vegas to celebrate and in the process buys a boat, gets shot, dies, gets resurrected, and discovers the Dark Metal iteration of herself hunting down all of the Harleys of the Multiverse. Wasn’t this a Jet Li movie?
It’s in this final arc that Phillips really begins to move us into what she wanted for Harley from the beginning of her run: growth and change. We start with Harley wanting to become a better person—looking to make amends for the people she’s harmed due to her past. And here, at the end, we get her saving Gotham multiple times as well as saving every version of herself, including the one looking to murder her. There’s always going to be fights and punching in a superhero comic—that’s just a part of the formula—but the part of Harley with a PhD comes out more often than not to simply talk through things. She proves that she isn’t beholden to her past and that part of her character, but she can still look at those aspects of herself—every one from those different Multiverses—and save every version of herself.
One of the nicer things in monthly comics is when a creator can finish the story they wanted to tell. Often there’s a dip in interest or some kind of event that keeps a story from being told to its intended end. Here, we can watch Phillips take Harley on that journey over twenty eight issues to get to the heart of the character and show that she’s always been able to have a story on her own without a former boyfriend coming in to sap the fun out of the room.
Get excited. Get independent.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
On this show, John and Matt Peters inaugurate The Kerouac Project Book Club with a discussion of William S. Burrough’s first novel, Junky.
with Dmetri Kakmi
The Innocents
England, 1961
Director: Jack Clayton
Cast: Deborah Kerr, Megs Jenkins, Martin Stephens, Pamela Franklin, Michael Redgrave
In the Gospel of Thomas, the world’s first Jungian psychologist, Jesus Christ, says what you do not bring forth will destroy you. In other words, what is inside you will either save or bring calamity. It’s wisdom Miss Giddens, a vicar’s daughter, might well heed. Though in her new employ as governess at Bly country estate she gives every impression of having forgotten, bringing a metaphoric roof down on her head.
To say Miss Giddens is hopeless at her job is an understatement. I’d hate to be the one she asks for references for her next post, if she ever gets out of Newgate prison or Bedlam. I can just picture future job interviews.
“Name three achievements from your last job.”
“I had a secret crush on my boss, drove one of his wards to an hysterical mental breakdown and caused the death of the other.”
“Excellent. When can you start?”
To be fair, Miss Giddens is not only inexperienced and out of her depth. She is also sexually repressed, overly devout, naive and gives every impression of being a well-meaning basket case. You know she’s trouble by the way she says she loves children more than anything else in the world. Only a self-absorbed man focussed on his pleasures would put her in charge of two young charges in a remote estate.
All this might be understandable if Miss Giddens is in her twenties, as is the case in Henry James’ novel The Turn of the Screw. But it’s unforgivable in a woman of 40, which was Deborah Kerr’s age when she starred in the film. Admittedly. Kerr was imposed on the director by the studio; it would be interesting to know who Clayton might have chosen had he been free to do so.
Oddly enough this minor misstep does not damage the film one iota. Such is the forces of Clayton’s control of his material, and his intense collaboration with cinematographer Freddy Francis and script writer Truman Capote (playwright William Archibald is credited but we know 90% of the script belongs to Capote) that the film is an improvement on what is possibly the most celebrated ghost story in the English language.
In the end we are left with an eerie psychological ghost story that explores the nexus between fantasy and reality, and repressed adult sexuality rubbing up against budding child sexuality. I dare say two scenes will raise eyebrows in our prurient, censorious age.
Clayton told Kerr to pitch the performance at an ambiguous level and she is expert at unsettling the viewer, making us question whether what is going on is real or if it exists solely in the governess’ feverish mind. Miss Gittens is the ultimate unreliable narrator and she cuts a pitiful if increasingly alarming figure when her mania kicks in. No wonder Nicole Kidman drew inspiration from Kerr for her performance as the equally deluded mother in The Others (2001).
From the opening credits, The Innocents is an exercise in destabilising an audience through cinematic artifice. Every technique known to the filmmaker is put to use to create a shifting, sliding, melting irreal space that mirrors the governess’ tenuous grasp on reality. It also captures the way memory works, overlapping and confusing one incident with another and creating a story that may or may not have anything to do with what is actually happening.
When the film begins, for the first 40 seconds the screen is dark and we hear a bird sing. Two hands clasped in prayer intrude into the darkness and we hear murmured prayer and sobs. This is Miss Gittens at the tail end of her ordeal. The flashback begins when the credits stop and we work our way to the tragic climax.
Throughout Clayton insisted on a wide-screen ration with minimal lighting and large areas of darkness that engulf characters. Even exteriors feel claustrophobic and oppressive, a sense of evil and corruption ever present. Apparently, Freddy Francis painted the sides of the lenses with black paint to create an “elegiac” focus, giving the film a rich if unnerving texture. Characters are often filmed in bold close up, the deep focus allowing more than one character to be clearly seen at the same time, with profiles at the centre of the screen, as if they’re simultaneously hiding something and creating overwhelming intimacy, as if we are beside them and involved in the action.
To create the melting, sliding mood mentioned earlier, Clayton worked closely with editor Jim Clarke to craft elaborate superimpositions and lingering cross dissolves between scenes. This is particularly effective during a memorable dream sequence that may or may not incorporate real action. The protracted, almost suspended in time, feeling the cross dissolves create makes us feel as if we too are dropping through different layers of consciousness and reality.
The result is one of the most beautifully unsettling ghost stories in existence. And a perfect trophy for the most unhinged employee of the year.
Oh, children, the new governess is here!
Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Woman in the Well, The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). He is now working on a crime novel called The Perfect Room.
This replay episode of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
In this week’s replay episode, John talks to author and editor Jaquira Díaz.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
Read Jaquira Díaz’s “Cami” at Story South.
Read Jocelyn Bartkevicius’s “Out of the Garden” at The Missouri Review.
To hear more of and about 15 Views of Miami, check out this episode of Functionally Literate Radio.
NOTES
This episode first appeared before Juno Diaz’s cancellation.
Check out Jeff Wilfong painting live at the Timicua White House in Orlando on Thursday, June 12th, Friday June 13th, and Sunday, June 15th.
Follow Jeff Wilfong on IG.
For more events at the Timucua Arts Foundation, go here.
If you’d like to support this show with a monthly subscription that will feature bonus content, please see TDO’s Patreon page.
For excellent tattoos in the Orlando area, check out The Tattooed Society.
Episode 674 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
Banana-Man struggled to get up, but eventually got to his feet. Edwige, my kangaroo companion from misadventures in North America, growled again and looked ready to pounce on the man. I stood in front of her, wagging my finger in her face. Kangaroos don’t understand that street vendors have a right to refuse a fifty dollar bill for any item being sold under five dollars. I turned around to face the Banana-Man to offer an apology, but I went perfectly still when I saw he had a revolver pointed directly at us.
— To be continued.
Since I’d been spending so much time on the Ghoulies saga, I see no point in doing a Satan Month for June as there was a whole lot of Satanic activity going on in those films. This leaves the Poliziotteschi genre as the only other alternative. Tonight’s movie is 1973’s Big Guns from director Duccio Tessari and I think this movie is a fine introduction to the Italian gangster genre so popular in the 1970s.
The movie begins with a birthday party for a young boy and I keep expecting some vile criminals to bust into the apartment, toss in some grenades, and a very unhappy birthday for all will be had. But that doesn’t happen. The boy’s father, Tony Arzenta (Alain Delon), leaves the party because he has to go to work. What is his job? Killing people for the mob. The next scene involves him assassinating a rival boss and his underling who had the unfortunate luck of entering his boss’s office right after the assination happened.
Tony has decided he doesn’t like the whole “killer for hire” career path. He offers his resignation to his bosses, but they warn him that this is not a position that you walk away from. Tony insists on leaving anyway and we in the audience know this won’t end well. Tony’s wife can’t get her car started one morning and sends their son up to get the keys to Tony’s car. Tony looks out his window as his wife and son get into his car for a trip to the grocery store. 3-2-1. The car explodes, Tony’s wife and son are incinerated by a bomb that was left for him.
Tony’s former boss yells at his henchmen to finish the job knowing full well that Tony will be seeking vengeance. At his family’s funeral, his parish priest warns him against seeking vengeance for what happened to his family and to leave it for God to take care of. Okay, but right after the funeral, some hitmen try to gunning Tony down. Tony gets in a car and chases after them. Can I just say how much I love chase scenes in Italian movies from the 1970s. Every automobile seems to be made out of cheap plastic and tin foil.
I guess I’m kind of confused by the moral lesson of this film. Is Tony supposed to ignore the mob and get on with his life after they killed his family? The mob is trying to murder him anyway. Am I supposed to care about these scumbag gangsters that deserve to die? Maybe the lesson is don’t become a hired assassin for the mob. It’s a dead end. An alternative title for Big Guns is No Way Out which I believe is a more apt description of what this movie is about.
Photo by Leslie Salas.Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, episode 599, episode 642, episode 643, episode 644, episode 645, and episode 670) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
In this week’s show, John talks to opera director Yuval Sharon about the past and perhaps future rebirths of opera, while advocating for the relevance of this provocative art form. Yuval’s new book, A New Philosophy of Opera, is lucid, persuasive, passionate, and fun.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
Miami Book Fair will take place November 22-24.
On December 3rd, The Drunken Odyssey’s writers take over the reading spots in the Loose Lips reading series here in Orlando, the city beautiful. 8 PM at Dirty Laundry, which is the back patio of Li’l Indies: 1036 N Mills Ave, Orlando, FL, United States, Florida.
To pre-order Greg Proops’s new comedy album, Purple Shasta Raccoon, here.
For excellent tattoos in the Orlando area, check out The Tattooed Society.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 648 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
I wanted the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, to cut this sniveling accountant named Albert Simmons down to size. Not figuratively cut down to size. Literally. I don’t do the whole murder thing, but I wanted justice after this man’s involvement in the sale of my Beanie Baby collection. But the Revenging Manta didn’t cut him up. He sheathed his sword and outstretched his hand.
“It’s been a long time, brother,” the Revenging Manta said as he helped Albert to his feet. — To be continued.
Looks like there was a followup documentary to Hell House LLC., the one about the group of young people that made a haunted house attraction at an actual haunted hotel and all hell broke loose. The events of this documentary cover the events following the aftermath of that incident. So despite the fact that there are numerous deaths and disappearances associated with this curse property, people keep wanting in there with their camcorders so they can get their fifteen minutes of fame on the TikTok.
One of these goofballs is named Jackson Mallet and he snuck into the hotel despite it being blocked off by the local authorities. He cries into the camera that the people are still inside before he panics and the footage gets all glitchy before it cuts to black. His mother, Wendy Mallet, laments his disappearance. I’m sorry. You raised a stupid son. You have to teach your kids to look both ways before crossing the street and to keep out of hotels that serve as portals to hell.
On October 6, 2017, New York Channel 8 aired a news show segment titled Morning Mysteries with host Suzy McCombs. This special is all about the Abaddon Hotel. Featured guests include Arnold Tasselman, a Rockland County bureaucrat that never had a day in his life, Brock Davies, a well-known medium, and Mitchell Cavanaugh, the last surviving member of the original Hell House documentary. Cavenaugh is furious at Tasselman from suing over the Hell House documentary, claiming that their hoax did damage to the reputation of the town. Brock Davies wants to enter the hotel since he’s a professional paranormal investigator.
We learn that other people have tried getting into the hotel with terrible results. One dumb teenager videotaped himself going into the hotel for Facebook clout only to fixate his camera on two legs at the top of the stairs. He streamed those two legs for hours until his battery ran out and the boy was never seen again.
Another video sequence involves a couple of guys picking up a young lady hitchhiking. She tells them to take her to the Abaddon hotel. When they arrive, they warn her not to go in, but she dashes inside. They go after her and when they find the hitchhiker, her eyes are all white and then the camera malfunctions. I assume those two good Samaritans are now dead, absorbed into that cursed hotel. We learn that the hitchhiker’s name was Savannah Collins, one of the fifteen people that died in the original Hell House incident.
Naturally, some young journalists from the news station want to sneak into the hotel with Mitchell Cavanaugh and Brock Davis. You’d think one of them would think to bring a hatchet along just in case, but why do that when you can just be trapped inside a haunted hotel forever. Did I mention the creepy clown shows up again?
Photo by Leslie SalasJeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, episode 599, episode 642, episode 643, episode 644, and episode 645) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
In School, the Rain Is at Least Something
One, two, three, four drops falling.
I let my eyes wander
to the windows and think about
the story my aunt told me.
A deer, confused, in the schoolyard
ran and jumped through a window.
On the wall, dinosaurs rumble
and forage. On the wall, in lightly illustrated rain,
an allosaurus stalks a mob of deer.
Its teeth shine like glass and I think
of the other deer, dazed and buckling and bleeding,
in a room of bean bags, clay,
and dirty thumbs.
On the wall, a frog has shed its skin
and bears its muscle, veins, nerves, and heart.
It’s on its back–
The rain taps the window and we
count: 99, 110, 127, 132.
On Friday, we will watch movies
of rivers, red balloons, and rain.
Shedding Skin
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Gaivotas” – Rival Consoles
- “Open Wide” – Nowhere Squares
- “The Six” – Colin Stetson
- “All the Bones Had Names” – Roy Nathanson, Nick Hakim
- “Super Breath” – Karen O, Danger Mouse
- “elysian fields” – They Are Gutting a Body of Water
- “Love Me Not” – Ravyn Lenae
- “Peace Corps” – Show Me the Body, Alli Logout
- “Walkin’” – Silver Apples
- “Thirteen” – Eric Dolphy, Mal Waldron, Booker Ervin
- “Martyrs, Badgers & Other Rodents” – SpermChurch
- “You Never Let Me Down” – Trampled By Turtles
- “Tebi Majko Misli Lete” – Branko Mataja
- “Bird On The Wire” – Bill Frisell
- “Wee” – Charles Mingus
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
I see we’ve boarded the Hindenburg and are well on our way to New Jersey. What happens after that is going to be for everyone on the ground to determine. But in the meantime, as we prepare ourselves for what may come, we at least have comics. I’ve gone on over and over before about my love of anthologies—their shorter stories, their showcasing of new talent, their ability to work well with themes—and the new series, Hello Darkness,from Boom Studios is no exception to that as the myriad creators here dig into various kinds of horror as though they were creating for a slightly less gory EC Comics.
In this first issue, we have seven stories to dive into—five short pieces and two longer works that will be serialized over the next few months in subsequent issues. The first story in the issue, “Contagious” by Jude Ellison S. Doyle, Letizia Cadonici, Alessandro Santoro, and Becca Carey, opens us on a small town and the children that have begun killing their parents. No one knows why the children do it, other than the need to do so is passed between them like a virus. To what end, we don’t know as the story leaves that aspect ambiguous, but we get a sense of the mood for this series overall with just this one piece. From there we have old men holding onto their glory days before becoming violent, surrogate limbs, a short story from the world of Something is Killing the Children, and a group of friends discussing world issues before their world ends.
Hello Darkness, from its first issue, does what I want to see in a strong anthology. But it also makes me realize something that’s been almost invisible in all my time reading these series. A lot of time, stories in anthologies like this are better because they’re together—they build on one another to create an encompassing mood. It takes a skilled organizer and editor to ensure these stories follow that thematic thread to maintain a cohesive whole. And while some stories are shorter and others will go on long after this first issue is over, they all play their crucial part in the collective. And while any one piece may stand on its own—these serialized stories may end up with their own volumes like many in the past—it’s their presence together to create an effectively creepy anthology that makes it such a good anthology to come back to every month.
As a horror anthology, Hello Darkness is what I’ve been waiting for after going through all the EC Archives at my library.And maybe we need horror stories right now to blunt the collective trauma we’re going to endure yet again. Sometimes these stories are what we need since they give us breathing room during everything else happening all at once. A good short story keeps you wanting to go onto the next one.
Get excited. Hold onto each other.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
On this week’s show, John King talks to the two-time former poet laureate Billy Collins about his latest collection, Water, Water, and how, if the window doesn’t open up for the composition of poetry, one should strive to find a trampoline in the woods, and how one can learn from the poetic breakers of decorum.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
This episode’s interview was conducted in association with Miami Book Fair, which will take place November 22-24.
To pre-order Greg Proops’s new comedy album, Purple Shasta Raccoon, here.
For excellent tattoos in the Orlando area, check out The Tattooed Society.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 647 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
The Story Inside
In school, we were asked what we wanted to become
and we answered “Teacher!” or “Mommy!” while stranger
inclinations hung inside like the wet underwear out back.
We were ashamed of the clothes closest to us. I probably smiled
and said “policeman,” but yearned to haunt the stories,
the old houses, the graveyards. If I had said “ghost” what future
was I cursing myself to? Ghosts rarely alter the future;
they are whispers of the past. How could I become
a Jedi or another archetype whose story was the story
of us all? I wanted to see in bull’s-eyes and carry strangers
from a burning world. My heroes were never far from a monster’s smile,
so I also wanted the atomic heart and armored back
of Godzilla. Even if my imagination took me back
to the West, where I could ride wild horses into a future
ripped open like a stained-glass horizon, I’d still spend miles
in swamps and mausoleums, more Poe than Gunsmoke. To become
an outlaw might be nice, a cthulu-cowboy nicer: the stranger
in an even stranger land. I realized I still wanted the ghost story.
But aren’t we all haunting or haunted no matter the story?
Like Kahlo, every mirror cracked like her fractured back,
painting blood outside the body, the self itself a stranger.
Her pain let me understand my own and she let me want a future
tied to the images created by hand and by thoughts like birds becoming
hearts melting in the snow of memory and lost smiles.
But then, I borrowed someone else’s answer, the smile
of someone else’s happiness and was told not to want a child’s story:
dreams and stuffed bears and board games become
cobwebbed and damp and dust and going back
to get them seems impossible, because it’s all future, future,
future. The neighbors are now no more than strangers.
And I find sometimes that there is nothing stranger
than the time between camera flashes, between smiles
that tell one story and the story inside. My imagined future,
regardless of what I told my teachers, is like the story
unread and waiting all the way at the back
of the anthology. The truth we have is what we become.
In old photos, I see a stranger who shares my story.
I had to learn to return the smile, to give back
a certain grace to a past smiling at the future presently becoming.
Between the Camera Flashes
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Finale: The Magic Store” – The Muppets
- “Heroes and Villains” – The Beach Boys
- “Renunciation” – Secret Chiefs 3
- “The Big Ship” – Brian Eno
- “Reich: Electric Counterpoint: I. Fast” – David Chalmin, Bryce Dessner
- “Plain Gold Ring” – Nina Simone
- “Pennies from Hell” – Marc Ribot
- “Angels and Demons at Play” – Sun Ra and His Arkestra
- “Knocks Me Off My Feet” – Stevie Wonder
- “Icing Sugar” – The Cure
- “Swan Lake” – Public Image Ltd.
- “Moanin’” – Charles Mingus
- “Cool Water” – Hank Williams
- “The Pink Room” – Angelo Badalamenti
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
Once again, I’m writing this article on the precipice of election day and, just like before, it feels like an exercise in routine. I’m reviewing the menu on the Hindenburg on the fifth of May kind of anxiety, you know? And yet, I still need to sift through my pile of comics, some of which were first solicited back when I was writing my previous election week article. As this is being written to go out on Wednesday, I don’t know what the state of things will be by then, but for the time being, let’s talk about Superman.
Superman and The Authority by Grant Morrison, Mikel Janín, Fico Ossio, Evan Cagle, Travel Foreman, Jordie Bellaire, Sebastian Cheng, Dave Stewart, Alex Sinclair, and Steve Wands is one of Morrison’s final stories for DC and it does have that sense of finality to it. This is Superman in his twilight years as his powers slowly dwindle and he has left much of the major heroics to his son. But even in this state, he still knows that there are threats out in the Multiverse only he can handle—or, rather, he knows he needs a team to help him pick up where he’s begun to lack. People like Midnighter and Apollo are easy enough, but Manchester Black has tried to kill him on several occasions, and Enchantress is trapped in a hell of her own making. Even still, with a team of disparate talents, Superman can always save the day.
Between Superman and The Authority and the last season of Green Lantern that I covered the other month, Morrison’s final stories for DC have been interesting to see this far removed. For both, there’s a sense of finality—Superman facing his final adventures and Hal Jordan flying off into the unknown—but also a springboard. There are just further stories of these characters that can, and do, continue on into the future. As always, Morrison brings in their interpretation of any character, but they always leave just enough for the next person to come in with more ideas. They know how to leave the toy box open for the next person. And that’s what has made their work so fascinating over all these years. Morrison’s ambitions for story have been vast in every universe and character they’ve touched, but it’s always in service to the universe and character, and to whoever will pick up that mantle after their exit.
Superman and The Authority is a getting-the-band-together book. We watch all of the pieces fall into place before this short run ends to be continued in another issue of Action Comics another universe away. But what the creative team puts together here makes everything on the page feel comforting—that this is this particular Superman’s last story, but that there’s going to be so much more beyond that is the kind of send-off every character would want. It’s no kind of ending, but an invitation.
Get excited. Get together.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
with Dmetri Kakmi
Ugetsu Monogatari
Japan, 1953
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Cast: Masayuki Mori, Eitaro Ozawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Machiko Kyo, Mitsuko Mito
Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain) is based on two ghost stories taken from Ueda Akinari’s 1776 short story collection of the same name; the subplot about the peasant aspiring to become a samurai is based on an 1883 story by French author, Guy de Maupassant.
Not content with melding two different literary sources, Mizoguchi also blends two popular Japanese genres of the time — the period drama and the ghost story — to create a seamless whole that is simultaneously a beautiful supernatural tale as well as an effective anti-war film.
Set during Japan’s civil war (1568–1600), the story follows two married couples as their lives unravel in a time of violence and greed. One is a farmer/potter who wants to sell his wares so that he can buy his wife beautiful things. The other is his brother-in-law who, despite wifely protestations, wants to become a famous samurai. Although the men’s actions drive the narrative, it is the underlying, and more deeply felt theme about how women suffer during war time that lingers in the mind long after the film ends.
Telling cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa he wanted the film to unfold seamlessly like a scroll painting, Mizoguchi achieves a dreamlike quality that often tips into nightmare, through the use of roaming cameras and crane shots that shift perspective so that it’s difficult for the audience to stabilise itself in one locale or reality. By effortlessly sliding from realism to fantasy and back again, the film posits the notion that reality is a nominal state dependent on who is experiencing what and when. Beauty and horror, fantasy and reality can exist simultaneously.
Although beautiful to look at, with exquisite black-and-white images, the beauty never precludes a world in which ugliness and brutality exist. Thus the famous poolside seduction sequence between Genjuro and the ghostly Lady Wakasa is starkly contrasted with Miyagi fighting for her life at a roadside. Tobei’s triumph as a samurai is similarly juxtaposed with his wife Ohama being gang raped. For every sweet there is a bitter pill.
The shifts between the phantasmal and the real acts as the shocks or ‘jump scares’ one expects from a contemporary horror movie. But Mizoguchi’s shocks are real and believable; there is no relief in laughter. He means business and in its own way Ugetsu is as serious in its intent as the following year’s masterpiece, Sansho Dayu. That’s why the final moments of Ugetsu are so heartbreaking and leave a lasting impression.
One of the things I love about this film, and perhaps it can be said that this element is also the thing I treasure most in the horror genre, is the way it slides so effortlessly and invisibly between real and unreal.
The elision from one state to the other occurs early on when the two couples cross Lake Biwa. As the boat emerges from dense fog, there is no doubt that the characters have moved out of the everyday into the uncanny, even though everything that happens and is uttered subsequently is real and believable. Perhaps the touchstone in this sequence is when they pass a boat whose sole passenger warns them about the dangers ahead before drifting back into the miasma. It’s like encountering Charon on the River Acheron.
Readers might have noticed over the previous ten meditations that, as a general rule, the movies that mean most to me, the ones I return to often, are those that have one single element that is beautiful, a stylistic formalism, that qualifies them for the pantheon of greats.
Amid the chaos and brutality, Ugetsu is so resplendent with beautiful images that their presence highlights a key factor about cinema: it is an aesthetic experience, a matter of painting with light, and dreaming with the eyes open. When true artistry is brought to bear on all aspects of the process, the interplay can be a seduction; reason and the senses are overwhelmed. We are lifted out of the daily grind and carried to a stylised realm that has everything and nothing to do with the real world. That is precisely what Mizoguchi achieves here and this might well be the reason why I find cinematic iterations of the Japanese ghost story so irresistible.
Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Dictionary of a Gadfly (as The Sozzled Scribbler), The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). His gothic horror novel, The Woman in the Well, will be published in March 2025. He is now working on a crime novel called The Perfect Room.
On this week’s show, John King talks to Charles Bock about his extraordinary new memoir, how to make grief readable, the everyday struggles of writing and publishing, and the sacred perfection of the film of The Princess Bride.
Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
This episode’s interview was conducted in association with Miami Book Fair, which will take place November 22-24.
For excellent tattoos in the Orlando area, check out The Tattooed Society.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 646 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
“Sold!” I screamed, my fingers digging into the shoulders of Albert Simmons, the accountant for the Goose Lord gang. “I can’t replace those Beanie Babies. My whole life’s work ruined!”
I grabbed Albert by the back of his neck and pushed him head first through the door. The Revenging Manta was cleaning his blade on the sweat shirt on one of the dead bodies on the ground. I knocked Albert Simmons to his knees in front of the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando.
“They sold my Beanie Babies,” I said clenching my fists in the air.
—To be continued.
So I thought I’d watch a horror movie this Halloween, something I hadn’t seen before. I kept hearing about this one flick, 2024’s In a Violent Nature from director Chris Nash. The movie is reportedly a slasher movie with a fresh take and I’ve developed an affection for the genre over the years. I just recently rewatched the 1981 classic The Funhouse from director Tobe Hooper. The Funhouse is a slasher movie done right. In a Violent Nature is a slasher movie done wrong. So very wrong.
4:3 ASPECT RATIO
The year is 2024. Please stop shooting your movies in the 4:3 aspect ratio. Yes, in the old days, this matched the aspect ratio of most television sets and perhaps horror directors realized their movies would get more attention on home video so it made sense to cater that screen size. But all televisions have wide screens now. I miss my Sony WEGA as much as the next guy, but the cathode ray tube is not coming back and it’s time we all moved on.
LOTS OF WALKING
Upon cueing up In a Violent Nature, we overhear a few dopey college students talking about their big plans for the weekend. One of them removes a gold locket from a makeshift shrine and a few moments later, a bloated corpse rises from the ground. That corpse starts walking and we see him walking though miles of forest, mostly from the back so we can’t see his face. His name is Johnny and he’s the Jason Voorhees stand-in for this picture. We get to see him walk a lot, occasionally hacking up a victim in the process. So much walking.
THERE’S NO MUSIC
This movie has no soundtrack. This movie has no mood. You see, when a young co-ed is swimming in the lake all alone, you need some creepy music from a synthesizer or an orchestra to indicate to the viewer that something bad is about to happen. Occasionally, you get to hear some indie rock songs the college students have playing in the background, but mostly we just get the natural wood sounds with all of the birds chirping and what not. That’s the sort of thing I play on my sound machine to fall asleep to.
THERE IS NO ENDING
This movie does not have an ending. It is hinted that Kris, the last surviving member of the college students, is supposed to lead Johnny into a trap and set him on fire with the aid of a full gasoline container, but she chickens out. She leaves the locket that Johnny’s been searching for on top of the container hoping that will be enough to keep him away. She runs through miles of forests, injuring her leg in the process.
A middle-aged woman in a pickup truck rescues her and tells her a long story about how her brother survived a bear attack. We keep expecting Johnny to come out of the woods and attack, but he never does. This goes on for at least twenty minutes! And then the end credits roll with a rendition of “Black Flies” as sung by Tracy Newman from a 1965 episode of the PBS children’s show What’s New because why not. Why make a fun slasher movie when you can bore your audience to tears?
This is what movies are in 2024.
Photo by Leslie Salas.Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, episode 599, episode 642, episode 643, episode 644, and episode 645) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
Poppa Mandrill cheated death–
left two stones of charcoal,
the rug burned at one end
and a chair leg went missing
with him, but there was always
a deck of cards with thirteen
jokers and no hearts,
slack hearths–
stills of October
berry wine
almost made it okay.
Bitter fruits on bitter vines
that wove over the door
into the bedroom
decorated with yarn
and corn dolls of various wear,
icicle pickle shelves,
a cool ruin,
a cool run.
Knots and needles
cushion some heavy grief,
woe flowers.
Shovels
leaned in all the corners
and not one hole filled.
Poppa Mandrill Cheated Death
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Too Close for Comfort” – Carmen McRae
- “Mourning Dove” – Shannon Inouye
- “Percussion Fruit” – Shatter Hands
- “The Bionic Woman Main Title (Unused Version)” – Joe Harnell
- “Which Way” – G Jones
- “Nobody’s Nos” – The Residents
- “Free Mingus” – David Murray Quartet
- “Alabama” – Michael Hurley
- “She’s Not a Disco Lady (High Energy)” – La Bionda
- “Schismogenesis” – Atsuhsi Izumi
- “The Casket” – Jerry Goldsmith
- “Whispers” – Uèle Lamore
- “Sevemez Kimse Seni” – Güneri Tecer
- “Jazz Beef” – Euglossine
- “Nargo” – Large Unit, Paal Nilssen-Love
- “Prime Time Love” – The Carpenters
- “2001 Polka” – “Martin Mull & His Fabulous Furniture
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
After coming home from a long trip into the Midwest and Wisconsin, it’s only appropriate that I dive into a comic that’s been sitting on my shelf for three years that somehow takes place in a very lovely house on a lake in Wisconsin. It really is a picturesque manor by this lake with the mountains framing the land as the sun rises every morning. But then there aren’t mountains in Wisconsin, are there? And the stars at night haven’t been moving how they should. What have James Tynion IV, Álvaro Martínez Bueno, and Jordie Bellaire created in this Nice House on the Lake?
No one has heard much of Walter in a few years. The last time anyone really talked to him, he mentioned that he was going to be busy with work for a while. But then he just sent his friend group—roughly 10 people—an email asking them all to join him at a lake house in Wisconsin for a few days. They all haven’t seen each other in years, so it’ll be a nice chance to catch up. But after everyone arrives, they check their phones. Scenes out of every major city show fire raining from the sky as people combust and melt before their eyes on screen. The friends want to leave, check on their families, but Walter won’t let them. Walter hasn’t been honest with them for the decades they’ve known him as Walter is one of the aliens burning the world down.
The Nice House on the Lake is like a large Hieronymus Bosch painting—you feel like you’ve gotten the full picture from your first look, but the closer you look, the more you find. As this story slowly unfolds, we learn more about Walter and his group of friends. Each issue centers on one of those friends, showing us where they are at the end of the story as well as their friendship with Walter and the slow unraveling of their lives at the lake house. It’s a clever conceit as we know where this story is going to go, but we’re missing the full picture as our focus stays close to one person at a time. Each person in the series gives their own weight to the plot as a result of this focus so we really see those finer details as we march toward the final issue.
Tynion, Bueno, and Bellaire have given us a different kind of haunted house story—one in which the ghosts are all outside and the living are trapped within the house. They’ve also shown us the worst of misplaced intentions—no matter how much you love your friends, you can’t dictate their lives. It’s the phantom echoes of the old world that reverberate across a gilded cage for all of Walter’s friends—everyone he has ever really loved who now want nothing more than to see him dead for what he’s done to them.
Get excited. Get trapped.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
On this week’s show, Jeff Shuster and I delve into two miraculously trashy John Waters films from the 1970s, Pink Flamingos (1972) and Desperate Living (1977), to cap off our annual Schloctoberfesting.
Photo by Leslie SalasTEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
Check out my interview with John Waters back on episode 133.
For excellent tattoos in the Orlando area, check out The Tattooed Society.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 645 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Driblets of blood fell from my hand, a reminder of the sorry state of Waldo, my red and white striped compatriot in the fight against the Goose Lord and his gang, who was bleeding out from a bullet wound to the gut. I scrambled looking for gauze, but all I saw were rows of candy colored fentanyl pills. I saw a door that was ajar leading to a back room where I used to store my collection of Beanie Babies, no doubt now being sold on the black market by the delinquents who had taken over my museum.
— To be continued.
Hey, kids. It’s October and time for your Curator of Schlock to become the Curator of Shock! And I have some ghoulish tales for you this week starting with the 1972 zombie classic Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things from director Bob Clark. He’s the guy that directed the two Christmas classics: A Christmas Story and Black Christmas. Let’s see if he handles horror as well as the holidays.
The movie begins with a cemetery caretaker being overtaken by a couple of ghouls. How would you like to have that job? Keeping an eye on a cemetery on a deserted island in the middle of the night only to be accosted by a ghoul in a top hat. It doesn’t help that this cemetery is filled with people that couldn’t get buried in a regular cemetery, the mass murderers and psychopaths are who’s buried here. And those too poor to be buried in a proper cemetery. I learned that they just fill a hole with bodies, cover it with dirt, and proceed to fill up another hole. Isn’t that what happened to Mozart at the end of Amadeus?
We in the audience learn all of this from Alan (Alan Ormsby), owner of a well-respected theatre company in the big city. He’s forced his theatre company to sail over to this nearby island for dead criminals. What for you may ask? Hey, how about digging up a dead body? And if you don’t want to, you’re fired. You’ll never work as an actor in this town again! So his actors start digging and find a desiccated corpse in a top hat.
An actor named Jeffrey (Jeff Gilan) tries to lift the corpse up only to scream as the corpse attacks him. Alan laughs as the whole thing turns out to be a prank. The living dead man is just another actor from the company wearing some fancy prosthetics. Jeffrey complains that he peed his pants and the other actors want out, but Alan still has a few tricks up his sleeves.
Donning a blue wizard’s robes and reading from a book of spells, he explores Satan to raise the dead. He even has a corpse he named Orville handy to see if the spell worked, but no dice. Orville doesn’t come back to life and Alan looks like a fool. Still, there’s fun to be had ridiculing a corpse. Alan even has Jeffrey preside over a fake marriage ceremony between him and Orville. The acting group has had it and decides to leave the island with or without Alan, even if it costs them their jobs. There’s just one problem. The dead have indeed come back to life. Fancy that. Until next time, avoid reading from ancient grimoires and playing around with dead things.
Photo by Leslie Salas. Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
It is rumored that one
of George Armstrong Custer’s scouts
was a shaman in hiding.
While Custer slept
the night before Little Bighorn,
the scout traced his boots with
a black feather and a knife.
Custer is said to have cast no shadow the next day.
Boots and Black Feathers
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Paisley Dreams” – Tommy Roe
- “Procreation of the Wicked” – Lovely Little Girls
- “Friends With Benefits” – Jim O’Rourke (“Black Horse” – Gastr Del Sol on Spotify)
- “Backcasting” – Reverse Engineer
- “Bloodlust” – Rubber Oh
- “Alienation” – Tim Reaper, Kloke
- “Cheese and Onions” – Galaxie 500
- “Object of Unknown Function” – Brandon Seabrook
- “This Is Not a Prayer” – Uniform
- “Window’s Soul” – Above the Trees
- “Back Again” – Caroline Davis
- “Ya Gaus Ya Meeran” – Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
Would you believe there’s more in my pile than a dozen DC series that I haven’t gotten around to? My procrastination knows no bounds or publisher size. But, at the very least, this is a series that isn’t coming from 2021 or something I’ve yet to touch on at all. In fact, I did write about the first issue of it last year and have finally read through its six issue run. That series is, of course, Rare Flavours by Ram V and Filipe Andrade as they steep us into a story that goes beyond what I thought we would see in its first issue.
From its initial issue, Rare Flavours sets up the documentary that Rubin is looking to make about the food in his life—both the dishes themselves as well as the people who create them. Mohan, the man he messaged to help him create this film, has his reservations. Mohan knows next to nothing about Rubin, but still follows him on this journey through India and the dishes they encounter regardless. He’s aimless, and Rubin is providing something more in his life than laying in bed after the death of his mother. Through this series, we see them travel to disparate locations—small spice markets tucked away behind side-streets, mathania chili fields in the desert, the beaches of Mumbai—and uncover the foods hidden within. But then there’s also the issue of the demon hunters on their trail.
This, though, is a story about stories. And throughout the story we see different sides of Rubin and what people say about him—from the terror depicted in art to the scholar and poet whose stomach was seemingly bottomless to the man-eater who must be put down to the friend that helped a man discover what he was meant to do with food and art in his life. Much like with many of the recipes included throughout these six issues, there are embellishments and different degrees of content added depending on who is doing the telling. There is never one way to make raan just as there’s no one way to tell the story of Rubin or Mohan. What we can trust about these people or the food they’re documenting is simply by judging what is in front of us at the moment, be it enjoying the history of a daal fry or Rubin sharpening his knives over a tied-up vendor.
Rare Flavours knows that food and stories overlap—every time we cook, we’re telling the story of the recipe—but the way in which V and Andrade approach this idea means it can only exist as a comic. The interspersed recipes that help to drive the narrative show us how to make food, but also how to read the history of the people who make it. Food has never existed in a vacuum, there has always been someone there to create what is on the plate as well as someone there to enjoy it. In Rubin’s case, he’s been there to see the recipes develop over millennia, and enjoy the people doing the cooking.
Get excited. Get hungry.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Last Tuesday, my wife and I put on Twister for family movie night. We had thought our 7-year-old daughter was old enough for it, but alas, she was terrified and has been scared to go outside ever since. She cries when we ask her to come outside with us and is convinced that a tornado will come down from the sky. I’d like to think I am a creative person, but I’m running out of ideas to fix this. Any suggestions?
Inquisitively,
Fretting Mom
————————-
Dear FM,
You should’ve gone with the Milton Bradley game instead. It’s great for cocktail parties and really gets things going. Of course, your daughter might be equally traumatized after a night of Twister with the family. She’d probably fare better with Operation.
Remember that one, with the tweezers and stupid buzzing, and that guy’s big, red nose? My poor cousin, Melvin Perfect, never finished medical school. He couldn’t pass the final exam, a high-stakes game of Operation.
Perhaps the film’s special effects were just too convincing. Explain to your daughter that they are largely computer-generated and no more real than Bigfoot or the moon landing. Assuage her fears now before she becomes a tireless shut-in too afraid to go out for groceries and obsessing over germs with her virtual therapist.
Any tornado movie is an allegory of the trauma of farm life. My grandmother was raised on a farm and conveyed as much in her “Farm Life” column for Farmer’s Weekly Digest Magazine. Her prized cow Petunia was swept into a cyclone much like the famous scene from Twister. Grandma Perfect was never the same.
I sometimes think of a simple life on the farm. It’s a lot of hard work, though, and I loathe getting my hands dirty. Early mornings aren’t my thing either. Livestock also gives me the creeps. Just give me some steak and eggs, prole!
You can show your daughter that there are scarier things than tornadoes. War, famine, and disease come to mind, but that’s a lot for a child to comprehend. Put on the 1974 Charlton Heston disaster pic Earthquake. With any luck, that turkey of a film will make her less afraid of anything.
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
On today’s show, John and Samantha Nickerson catch up and discuss Miami Book Fair, Celebrity Poetry, the comic mask, and the acting careers of James Franco, Jack Nicholson, and Robin Williams in a totally linear conversation.
Samantha Nickerson at a Type In at the Kerouac Project of Orlando.NOTES
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 640 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
mourning and fog
around the pond
and around the will,
well,
you get the idea
but my ankle grinds
with each step
like gravel in my sock
and an invisible goose
honks
across the water
o mine is cooked
it toots the ripples
I hear they are good guards
maybe they can smell cancer
like a dog
Phlegmatic Mountains and Organized Decays
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “The Laughing Song” – Harry Owens and His Royal Hawaiians
- “Seaman’s Rap” – Robert Tomaro
- “Almost a Ghost” – Isik Kural
- “Transformation Ritual” – Dustin Wong, Gregory Uhlmann
- “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)” – Neil Young, Devo
- “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy” – Uncle Dave Macon
- “Continuum 6” – Nala Sinephro
- “Na Na” – Disasterpeace
- “Item 1a” – Rob Mazurek, Nick Terry
- “Concrete Curb Enforcement” – PeelingFlesh, Cold Hard Truth
- “Basquiat Energy” – LL COOL J
- “Chips for Tea” – The Laughing Apple
- “Peachy Keen-O” – Beth Anderson
- “Rock On The Ice” – Zodiaks
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
Another week, another lack of a major historical event, another opportunity for my stress ulcer to heal, and another dive into the backlogged pile that sits in the corner of my room watching me sleep. But then things just watching you sleep is rather mild compared to something creeping out of the dream realm and wreaking havoc on the world. Or those same things drawing you into a dream world where you’re tortured by dreadful visions from the deepest recesses of your mind. That, though, is where we find one of the most recent DC events in Knight Terrors by Joshua Williamson, Howard Porter, Brad Anderson, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Casper Wijngaard, Steffano Nessi, Frank Martin, and Troy Peteri.
Knight Terrors from beginning to end was a building-block event. This wasn’t the state change that something like last week’s Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths was, but it was still something that affects the DC Universe as a whole due to the massive scale of its villain, Insomnia. As this is a villain that works within the dream realm—but somehow outside Sandman Dream’s realm—the entire world must be asleep. And through sheer magical force, this is accomplished as every living, organic being on Earth is thrown into a deep slumber. The only people left to deal with the slowly deteriorating state of the world are the various robots, like Red Tornado and the Metal Men, and those who don’t need sleep—our main heroes, Deadman possessing Batman’s sleeping body and Wesley Dodds, the original Sandman.
Even if this event is mostly here to establish an anti-superhero thread that ties into the current Absolute Power event happening now, there’s still a fun through-line in this as our main characters are Deadman and Wesley Dodds. Outside of one-off stories, this isn’t the kind of pairing that we see in contemporary event comics. And just their presence—Deadman as this ghost inhabiting Batman’s body and The Sandman as a resurrected pulp hero who comes back because he knows how to put people to sleep. As a combination, there’s an absurdity there, but it works well to see the interplay between two characters that don’t get much of a spotlight. The creators here bring a prestige to the pair and who they are that we haven’t seen since Sandman Mystery Theatre ended in 1999. It only makes us want to see more of these kinds of background heroes return to showcase just how much storytelling potential still exists for them.
An event like Night Terrors reminds me of more small-scale events in the past like Convergence or Drowned Earth that take a small concept and expand upon it until a whole event seems to pop up. They’re there to bridge gaps in larger stories or help bring out characters we haven’t been paying attention to, but they’re the kind of story necessary to these longer-running superhero universes. Sometimes you just need a low-stakes story to get some readers interested in the larger universe and Knight Terrors is an easy series to get interested in.
Get excited. Get spooky.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
In this week’s replay episode, John talks with the writer, publisher, and podcaster, Michael Wheaton.
NOTES
Check out Michael Wheaton’s magazine and press, autofocus.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Listen to this replay here, or rick click to download.
I almost tripped over a severed arm as I made my way over to Waldo, my compatriot in the striped red and white shirt. He was clutching his gut as red started to bleed into the white stripes of his shirt.
“I’m dying, man,” Waldo said as he looked up at me with glazed eyes. I had my problems with Waldo, but I didn’t want him to get a visit from the Grim Reaper. Not that night and not by any other hand, but mine. I took off my shoe and removed one of my sweat socks.
“Press this against your wound,” I said. “We’ve got to stop the blood.”
— To be continued.
Tonight’s movie is 2022’s Talk to Me from directors Danny and Michael Phillippou. This movie features the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen in a movie. There’s a scene of a dying kangaroo by the side of the road. I don’t care if you want to show suffering puppies or kittens or goldfish, but leave the kangaroos out of it.
Fair warning. This movie may be in English, but it’s an Australian movie so while everyone is speaking English it ain’t like no kind of English I’ve ever heard. Put the captions on. You’ll thank me later. The movie begins with a bunch of raucous teens at a party and everyone has their phones out recording a guy named Cole attacking his brother before stabbing himself in the eye with a beer bottle. We’re then introduced to a young woman named Mia (Sophie Wilde) who is still grieving over the death of her mother, Rhea, who “accidentally” died when she took too many sleeping pills.
Mia decides to go to a party with her best friend, Jade (Alexandra Jensen), Jade’s boyfriend, Daniel (Otis Dhanji), and Jade’s young brother, Riley (Joe Bird). So what do a bunch of bored Australian teenagers do for fun? Well, they decide to mess around with a cursed object, severed hand cast in ceramic with Satanic writing all over it. That’s great. What better thing to do on a school night than try to summon Nyarlathotep. And be sure to have your smart phones out so you can record every grisly minute of it for your clout chasing.
It seems when you touch this hand, you see dead people. Disgusting, bloated, rotting dead people. If you say, “Talk to me,” the ghost will talk to you. If you say, “I let you in,” you allow the spirit to possess you. Apparently, you should only let the ghost possess you for a maximum of 90 seconds or bad things will happen. To sever the link, someone has to remove the ceramic hand from your grasp. That’s harder than it sounds as the ghosts really don’t want to return to the void. Mia decides to let herself get possessed, but the dopy teens can’t get the hand off her and she goes over the 90-second mark.
Things go from bad to worse as these little shits are treating spirit possession like huffing whippets. Eventually, little Daniel gets abused by violent spirits seeing if they can crack his head open in front of everyone. Mia’s dead mother reaches out to her to guide her through this new world of terror, but can this ghost be trusted? Kids, leave the Satanic objects alone and maybe play a good old-fashioned game of Monopoly.
Photo by Leslie Salas Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
willowed and winnied
those middle years
what a larkin
what stark thrushlings
magic hour crushed
slews of bright moments
candy corn rows of memory
starched felt gravities
brittle little tumes
of suns and sundowns
An almost blues and
the broken slide
we were almost too big for
but grandpa still grew pumpkins
for us and how that made
no impression until decades later
my hand taloned
thinking about playing spades
and drinking from jars under
the crowns of porch lights
Tuning While Moonbeams Play
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Alabama Jubilee” – Bob Blake aka/”Dr.Bob” (The Music Doctor)
- “Moonlight Bay” – Doc & The Mads
- “Do It Again” – Waylon Jennings
- “Silhouette” – Elias Stemeseder, Christian Lillinger
- “Music for Airports, 1/1 (Radio Mix)” – Bruce Brubaker
- “Rubber Shirt” – Frank Zappa
- “Runnin’ Wild (78 Version)” – The Chordettes
- “Reproduction” – Tab Hunter
- “Spiders in The Trees” – Caleb Landry Jones
- “Over the Rainbow” – Roy Smeck
- “Don’t Stop It Now” – Lewis Baloue
- “Moonlight Bay” – Doris Day with Paul Weston & His Orchestra & The Norman Luboff Choir
- “In Due Time” – Dreamcrusher
- “The Hag” – Landless
- “Type 3 – The Achiever, Pillar Coral” – Mia Pixley, Rob Finucane
- “Moonlight Bay” – American Quartet
- “HEALTH” – Leo Chang
- “Moonlight Bay” – The Darol Rice Silver Saxophones
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
After diving into the multiversal oddities of Justice League Incarnate last week—and not realizing it was a prequel book to the next big event—I dug deeper into my backlog. From its depths, I pulled the event at the end of that multiversal journey: Dark Crisis on Infinite Earthsby Joshua Williamson, Daniel Sampere, Alejandro Sánchez, Daniel Henriques, Danny Miki, Jack Herbert, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Cam Smith, Rafa Sandoval, Alex Guimarães, Romulo Fajardo Jr., Matt Hermes, and Tom Napolitano.
Dark Crisis is an Event Book, the first major Crisis of the decade, and feels like it from the onset as the Justice League essentially die in the opening page. Well, “die” in comic terms—they’re trapped in inescapable mental prisons that powers the villain Pariah’s cosmic engine, but that it’s own thing. But, after the events of Justice League Incarnate, the Great Darkness is beginning to seep into the Multiverse and, with the Justice League’s “death,” every f-tier villain is coming out to try to lay claim to the world. But it’s only Deathstroke’s own army of villains that has any success as he’s able to call upon the Great Darkness to pull more and more people under his influence. And all the while, a league of legacy heroes does what they can to keep the world from tipping into complete chaos before the final fight of the Multiverse pushes its way onto Earth-0.
At the core of this story, though, is the conflict and history between Dick Grayson and Slade Wilson. The two have been at each other’s throats since the latter’s inception in 1980 and we’ve seen this play out over the past forty years with one of the most recognizable versions of this happening in theTeen Titans animated series in the early 2000s.And it’s at that point that Dark Crisis feels like it’s an event for the people who grew up on the DC animated series. While it’s coming nearly twenty years after the Teen Titans series, it’s coming right on time for the people who had grown up watching it to become more curious about these characters from their childhood. To see that character conflict play out on such a grand scale makes that original conflict feel all the more significant.
Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths is a massive event that pulls on all types of continuity, but it’s also an event that’s helped to establish the infinite universes within the DC Universe again. And it’s in these infinite universes that more and more stories can be told that can act as jumping-on points for those readers that were little kids watching Teen Titans and Justice League Unlimited reruns on Cartoon Network. It took around twenty years for DC to get to this point after those series had been canceled and that weirdly dark era of the New-52 faded, but they’ve finally found a way to potentially get those kids into comics.
Get excited. Get In.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
When I first envisioned this piece I wanted to call it “J.D. Vance is a Fucking POG.”
Because it’s true: J.D. Vance is a fucking POG.
But to be fair, most people on this planet could be called POGs.
Including myself during this particular point in time (though this wasn’t always the case).
So, the brand sort of loses its sting.
Unless, perhaps, we come to a better understanding of a few things.
For instance:
What is a POG?
For those who don’t know, it’s an acronym used by the U.S. military’s infantry to describe anyone who isn’t infantry — a person other than a grunt.
It’s a term of contempt.
Of course there are obvious and often unspoken exceptions — special forces, tankers, engineers, even attack pilots — and perhaps that’s a contradiction, but generally, “POG” means someone who isn’t in danger, who isn’t typically in the shit.
And of course, it goes without saying that the wars of the Global War on Terror sidestepped this rule on many an occasion, making it so POGs — be they motor-t or maintenance or other non-combat personnel on the roads of a place like Iraq — would find themselves very much in the role of a grunt, firing M16s back at enemy shooting AKs and RPGs and mortars at them, rendering the derision of the term “POG” nearly pointless, at least in those moments — and this said nothing about the non-infantry types attached to grunt units or in direct support of them, the intrepid chaplains and corpsmen and civilian correspondents who shared many of the same dangers, or the artillerymen and drone pilots and other rear echelon personnel who contributed to a great deal of the killing.
I guess what I’m saying is that POG is a complicated word that has flexible uses.
So, yes, J.D. Vance is a POG. Big deal.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t hold that against someone.
The term made more sense when I was in the infantry, sleeping in the rain, coming into base caked with mud to see all of them in their offices, drinking coffee and wearing crisp, clean uniforms, well-rested and fed. It was hard not to feel a bit of resentment in those moments. A bit of anger.
Likewise, coming back into the wire after being shot at and shooting back, after stepping over dead bodies and seeing your friends killed or badly injured — it could thicken into something resembling hate.
But outside of the fear and the pain and the tunnel vision that comes with it, my logical brain always came to the same conclusion, always said the same thing: tough shit. That they had chosen their path, and I had chosen mine.
I can’t stand here and logically fault someone for avoiding service in the Marine Corps infantry.
It only makes sense.
Nor can I blame someone for avoiding combat duty in nothingburger wars like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam.
Historical hindsight has shown such a dodge to be exceedingly prudent.
However, I do make exceptions.
Namely for hypocrites who wanna run their mouths and start new wars long after the point at which they’ll be put in any personal danger.
Case in point: Ted Nugent, the rock and roll star who claimed to have avoided Vietnam service by pissing and shitting himself for days, snorting meth and refusing to bathe till he was crusted in a coat of dried excrement prior to appearing before his draft board — the same Ted Nugent who, years later, called people “weenies” and “insulated, spineless cowards” for opposing the war in Iraq.
Other prominent examples include Dick Cheney, recipient of five draft deferments, and George W. Bush, who served in the Texas Air National Guard to avoid combat in Vietnam — men who, having grown old and having gained the reins of power, must’ve decided that they did want to go to war after all — just as long as they could fight it vicariously through 18- and 19-year-olds such as myself.
The list goes on, but in general, these are the types of men I’m talking about — and this brings me back to J.D. Vance.
Yes, he did serve four years in the Marines.
And yes, he did deploy to Iraq.
But J.D. Vance was a POG.
And unlike a lot of POGs who served in Iraq, he did not see any combat.
Again — I don’t typically hold that against someone.
But — slimy opportunist that he is — he just had to run his mouth.
In particular about vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, who retired in 2005 after 24 years of service in the Minnesota National Guard.
Walz was an artillery guy who never saw combat, never even deployed to a combat zone. Instead, he retired a few months before his guard unit got orders for Iraq. Then he ran for Congress on an anti-war ticket.
For this, Vance has essentially called him a coward.
When Walz misspoke about assault rifles like the one he “carried to war,” Vance leveled charges of stolen valor — something usually reserved for people wearing uniforms and decorations they didn’t earn.
Now I’d like to think that most intelligent people see this for what it is: Vance playing politics, being a petty, pedantic piece of shit who’s shown himself willing to say and do anything for power.
But I’m not so sure these days.
Say what you will about Walz; I’ve made it clear I’m not going to hold it against anyone for opting out of a pointless war like Iraq — especially when they’re on record being against it.
While his statement about the assault rifle might’ve been an accident, while it might’ve been on purpose, I don’t really fucking care — nor do I feel one ounce of pride or excitement for either candidate’s status as an enlisted “veteran” (a term I have my own beef with, not to be confused with “combat veteran,” but that’s the subject of another essay).
I don’t think military service is indicative of good political leadership anymore than business ownership is.
And I can’t stress enough how I don’t really hate or dislike or want to disrespect POGs; indeed, watching Russia step on its own dick in Ukraine, especially during that early push on Kiev, has given me much more respect for all those logistics nerds.
But I can’t help feel the young grunt inside me chafe, listening to Vance disparage Walz.
Vance, attached as he was to the Marine air wing, far from the main danger, a combat correspondent who never saw combat.
Vance, who might’ve even gone outside the wire once or twice, but never got bit.
Vance, joined now at the hip with a career criminal who avoided the Vietnam draft because of bone spurs, a man who claims to have no respect for POWs or anyone who fights and dies in America’s wars.
Vance, really one to talk–and I say this with total recognition of irony, but in response to the running of his mouth: to listen to him split hairs about the service of another man who served 20 years longer than he did, to hold his own service up and imply it to be of higher quality, to frame himself as a braver man because he took photos of pilots behind the walls of highly secure compounds–well, it brings out the infantryman in me and the flexible uses of our favorite acronym, so that I can mean it with maximum prejudice and the highest level of scorn when I say that in judgments about combat service, while I understand it’s a free country, maybe he should just shut the fuck up, because J.D. Vance is a fucking POG.
Fred Lambert is a writing tutor whose work has been featured in Ghost Parachute, War, Literature & the Arts, and After Action Review. He lives in his hometown of Orlando, Florida.
Dear Dr. Perfect,
I’ve suffered from insomnia for the past two months.
I’m going crazy.
I’ve tried everything! Melatonin gummies, long runs for exercise, and working myself to exhaustion.
Nothing.
On most days I get about 1-2 hours of sleep.
Any ideas?
Sincerely,
Anguished Insomniac
Dear Insomniac,
Have you tried reading War and Peace? Anything by Tolstoy would do. Oliver Twist is another snoozer. Maybe something more contemporary like that Da Vinci Code series or one of those excruciating political biographies, such as Winston Churchill: The Fat Drunk Years. Though don’t fall asleep beneath its 4,000 pages.
Purchase some new pillows, nice ones that spruce up the place. Take a deep breath, down two shots of whiskey, turn on CNBC, and call it a night.
If that doesn’t work, I know a guy who’ll knock you out in one punch for $20. He once worked as Mr. T’s stunt double in the 1983 film D.C. Cab. He’s spry for a septuagenarian on steroids.
I like to place lighted candles around and play some Leonard Cohen. Until you’ve tried that, you don’t know what you’re missing.
Our beds are the best place imaginable. How tortuous to find little solace in them. I used to lie awake and wonder how much more perfect I could be. This riddle within a riddle was responsible for many sleepless nights, but then my best thinking happens at night.
For example, I’ll have an idea for the right drapes for my lounge. Inspiration seizes me. That’s why I keep a notepad and pen on my nightstand. Other times, I’ll jot down portions of my monologue for my one-man show at the largest of the black box theaters in the secret headquarters of the Drunken Odyssey. Check out Love Me Not. It’s got rave blurbs from the underground theater press.
My editor who runs The Drunken Odyssey has threatened me if we don’t recoup the production cost, which is high somehow despite being staged in a black box theater. Please come. Buy tickets at .
The stress is frankly keeping me up at night.
I suspect you are exhibiting signs of restless mind syndrome. That, or an inherent fear of sleep. The path to recovery begins with acceptance. Start accepting things as they are.
There’s hope for you yet, anguished insomniac. You can and will fall asleeeeeeeeee—
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
On today’s show, John talks about poetry and bookselling and MFA programs and AWP conferences with Alex Gurtis, whose latest chapbook, When the Ocean Comes to Me, is now out with Bottlecap Press.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 640 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
On this episode, John speaks with the screenwriter and novelist Jennifer Manocherian about building characters, planning stories, and the discoveries made while drafting.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 637 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
with Dmetri Kakmi
The Curse of the Cat People
USA, 1944
Director: Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch
Cast: Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph, Anne Carter
The Curse of the Cat People is among the finest glimpses cinema offers into the workings of a child’s mind, as well as being an astute study of loneliness and trauma. It is also a shimmeringly beautiful film—the visual beauty being not merely superficial but manifesting a deeper understanding of the horror genre’s transcendent or metaphorical qualities.
Conceived as a sequel to Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 Cat People, the original title was ‘Amy and Her Friend’—hardly captivating but it gives us a glimpse into the kind of film Lewton wanted to make when he and Dewitt Bodeen worked on the script. The result is a sequel that goes out of its way to pick up the threads from the previous film. The only problem is Curse was made two years after the original, while six years have elapsed in the cinematic universe.
Robert Wise replaced Gunther von Frisch as director when the latter fell behind schedule. Wise had previously worked as editor on Lewton’s films and, in a long career, he went on to direct works that display the breadth of his versatility, from musicals to horror and science fiction.
Watching Curse for the first time reminded me of audience responses to a much later Wise horror movie. As the credits rolled on the reincarnation thriller Audrey Rose (1977), a woman seated next to me in the cinema said, ‘That wasn’t scary, but it was very good.’ The same applies to Curse. Not particularly frightening. But very satisfying indeed.
At heart, Curse is a sinister fairytale that closes the circle for Kent Smith’s character, Oliver Reed. After the death of his first wife Irena Dubrovna, he marries former co-worker Alice Moore and they now have a child. Six-year-old Amy is introverted and her father fears she is too much like his former wife.
‘She could almost be Irena’s child,’ he declares rather insensitively to his new wife.
‘Except she’s not,’ snaps down-to-earth Alice. ‘She’s my child.’
As becomes evident, his inability to move on from his first wife drives the story. The shadow engulfs the entire family, especially his daughter.
‘Sometimes I feel there’s a curse on this family,’ says Alice.
There is, but it is not what an audience might anticipate from the lurid title. Parents’ secrets can harm a child. So it is with Amy. Unable to connect with her father and caught up in his psychic maelstrom, Amy turns to an invisible friend, who, as it turns out, is her father’s dead ex-wife.
French actress Simone Simon returns as Irena Dubrovna, the tormented cat woman from the first film. Pitching the performance somewhere between fairy godmother and phantom, she is childlike, fey and wistful — aware that her duty is to protect Amy, while being mindful of the fact there is unfinished business with her ex-husband.
Dewitt Bodeen’s script is replete with Freudian and Jungian psychology. The undercurrent of repressed memory and a child’s perspective of the world manifest on screen thanks to cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca’s sophisticated understanding of cinematic language. It adds layers to the story, as well as providing visual pleasure for the viewer. In creating some of the most strikingly beautiful images in American cinema, Musuraca does not rely on overt special effects. Rather, he uses subtle shifts in light and dark to guide an enraptured Amy out of the real into the unreal.
Fulfilling the film’s horror remittance, Amy’s imagination is extended beyond her own backyard when she encounters a ‘witch’ and her ‘spell-bound daughter’ in a nearby house haunted with its own mother/daughter psychodrama. It is here that the film lets fly with the old dark house tropes. Unsettling shadows, strange and unusual camera angles, entrapping staircases and weird stuffed animals as Amy wonders into the dark woods of her own imagination. Horror elements are further supplemented with references to Washington Irving’s Legend of the Headless Horseman, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem ‘The Unseen Playmate’.
The question of whether Irena’s ghost is real or a figment of imagination is left unanswered until the final frame. Even then the film insists that daydreaming or reverie can create another kind of reality, one that is as valid as daily life.
By claiming to believe in her invisible friend (even when he doesn’t), Amy’s father is able to close one chapter in his life and open another. As Irena fades from view in the snowbound backyard, we know that Amy no longer needs her. And her father is free to move on.
Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Dictionary of a Gadfly (as The Sozzled Scribbler), The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). His gothic horror novel, The Woman in the Well, will be published in March 2025. He is currently working on a crime novel called The Perfect Room.
I had no idea that the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, would throw exploding gas pellets to the floor, enveloping the room in smoke as we tried to subdue some fentanyl pushers. I could hear Waldo screaming in the background as gunfire went off. I could see the shadow of Edwige, my kangaroo companion from my misadventures in North America, boxing the ruffians that had turned my life’s work, The Museum of Schlock, into a haven for the most notorious gang in Central Florida.
— To be continued.
Tonight’s movie is 1971’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet from director Dario Argento. For some reason, this one doesn’t get the attention it deserves. It’s the third part of his animal trilogy. I guess flies can’t really be considered animals, but I think I might be missing the forest for the trees or the trees for the forest? Whatever. On with the review.
Our movie begins with a drummer named Roberto (Michael Brandon) jamming with his band only to notice a mustached man wearing sunglasses and a fedora staring at him through a distant window. Roberto has seen this man before, following him through a crowded street one day or driving right behind him another day. As Roberto says goodnight to his band mates, he notices the mustached man staring at him behind a corner before walking away. Roberto has had it and decides to chase after him.
Roberto confronts the mustached man in an abandoned theater, but the man denies having followed him. The mustached man pulls a knife on Roberto who’s having none of it. Roberto tries to wrench the knife away from the mustached man, but accidentally stabs him in the process. Bleeding out, the mustached man stumbles and falls into the orchestra pit. While Roberto looks down on the body, the theater lights flash on and someone wearing a goofy mask snaps some photos of the guilty Roberto before sneaking back into the balcony.
Why can’t this ever happen on Grantchester? Why can’t the dashing young Anglican priest accidentally stab some creeper while a psychopath in a Howdy Doody mask looks on. Because that’s reality! The world is a freak factory and it needs to invade 1960s Cambridge. Anyway, Roberto returns home and is nearly strangled to death by an intruder that warns him that this is only the beginning. Then he gets knocked out. Roberto later confides in his wife, Nina (Mimsy Farmer), that he may have murdered someone which is why he can’t go to the police about the intruder.
With no other recourse, Roberto turns to God-I mean his friend, Godfrey. Godfrey (Bud Spencer) is a bearded world-weary man who advises Roberto to hire a detective. Roberto hires a PI named Gianni (Jean-Pierre Marielle) who Wikipedia describes as a flamboyant detective. Well, it seems that Gianni can’t get many clients due to his “flamboyant” nature and the fact that he’s never solved a mystery. Still, he assures Roberto that the odds are he’s bound to solve a case at some point.
Did I mention that the psycho tormenting Roberto has been murdering local women? I can’t imagine any of this will work out well for Roberto as he has a recurring dream about getting executed in a public square by getting his head lopped off. I won’t spoil the end, but with a beginning hook this good you’ll want to keep watching until the end.
Photo by Leslie Salas. Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
The rock from space had more names
than fragments: angular rhombus,
H-chondrite, UFO, 1685 Toro,
speck of solar nebula, brute blood of the air.
A glossary booming and unwholed
across the Alabama sky.
We could call it homewrecker,
though the roof was repaired
and the radio replaced.
Some call it a hammer.
If her hip the anvil, then
the heart the broken crucible,
untempered and cooling.
“I feel bruised,” she said.
Though the hip healed, the mark
never did. The sudden blow too baffling
to navigate for even her fifteen minutes.
Pieces of life shed like space dust,
unable to enter the atmosphere
of the after.
(For Ann Elizabeth Fowler Hodges)
Stars Fell on Sylacauga
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Stars Fell on Alabama” – Percy Faith
- “Common Loon” – Xiu Xiu
- “Asleep at the disco” – Luca Sguera, Giovanni Iacovella, Joe Rehmer, Arch
- “Primitive London 1” – Basil Kirchin
- “Stars Fell on Alabama” – Frank Sinatra
- “The Horse Has a Voice (feat. Theon Cross)” – Matthew Herbert, London Contemporary Orchestra
- “I Skovens Dybe Stille Ro” – Teis Semey
- “Elizabeth Montgomery’s Face” – The Embarrassment
- “Stars Fell on Alabama (Live)” – Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette
- “Steady On” – Human Resources
- “And the Red Light was my Mind” – Alec Goldfarb, David Leon
- “Plastic Skank” – Rolo McGinty, Rob Miller
- “Stars Fell on Alabama” – Sun Ra and His Arkestra
- “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Closing Theme)” – Jack Nitzsche
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
After looking at The Power Fantasy the other week, I had another look at the ever-dwindling backlog still gathering dust on my shelf. I assumed the issues of Wonder Woman I went through were the oldest thing in the pile, but there’s a series from Kieron Gillen tucked away under some other series that I’ve somehow put off reading for over three years now. So now it’s time to dive into Gillen, Esad Ribić, Guiu Vilanova, Matthew Wilson, and Clayton Cowles’ take on Jack Kirby’s perennially overlooked pantheon, Eternals.
Ikaris is an arrow. Like many Eternals, he has a specialty and his is finding a target. It isn’t that he’s able to track like a hunter, but rather he can hit what needs to be hit. And he does hit very hard. But being able to hit hard can only carry him so far as others—Sprite, Sersi, Kingo, Thena, Druig, etc.—are much more diplomatic or cunning or sneaky. However, when Thanos reappears after being dumped into a black hole and the Machine that keeps Earth intact begins to malfunction, hitting hard will do. But it’s here that the Eternals all learn something about what they are—while they’re immortal due to their ability to resurrect within the Machine, their new life comes at the cost of another life somewhere on Earth. Couple this with their temporary inability to resurrect while the Machine was on the fritz, and Ikraus can no longer be the arrow that breaks against a wall only to come back over and over. There is a cost to consider.
The two-pronged approach to having the Eternals confront mortality is what makes their story work. These characters by design have always occupied the realm of myth and parable. By focusing our attention on Ikarus and his need to protect one person, a kid named Toby Robson, we leave that mythic realm and return to ground-level realism. And we’re grounded further when, after keeping the Machine from imploding, Ikarus sacrifices himself and returns to life to find that Toby’s life was the one taken in exchange for his own. For the first time, the immortals have to consider what it’s like to live a mortal life as they’re programmed to be heroes. Every encounter carries the weight of someone else’s sacrifice and we watch as this new sense of fallibility paints how they interact with the world.
Gillen, Ribić, Vilanova, Wilson, and Cowles show us what can make something immortal so compelling. And in doing that, they show us just what makes comics something we continually come back to read. Even with the perpetual nature of many of these characters, we see the creators reflected in every page as they’re the current personality the characters inhabit. It’s a cycle that never seems to end, but it’s the kind of cycle that we return to over and over because in every mythic tale of someone immortal, there’s always the kernel of humanity at its core.
Get excited. Get resurrected.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
On this episode, John speaks with the poet Tiffany Midge about the vibrant, often overlooked roles of humor and entertainment in poetry. They also talk about James Cameron’s Aliens, popular culture as metaphor, and serial killers.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 637 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Revenging Manta, Edwige, Waldo, and I leaped from the elevator, ready for action. There were about a dozen goons wearing gas masks and rubber gloves. They were sorting multi-colored fentanyl pills and filling empty boxes of cracker jacks with them. One of them noticed us and whipped out a Beretta Tomcat. The first shot rang out, but the Revenging Manta was wise to the danger. He threw an exploding gas pellet to the floor.
Smoke enveloped the room.
— To be continued.
Tonight’s movie is 1971’s The Cat o’ Nine Tails from Dario Argento. This is the second in what became known as Dario Argento’s “Animal Trilogy.” It’s a Giallo movie starring James Franciscus, Karl Malden, and Catherine Spaak. Some of you kids might remember Karl Malden from Billion Dollar Brain with Michael Caine. He plays a blind man named Franco “Cookie” Arnò. He gets the nickname “Cookie” from his niece, Lori (Cinzia De Carolis), because cookies are sweet and she thinks he’s sweet.
Franco sort of witnesses a murder. He overhears some suspicious activities from his balcony and his niece informs him that a man he had passed by earlier has been murdered when she sees his picture on the front page of the newspaper. This was a rather gruesome death. The victim was shoved into an oncoming train and you get see the body become a twisted, tangled mess. Franco is a crossword puzzle maker, but that doesn’t stop him from wanting to become an amateur sleuth. For the makers of the Hallmark Channel’s Crossword Mysteries movies starring Lacey Chabert, Dario Argento was doing it in style decades ago. Come up with some new material!
Franco joins up with a reporter named Carlo who’s investigating the murder. At this point, I’m not going to pretend that the movie has completely lost me because it has. I can’t follow Giallo movies half the time. I get the idea that the killer is on to their investigation and targeting the two newspaper men. There’s a scene where Carlo is entertaining Anna, a lady friend, and offers her some milk. Turns out the milk has been poisoned, but Carlo figures it out before Anna takes her first sip and slaps it out of her hand.
There’s a scene where Franco and Carlo have to go into a morgue containing one of the murder victims. The woman had a locket which contained a vital clue, but she was buried with it. Carlo breaks into the coffin while Franco stays at the entrance. It’s around this time that I begin to wonder if Franco is really blind or if he’s faking it. Maybe he’s the killer, but that theory is put to rest when the actual killer drags Franco away from the entrance and seals poor Carlo in the crypt with a faulty flashlight.
Apparently, Dario Argento does not care for The Cat o’ Nine Tails, thinking it one of his lesser efforts. Hey, any movie that features a psychopath getting pushed down an elevator shaft and gripping for dear life as the cables that burn his palms so bad that steam comes off them can’t be all bad.
There are worse ways to spend a summer evening.
Photo by Leslie Salas. Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
Her hand cups the rain
while my ears cup her laughter.
Then, daylight thunder.
Precious Memories
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Precious Memories” – Sister Rosetta Tharpe
- “Look at the Colors” – Little Folkies
- “i like the way you kiss me” – Vitamin String Quartet
- “Stroganina” – Raw Fish, Teis Semey, Giovanni Iacovello
- “Precious Memories” – Susan Raye
- “Helpless” – Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
- “Amen 2’” – Jill Fraser
- “Hi-Eenktum Daddy-O” – Norman Blake, Ana Cristina Cash, John Carter Cash
- “Cooking Breakfast For the One I Love” – Fanny Brice
- “Cold Comfort” – Justin Townes Earle
- “Threads Gather” – Phillip Golub, Alec Goldfarb
- “A Daydream (Raw)” – A Giant Dog
- “Pushing the Car” – Krzysztof Komeda
- “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” – Ryuichi Sakamoto
- “Precious Memories” – The Stanley Brothers
- “Pithecanthropus Erectus” – Mingus Big Band
- “Kiss Me Once And I’ll Kiss You Twice” – Gary Wilson
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
Earlier last year, I had looked at the first issue of Spirit World in conjunction with the recent re-launch of Shazam. I had looked at the ways in which each series approached magic and how they differed in their overall structures. Since then, Spirit Worldhas reached its six-issue conclusion and showed us how Alyssa Wong, Haining, Sebastian Cheng, and Janice Chiang wrapped up Xanthe Zhou’s story and established a new pantheon within the DC Universe.
Since we had last left Xanthe, they were on the search for Cassandra Cain in the titular spirit world and had exorcised an old acquaintance of John Constantine’s—who had turned into a mass of bitter souls known as a Collective—before being reunited with the mother who had long assumed they died. After this, we have an almost vertical escalation in tension as we’re introduced more fully the spirit world and the gods and demons who reside within. It is a world that is like an odd mirror to our own—a built-up, urban environment with all manner of spirit that looks to eat the humanity from your bones or concoct deals for your blood. But even more threatening is the massive Collective that has been hunting the streets and absorbing more souls into its malcontented mass. It’s even torn its way into the line of souls waiting for reincarnation to consume them before Xanthe, Constantine, and Batgirl are able to exorcise the forgotten spirit at its core.
I mentioned how Spirit World handles its magic in the previous article, but what it does as the story progresses is push this new magic and world forward. Toward the end of the story, we’re introduced to the Jade Court—a collective of deities that oversee the spirit world and control the flow of reincarnation. And the introduction of this pantheon highlights one of the more enjoyable things with DC’s broader universe: the canonization of every religious practice and pantheon that has ever existed. Instead of having to decide on which ones hold weight in the universe, it just lets everything happen and the creators can do with that freedom what they wish. For Spirit World, Wong, Haining, Cheng, and Chiang work syncretic religious ideas to bring together Taoist, Buddhist, and Chinese folk religions to make the Jade Court feel like a pantheon that is part of a broader religious tradition, but also able to slot right into the universe.
Spirit World knows how to build. In each issue of this series, we’re introduced to new characters, concepts, and ideas that make this series feel like a jumping-off point for the team to return back to later. Or it’s a point for other creators to explore the world further. For a miniseries in a broader comic canon, it’s helping to make more than just another character study or one-off conflict—it’s giving us more depth to the world that we’re already familiar with.
Get excited. Get offering.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
On this week’s show, John talks to Jeff Alissandrelli about his new novel, And Yet. We discuss the existential torment of desire, the problem of overthinking the problem of overthinking, and the role of desire in literature, psychology, and history.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 636 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
When I try to put
words to the rhythm of love’s
hum, I find it easier
to point to visual choices–
a shared DVD of Rear Window,
slightly worn boxing gloves,
the rabbit who kept a foot.
Carolina in the Morning and Other Amorous Delights
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “I Am Controlled By Your Love” – Helene Smith
- “NOBODY KNOWS” – Killer Mike, Anthony Hamilton
- “Nils Klim” – Mari Kvien Brunvoll, Stein Urheim, Moskus, Anja Lauvdal, Hans Hulbækmo, Frederk Luhr Dietrichson
- “Carolina in the Morning” – Gloria DeHaven (Judy Garland on Spotify)
- “The Red and Black (Live)” – Minutemen
- “The Woman Is Perfected” – Gisburg
- “Dreamin’” – Common, Pete Rock
- “Hashtag” – Gillian Welch, David Rawlings
- “Something About You” – Peter Cat Recording Co.
- “Carolina in the Morning” – Freddy Cannon
- “String Around a Stick (Live)” – Bob Log III
- “ONYO OCOLO” – Ekuka Morris Sirikiti
- “Weird Moments” – Louis Cole, Metropole Orkest, Jules Buckley
- “Been Ridin’ So Long” – Greg’s Electric Song Salad
- “The Muse of Time” – Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters
- “Image of Love” – Belong
- “Carolina in the Morning” – American Quartet
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
Another week, another major release by a beloved author. It does feel like we’re getting more and more new series that feel essential to the medium as art and writing are in a near constant fight against the encroachment of computer generated slop. But then that’s what makes these series feel all the more special as audiences can see just what human hands are capable of making without using more power and water than a small country. Ironic considering the characters in Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard, and Clayton Cowles’s new series, The Power Fantasy, can decimate a small country with barely a thought.
A person with power is nothing new. A person with a superpower is. And those six people individually have the power of a country’s nuclear arsenal. Since the 40s, these people have existed and bent the world around them as they walked. But at no point has any of them gone so far as to use their powers to their fullest extent. All of them know the consequences of that. Etienne Lux ruminates on the potential to wipe the minds of millions to achieve a kind of world peace in 1966—an extreme to prevent nuclear disaster. But the angel Valentina quashes that plan. There’s an ethical balance that Lux is looking to achieve with their powers. He has grand ideas on how to make the world a more stable place with so many earth-ending people in it. When we see him again in 1999, he’s still looking to keep that balance.
But a world with six people who each have their own brand of nuclear capabilities makes for a world where our leaders are even more paranoid than during the Cold War. A nuclear superpower has fail safes and lines of communication and the implicit understanding that a single launch will mean the end of the world should they push the button. But we’re now dealing with people who have none of that. They’re people. They’re impulsive, vain, and retaliatory. They retaliate to one mortal wound with the death of the president, most of his cabinet, and all of their families. The core of the book is the ethical quandary that Lux brings up in the first few pages of this first issue—that the existence of people who can destroy the world on a whim is immoral and that their death should be the first step to achieving some kind of peace. And yet, after posing that question, they’re all still alive more than thirty years later.
A book like The Power Fantasy is the kind of thing I’ve been waiting for without realizing it. I’ve been in a reading slump—as evidenced by the articles I’ve written about confronting my piled-up series—and from the first issue this feels like the hook I needed to want to dive into comics again. The considerations taken on every page by Gillen, Wijngaard, and Cowles makes this a series that we’re going to be writing about for the next decade.
Get excited. Get ethical.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
On this week’s show, John talks to his friend Michael Wheaton about how to live in think in a media-saturated American life, which is the subject of his new book, Home Movies, available through Bunny Books.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
Check out my previous interview with Michael back on episode 537, or our commentary on Children of Men back on episode 438.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 635 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
As Edwige, Waldo, Manta, and I rode down the elevator, we had a moment. Waldo took out a pack of Bubblicious. It was the watermelon flavor, my favorite. He first offered a piece to The Revenging Manta, but the ninja vigilante held up his hand to pass on the offer. He offered a piece to me and I asked for two, one for myself and one for Edwige, my kangaroo companion. We all chewed and blew bubbles, reveling in the pops and cracks our mouths produced. But that moment soon came to an end as the elevator dinged and the door opened. I swallowed my gum.
— To be continued.
Sorry folks. I forgot that August was Giallo Month when I turned in my column on The Running Man. I remedy that this week with 1970’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage from director Dario Argento. This is the big one, the movie that kicked off Italy’s Giallo obsession in the 1970s and America’s Giallo obsession in the 2020s. While not the first Giallo ever made, it was the one that kind of cemented the genre. Did I mention that this movie features a score composed by Ennio Morricone?
Our movie begins with a young American writer named Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) getting a check for a book he’d written on rare birds so he can leave Italy with his girlfriend, Julia (Suzy Kendall). Sam wanted to be the next American literary sensation, but Italy seemed to give him a severe case of writer’s block. And then he witnesses a woman being stabbed by a masked killer in an art gallery.
The entrance to this art gallery makes patrons go through two electronic glass doors. Sam goes through the first glass door, but the killer manages to lock both sets of doors before fleeing, forcing Sam to watch the woman writhing in pain as he can neither enter to help her or leave and seek aid. After pleading with a passerby to call the police, detectives show upon the scene. The woman survives her wound, but an Inspector Morosini (Enrico Maria Salerno) notices a similarity between this murder and other killings in the area.
Back at the police station, Sam is grilled for details. He feels he’s helped the police as much as he can, but Inspector Morosini confiscates his passport and wants Sam to stay in town for a few more days. On his way home, Sam is almost beheaded by someone welding a meat cleaver, but the would-be assassin hits a pipe and scampers off when an old lady shows up. He tells his girlfriend of the day’s events and she laughs it off.
The police continue to to bungle the investigation as Sam goes looking for clues on his own. More murders occur and Sam gets into more danger the closer he gets to the truth. A painting of a young woman getting attacked is key to the solution of this mystery. I can never follow along with things, but I’ve heard it said that Giallo isn’t always supposed to make sense. The Bird with Crystal Plumage is part one of Argento’s “Animal Trilogy.” The Cat o’ Nine Tails will be next.
Photo by Leslie Salas Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
The sun cuts down, bright
as Prince Adam’s Power Sword.
I wince but can’t smile,
a juvenile
Skeletor, no cackle, bored
of all this heavy light.
Spears of Late Summer Grass
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Drinking Song (Drink, Drink, Drink)” – Touch of Class
- “Paradise Ocean Club” – Tupperwave, Ed.
- “Alabama Jubilee” – Jerry Reed
- “The Breeze and I” – The Emperors
- “G-dzilla G’dolah” – WHY?
- “Pride I” – Meshell Ndegeocello
- “Laid Waste” – Poison Ruïn
- “Thrashing It Out” – Simon Fisher Turner
- “He Who Lives In Fear” – Herbie Hancock
- “Piece No. 5” – Erland Dahlen, John Paul Jones
- “Top” – Klara Lewis
- “Preludio a Colón (Live)” – Mitsuko Shirai
- “Ruby Church” – X
- “La suivante” – René Lussier, Érick D’orion, Robbie Kuster, Martin Tétreault
- “Wave Hill” – Guy Klucevsek and the Bantam Orchestra
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
Going deeper into my unread pile, we find—wait, Gerard Way just released a new comic, so we’re shifting a bit this week. While we haven’t seen a new comic from the My Chemical Romance singer since 2020’s The True Lives of Fabulous Killjoys sequel, we are immediately entering into more bizarre territory in their new series with Shaun Simon, Chris Weston, Dave Stewart, and Nate Piekos, Paranoid Gardens.
Paradise Gardens is a medical care center in close proximity to a vast cliff overlooking an ocean. Loo is one of the most accomplished orderlies in attendance despite having lost all of her memories before working there—all she seems to know is her name and her work in the center. And yet she’s seen as relatively normal in Paradise Gardens as many of the other residents seem to have come from the pages of classic comics—everything from aliens to spies to superheroes seem to find their way into this facility for treatment. But several specters loom over the orderlies in residents as the head doctor is a member of a cartoon monkey-obsessed cult and the building itself has something in its walls that the head nurse needs to pacify.
While this is a first issue, it doesn’t actually feel like a beginning. With all of the lived-in locations in the facility, the inter-personal relationships we’re seeing quick glimpses of, the ways the residents all live with one another, we feel as though this is a world that has existed long before we’ve arrived to it. We’re seamlessly placed in the world and are trusted to find our way in it—much in the same way Loo has since her own memory loss four months prior. And it’s in this feeling that many of the odder aspects of the world stand out not as oddities, but as just another piece of the story mechanism moving forward. We’re fully committed to what the creative team is showing us as, with Loo, we’re able to fully suspend our disbelief and simply accept things as they are. That is until we’re presented something like the living walls of the building in a way that’s meant to be kept secret from the other characters. We as readers know what’s normal due to how it is being shown to us and then we’re given the twist.
As I’ve always mentioned in these articles, the balancing act a first issue must maintain is a delicate one. We need new characters, settings, dynamics, lore, and everything else in just a few pages to keep us interested in how the story will play out over an unknown number of issues. But Paranoid Gardens works with us. It slowly builds and reveals before our final hook that acts as an immediate call-back to the first page of the issue and shows us the inklings of a mystery within this facility. And it’s why we keep coming back to it.
Get excited. Get paranoid.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
I have just gotten engaged and I’m so excited to spend the rest of my life with my fiancé. Since the engagement, however, my future mother-in-law has been absolutely unbearable.
I constantly hear unsolicited advice on how I should watch my figure before the wedding, what the decorations should be, and how I can be a better wife for her perfect, do-no-wrong, son. I managed to set my frustrations aside, but it all came to a head when she suggested that she should wear a white dress to our wedding because “she was his first love.”
Infinite ick.
When I looked to my fiancé for help, he stayed quiet. I love my fiancé so much and we’ve never had any huge problems, but I’m scared that things might be like this for the rest of my life.
What should I do?
Sincerely,
Concerned Wife-To-Be
—————————–
Dear Future Divorcee,
Your wariness is understandable. Her judgmental eyes burn you to the core. She’s determined to render you inadequate enough to make one scream. We’ve all been there. Some mothers have a hard time letting their sons go. No one is good enough for their “baby boy.” How dare you even try.
You’re in the crosshairs of a seemingly possessive woman hellbent on testing your nerves. She’ll make your life miserable up to the wedding day and possibly after if you let her. If you’ve seen the 1985 film, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome the answer is obvious. Settle your scores in the Thunderdome.
I once courted a girl with an equally domineering father. He took me aside before our big date and told me that if I broke his little girl’s heart, he’d “harvest my organs for sale on the black market.” A little harsh, I thought, given that I was only seventeen at the time.
Strangely enough, she ditched me right before prom for the captain of the football team. When I confronted her father at the supermarket where he worked as night manager to ask him about retribution for my broken heart, he scoffed.
“All’s fair in love and war,” he bellowed with a slap to my back, cracking a smile.
He was as big as Porky from the movie Porky’s, so I had little recourse. Instead, I found a pricing gun left on a stand of canned foods and went to town, marking everything 50% off—game, set, match.
Your future mother-in-law expects you to be perfect. Being perfect myself, I share her sentiments. You can’t, however, let mind games ruin what could be a healthy, long-lasting marriage. Attempt a lunch outing with her to clear the air or put something in her drink; something that gives her the runs for at least two weeks.
Oedipus Rex remains a classic Greek tragedy, where a mother kills her husband to marry her son. Or was it the other way around? I can’t keep up with these steamy paperbacks. Either way, there’s plenty to be learned from Ancient Greece. How did they cope with daily drudgeries, especially without a Samuel Beckett novel to pass the time?
There’s no pleasing everyone. Your best bet is to kill her with kindness until she finally acquiesces out of boredom or eventual acceptance. Whatever you do, don’t demand that your fiancé choose between you or her. That’s bad form.
Take your future mother-in-law skydiving instead. It’s the perfect bonding experience that worked wonders on my third wife’s overprotective therapist.
I’ll await my invitation to the wedding.
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
with Dmetri Kakmi
I Walked with a Zombie
USA, 1943
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Cast: Frances Dee, Tom Conway, James Ellison, Edith Barrett, Darby Jones
In an alternate universe I Walked with a Zombie would be called Jane Eyre and Zombies. There would be a couple of lame jokes, the feisty heroine would kick some undead arse while a hapless male hid behind the chaise longue, and that would be the end of a one-joke CGI spectacle. Fortunately, that was not the case here.
The redoubtable dynamic duo of of 1940s horror movies, Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur, aimed much higher. Despite the sensational title, I Walked with a Zombie is not scary. It is a masterpiece of subtlety and understatement. Made on a shoe-string budget in under a month, it ranks among the most beautiful horror movies made.
I suspect the best way to describe I Walked with a Zombie is to say it is eerie and weird, with more than a touch of poetry — a poetry of shadows. If tenebrosity could speak it would talk the language of Lewton and Tourneur’s film — a languorous, hypnotic interplay of light and dark and consonant with vowel that, like the magical incantation of the title, draws the viewer into a dreamworld where beauty is a mask for death and destruction.
Foremost, I Walked with a Zombie is a tragic love story. Thwarted passion and a desire to control is at the centre of everything that happens on Saint Sebastian, a post-slavery Caribbean island, that is anything but a tropical paradise.
‘Everything seems beautiful because you don’t understand,’ says Tom Conway’s Paul Holland in a mellifluous voice (he was George Sanders’ brother; honeyed voices must run in the family). ‘Those flying fish, they’re not leaping for joy; they’re jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water, it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies. The glitter of putrescence. There’s no beauty here. Only death and decay.’
Cheery fellow, isn’t he? That’s why Frances Dee’s nurse Betsy Connell can’t help but fall for him, despite the fact that he is married and she is employed to look after his semi-comatose wife, Jessica Holland. But is Jessica suffering from a ‘tropical fever’, as the good doctor decrees, or is she dead and somehow able to peregrinate ethereally at dusk?
The question remains unanswered. Therein lies the film’s charm. We are not certain if Jessica truly lies with Baron Cimetière or if she suffers from acute melancholia after her husband stops her from running off with his half-brother, Wesley.
The depiction of human relations as complex, varied and riddled with ambiguity and contradiction should not come as a surprise. Pulling away from the kinds of horror movies Universal made in the 1930s, Lewton and Tourneur turned out smart films that draw on their respective cultured European backgrounds, but set in a contemporary American milieu.
‘Human, all too human,’ as that other chipper fellow, Nietzsche, wrote.
The same respect is accorded to black characters. Far from coming across like silly 1940s caricatures, everyone, from Theresa Harris’s Alma to Sir Lancelot’s calypso singer, is given a multilayered inner life and vital roles to play. This applies even to Darby Jones who plays the extraordinary figure of Carrefour (French for ‘intersection’). Monolithic, bug-eyed and eerily silent, he is the silence that surrounds the island’s historic slavery trade. He may even be a god that guards the gateway between life and death.
If I Walked with a Zombie is about anything, it is that appearances can be deceptive. ‘It’s beautiful here,’ exclaims nurse Betsy when she arrives on Saint Sebastian. ‘If you say so, Miss,’ says her black coachman. He knows better and, like the script itself, there is a world of meaning tucked inside the carefully chosen words and images.
Ambiguity is at the heart of all great horror stories. A level of uncertainty is essential for full effect. Is it really happening or is it a product of a disturbed mind? Are the events truly occurring or is there another way to see or interpret? That level of questioning opens doors of perception and interpretation, allowing even the most sceptical viewer to enter the story on a deeper level. Ultimately, that is the secret behind the success of Lewton and Tourneur’s most memorable outings, whether we are talking about Cat People (1942), The Seventh Victim (1943)or Curse of the Cat People (1944).
Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Dictionary of a Gadfly (as The Sozzled Scribbler), The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). His gothic horror novel, The Woman in the Well, will be published in March 2025. He is currently working on a crime novel called The Perfect Room.
On this week’s episode, Rachel Tillman, Samantha Nickerson, and John King join the nocturnal jousting in a conversation about Jewel’s A Night Without Armor. This is a taste of what will be coming to my Patreon content, once I launch a Patreon page for this podcast.
NOTES
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 633 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
\Without knowing where in the building the Goose Lord was, I decided that I, the Curator of Schlock, Edwidge the kangaroo, the Revenging Manta, and Waldo should make our way to service elevator. With power restored to the building, we should have been able to get down to the basement and see if there were any clues to this gang’s operations down there. — To be continued.
Tonight’s movie is 1987’s The Running Man from director Paul Michael Glaser. This one was a childhood staple of mine. I remember we had the VHS tape. I think it was regularly aired on Showtime too. Yes, I watched R-rated movies as a kid. What? You didn’t? Arnold Schwarzenegger was a household name back in the day and my favorite movies with him usually took place in a futuristic dystopian hell. The Running Man is a great example of one of these.
In the future, the United States has turned into a police state following world wide economic collapse and depletion of natural resources. A potentially violent populace is subdued with television game shows, the most popular of which is titled The Running Man. On this game show, hardened criminals are sent into maze-like arenas to face off against high tech gladiators called stalkers. If they can make it out alive, they receive a full pardon and can go their merry way. But few ever do.
Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as Ben Richards, a police officer who refused to fire upon food rioters due them being unarmed. Defying his orders to shoot at the crowd from his helicopter, Richard is subdued by his men and sent to prison and blamed for the killing of the rioting civilians. While in a labor camp, he hatches an escape plan with fellow prisoners Harold Weiss (Marvin J. McIntyre) and William Laughlin (Yaphet Kotto). Weiiss and Laughlin are members of a resistance and want Richard to join them, but he’s never been one for politics and leaves to find his brother so he can figure out a way to sneak out of the country.
Unfortunately, Richards’ brother was sent away for reeducation and his apartment is now owned by a young woman named Amber Mendez (María Conchita Alonso). She screams that he’s “The Butcher of Bakersfield” and intimidates her into helping him leave the country, but she betrays him to the authorities. Richards then meets Damon Killian (Richard Dawson), the sadistic host of The Running Man. He wants Richards as his next contestant. When Richards refuses, he threatens to throw a recently captured Weiiss and Laughlin into the lion’s den.
Richard agrees, signs the contract, and we are treated to a spectacle of dancing girls and noisy spectators, all of whom want Richards dead. Killian tells Richards he won’t be alone as it’s announced Weiss and Laughlin will be going with him, reneging on his part of the deal. Richards and company face off against the first stalker of the night, Professor Sub-Zero (Toru Tanaka). He kills his prey with a lethal hockey stick. Arnold manages to slice his throat with barbed wire.
Still, there are more stalkers to come like Buzzsaw (Gus Rethwisch) and Fireball (Jim Brown). The stalker named Dynamo (Erland Van Lidth) even sings opera music while shooting electricity from his hand. Soon Amber joins Richards and company when the network catches her snooping around the archives, trying to find out the truth of the Bakersfield massacre. Will the four of them survive and expose the lies of this totalitarian stake? Will Killian die in a fiery explosion? Watch it and find out.
Photo by Leslie Salas. Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
I hope there are more
words for love than for goodbye–
a vocabulary
carved less than our flesh,
more truthful than what’s caught by
the eye’s perfect score.
When Your Arms and Shoulders Seem to Blaze
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Muskrat Ramble” – Trio Raisner
- “Jet Free” – Space Dimension Controller
- “Nasali Nini” – KOKOKO!
- “The Forest Feasts” – Summoning the Lich
- “Alpha Mega (Live at Smalls, 1996)” – The Next Step Band
- “Great Lover” – William Onyeabor
- “Pop Corn” – Jean-Michel Jarre
- “Rustem” – Taraf de Haidouks
- “Don’t Go” – Vaudou Game
- “I Only Want to Be with You” – The Tourists
- “There Was a Time” – Ginger Root
- “Cemetary Rats” – Orange Goblin
- “Money” – Jake Elijah
- “Symphony No.5: I. Trauermarch” – Gustav Mahler / Herbert von Karajan
- “Blackbird” – Jean-Michel Jarre
- “Smiles” – Crazy Otto
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
What, you thought I was done with my pile? My ability to not do things is only beaten by ability to put other things off until they’ve collected dust or canon irrelevance. But, unlike my procrastination, good stories persist regardless. And there are some stories that are solid, but get swept up into a large-scale event and end up either half-remembered or in a collection of event one-shots that goes out of print within the year. Luckily, my pile has unearthed some of those event one-shots in the form of Batman Secret Files for the characters Miracle Molly and The Gardener from James Tynion IV, Dani, Christian Ward, Lee Loughridge, and Tom Napolitano.
While both of these stories connect to some larger part of the Fear State story line from a few years ago, they act more like origin stories for both characters. For Miracle Molly, we have Mary Kowalski, a woman deeply unhappy with her life who undergoes an experimental program to essentially erase her past memories after having her engineering work stolen from under her. As a member of the Unsanity Collective, she has freed herself from the past that burdened her to become the self that she was always hoping to be. For The Gardener, we have a bit more connection to the broader DC canon as Bella Garten was a former student of Jason Woodrue (the Floronic Man), and peer to both Alec Holland (Swamp Thing) and Pamela Isley. Garten was the romantic partner before Isley became Poison Ivy and still tries now to help her go back to their college ideals when all they wanted was for the plants to speak for and defend themselves.
These end up being the reference materials for all stories involving those characters going forward. There’s a degree of definiteness due to these pieces coming from one of the characters’ creators, Tynion IV, that seamlessly links them into the DC Universe at large. Miracle Molly is a known entity for a new gang in Gotham while The Gardener has her own history with many of the other plant-based characters in the world. Neither are world-altering in their presence and they fill a niche needed for many smaller-scale stories as they both have their own goals outside of any hero. They can stand on their own without having to be dragged into another event.
More than anything, I just like new characters. I like seeing what a creative team can do when given a bit more freedom on a longer running series to introduce something different from what we’ve seen in canon before. And having an artist like Jorge Jiménez designing characters for other artists like Dani and Ward just brings the collaborative storytelling of long-running comic series all the more enjoyable. And that’s what many of these series do need to focus on—creating something new that fans can hold onto and these one-shots do just that.
Get excited. Get new.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Dear Dr. Perfect,
There’s this girl at work that I have a total crush on. We get along super well and sometimes hang after work. I really like her, and I know for a fact that she’s single. I’m worried that I’ll ruin our friendship by asking her out, or worse, we break up and things get really weird.
I want to figure out how to ask her without putting pressure on her. But at the same time, I don’t know if I should ask her at all. Thoughts?
Sincerely,
Co-Worker
———————————————
Dear Hopeless Romantic,
You’ve come to the right place. I’m a bit of an expert on the language of love. Of course, I’ve toiled through the mysteries of romantic attraction as long as any philosopher or deadbeat poet. What I have learned is that courtship is weird.
The animal kingdom has methods not too far removed from our own. Birds awkwardly sing for their mates. Lizards puff out their chests. Lions fight one another for a chance with the lioness. The loser is roundly rejected and further humiliated by the lioness with a kick of sand to the face. I’m not sure what sand crabs do. I’m not even sure why I thought of sand crabs. I am hungry for seafood.
You have reached a pivotal moment where you don’t know if your coworker is interested. It’s hard to tell, as only creeps mistake casual friendliness for romantic interest. Don’t be a creep. Another unwritten rule of the dating game involves maintaining one’s dignity. If she knows you like her and her feelings aren’t mutual, you’ll be forever branded with the scarlet “L” (for loser).
But wouldn’t she be flattered? Not necessarily. Women can detect desperation like a hard-boiled PI. They’re experts on tone, body language, confidence, and fear. Just ask my mother.
I once sought her advice in asking a certain girl to the high school prom. She turned from the pot of boiling chili on the stove and mapped out varying scenarios with potential outcomes on a sketchpad. She was also an advice columnist for our hometown paper, The Grand Rapids Gazette.
“Whatever you do,” she advised, “don’t overanalyze things.”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing now?” I asked.
“Listen to your mother,” my father said from the corner of the kitchen, watching us.
“Where’d you come from?” I asked.
You’ve already completed step one, establishing her relationship status. The next step is to gauge her interest. Ask her to someplace casual (coffee shop, casino cruise, gun show, etc.). Send her some anonymous flowers and observe her reaction.
If she’s receptive to any of this, give it a shot. If unrequited, never talk to her again.
If you arefortunate enough to garner her interest, take her to a movie. I don’t want to generalize, but all women love The Notebook (some men too). They go crazy for it. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is another one. Read some Henry James. He spent most of his literary career trying to figure women out. The works of Jane Austen also provide some helpful insight into the female mind.
Don’t give up until you have to. That’s what my mother used to say.
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
On this week’s show John speaks with Todd James Pierce about Larry Watkin and his history with Walt Disney as a novelist, screenwriter, and producer. They explore the 1940s to the 1960s of Watkin’s career and the common themes present throughout his risky live-action Disney projects such as Darby O’Gill, Robin Hood, and Treasure Island.
Todd James Pierce and John King on Main Street USA. (John doesn’t know how to take a good selfie, especially in 100% humidity.)TEXT DISCUSSED
Check out Todd’s wonderful podcast, Disney History Institute.
NOTES
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 633 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Sparing the punk named Waldo’s life, I grilled over what sinister plan the Goose Lord had in store for the citizens of downtown Orlando.
“Curator, he plans to get all the children in town hooked on Dance Fever,” he said, still crying with humble gratitude. “Once the kids are hooked, he’ll have an army of addicts ready to do his bidding for their next fix.”
“Where is the Goose Lord now?” I asked with steadfast resolve.
“I don’t know,” Waldo said. — To be continued.
Tonight’s movie is 1979’s When a Stranger Calls from director Fred Walton. This was an attempt to adapt the famous urban legend about a babysitter receiving phone calls from a maniac telling her to check on the children. Fed up, the babysitter calls the police who inform that all they can do is trace the origin of the phone call the next he calls. She keeps the creeper on the phone long enough for the police to trace the call. The police call her back and warn her that the calls are coming from inside the house. The maniac is in the house! He’s murdered the children and the babysitter will be next!
Yeah, that’s basically the beginning of this movie. You have Carol Kane as Jill Johnson, a babysitter tasked with babysitting two children that are down with the flu while the parents go to dinner and a movie. The kids have the flu and they’re fast asleep so this should be an easy gig if not for that pesky maniac calling her every two minutes. The scenario plays out much as you’d expect, but when Jill attempts to flee from the house, she sees Charles Durning standing right there and screams. I would probably scream if I opened my front door and saw Charles Durning standing there.
I hope you like Charles Durning because this becomes his movie from here on out. He plays John Clifford, a former police officer turned private investigator. I guess the horrific murder of those children forced him to resign from the force. Anyway, we find out that the maniac that murdered the children was a British sailor named Curt Duncan (Tony Beckley). The jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity and sent him away to an asylum where the doctors couldn’t make heads or tails of his psychosis. And then he escapes seven years later and Clifford is hired by the family of the murdered children to track down Duncan and kill him.
Duncan is now living it up in Los Angeles by going to a local dive bar and chatting up a woman named Tracy (Colleen Dewhurst) who keeps giving him the brush off. Did you know Colleen Dewhurst was a respected actress best known for her performances in Eugene O’Neill plays? Anyway, Duncan won’t leave her alone so one of the regulars beats the crap out of him and shoves him out the door. Later on, Duncan shows up at Tracy’s apartment and asks her out and she says she’ll meet him tomorrow.
Meanwhile, a sweaty Clifford is running all over the city trying to find Duncan’s whereabouts. I have to say that this Duncan doesn’t remind me of the maniac that was terrorizing Jill Johnson at the beginning of the movie. It feels like a second movie got tacked on to a rather tepid retelling of the babysitter story. Skip this one. Maybe watch License to Drive starring Corey Haim and Corey Feldman. It also stars Carol Kane.
Photo by Leslie Salas Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
They were all too sweet
and paid me in greeny sad
cypress. I overstayed
my welcome. We prayed
for rain to roll the skulls back
below our feet.
The Art of Mourning
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Saint-Saëns: Le Carnaval des Animaux: Aquarium” – Martha Argerich
- “¿Dónde Estás María?” – Meridian Brothers
- “The Wife of Usher’s Well” – Cerys Hafana
- “Dinosaur Teeth” – Trees on the Moon
- “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” – Albert Farrington
- “Sloppin Pet Space Pigs! Live!” – Lenny Wiles Lionstar
- “Ballade des Géants” – JB Dunckel
- “Head Shampoo” – Curt Boettcher
- “Graveyard Theme (Trick or Treat)(2nd Reprise)” – Vince Guaraldi
- “He Knows Who You Are” – Zilgi
- “Will You Buy a Fine Dog?” – Paul McMahon
- “Functionality” – Nowhere Squares
- “The Phantom of the Opry” – Jerry Reed
- “Balls…Fire” – Didjits
- “String Quartet No. 15 Op.124: III. Dotted Crotchet = 84: Arcadia Quartet
- “My World Fell Down” – Sagittarius
- “Introspection” – Wolfgang Schmidtke Orchestra, Steve Lacy, Alexander von Schlippenbach
- “Aba Daba Honeymoon” – Helen Kane (as Betty Boop)
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
Don’t you miss the weekends where the existential dread didn’t set in? Me neither, now let’s talk about Wonder Woman. And this is an evergreen character for the moment as she is meant to represent hope, compassion, and the goodness that we can find in most people. Most, of course, being the key word there. But for this final volume of Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad’s run on the character, we’re finally seeing where some of that compassion can end as we come up against the machinations that have been building up for the past two years with their final story, Revenge of the Gods.
After we last left Diana, she was dealing with the death of her mother and the uniting of all three Amazon tribes to beat Chaos back through Doom’s Doorway. Without getting any real time to recover, she’s back to stop Dr. Cizko’s newly minted Villainy Incorporated and the mind-altering chemicals they’re mixing into batches of milk. But this isn’t the only villain for these last few issues as the crux of this milk scheme isn’t Cizko’s at all—he was only a single piece being moved by the goddess Hera as a means of subjugating the Earth once more. For this run, we’ve been seeing the gods in the background and in Diana’s afterlife, but their demise is imminent as they lose their faithful. But with mind-controlling milk and a floating temple in the middle of Washington DC, Hera plans to turn the planet back to believers in the old gods.
But, of course, Hera can’t succeed and it takes all the powers on Earth and the Rock of Eternity to stop her. This is where the run slows down. Instead of ending things on bombast in the lead-up to Wonder Woman #800, we’re instead treated to something wholly different: a series of dream sequences. Diana has to recover after her fight with Hera and this deep meditation allows her mind to wonder into those of her friends. We see her across the eras as a variety of artists bring us back through history to show just who Wonder Woman was and will become. It feels like an earned ending more than anything—one final rest for this character before a new team takes over—but also the thesis of their entire run. Diana was only ever just one person, but it was everyone around her that helped make her the character that has become so iconic.
There haven’t been many long superhero runs I’ve read in the past as they were happening and this feels like what many of those old trades I would check out at the library would feel like when I got to their final volumes: a story that feels complete. So often we read about runs being truncated due to outside factors and what the team has to come up with in order to wrap things up in a couple issues. Here, we get what this ending was meant to be and it does feel nice to get that sense of closure.
Get excited. Get into the next pile I have on my shelf.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Dear Dr. Perfect,
My roommate will shove a load in the washer and leave the apartment for hours, sometimes not coming home until the next day. When I ask if I can transfer her clothes for her, she gets pissy.
Even though I only do laundry once or twice a week, it feels like an ever-smelly issue. After a few hours, the wet clothes mildew and the machine is near where I sleep.
What, if any, are my civilized options?
A roommate at civility’s edge
———————————–
Dear Unfortunate Roommate,
Extended periods of cohabitation can be trying.
As the old saying goes, you never really know someone until you live together. By then, it’s too late. It’s like walking on eggshells across thin ice atop more eggshel.
My brief stint at Oberlin studying anthropology involved rooming with this imbecile who fancied himself a horticulturalist. He turned our dorm into a pot farm replete with foul-smelling marijuana permeating the air. The stench covered my clothes, and the trauma lingered for several years after. I drew the line when he started baking pot brownies.
“If I have to smell one more of those stupid brownies, I’ll bash your head in,” I told him, holding his prized glass bong.
Some years later, I roomed with a self-proclaimed “ladies’ man” in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He asked me not to enter the apartment if there was a sock on the door. Fair enough, I thought. I soon realized that he hung a sock outside the door regardless of whether anyone else was there.
“I’m on to you, you bastard,” I seethed. “You put one more sock out there, I’ll bash your head in.”
He proceeded to pile-drive me into the vinyl floor of our studio apartment. I got a couple of good shots in before the concussion. Might have even ruptured his kidneys.
Your roommate is woefully inconsiderate and probably not ready to live on their own. Consider taking their clothes from the wash and lighting in the fire pit outside.
I once shared a dorm at Harvard with a young Tommy Lee Jones. He constantly rehearsed these plays or whatever the hell he was doing. I said, “Hey, Hamlet. Give it a rest.” We got into a fistfight.
In the end, it’s only temporary. Roommates prepare us for long-term cohabitation with our eventual significant others. You’ll be able to put up with anything by then.
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
In this week’s episode, Rachael Tillman and I break some standards of academia as we discuss the poetry insights of Paul Chowder, the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s 2009 comic novel, The Anthologist.
Since this is novel is a novel and not, strictly speaking a craft book or a scholarly treatise, we shouldn’t be treating this novel like either of those. In fact, the novel is sort of the consciousness of a mid-level poet who experiences sometimes extreme anxiety about making the sort of poetic declarations that the introduction of his anthology seems to require. But the ideas are so good and presented so unpreciously that we couldn’t help ourselves. Plus the novel is charming and funny, so there’s that.
Thanks to Nicholson Baker for granting us a self-effacing invocation for this rambling, joyous conversation about a book I cannot recommend highly enough.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 631 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
fighting the waves
of a great lake
the taste of loss
in the mouth
the willfulness
to roll
right into the bonfire
bound to lose
and bound
to mix metaphors
I thwack another crest
of white foam
to pull away a hand
wet and stinging
and empty
Zipkin Finds a Clue
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Hey Little One” – Shelley Duvall
- “my goth acquaintance” – Lumberob
- “Egg Radio” – Bill Frisell Quartet
- “Just Listen” – Mark Guiliana
- “Kaboela Style” – De Schuurman
- “Danse A la Musique” – The French Fries
- “3BPM: Pulpit” – Christopher Rountree, wild Up, HOCKET
- “Mandala” – Meridian Brothers
- “A Movie is Like a Bag of Flour” – David F. Friedman
- “The Erotic Adventures of Zorro (Trailer)” – David F. Friedman
- “What’ll I Do” – Art of Time Ensemble, Madeleine Peyroux
- “Water You” – William Austin Clay
- “Jetsam” – Kaycie Satterfield
- “Canadian Shirley Temple” – Isness
- “Pun Pun Catalú” – Celia Cruz, Willie Colón
- “Revenge Mongrel” – The Great Kat
- “Spider Blues” – Enrico Rava, Evita Polidoro, Matteo Paggi, Francesco Ponticelli, Francesco Diodati
- “I’m Gonna Walk, Talk, and Sing” – The Blackwood Brothers Quartet, Bill Shaw
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
I often forget that Zatara, one of the earliest magicians in the DC Universe, made his first appearance in Action Comics #1 in his own set of adventures alongside Superman’s. And that his daughter, Zatanna, turns 60 this year after decades of guest spots and appearances over any medium a comic character could show up in, is something that also always slips my mind. But this year we can celebrate her birthday with a new comic series from Mariko Tamaki, Javier Rodríguez, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaoun with Zatanna: Bring Down the House.
There is no better place for a magician like Zatanna to show off her mastery of the magical arts than Las Vegas. In a small casino hotel. With free admission. I mean, at least it pays the bills. But after enough supeheroics to fill up a dozen other series, maybe it’s time for Zatanna to simply relax with a small-stakes sort of show for a while. It’s something that can at least provide a distraction from the dreams that keep visiting her every night of her first time using real magic as a child. Or the odd shadows she’s seen while on her morning run. Or the person who has been wearing a dozen different outfits to see her free show every day. But that’s all coincidental. None of it could possibly have anything to do with all of those kids that disappeared from her magic trick or her dad’s death. Or the giant demonic creature peaking out from behind the curtains on her stage.
As I mentioned last month with Tamaki’s characterization of Wonder Woman, as an author, she has this deftness to her character writing that feels definitive. Zatanna as a character is someone who has some consistent aspects in terms of appearance and ability, but her personality can go in a few different directions depending on the creators working with her. In this first issue, we’re getting more history and personality in a few panels that gives us a character that feels familiar to our past experiences—I still remember my first being the Justice League cartoon—while also giving us a more solid feel. This is a character with the outward confidence of a stage magician, but who listens to self-help podcasts while on a run. She’s rooted to her current job and show, but wants to run away from the past that she sees every night. We get more than just a magician, we get a person.
But then this is only our first issue. It is, however, an introduction to what Tamaki, Rodríguez, and Otsmane-Elhaou are looking to do for Zatanna as a character: give her a solid starting point. We can see just from this first issue that we’re going to explore her past, her present, and what could become of her from there. It’s also giving us something definitive others can look at and know how to work with her as a character. From this first page, we already feel a foundation being laid.
Get excited. Deticxe teg.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
On this week’s program, I talk to Charles Simic about James Tate, Kansas surrealism, humor in poetry, and embracing the unconscious,
Photo by Richard Drew.plus I talk to Richard Blanco about the accidents that turn us into artists, the grind of editing, and the joys of finding new forms and challenges.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
Be sure to check out the music of David Rego, whose songs “Rings Ring” and “Sapphire Showers” appear on this episode.
Listen to this replay here, or rick click to download.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
Looking back,
old postcard edges,
dulled like eye teeth
that bite softer these days.
The Dirt Should Be Piled Up Here Somewhere
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Absinthe Frappe” – Victor Herbert
- “Rockstar” – Trance
- “Bazo Banga” – KOKOKO!
- “Ghoul” – Saka, Of The Trees
- “TEC ME OT JOK” – Ekuka Morris Sirikiti
- “Sonores” – Hainbach
- “Jubu’s Poem” – Jubu Smith, Charlie Hunter, Calvin Napper
- “Mecha” – Doctor Jeep
- “Shining” – Àbáse, Ori Jacobson
- “Jazz Concerto: III. Solos – Ad Libitum” – Zbigniew Seifert, Mateusz Smoczynski, Dominik Wania, Slawomir Kurkiewicz, Michal Miskiewicz, Rafal Janiak, Chopin University Chamber Orchestra
- “Mangled and Maimed” – Vulvodynia
- “Part VI (Live)” – Jordina Millà, Barry Guy
- “Moonbeams” – Victor Herbert
- “Whistle While You Work (Live)” – Sun Ra
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #279: Confronting the Pile, Part 3
Wait, where was I from the previous week? Right, Wonder Woman and the slow chipping away at my to-be-read pile. With that last story arc, we saw Diana making her way through various pantheons and multiverses as she attempted to find a way both back to life and to stop the doppelganger of her from burning the past to usher in a new future. The same writing team on that arc is back, but this time we’re leading into a larger, multi-series event that has been building up in the background. Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad bring us the second volume of their run on Wonder Womanwhile also being joined by Stephanie Williams, Vita Ayala, and Joëlle Jones for said event, Trial of the Amazons.
After returning to the living world, Wonder Woman has to readjust to life itself. So many people had said their goodbyes and given their tributes that it’s difficult to simply get back to work as though nothing had happened. But that’s what Diana does best—getting back to work to distract herself. And there’s enough distraction in Doctor Psycho sending Shining Knight after her, Image-Maker sending mirror clones of her to drag her back to death, and Altuum the Survivor threatening to burn Themyscira to the ground in revenge for stealing the island from his people. And all the while, there’s the rumblings of the disparate tribes of Amazons coming to Themyscira to air their grievances.
Despite being a multi-series event book, Trial of the Amazons is incredibly focused in the story it’s looking to tell. Instead of the typical event that interrupts a slate of monthly books before going back to normal, what we have here instead is a natural coming together of two series—Wonder Woman and Nubia & The Amazons—while serving as a jumping-off point for another series in Wonder Girl. Due to it concentration on Themyscira and the three tribes of Amazons coming together for the first time, each issue of this event feeds into the next, creating one narrative between the multiple creative teams that feels like a cohesive whole, bookended by Trial of the Amazons #1 and #2. And in the end, it does what any good event book should do: give us enough of a state change for new series, new characters, and new story arcs to lead us into our next volume of the mainline series.
While these story arcs mark a midway point between the four volumes of Cloonan and Conrad’s run on Wonder Woman, it shows us just what makes a long run on any of these superhero series work: consistent characterization, momentum, and foreshadowing. Diana is Diana throughout—steadfast, headstrong, and continually compassionate. She jumps from conflict to conflict without giving herself much time to rest, even after the death of her mother, and we can see in the background the larger threats building themselves up in the distance. It keeps readers curious enough to come back month after month and rewards them for noticing those background details throughout.
Get excited. Get back.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
On this week’s show John talks to Blake Sanz, author of The Boundaries of Their Dwelling, about the intertwining short stories within the book and the journeys of emotional vulnerability, writing as a grad student, and wooden planks reminiscent of Theseus.
Book Discussed
NOTES
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 631 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Waldo, the punk that defaced the statue of Carl Weathers, was pleading for his life. The Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, unsheathed his sword and handed it to me.
“This man has wronged you,” The Revenging Manta said. “Do what needs to be done.”
I held the sword, ready to dispense some street justice when I looked over at Edwige, my kangaroo companion from my misadventures in North America. She has turned her gaze away from me and I knew she disapproved. I handed the sword back to the ninja.
“I can’t do it,” I said as Waldo gasped in relief.
“Then his life belongs to you now,” The Revenging Manta said as he sheathed the blade.
— To be continued.
Tonight’s movie is 1966’s Eye of the Devil from director J. Lee Thompson. This movie has no devil in it if you were expecting to see his eye. It stars David Niven if that’s a selling point. I think the last movie I covered starring him was 1967’s Casino Royale. I consider that movie to be the worst movie of all time, but that’s just my personal taste.
Eye of the Devil begins with a fancy dinner party complete with harp player in the home of Philippe de Montfaucon, Marquis de Bellenac (David Kevin), and Catherine de Montfaucon, Marquise de Bellenac (Deborah Kerr). Wait. What? I’m nor repeating that. We’ll just call them Philippe and Catherine for the rest of this review. Anyway, Philippe and Catherine live an idyllic life in Paris, France with their two young children, Jacques and Antoinette. A mysterious visitor comes to Philippe and says he must return to the family vineyard in Bordeaux. There’s a problem with the grape crop this year and the entire area depends on it.
Philippe leaves for the family chateau, but tells Catherine to stay behind with the kids. Jacques complains to his mother later that night that he needs to be with father and so they’re off to the chateau that her husband warned her about. While driving into town they get the stink eye from the local villagers as they drive up to Philippe’s estate. Philippe plays off everything as normal, but Catherine feels uncomfortable in his family home. A strange brother and sister pair named Christian (David Hemmings) and Odile (Sharon Tate) keep hanging around the estate. Christian is an archer and kills a dove right in front of Catherine.
Meanwhile, Odile seems to have the ability to turn a frog into a dove which she demonstrates in front of the kids. There’s a creepy town priest played by Donald Pleasance and a secret society of robed figures that seem to appear and disappear. Catherine spots Philippe in a secret ceremony with these same robed figures and one of them quietly warns her to flee the town while she still can.
Catherine sticks around only to get drugged and bedridden while a sinister conspiracy with pagan undercurrents begins to unravel. If it were me, I’d get the hell out of Dodge. I don’t want to get bees shoved down my throat or get burned alive in a wicker basket.
Photo by Leslie Salas Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
We are no archipelago –
spilling
everything
but the drinks
in the seats.
We Are No Archipelago
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Here Comes the Meter Man” – The Meters
- “Everything’s Beautiful” – Hiatus Kaiyote
- “Flipside” – Melt-Banana
- “Gemini” – Deliria
- “Cannibal Holocaust (Main Theme)” – J. Blake, The Brisco County Youth Orchestra
- “Wang Dang Doodle (Live)” – Willie Dixon
- “The Foragers” – The Octopus Project
- “Dear Onion” – Guided By Voices
- “Prioris: Dulcis amica Dei” – The Gesualdo Six, Owain Park
- “Gross Abuse” – 200 Stab Wounds
- “Mimi Pretend (Live)” – Ulrika Spacek
- “Vast Wildlife Poison” – Prefuse 73
- “Cinnamon Temple” – Hiatus Kaiyote
- “Night Shift” – Dave Neabore
- “Yellow Dawn” – Sumac
- “A Bird in a Gilded Cage” – Joe Capraro, Phil Darois, Armand Hug
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
While meta-narrative detective stories in which the titular character must find out who killed him in his own story can be interesting, I feel suspicious whenever this trope crops up. Peter Milligan, Raül Fernandez, Giada Marchisio, and Jeff Eckleberry’s first issue of Profane uses the trope to perfection.
From the opening panel, Will Profane lays out who he is and what he’s trying to do: a private investigator with a case to solve. But we already have a twist by the second page as he approaches what is presumably the solution to the case before he blacks out and ends up in a bar. He talks of the case as though it were a recurring dream—the same details taking place over and over. But it’s through his memories and his usage of a particular scrying technique that he’s pointed in another direction toward someone who may know where this particular case is leading him. But she wants nothing to do with him after saying his name is Will Profane. Not for any past slights, but because that’s the name of the detective in her ex-boyfriend’s detective novels. And while Spud Coltrane may be a prolific author, the discovery of his recent murder as the site where Profane blacked out shows us his involvement in the mystery.
Milligan, Fernandez, Marchisio, and Eckleberry use our perception of detective stories to raise more existential questions for our detective, namely: if the author of the story is dead, what will the main character of the story do now? At a point, it feels almost redundant to respond “solve the murder” since that’s an afterthought here. Can a character independent of their writer actually exercise any real agency outside of what the story says? And when someone else has stolen the latter half of the manuscript, how does this character know if they’re acting within the original story or within the edits made by someone trying to lead them astray? We dive deeper and deeper into what is and isn’t considered free will within the confines of the story and how much of that may simply be a matter of perspective. And all within the first issue of a larger series.
Profane from the final page of this issue feels like it is here to reconfigure character in a detective story. We’ve seen so many mysteries over the centuries that finding a new way to explore what a detective can do in fiction feels like dozens of authors looking to squeeze blood from a stone. And yet here we’re still seeing the drips of blood coming from the genre in ways that both the readers and the characters trapped in the narrative couldn’t expect.
Get excited. Get spiraling.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
You know how it is: when you aren’t the church-going type, but find yourself at Sunday service anyway—maybe you’re visiting your grandma, or maybe it’s Easter—and the pastor says, “I invite you to share the peace with your neighbor”, and everyone around you unexpectedly turns and greets the person seated to their left, and then the person seated to their right, and the rando in the pew in front of you turns around and says, “Peace be with you”, and you’re, like, “Um, yeah, same.” This is what’s called “passing the peace”, and it’s a common ritual in most Protestant churches.
This consecrated yet deeply impertinent (to introverts) church tradition symbolizes the unconditional love, unity, and forgiveness God calls on each of us to offer to the assholes we live with every day.
Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems is nothing like passing the peace, thank God.
If the poems do any sort of emotional labor, it’s to make you feel reverent, probed, discomfited, gratified, or possibly even literate (beautifully illustrated in Kaveh Akbar’s poem that kicks off the collection). But the poems will not forgive you. The whole point of pairing a poem with a reflection is to demonstrate how deep reading—reading that makes you do the work to engage with a poem—is the narrow path when it comes to enjoying poetry.
Okay, yes, there is love in these pages. There is love on every page, actually, but it is the love of craft on display in the poems, and the love of the love of craft on display in the reflections. No accidental, come-one-come-all congregation; each of these fifty poems has earned its page (most are one-pagers), and each reflecting poet has something unique and beatific to say about their choice poem.
- Haryette Mullen relates the significance of historical context to Liu Xiaobo’s poem “For Su Bingxian.”
- Fanny Howe demonstrates virtuoustic how-he-did-it-ism in Carl Phillips’s “Parable.”
- Carl Phillips turns around to offer fandom to Danez Smith’s poem “gay cancer” for being “the slyest sonnet ever.”
- On Wiliam Stafford’s “Vita”, Jim Moore offers a confession of personal inspiration.
- In Susan Stewart’s “The Forest,” Jennifer Grotz notes the form reflecting the content.
- In Tomas Tranströmer’s “From An African Diary (1963)”, Seshadri sees a call for help and a path
- to redemption.
- Stephanie Burt finds one way of finding meaning in life in Monica Youn’s “Hangman’s Tree.”
- Diane Seuss shares an off-hand comment about a student who got a tattoo of a line from D. A. Powell’s “Boonies.”
- In Seuss’s own “I once fought the idea of the body as artifact,”, Erika L. Sánchez admires the playfulness, and in envy says what we all always say when we’ve read something awesome: “I wish I had written that.”
And on it goes. There is no blurbese here, just artistry, reverent and probing and discomfiting and gratifying artistry. If, as Sophie Cabot Black said about Jason Shinder’s “Eternity,” “Poems are ultimately about poetry,”, then consider these fifty reflections about fifty poems as poems in their own right.
Brian A. Salmons lives in Orlando and writes essays, poems, and plays, which can be found in Qu, The Ekphrastic Review, Autofocus Lit, Stereo Stories, Memoir Mixtapes, Arkansas International, and other places.
Find him on IG @teacup_should_be and Twitter @brianasalmons.
with Dmetri Kakmi
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
USA 1939
Director: William Dieterle
Cast: Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Hara, Cedrick Hardwike, Edmund O’Brien
It is axiomatic of life and fiction that beauty, male or female, constitutes the norm. Yet beauty is rarely the generator of plot; Homer’s Helen of Troy is the only one that comes to mind. Paradoxically, it is ugliness that is most suited to generating character and hence narrative. Look at The Man Who Laughs (1928), Freaks (1932), The Elephant Man (1980) and Mask (1985).
It is also true that Lon Chaney invented cinematic ugliness. In 1923 he too played Quasimodo, the hunchback, just as he would go on to portray other horrors on screen. But his is not the greatest portrayal of Victor Hugo’s (anti)hero.
The honour belongs to the great Charles Laughton whose rendition of Quasimodo is perfection, as sensitive and nuanced a portrayal of an outsider as you can hope to get. He rends the heart in a performance that owes much to silent cinema because it relies on conveying emotion, not through dialogue, but through body language and the face.
‘We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces,’ says Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Charles Laughton had a face too. It was not pretty. Or handsome. One might even say he had a face that was perfect for radio. His was a face and a body no man with ‘a strong streak of homosexuality,’ as Laughton himself put it to Robert Mitchum, would want to be born with, and it caused him great anguish.
In the guise of Quasimodo, Laughton, who was married to Elsa Lanchester, The Bride of Frankenstein herself, takes the distress and misery he is said by his wife to have felt and channels it into one of the great screen performances. It shines through the brightly assessing eyes when he first appears on screen. Though he cuts a grotesque figure, it is evident from the way he scans the crowd that he is no monster. His is a noble spirit trapped in a twisted body. That doesn’t stop the Parisian rabble from staring in abject fascination before expelling him from their midst.
On the instant we are reminded of an observation made earlier by Harry Davenport as King Louis XI. ‘One shrinks from the ugly and one wants to look at it. There’s a devilish fascination in it. We extract pleasure from horror.’
He might be summoning up the history of horror movies.
This being a parable of fifteenth-century Paris, ugliness is sharply contrasted with beauty, ignorance with knowledge, darkness with light, and degradation with intellectual and spiritual elevation. Quasimodo walks a fraught line between these states, veering wildly from one to the other and back again. His is the eternal human condition. Though he is ruthless when needed (he bathes the great unwashed in hot oil when they try to break into the cathedral), he is also smarter and in possession of more insight and intelligence than those around him. As a fiction that made his way into global consciousness he is Victor Hugo’s bridge between the darkness of the Middle Ages and the light of the Renaissance — ignorance vying with enlightenment.
As a would-be lover Quasimodo is too good for Maureen O’Hara’s Esmeralda. (Elsa Lanchester said of O’Hara, ‘Butter wouldn’t melt in Maureen’s mouth, or anywhere else for that matter.’) All agree that Esmeralda is pretty. Yeah, pretty stupid. She and Gringoire deserve each other. In the end, as they traipse off to populate the earth with their dimwitted offspring, Quasimodo looks upon them from his eyrie in the cathedral and asks the gargoyles, ‘Why was I not made of stone, like thee?’
Easy. The gargoyles are in the movie for analogous pictorial composition. Added four centuries later, they weren’t there in the fifteenth-century, when Quasimodo gambolled in the belfry. Thus William Dieterle’s romantic testament collapses time, merging centuries as Europe heads toward World War II, further proof that history is neither linear, nor a salutary lesson for humanity.
Quasimodo, on the other hand, is eternal. Like the old gods, he is resurrected every few decades to cast a jaundiced eye on the world that made him thus.
Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Dictionary of a Gadfly (as The Sozzled Scribbler), The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). His novel The Woman in the Well will be published in 2025. He is currently working on a crime novel called The Perfect Room.
On this week’s show, Samantha Nickerson talks to Juli Min about reverse-chronology narratives and the captivation of surprises in following characters over decades.
BOOK DISCUSSED
NOTES
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 630 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
With the snarling lioness subdued, I helped Waldo down from the fake tree in the Sheena: Queen of the Jungle exhibit. He was shaking as crouched down. Waldo covered his head with his hands and looked up at me with pleading eyes.
“I’m sorry I messed up the statue of Carl Weathers,” he said. “The Goose Lord and his gang made me.”
“Carl Weathers is an American treasure,” I said with contempt for this punk I thought I had killed when in reality I had only beaten within an inch of his life.
“Curator, you don’t understand,” Waldo said as tears streamed down his cheeks. “I’ve got a family! I’ve got kids!”
— To be continued.
Tonight’s movie is 1974’s Emergency Squad from director Stelvio Massi. I’m not going to mince words. There are some hideous men in this movie. One guy has a combover that isn’t even a combiner. It’s just a few strands forming into a makeshift rat tail that dangles from his bald scalp to his nose. There’s one scene where the camera focuses on the pockmarked face of a scuzzy criminal while the topless dancer remains out of focus. Fire the cinematographer!
What’s the plot? A gang of thieves robs a car transporting money for a bank or a foreign diplomat. Tomas Milan stars as Tomas Ravelli, a cop with a chip on his shoulder due to a gang of robbers shooting his wife to death. Yeah, she was just walking down the street with a baby carriage one day and took some bullets to the chest and the thieves made their getaway. I half expected the baby carriage to roll out into the street and get hit by a Mack truck. Ravelli’s baby boy survived, but Ravelli and the other police never caught the thieves.
It’s these very same thieves that robbed that transport car of hundreds of thousands in unmarked bills. Their leader is a man known as The Marseilles (Gastone Moschin), a portly blond man with a hacking cough. He’s got a sultry girlfriend named Marta (Stefania Casini) who spends her spare time dressing up as Marilyn Monroe. He and the gang plan to split the money six ways, but an argument erupts when one of the gang members wants to skip town. Somehow he manages to get his head cracked open when falls back onto a raised floor. Oh well. More for the rest of them.
Later in the movie, four of them drive around town dressed as priests figuring it’s the perfect disguise for getting through those pesky police stops without any questions asked. Rino (Ray Lovelock), the youngest of the gang, insists on stopping for cigarettes, but gets his cover blown when he accidentally drops his gun in the convenience store. It’s not long before the clerk calls the cops and they’re on their tail. A shootout commences with The Marseilles and Rino opening fire on the chasing police. The chasing cops get shot up and run off the road, but Rino takes one in the head. Oh well. More for the rest of them.
The gang isn’t out of the woods yet. Ravelli is chasing them down by helicopter, shooting at the vehicle whenever he can. Even when they lose Ravelli, the gang falls apart when it’s revealed The Marseilles planned to kill all of them so he and Marta could make off with the money. I guess there’s no honor among thieves and revenge is a dish best served with hot lead.. You can check out Emergency Squad on TUBI.
Photo by Leslie Salas. Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
My nerves–sweetened by
natural honey–so bad
I don’t have to use
a catheter to make me cry.
Bladderjacked By the Cutullan Postman and Other Modern Calamities
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Sweethearts Remember” – Jim Lauderdale
- “Let the Good Times Kill (Live)” – Danava
- “Love in Outer Space” – Secret Chiefs 3, Kronos Quartet, Trey Spruance
- “Aspiring to the Sky” – Rich Ruth
- “Cows Come Home” – John Glacier
- “Tineacious” – Mark Dresser, Jerome Rothenberg
- “The Center That Cannot Hold” – Replacire
- “Serving the Fruits of the Infinitely Branching Multiversal Tree” – Pepe Deluxe
- “Everybody Is” – Pepe Deluxe
- “Help, I’m a Rock/Transylvania Boogie (Live)” – Frank Zappa, The Mothers of Invention
- “R.I.P. (Rest In Pain)” – Cavalera Conspiracy
- “Bandits” – Billy Cobham
- “Go Dig My Grave (Live)” – Lankum
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
You didn’t think the pile was over already, did you? That first run that I wrote about last week was only the tip of an old iceberg that’s been sitting on my shelf collecting dust between house moves. Since we have nearly four years worth of stories to catch up on, we may as well keep going through Wonder Woman and the new creative team that took over after Mariko Tamaki and the events of DC’s Death Metal event. This time around, we have Becky Cloonan, Michael W. Conrad, Travis Moore, Andy MacDonald, Jill Thompson, and Emanuela Lupacchino giving us Diana tumbling through the multiverse in Afterworlds.
This new arc finds Diana tumbling into a new pantheon as she finds herself in Asgard, locked in an eternal battle that will repeat in perpetuity so long as there are warriors to fight. With no memory of who she is other than that she knows how to fight, Diana takes a sword from the Norse hero Siegfried, and proceeds into the fray before catching an ax to her chest. Here, she is no longer invulnerable like she had been on Earth. But this is normal in the realm as she wakes up in Valhalla to enjoy the mead, meat, and company before fighting again the next day. But there’s a problem with the routine as more and more warriors are not reviving to fight. And this leads Diana and Siegfried on a patch down the World Tree and across the multiverse as they find a path of destruction created by the bifurcated Roman god, Janus.
There are dozens of instances of heroes coming back from the dead for next to no reason—Brightest Day as an event enshrined that sentiment—but this story arc makes Wonder Woman coming back from the dead after sacrificing herself during the Death Metal actually feel earned. This wasn’t simply dropping her back into the world as if nothing had happened, this was her clawing back to life with a head of half-memories and Ratatosk, the World Tree’s messenger, chirping on her shoulder. But this is a story too of Diana realizing that, even in death, she still has work to do after her ascension to godhood. That there is always some problem to be solved, that there is some injustice to right somewhere in the world, means that she can never let herself die or take her seat on Olympus. She has to live to keep the world going.
While this arc of Wonder Woman is another transition period, it is also giving us set-ups for what will come later in this team’s run. We’re getting new characters, relationships, small crises popping up along the multiverse, and a reintroduction of Diana into the world after her death. We start small with the threat of the past and future being erased from the world, so we can only get bigger from there.
Get excited. Get through.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
On this week’s show Chrissy Kolaya talks to Li-Young Lee about his latest collection of poems, The Invention of the Darling. Together they explore the rooms of poetry, the systems of the human imagination, and the voice of angels.
BOOKS DISCUSSED
NOTES
The Society for Speculation presents: The World Ahead: a talk on a new collaborative project from artist Rachel Simmons & writer Chrissy Kolaya. Saturday, June 29th, 7-9 PM at The Kerouac Project of Orlando.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 629 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Weapons of Death
“Who let the lioness out?” I asked as Waldo clung for dear life on the fake tree in the Sheena: Queen of the Jungle exhibit. The Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, stuck two fingers into his mouth and whistled. The lioness swerved around and darted straight for us. The Revenging Manta gripped his sword as she lunged at him, jaws wide open. With the hilt of his sword, he cracked her on the noggin and down she went.
— To be continued.
This week’s movie is 1977’s Weapons of Death from director Mario Caiano. Last week I covered Violent Naples which is part two of the Commissioner Betti Trilogy. I was not aware of this trilogy and frantically began searching for the first and third parts, Violent Rome and Special Cop in Action. Neither are available on the various free streaming services on my Roku player. However, Weapons of Death is a kind of spin off from that series as it features Gennarino (Massimo Deda), the boy who got disabled after his father, a mechanic, saved his life before being burned alive. When Commissioner Benti was about to quit the force, he saw poor Gennarino struggling to cross the street and for that reason alone, he stayed on the force.
Gennarino is getting by okay in this movie. He walks with a limp, but has figured out a way to earn some cash with some other boy hoodlums. He sells old newspapers to cars on lover’s lane so the couples can cover their windows while discreetly doing the deed. Other scams involve stealing the tires off of rich men’s cars and selling crappy tap H2O as fancy mineral water. There’s even a scene where young Gennarino steals a race car for a joy ride.
I wanted him to crash and burst into flames, but we don’t always get what we want.
A Commissioner Belli (Leonard Mann) keeps a close eye on Gennarino, trying to keep the kid on the straight and narrow, but the commissioner has a lot on his plate. A violent train robbery happens at the start of this movie. Money is stolen and guards are shot by masked robbers. This is a nasty bunch. When one of the robbers gets wounded, another robber shoots him dead rather than take him with them. Chief orchestrator of these robberies is Santora (Henry Silva), a close relation of Don Alfredo Criscuolo, his godfather. You kids may recognize Henry Silva as Kane from the hit TV show Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
Other members of the Camorra are too happy with Santora’s antics. They don’t like the attention he brings to their organization while trying to become legitimate businessmen. They organize an assassination that gets foiled when Commissioner Belli saves Santora’s life.
Sure Santora has been robbing banks and killing security guards and other innocent bystanders, but he needs to be taken down the right way. Think of all the lives Belli might save if he just lets Santora get taken down like the dog that he is.
Commissioner Belle finally takes down Santora in a train station, but not before Santora sends a round into the chest of young Gennarino. The poor kid dies, never getting to fulfill his dream of becoming a Rhodes Scholar.
Those are the breaks in Italian cop films, kid.
Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
Sometimes we block the exits
and set the fires ourselves.
Shave That Dog!
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend” – Edison Military Band
- “Sonida Cósmico” – Hermanos Gutiérrez
- “Gone Again” – Fana Hues
- “Vajranala II” – Senyawa
- “Irrealta” – Pierre Desprats
- “Springdans frå Tøyen ” – Frøkedal
- “Earthmother” – Mary Ocher, Your Government
- “Essa Moca….Ta Direrente” – Wilson Das Neves
- “No Tag” – MINARU
- “Kiss the Carpet” – The Sisters of Mercy
- “Le serpent” – Pierre Desprats
- “Singing Contest” – The Intelligence
- “Waiting for Centuries Pt. 2” – Jimmy Bidaurreta
- “Singular Band” – Steve Harley, Cockney Rebel
- “Microverdose” – Jeff McLeod
- “When The Midnight Choo Choo Leaves For Alabam’” – Irving Berlin, Ethel Mermen, Dan Dailey
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
Since the onset of Covid and how that affected my comic buying habits over the past few years—my home shop began shipping out pull lists early in the pandemic and never really stopped—my to be read pile had become uncharacteristically large. Here in 2024, when I pulled an issue from October 2020, I knew I had to start chiseling away at this edifice. And so begins the task of reading through four years of accumulation to lessen the shame of having the pile collect dust. And this just happens to begin with Mariko Tamaki, Mikel Janín, Carlo Barberi, Steve Pugh, and Rafah Sandoval’s ten issue run on Wonder Woman.
After moving to Washington DC, Diana finds herself embroiled in something strange, yet familiar: people doing things against their will with no memory of what they were doing. This means it’s time, once again, to figure out what Maxwell Lord is doing from his prison cell. But when Wonder Woman discovers that Max can’t be the one behind this string of strange occurrences, we discover his estranged daughter, a woman named Emma who happens to live down the hall from Diana. With stolen Lord Enterprises tech, Emma was able to develop an app to amplify her own powers and remotely control anyone who happened to use it, including Diana. With the tech on the black market and only one person who knows how to use it, Wonder Woman and Maxwell Lord have to cross the planet to find the missing pieces of tech before their own eventual confrontation.
As a quick, ten issue run on the character, Tamaki manages to fit in an incredible amount of story with each issue feeling like its own stand-alone arc for every character involved. And this condensing of story does help to transition us between some of the larger events happening in DC at the time without feeling as though it’s only a transitory series. What Tamaki and every artist who worked on the book do so well throughout is make this series feel like it does matter to the overall character of Wonder Woman—that her development here isn’t something that can be so easily swept under the rug when the next big event looks to wipe the slate clean again. It’s a macro-level character study told in five months that makes us feel like we have a better version of Diana at the end of it.
While the event comics of the past feel like they’ve already been lost to the continuous stream of world ending events and reboots that superhero comics are plagued by, this run on Wonder Woman feels consequential. Even if we’re more than three years after it ended, we can see bits and pieces of character development into the next, even longer run, on the character. And being able to see that building up of this character over so long does give us that feeling that keeping up and reading all of these series is leading to something, even if we know the story can never really end.
Get excited. Get wonderful.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Happy Bloomsday, one and all.
Well, probably not all–but many of the literary weirdos who might find their way onto this site this morning or mid evening or with their faces mashed oh so narcoleptically atop their keyboards.
What was I talking about?
I am fickle about holidays. My four foot pink Xmas trees gets erected maybe every third year.
I feel similarly about Bloomsday, named after that day in literature in which James Joyce’s Ulysses is set.
I am, technically, a Joyce scholar, due to an existential rabbit hole I flung myself into from 1993 until some hazy time after. (Please don’t read the following image, which is used just to verify that I have bona fide academic accomplishments regarding my understanding of Ulysses, set on June 16, 1904, published in 1922.)
There are maybe four chapters of this doorstop novel that I have more than a dim understanding of.
I’ve hosted two live readings from Ulysses on this holiday, which the Irish singer Joe Hurley once called “St. Patrick’s Day for Nerds.”
My best Bloomsday show was a studio affair, however.
I enlisted numerous readers for this one. Jeff Shuster, the Curator of Schlock, howled that the words I demanded he read were not actually words. I could hear Joyce’s ghost snickering from the ether at that juicy moment.
In my earliest days as a podcast listener, back when the novelty of podcasts seemed to make anything possible, I listened to someone who called herself Paigerella, who read Ulysses aloud about once a week, taking if memory serves years to get the whole book read. She wasn’t a scholar, and did not frame each episode with commentary, or much commentary, but might opine, after a Joycean fart joke, that James Joyce was such a boy.
Paigerella’s conception of Ulysses as an aesthetic experience was that like a blue-tipped match, you could strike it anywhere. The book made enough sense out of context to be a fun read, and it was fun, most of the time.
This was the version of Ulysses I bought and read the summer between my undergrad work and MA work. I went made like Coleridge’s ancient mariner and bothered people at parties with the messianic weirdness, or radical human-ness, of this novel. Paigerella was probably a better ambassador for the book.
Ulysses features two men wandering all over Dublin and one woman staying at home in bed.
My first Bloomsday celebrations were in NYC, in downtown Manhattan, in readings hosted by the National Book Award winner Colum McCann. Unless you work on Wall Street, this is an odd neighborhood to wander into.
Colum McCann by John King.The venue was and still is Ulysses Folk House, in downtown Manhattan near Wall Street. A bar a few doors down is named Beckett’s. I deeply hope those two bars occasionally play softball together.
In 2008, I recorded the event, which features a lot of people reading passages, people including my beloved friend Christopher Booth (who knows more about Ulysses then I do), Colum McCann, of course, and Sam Shepherd, Alas, I didn’t have enough tape for the indomitable Aedín Moloney performing Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. Aedín eventually adapted this reading into a one-woman play.
I have seen that this Bloomsday reading celebration celebrates its 21st anniversary. If you live in New York, this is a fine celebration on a cobblestone street from another century.
I plan to listen to a little Paigerella this year, listen to her read the first chapter and relearn about Buck Mulligan’s stately plumpness and all his churl.
I’ve never experienced Bloomsday in Dublin, but the great Bloomsda’s I’ve had are better than any other holiday. Wherever you are, I hope the links here help you celebrate, if you want to.
Try to have fun with it.
Photo by Shawn McKee.John King (Episode, well, almost all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has published scholarship both on James Joyce and Samuel Beckett and, naturally, Mystery Science Theater 3000. He is the author of the novel Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.
On this week’s show, I talk to the novelist Kent Wascom about the continuation of the Woolsack legacy in his new novel, The Great State of West Florida. We discuss the vibrantly chaos of Florida, the postmodern pulp possibilities of the western genre, and the importance of a great book cover.
Kent Wascom & John King. Photo by Samantha Nickerson.BOOK DISCUSSED
NOTES
Check out our earlier conversion back on Episode 125.
Follow my brother, James King, the tattoo artist, on IG. He now runs his own shop, The Tattooed Society.
4960 Oak Avenue Winter Park, FL 32792.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 628 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
“Help!”
Edwige, my kangaroo companion from my misadventures in North America, the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, and I heard the cry coming from the Sheena: Queen of the Jungle exhibit. I almost tripped over the collapsed state of Tanya Roberts while rushing into the exhibit. Waldo, the punk of the Goose Lord gang I thought I subdued, was hanging from a branch of an artificial fynbos tree while a lioness roared at him.
— To be continued.
This week’s movie is 1976’s Violent Naples from director Umberto Lenzi. Hey, this one stars John Saxon. Do any of you remember John Jaxon, star of such movies as Cannibal Apocalypse, Battle Beyond the Stars, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Beverly Hills Cop III? Beverly Hills Cop III was the one that took place in the amusement park. No, it’s not the bad one of that trilogy. It holds up better than you’d think.
Violent Naples begins with Commissioner Betti (Maurizio Merli) transferring to Naples and it’s the same handsome Italian man with a boss mustache from last week’s movie. Was Maurizio Merli the Clint Eastwood of poliziottesco films? He’s greeted in Naples by almost getting run over by a goon working for The Commandante (Barry Sullivan), our chief villain of this picture. Among other nefarious activities, The Commandant offers a protection racket to various small businesses in Naples. And if you don’t pay up, you get your shop wrecked or worse.
The Commandante isn’t the only crook Bette has to contend with. We’ve got a couple of nasty scumbags trying to rob this wealthy man, but the wealthy man keeps setting off various alarms in his house, foiling their plans. They still manage to kidnap his wife and leave her to be found by the police, bruised and broken. Betti sets up an entrapment operation to catch them and one of the scumbags manages to impale himself on a spiked gate trying to escape. That’s a really stupid way to die.
There’s also a bank robber named Franco (Elio Zamuto) who’s got a beef with Bette for putting him away once before. Franco has come up with a clever scheme. He robs a bank on one side of town and a motorcyclist drives him away and drops him off on the other side of town in no time flat. This frustrates Bette to no end, but when he finally catches up to Franco’s operation, we get a chase scene culminating in a violent face-off on a commuter train.
But chief among these villains is The Commandante who likes to roll bowling balls into the heads of his enemies. Getting back to the aforementioned protection racket, there’s this mechanic who refuses to pay so The Commandante’s goons pour gasoline all over his car shop and set it ablaze. The mechanic’s young son is crying in the background and his father sacrifices himself to save him. Also, the kid had his leg or pelvis shattered during his rescue so he’ll never walk properly again. I hate The Commandante! Leave children out of your schemes!
John Saxon plays a businessman named Francesco Capuano and he’s the key to taking down The Commandate.
It seems the Monthly Film Bulletin, a British rag from back in the day, accused Violent Naples of being a Dirty Harry ripoff.
I agree. Violent Naples is so good!
Photo by Leslie SalasJeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
There was a young artist from Dublin.
The girls all made fun of his fumblin’.
To a new one he sung,
like a Barnacle she clung,
and what she taught him sure was humblin’.
In the Sweat and Dew of Pyramids and Lilacs
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Trail of the Lonesome Pine” – Laurel & Hardy
- “Blue Blaze” – Abigail Lapell
- “Tangled Out of Nowhere Slow” – Luxury Sleep Solutions
- “Kev Said” – Kevin Hopper
- “Ouija” – Sylvia Plath
- “Life Is Over” – The Hell
- “And Then The Rain” – The Jesus Lizard
- “Moisture” – The Residents
- “The Bourbaki Conjecture” – Kim Cascone
- “O Venezia, Venaga, Venusia” – Nino Rota
- “Sunflower River Blues (Re-Recorded Version)” – John Fahey
- “Frostbite of Death (remix)” – Green Beret
- “Black Dog” – Spider John Koerner
- “Plain Gold Ring” – Nina Simone
- “Bound to Lose” – Skeptic?
- “Dance of the Poppies” – Davey Williams & LaDonna Smith
- “Anna Livia Plurabelle” – James Joyce
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
Over the past few years, many comics take a quick break before returning to their worlds. Creative teams need breaks. While some never come back after their first arc and stay unfinished for years, we do see others pop back up after brief pauses to finish the next steps in their stories. After covering the first four issues of Briar back in November, I didn’t know when the series was going to return. But finally, last month, writer Christoper Cantwell returned with a new creative team in Alex Lins and Luis NCT for the start of the next arc in Briar #5.
This arc begins not long after the previous issue ended—maybe as many months as the break between issues—as Briar Rose and her companions look to make some money before confronting Rose’s godmother, Grendrid. If they were close to their lowest before this issue, they’re even lower now as they barely make enough money to support themselves taking odd jobs in Shadow Village and getting into fights with local authorities.
While all of this can seem like typical D&D party shenanigans, we’re quickly reminded of the core drama of the first arc: why Briar Rose was put to sleep by her godmother. As Rose and her companions flee the town, a crack opens in the ground, swallowing the town with fire and brimstone while the party watches from a distance and Grendrid’s words echo in her head.
But for this issue of Briar, we’re given that sense of a returning series that we haven’t felt in a while. As I mentioned in my previous writing about the series, this was originally only a four issue miniseries until the publisher extended it into a continuing series. And while this has happened recently with a few other series from Boom, seeing Briar come back after its hiatus and slip right into a continuing series feels like a logical step for many series. These miniseries become the pilot episodes before being green-lit for a full season of comics gives a creative team time to re-calibrate and consider how much more they can do with more time and space for their stories. The process draws readers into the world with a small hint of what could come before finally opening up the world for them to dive in further.
Briar is just one of many series that follows this format, but it’s the one that’s most fascinating to watch as its own narrative matches its publication with Briar Rose herself sleeping and returning for us. As a series itself, the creative team still brings us a retelling of a fairy tale heroine without falling into the dark edgyness that plagues other fairy tale retellings. For publishing, it can show us a new way forward for some smaller series.
Get excited. Get back.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
On this week’s show, I talk to the poet David McLoghlin about his newest collection of poems, Crash Centre, history, religion, rugby, boarding school, trauma, and exiting the comforts of metaphor.
TEXT DISCUSSED
Buy Crash Centre here.
NOTES
Check out our earlier conversion back on episode 309.
Check out David reading Rilke’s “Presentiment” back on episode 275.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 627 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
There I was with my faithful companion the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando and Edwige, a female kangaroo fitted with boxing gloves. I wondered how we were going to rid the Museum of Schlock of the Goose Lord and his gang of thugs. If only I had access back then what I have access to now. I could have taken Dune Part 2, projected it on a big screen for all the gang members to see, and bored them all to death. — To be continued.
Tonight’s movie is 1976’s The Tough Ones from director Umberto Lenzi. Yes, it’s high time I entered into the world of Poliziotteschi, Italian crime movies that were so popular in the 1970s. This one is a slice of life in the week of a cop living in 1970s Rome, a cop by the name of Inspector Leonardo Tanzi (Maurizio Merli). He’s a handsome Italian man with a boss mustache and fists of steel, but is that enough to stop the creepers and thugs making Rome a cesspool of violence?
Inspector Tanzi is head of the anti-gang squad, but that doesn’t stop him from getting reprimanded by his boss, Vice-Commissioner Ruini (Arthur Kennedy), for actually going after the criminals and maybe not playing by the book. How an Irish-American became a Vice-Commissioner in Rome is beyond me? I wonder if the Grim Reaper looks and sounds like Arthur Kennedy because the man’s face is an abyss that I don’t want to look into.
The main villain of this picture is a hunchback named Vincenzo Moretto (Tomas Milian), the brother-in-law of a man suspected of robbing a bank and killing a security guard. Tanzi finds (plants) some blow in Moretto’s car and promptly arrests him. Moretto demands to use the bathroom and proceeds to pee all over the floor before slitting his wrists with the band of his watch and blaming it on police brutality so Ruini drops the charges of drug possession and assigns Tanzi to license and permits.
This doesn’t stop Tanzi from running into disgusting criminals during his off time. He chases down a rape gang led by the son of prominent rich man, but that doesn’t stop Tanzi from shoving the rich kid’s head through a pinball table and giving chase to him and his chums. Richie Rich even tries to run Tanzi down a couple of times before Tanzi shoots a couple of bullets into his head.
Let’s get back to Moretto. He’s had a beef with Tanzi ever since he made Moretto swallow a gold bullet. This golden bullet was given to Tanzi by his girlfriend after some goons stuffed her into a car and in the junkyard and almost crushed the car. It was Moretto’s idea to intimidate Tanzi, but Tanzi forces him to swallow it whole. After crapping the bullet out, Moretto’s vows to kill Tanzi with the golden bullet.
The Tough Ones is a fun ride while it lasts. The chase scene with Moretto forcing an ambulance driver at gunpoint to drive is worth your time alone.
What else are you going to do on a Friday night?
Photo by Leslie SalasJeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
I would could I lift
spite out like a cracked tooth, dry
fear like a hard sponge.
If We Only Had Those Tools We Threw Away
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “La Tóxica” – Alejandro Fernández, Anitta
- “Autumn Leaves” – Arooj Aftab, James Francies
- “Our Spring Will Come” – Bertrand Chamayou
- “Good Times” – Henry Threadgill Sextett
- “Loungemusik från arabien” – As-Sahra
- “Gina Sleeps All Day” – Spring Breeding
- “Telling Me Lies” – The Woggles
- “Dallas (S.J.)” – Merchandise
- “Druid One (Live, Essen, 1970)” – Third Ear Band
- “Every Moment After This (Live)” – John Zorn, Jesse Harris, Petra Haden, Brian Marsella, Jorge Roeder, Ches Smith
- “Secrets” – Beak>
- “The Howl” – Crowded House
- “Blancasnow” – Enrico Rava, John Abercrombie, Palle Danielsson, Jon Christensen
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
Living in the opening of a climate crisis, I’m watching for something good to happen—an uptick in renewable energy sources, fusion energy finally achieved, or another miracle.
Comics are bastions of fantastical thinking, right? Only in the pages of a comic could we see a tower that provides almost limitless energy by harvesting the personifications of our most common sources of said energy. When does a company not try to make something scarce for an economic edge? Now we get to see what happens when that tower comes down in Nick Dragotta, Caleb Goellner, and Rus Wooton’s Ghost Cage.
Ohm is the biggest corporation on Earth. After building the tower, Ohm would go on to influence nearly every facet of life through power outages and planned “maintenance.” But after an attack on the tower, the sources of power have escaped containment and are threatening to tear the tower apart from the inside.
Ohm has a back-up plan: Sam. If Ohm’s tower is powered by the imprisoned spirits of various energy sources, then Sam is the spirit of consumption—quite literally as he goes floor by floor to absorb each of those spirits. But while he makes this journey, he’s shepherded by Doyle, an Ohm tech drafted into helping check Sam’s diagnostic data to ensure he’s able to make it to the top. Doyle herself is brought into the fold because she’s one of hundreds in the tech support paddock—loyal enough to do whatever Ohm asks and trusting enough to never question any of it.
There’s a certain degree of absurdity that comes with Ghost Cage’sconcept that feels both ripped from the pages of popular battle manga and a not-completely-illogical leap from late capitalism. Sam literally fights and eats these spirits in the name of progress. But whose is that progress? All this energy Sam is absorbing is in service to the AI version of Ohm’s founder, Karloff.
The frantic density of Ghost Cage’s three issues speaks to the comic power of Dragotta, Goellner, and Wooton. We see a microcosm of the world that could be with a company like Ohm at the helm of Earth’s power supply, the limits of that power, and the world after their grip is gone. And the latter comes from the people who were trapped on the inside of it—the employees, daughters, and creations of a massive company—and shows us that it’s those people who always push the world forward.
Get excited. Get powered.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
with Dmetri Kakmi
The Bride of Frankenstein
USA 1935
Director: James Whale
Cast: Boris Karloff, Ernest Thesiger, Elsa Lanchester, Colin Clive
The Bride of Frankenstein is unique in the horror pantheon. Far from being a mere sequel to Whale’s own Frankenstein (1931), it is a beast in its own right. And, like Beatrice to Dante, the ‘monster’s mate’ is Whale’s greatest creation.
Alongside Hitchcock, James Whale was among the first British auteurs. After working in theatre, he moved to Hollywood and made popular melodramas before turning his hand to horror. Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933) followed. But his heart was not in the genre. He wanted A-list prestige projects that would raise his name out of the flea pits to serious cinematic heights.
Carl Laemmle Jr at Universal Studios had to talk Whale into directing the Bride. Lured back with the promise of a bigger budget and more artistic freedom, Whale exceeded expectations and delivered a sumptuous gothic poem that is neither horror nor entirely a dark comedy, but an idiosyncratic essay that defies classification. Studio heads did not know what to make of it and the censors lost their collective marbles when they saw it, imposing a number of cuts that shortened the running time by fifteen minutes.
I first encountered the Bride when I was fifteen years old. Pretending to be sick, I stayed home from school to watch it on midday television. The grotesque, freakish images made me see the world anew. It was like being confronted with a new reality and deciding to make your home there. I recognised without being aware of it at the time that the Monster’s plight — a set-upon outcast — was my plight as a gay teenager. The outlook expressed on screen was, explicitly or not, a mordantly gay sensibility that through a series of symbols and situations spoke to those in-tune.
Next day, struggling to describe the film to friends, I called it ‘a gothic phantasmagoria’.
A principle pleasure is the film’s capacity to slip insurgent ideas into what could have been a standard script. Whale influenced the writing (the prologue and the homunculi, for instance, are his ideas) and was instrumental in casting British actors in the main roles. The comedy is not there to lighten the burden between scenes of terror but rather woven into the overall texture to convey a distinctly English brand of humour that is nothing short of subversive and (nowadays) camp. By the end you feel as if you have been sitting down with Whale himself, having a good old chinwag with a refined man, while Franz Waxman’s virtuoso music underscores peak moments.
Filmed on studio sets in a German Expressionist mode, The Bride of Frankenstein is high on artifice and style. Like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), sets are exaggerated, bigger than life, to convey interior states of mind. You can’t imagine a normal human being living in those vast shadow-filled spaces, but you can imagine someone feeling like that. Depending on a character’s mood, a forest can be a bucolic paradise or a stark tableaux of tall straight trunks devoid of branch and leaf. Painted skies glower. Cemeteries almost spew out the dead as gravestones tilt crazily and marble figures loom out of a noxious miasma.
None of this means anything if it was not for a brilliant cast. We will focus on two pivotal roles.
Ernest Thesiger was one of the great English stage eccentrics. He brings to the role of Doctor Septimus Pretorius (‘There’s no such name,’ mutters Una O’Connor) a customary love of theatrics and aristocratic scorn that is hilarious and menacing. He is the granddaddy of all mad professors, a Mephistophelian figure, there to tempt victims from the straight and narrow. Far from being ‘coded gay’ he is about as out there as an actor dared to be in 1930s Hollywood. Doctor Pretorius is not in the film to merely create a bride for the monster. He is there to bust up a happy heterosexual union as well. And it is hilarious how quickly and eagerly Dr Frankenstein drops his wife-to-be and goes off with a sinister old queen to create ‘unnatural’ life in a lonesome tower.
But even Thesiger cannot stand up against the mighty Elsa Lanchester. When she is unveiled in the final minutes of the film, her towering figure almost steals the show. She is astonishing as the eponymous bride. (Lanchester in fact portrays two characters. Fey Mary Shelley in the prologue and the uncanny Bride at the end.) Make-up artist Jack Pierce outdoes himself here, creating the most iconic and instantly recognisable female monster in cinema history. Coming across like a bizarre fashion model in minimalist flowing robes and Nefertiti style hair, Lanchester is a sight to behold. All jerky movements and hissing, she is an exaggerated form of womanhood that bespeaks of the drag queen.
Rumour has it that when he first saw Lanchester in full make up Thesiger said to Colin Clive, ‘We even did her hair. What a couple of queens we are.’ The only give-away the Bride is assembled from cadavers is the jagged scar beneath the chin. It is a pity her screen time is limited because it would be interesting to know what she got up to if she lived. We can surmise from her hostile response to the Monster that she would not countenance compliance or easy domesticity.
The Bride of Frankenstein is of its time, but it is also surprisingly forward looking. First, it foregrounds overtly homosexual characters in a way that won’t be seen until Ryan Murphy’s TV series American Horror Story hits the airwaves in the 2000s. Second, it looks forward to a time when same-sex couples can think about having children through artificial means. Medical advances allow contemporary feminists to contemplate procreation without men. The Bride of Frankenstein, with Ridley Scott’s Alien Covenant (2017), says two can play at that game, and ups the ante by pursuing male procreation, free of women, with a Promethean leap that links ancient myth with present-day sciences.
Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Dictionary of a Gadfly (as The Sozzled Scribbler), The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). His novel The Woman in the Well will be published in 2025. He is currently working on a crime novel called The Perfect Room.
In this week’s show, Chelsea Alice interviews translator Ian Patterson again. This time they discuss The Theory of the Four Movements by the 19th century French utopian thinker Charles Fourier, as a way of thinking about 19th century history, science, and philosophy. They also discuss Ian’s recent poetry collection Shell Vestige Disputed. The last time these two discussed Ian’s translation of Proust.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 626 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, wasn’t buying my story of a reanimated corpse attacking the goons that were hauling him off while unconscious. I argued that I once lived in an antebellum mansion filled with vampires and was almost abducted by aliens, but he called my observations flights of fancy and a distraction from the mission of taking down the Goose Lord and his gang of fentanyl pushing goons.
We pressed on, but I kept my eye out for roving zombies.
— To be continued.
Tonight’s movie is 2024’s Late Night With the Devil from directors Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes. I wonder if they’re related. The premise of this found footage horror movie is what if a late night host from the 1970s had a demonically possessed young girl on his show? What provocative, 1970s shenanigans would ensue in front of a live studio audience?
Our movie begins with a brief biography of Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), host of the late night show Night Owls back in the 1970s. While he rose in the ratings, his viewership never beat that of Johnny Carson. Paul Williams once visited The Tonight Show dressed as an orangutan from Battle of the Planet of the Apes and sang “Here’s That Rainy Day” in front of a live audience. How could Jack Delroy ever beat Carson?
Production halts on Night Owls after Delroy’s wife, Madeleine (Georgina Haig), passes away due to cancer. When Jack finally returns to Night Owls, he books controversial guests, but his ratings decline. With his contract almost up, he books some special guests for a Halloween edition of Night Owls. First of these is Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), a psychic and medium who claims he can hear the dead. Next we have Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), a former stage magician who now spends his time debunking the paranormal. He reminds me of the Amazing Randi, a popular skeptic back in the 1970s. I remember him on the cover of Dynamite magazine back in the day.
It’s fascinating how this film is presented as an actual episode of Night Owls. It has the feel of an episode of a late show made back in the 1970s, complete with Billy Carter jokes in the opening monologue. During commercial breaks, we get some behind the scenes footage with Jack and his crew. Gus McConnell (Rhys Auteri) is Jack’s sidekick and tries to sway Jack from not going too far while Leo Fiske (Josh Quong Tart), the sleazy producer of Night Owls, wants him to push the envelope. And push the envelope Jack does with his final guest, Lilly D’Abo (Ingrid Torelli), a young girl possessed by the devil.
We get a brief documentary about Lilly, the last surviving member of the cult of Abraxas. It seems they all committed suicide by setting themselves on fire, but Lilly some survived with another being inside of her. June Ross-Mitchell, a parapsychologist, is the author of an upcoming book about Lilly, Conversations With the Devil. Jack wants June to conjure up Lilly’s devil live on air. Late Night With the Devil is an enjoyable ride, currently streaming on Shudder.
Photo by Leslie SalasJeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
I lost equations
traceable in bass solos
on dad’s records.
Lost Equations
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “WSOD” – Shellac
- “Gouldamadin (WIZRD Remix)” – Gouldian Finch, WIZRD
- “Serenade in E-Flat Major” – London Music Works, Nick Squires
- “Suffer” – Clan of Xymox
- “The Barney Miller Theme” – TV Tunesters
- “Glow Drift” – Bill MacKay
- “Maciste Is Back in Town” – Scott Amendola, Henry Kaiser, Michael Manring
- “Letters from the Sea” – Msaki, Tubatsi Mpho Moloi
- “Two Kinds of Tears” – Lionlimb
- “Cyclops” – Finom
- “Open Sky” – Lorenzo Dada, Luciano Michelini, Tears of Blue
- “Labyrinth” – Magic Fig
- “The Bells of St. Mary’s” – Gastr Del Sol
- “Intermezzo in C Minor (Piano and Double Bass)” – London Music Works, Nich Squires
- “Theme From Electric Surfboard (Live)” – Jack McDuff
- “La Ley del Monte” – Vicente Fernández
- “Hill Street Blues” – Daniel Caine Orchestra
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
In this week’s show, John talks with Daniel Handler about the absurd fun of stress-testing reality, the joys of listening to Sun Ra, the efficacy of writing on ordinary writing pads, and the importance of waiting for the good stuff to come to us as writers.
Daniel Handler by Meredith Heuer.TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 625 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
I got The Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, up to speed. Yes, the Goose Lord and his gang were still up to their nefarious plot of harming the citizens of downtown Orlando. Edwige had come to my rescue when a leather clad gimp tried biting throat out and how we subdued a punk resembling Waldo from Where’s Waldo. Just as I was about to tell him about the power going out, the lights flickered on. I was expecting to see the bodies of the goons killed by the zombie in The Beyond exhibit, but they were nowhere to be seen. I trail of blood was all that was left. – To be continued.
Tonight’s movie is 1996’s Twister from director Jan de Bont. This was the second highest grossing movie of 1996 right behind Independence Day. For you kids out there, yes we used to go to movies that weren’t part of franchises featuring a Marvel or DC character. Back then, all you needed were tornados tearing through hearth and home to satisfy an audience. It was a simpler time when matinee tickets cost five bucks and 3-D movies were a relic from the 1950s.
Our movie begins with a young girl watching her father get sucked into an F5 tornado. I guess that would scar you for life. Fast forward about twenty eight years and she’s now a hot shot tornado chaser named Jo Harding (Helen Hunt). Her estranged husband, Bill (Bill Paxton), is engaged to a woman named Melissa (Jami Gertz). He travels out to tornado country (Kansas?) with his fiancé to get Jo to finally sign the divorce papers. Before he can get a word in edgewise, Jo shows him a fancy machine named Dorothy (Wizard of Oz reference) that will spit little robots up into the tornado so they can analyze and better predict when and where tornados will show in order to give people more warning.
Jo’s tornado chasing team is a carnival of maverick scientists, chief among them a hard rocker named Dusty (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). Bill used to be a part of this team before he separated from Jo and decided to start a career as a TV weatherman. But Dorothy was his idea and Jo got the machine to work so he and Melissa tag along on the first tornado chase. Unfortunately, there is an evil tornado chasing team trying to steal their, ummmm, thunder.
Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes) is the lead scientist of this rival team and this team drives all black vehicles and have corporate sponsorship. To make matters worse, Jonas has his own version of Dorothy that he stole from Bill back in their college days. I hate Jonas and his corporate sponsored tornado chasers! Don’t worry. Jonas will get what’s coming to him. And it’s death! Sweet death!
Look, if you want scenes of flying cows, steak and eggs, dog rescuing, and drive-in destruction, then Twister is the movie for you! I hear it’s getting a sequel this summer titled Twisters. I guess this time it’s war!
Photo by Leslie Salas.Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
Put shaving cream on
your head and do the dishes.
Respond in terza rima.
Use the following
words in a story: kryptonite,
Mister Mxyzptlk, spinach, gonorrhea.
Hot Licks and Rhetoric
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Rainbows” – John Travolta
- “Identity Crisis” – Trees on the Moon
- “Open or Close” – Nicole Glover
- “Un” – Ghédalia Tazartès
- “Dirty Grape” – Johnny “Hammond” Smith
- “Vendetta (tema)” – Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats
- “King Of The World” – Steely Dan
- “A Lollipop for Papa” – Peter Zinovieff
- “Curly Shuffle” – Don Rich
- “Punch and Judy: War Cry” – Harrison Burtwistle, Jan DeGaetani
- “2HB” – Roxy Music
- “Scratch” – Kenny Barron, Kiyoshi Kitagawa, Jonathan Blake, Immanuel Wilkins
- “Home Home Home” – Pokey LaFarge
- “My Corpse, Your Dungeon” – La Suspendida, Kilter, Andromeda Anarchia, Growlers Choir, seven)suns
- “Drinkin’ Stein” – Sylvester Stallone
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
Houses are haunted by what we leave behind in them. For instance, a house I used to live in is haunted by the collection of coolers we accidentally left in the attic. In another instance, a house may be haunted by the giant machine designed to peer into the afterlife and make contact with the ghosts there. Either/or scenario. While the former may not inspire much terror—although the family who moved in after us may have been hesitant to open the coolers—the latter contains its fair share of haunts. And that house and machine become the foundation for the new series from James Tynion IV, Christian Ward, and Aditya Bidikar: Spectregraph.
In 1967, Ambrose Everett Hall addresses the occult organization he has been a member of for some time. He decries their beliefs in the afterlife and their pursuit of contact with the dead—a feat he says is impossible. Unless, of course, he is able to create his own afterlife in the mansion he’s building on the California coast. In 2024, Janie Chase is looking to help sell that house as quickly as she can. On her way out, she realizes that she left her infant in his high chair, but she can’t turn back now—the commission on selling this house will help keep her family afloat for a long while. Showing a house shouldn’t take too long. But this house isn’t so much a house as a ritual. You have to punch in the right code with the right key to enter. You have to do things in sequence or else you’ll be trapped in its walls for days. And you’ll be trapped with whatever Ambrose Everett Hall left in the massive machine in the middle of the house.
As a first issue, Spectregraph introduces its world and its rules before giving us an inversion of those rules. There is no afterlife or ghosts, the Hall mansion is an intricate clockwork of moving parts for an unknown end, and Janie Chase is going to give a tour of said mansion. But as this issue goes on, the creative team topples what we know in reverse order. Janie is not there to give a tour, but to begin the activation of the mansion’s moving parts to create a kind of ghost. Everything in the issue is set up much like the mansion itself—we go in with our own expectations before the subversion within the story.
Spectregraph‘s first issue gives us a new take on the haunted house. The house isn’t haunted so much as it’s creating its own haunts while Tynion IV, Ward, and Bidikar give us the puzzle at the heart of the house. Considering how they’ve set up this first part of the story, we can start to see how these pieces will fit into the narrative, but as with some of this team’s previous works, there’s always another piece we never consider until it’s too late.
Get excited. Get haunted.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
For anyone who prefers to listen to interviews with your eyes and ears, here is a video of John’s interview with Rochelle Hurt, which was featured on episode 526 of the podcast.
In this week’s show, John talks with Ann Hood about her newest novel, The Stolen Child, which features a storyline about artists during World War I. During this interview, I may have defended IHOP perhaps too strenuously. Talking with Ann was, as always, charming.
Ann Hood by Beowulf Sheehan.TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
Kent Wascom will read from his new novel, The Great State of West Florida, at the Kerouac Project of Orlando at 5:30 PM Sunday, May 26th.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 624 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Edwige, my steadfast kangaroo companion, had once again returned to me. She held a a giant key ring in her mouth and dropped it in front me. The key had a horse skull carved at the end of it and I marveled at its craftsmanship. The Revenging Manta stirred again and slowly opened his eyes. Upon seeing Edwige, he reached for a sword that wasn’t there.
“Ah, this is the famous Edwige you told me all about,” the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando said as he slowly rose to his feet. “Where is my weapon?” — To be continued.
Tonight’s movie is 1980’s The Changeling from director Peter Medak. This is a super scary one.
Well, not really. This makes The Amityville Horror look like The Grudge by comparison.
The movie begins with a famous composer named John Russell (George C. Scott, naturally) on vacation with his wife and young daughter. His car has conked out on a snowy road high up in the mountains. He walks over to a pay phone to call for help only to see his wife and daughter get killed in a horrible car crash. I’m talking about a closed casket funeral.
A few months go by. John gets a teaching gig at a prestigious college. He rents a fancy manor house from an agent of the neighborhood historical society, Claire Norman (Trish Van Devere). Not long after he moves in, he begins to notice some abnormalities in his new residence. Instead of a bump in the night, we get a bump during the day. A maintenance guy says it’s the furnace, but we know it’s not the furnace. The house is haunted and it’s up to John to get to the bottom of this.
John sees a downing boy in a bathtub in one of the rooms on the upper floor. That would be my cue to leave, but John keeps exploring the house, uncovering a hidden door leading to a tiny room in the attic. John hires a medium and has her hold a seance where he learns the downing boy in the bathtub’s name was Joseph Carmichael, the same name of a prominent United States senator. Turns out his dad murdered the boy because he was too sickly and adopted another boy to take his place. This was a ploy on the part of the father to get inheritance.
The ghost of the sickly boy wants revenge, but his dad is long dead so who does he want revenge on? The kid his dad adopted and became a U.S. senator? He’s an old man now. He’ll be kicking the bucket in a few years anyway. So the ghost can’t get revenge on the man who murdered him and the man who took his place wasn’t really complicit. Not in the murder anyway.
This ghost is a loser.
Yes, ghosts can be losers too.
That’s what I learned from The Changeling.
If and when you become a ghost, do better.
Photo by Leslie Salas.Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
Grave, the tempo is
called. Slow and solemn. The waitress
pours you more water.
She asks how everything is.
You poke your yolk and
watch its perfect weep. Everything’s
fine, you tell her. Fine,
like the end of a song.
I had nothing left to articulate.
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Thème Rythme Léger” – Ahmed Malek
- “Little Things (Reimagined)” – Jorja Smith
- “Hells Bells” – Maria Faust, Lars Bech Pilgaard, Anders Vestergaard
- “Michael Furey” – Lemoncello
- “My Everything” – Rachel Chinouriri
- “NULLIFY” – SPENT CASE
- “Our Father” – Julius Eastman, wild Up, Christopher Rountree, Davóne Tines
- “Panharmonic” – Taroug
- “Infernum (Remix)” – Muse to Sirens, Trey Lane
- “Imajighen” – Mdou Moctar
- “Fire” – Ibibio Sound Machine
- “Perburuan (The Hunt)” – Senyawa, Lawrence English, Aviva Endean, Peter Knight, Helen Svoboda, Joe Talia
- “Dab Dub” – Microdose
- “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy” – Bette Davis
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
How many Robins do we have now? Five mainline ones and enough spin-offs, one-offs, alternative universe, and international reinterpretations to fill its own series makes the mantle of Robin a strange one. As one of the first sidekicks—Captain America’s Bucky beating Dick Grayson by a month in publication— the name “Robin” does carry a certain prestige despite the original costume. Damian Wayne, though, strikes this balance between the brooding nature of Batman and the circus-adjacent appearance of Grayson’s original Robin. And it’s in that balance that we see much of Juni Ba, Chris O’Halloran, and Aditya Bidikar’s first issue of The Boy Wonder.
Beginning with the telling of a tale, The Boy Wonder gives us a succinct origin of Damian Wayne as Robin before showing us his hunt for the demon that has been terrorizing Gotham while his father is away. As the grandson of the Demon, Ra’s al Ghul, Damian feels this is an opportunity to show what he’s really capable of when stalking the roofs of Gotham solo. But Damian isn’t alone. He never can be. As one of many Robins and people who have lived in Wayne Manor, he still has a family to keep him safe on these outings. And after beating up a hoard of small demons that turn out to be Clayface with the help of Nightwing and Batgirl, Damian does what comes naturally to him after all these years—stopping an old woman being mugged. But after his altruism, we see that Damian and his adoptive family haven’t stopped the demon as something strange plucks the old woman from the ground before disappearing into the night.
I’ve written about Ba’s past work with Monkey Meat and praised his approach to storytelling as well as the fractured nature of the series’ five issues. The Boy Wonder takes many of those same narrative strengths and lengthens them. There is all the same frenetic energy as Ba’s past work, but there are these quiet moments of small panels and white space that help to slow things down, as if we’re watching the characters catch their breath. That we have that for this series about Damian helps to better reinforce his own need to stop, slow down, and consider what is happening around him. The slow maturation of the panel showing Damian’s growth while coupling that with kinetic outbursts of energy to let us know that he’s still a teenager who’s only recently curbed his murder urge.
The Boy Wonder is difficult not to like. From the script to the pencils to the colors to the letters, the entire team shows how much fun they’re having with this first issue in every page and panel. And that the team is publishing this under DC’s Black Label imprint only makes me more curious as to what the rest of the story could entail and how far they can push one Robin.
Get excited. Get wonderful.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
On this week’s replay episode, I talk poetry with Brittany Perham!
Photo by Lisa Beth Anderson.TEXTS DISCUSSED
Episode 278 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
Insomnia rattles–
shakes with cicadas and
air conditioners.
An Empty Gesture
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “A Wee Bit of Burglary” – Raymond Scott
- “Furrowed Sugarloaf” – Greg Saunier
- “Old Ideas (modified)” – Jeff McLeod
- “Deceptive Transceiver” – Ian Lynch
- “Short (feat. Mavis Swan Poole)” – Shirlette Ammons
- “Prize Giving” – Thom Yorke
- “Worry” – Ghost Piss
- “Microonda Sahara” – Cyril Cyril
- “The Hunt” – Ian Lynch
- “Transmuting Chemical Burns” – Full of Hell
- “Life in Three Stages Part I: The Child and the Desert” – Stephane Wrembel, Jean-Michel Pilc
- “Unfolding” – Michael Frankenberger
- “Egoli Affirmation” – Equal Spirits
- “Mickey’s Dead Stuff” – Mandy
- “She’s Got Weird Arms” – Melvins
- “Ticking Clock” – Carlos Giffoni
- “Grow” – Maria Chiara Argirò
- “tre” – Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, Andreas Werliin
- “Processo” – Bruno Nicolai
- “A Tear” – The Lostines
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
Last year, I talked about the first issue of Oni Press’s new anthology, Xino. The creative teams showed us myriad visions of the hell-future we’re dragging ourselves towards. Since then, the final two issues have released with more stories of all the ways in which the world scatters us, leaves us hopeless, and devours. But at least the stories are all fun.
The ten stories included in the last two issues of Xino range from finding hope amid certain destruction by an overwhelming alien force to a few friends taking their class project robot out for a spin around town. But the depth and breadth of stories present, at no point do any of them feel as though they’re calling their twists too early or do those same twists come off as contrived. There’s a delicate balance that’s difficult to achieve, but so many of them do it expertly—it’s like watching those first episodes of The Twilight Zone for the first time and never knowing where the stories could possibly go. For instance, in “Visceral” by Justin Jordan, Molly Mendoza, and Jim Campbell, four friends are lost in the woods on a hiking trip. After days of being lost, they notice a town that isn’t marked on their maps, but run into it as they’re desperate for food and aid. But upon arriving, the town is empty. It looks as though there had been people there, but they had simply vanished. Until one of the four tries to pick up a phone and is promptly bitten by the phone while everything else begins to slowly chew away at the group.
To have such consistency and bold speculative imagination recommends anthologies series like Xino should as one of the main outlets for comics right now. With the limited space for each story, the format gives the audience just enough from a creative team to know what kind of stories they’ll be creating in the future. These stories serve as previews for what will likely be a favorite series, even if that series isn’t the same as the anthology story. As an incubator for creativity, anthologies in US comics feel like a necessity that just isn’t given the support stories need to thrive in a larger market.
Even if some anthologies do fall to the wayside, the stories will stick with us. The twist at the end of Hagal Palevsky, Carson Thorn, and Jim Campbell’s “Testimonial” will plague my nightmares for years for both its prescience and crushing inevitability. And that feeling—that the story will stick around—is something we all want from our comics. Even if the story only sticks with one person, they’re going to keep coming back to it over and over again because it worms its way so deeply into our minds.
Get excited. Get collected.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Dear Dr. Perfect,
My fiancé asked me when we were going to finally get married. When I told her that I didn’t believe in marriage, what’s-her-name berated me for proposing to her, which I never did. Her accusation forced me to berate her for accepting marriage proposals from strange men.
She demanded we go to couple’s counseling. I demanded we go to only a counselor strictly devoted to Jungianism. When she found one, I then told her I didn’t believe in couple’s counseling.
How can I possibly practice ethical non-monogamy with someone who so continuously gaslights me?
Signed,
Someone Hopeful in Trying
Dear Hopeful,
As someone who has had his share of subsequently annulled Vegas marriages, I can tell you that a good, strong relationship requires little more than a simple handshake between interested parties. Ask her if she wants to shake on it.
The biggest underlying issue here involves the expectations of your fiancé. Is she prone to accepting marriage proposals from strange men or just tired of waiting? Jungian analysis might not be her biggest priority now. Then again, it could not hurt. Can you hire a semantics professor to perform an intervention, perhaps?
If you feel like you’re being manipulated into commitment, try countering her with the gassiest gaslighting possible within the depths of your twisted mind. Something like, “I wanted to get married last week, but you said X, Y, and Z,” or “Waiting is the right thing to do.” For the full coup de grâce, try, “It’s not about what I want. I’m doing this for you.”
Do keep this in mind, though. Women often have an innate ability to suss out nonsense and leave you drooling in a puddle of tears with your pants around your ankles. Tread lightly, would be my advice. Couple’s counseling isn’t the end of the world. Take separate cars and arrive early to get the counselor on your side in advance.
A friend of mine dreaded matrimony so much that he strung along his fiancé for five years, going as far as faking a leg injury. “I can’t very well walk down the aisle with this bad leg!” he exclaimed. He even forged a doctor’s note.
When they finally got married, he was never happier. They were the perfect couple whose divorce some years later was admirably amicable.
Now that’s love.
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
with your host, Dmetri Kakmi
King Kong
USA, 1933
Produced and directed: Merian C Cooper, Ernest B Schoedsack
Cast: Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot
King Kong is modern myth. The story of a colossal primate that wreaks havoc on civilisation touched generations and is as alive today as it was when it was released almost one hundred years ago. Sequels, remakes and multiverse spin-offs followed, but none come close to the otherworldly magic, poetic majesty and carnal suggestiveness of the original.
Alarmed by the sex and violence in this pre-code Hollywood blockbuster, the Hays Code censors (1934-1967) removed many offending scenes. All except one was found and put back when the film was restored in subsequent decades. Footage that was not found — giant insects and reptiles devouring crew members when Kong shakes them off a log into a chasm — was recreated with gory relish by Peter Jackson for his version of the film in 2005.
According to god’s gazette, Wikipedia, King Kong ranks as one of the great horror movies and fifty-sixth greatest movie of all time. Rare for a horror film, it is deemed historically and aesthetically significant. Today it is remembered for groundbreaking special effects, such as stop motion animation, rear projection, miniatures and matte painting.
And the leading lady’s ceaseless screams.
Canadian born Fay Wray (1907-2004) was already a leading lady when she appeared in the film that immortalised her name. (She appeared in Mystery of the Wax Museum in the same year.) All I can say is she must have been hoarse by the end of filming King Kong. If she let off one more of those ear-piercing shrieks I would have tossed her in his mouth myself. Surely even she realised after a point that the poor lunk was not going to eat her—at least not in the way she imagines.
All Kong wanted was some nooky. Why else does he wrestle a symbolic snake shortly after bringing Ann Darrow to the love shack? (He toys with dead serpent’s limp form in a highly suggestive coitus interruptus sequence.) And surely he has only one thing in mind when he peels off Ann’s garments, like a delectable banana, as she swoons in the palm of his hand. He even sniffs his fingers after touching her lily-white skin.
So what is King Kong about?
The creative team behind this masterpiece touched on an archetype. Like all potent allegories, the things Kong represents transcend time and place, and they carry different meaning for different people. Cooper and Schoedsack sold the film as a retelling of Beauty and the Beast (‘It was beauty killed the beast,’ Carl Denham sententiously announces). Recent feminist readings argue King Kong is a date rape story. Another theory opines that the giant ape is an emblem of white anxiety about black sexuality. The 1976 and 2005 versions point to environmental callousness. Pitching Kong against that other formidable post-war Japanese symbol, Godzilla, the multi-verse films focus on humanity’s innate destructiveness and ongoing battle against nature.
An undercurrent in the horror genre is rampant male lust and the way socialised man is perceived (and possibly sees himself) when in the grips—like a frenzied animal that will do anything to find relief. This notion is expounded in wide-eyed delights such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and the following year’s wonderfully named I Married a Monster from Outer Space. (Though I must say if I married a monster that looks like Tom Tryon, I’d let him try on anything he wants. Baba-boom!)
With this in mind, I assert that Kong is a treatise on male virility and man’s pitiable apprehension before woman’s sexual allure — not so much beauty killed the beast, as beauty neuters beast and makes him feel inadequate in the process.
Kong may rise to the peak of ecstasy atop the metaphoric erection, the Empire State Building, but he is destined to lose his potency. His clumsy attempts at seduction fall short in civilised society, where a woman expects to be wooed not dragged off to a cave and taken by force. This is why a beast like Kong reigns supreme in the jungle and is supplemented in the city by a sap, like the ship’s first mate, Jack Driscoll. As Kong breathes his last, Ann Darrow has already moved on to her next conquest.
Man’s wilting humiliation is woman’s triumph. The battle between man and woman is sempiternal. That is why the dominant images in the story are circular and set up a chain of visual echoes and correspondences. The New York train, for instance, is the serpent Kong wrestles in the cave, the Empire State Building is the mountaintop lair, the airplane that guns down Kong is the pterodactyl. Only in the latter part of the story civilisation trumps the primitive.
One of the more striking elements of King Kong is the way it looks. It is atmospheric, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. The old studio masters knew how to light a film. The contrasting, shadow-filled black-and-white cinematography creates a sense of dread and expectation, and it perfectly supplements the lyric matte paintings and studio sets to create a fantasy of a lost world. The background projection is often framed by a circular canopy of trees and undergrowth so that it looks as if the viewer is peeking through a window into another time.
Wreathed in mist and covered in steamy jungle, Kong’s Island is an enclosed bower for the eruption of primal passions. The reigning king may be brought low in the climax, but his enduring popularity proves that you cannot keep a good man down. He will rise again.
Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Dictionary of a Gadfly (as The Sozzled Scribbler), The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). His gothic novel The Woman in the Well will be published in 2025. He is currently working on a psychological crime novel called The Perfect Room.
In this week’s show, John talks with Nicholson Baker about the potential sorrows of writing, the drive to discover joy, and the need to explore other creative endeavors besides writing.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
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Episode 622 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
I was trying my best to stir the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, to consciousness. He groaned.
“Come on, man,” I said. “Get it together. Orlando needs you!”
As I shook the Revenging Manta, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched. I turned myself around and shined my flashlight only to see a beast glaring at me. I screamed and then the beast screamed. I knew that scream. It was Edwige, my faithful kangaroo companion from my misadventures in North America.
— To be continued.
Tonight’s movie is 2024’s The Beekeeper from director David Ayer. It stars Jason Statham and we like Jason Statham here at the Museum of Schlock. Whether it’s beating up goons in a Las Vegas Casino to the tune of “White Christmas” or chasing down a demented serial killer in Blitz, his name on the marquee always you’re in for a good time. And with the recently released Beekeeper, I may have just witnessed his masterpiece.
Our movie begins with a man named Adam Clay (Jason Statham), a beekeeper that’s utilizing a shed on a farm owned by a retired school teacher named Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad). Poor Eloise gets caught up in a phishing scam when she sees a warning message pop up on her laptop with a number to call. I’m still adamant that the villains in The Kidnap Syndicate are the most people I’ve ever seen in a movie, but the villains in The Beekeeper come close to that level of evil.
Eloise calls the number, thinking it’s a tech support line and we’re introduced to a sleazy phishing scam incorporated. A con man named Mickey Garnett (David Witts) explains to his employees how to properly fleece an kindly old lady. He tells her Eloise that she’ll lose all her data if she brings her computer to a repair shop and Eloise doesn’t want to lose all the photos of her daughter she had saved on her computer. She gives the scammer access and not only does she lose all of her retirement savings, but also two million dollars from a charity fund she manages.
Adam Clay stops by her place to drop off some fresh honey, but is soon arrested by an FBI agent named Verona Parker, Eloise’s daughter. Clay is let go when the FBI realizes Eloise died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Agent Parker informs Clay that her mother was scammed and that the FBI has been trying to catch these scammers for months with little to show for it. As it turns out, Clay had also worked for a CIA backed organization known as “The Beekeepers” and he uses everything at his disposal seeking justice for Eloise.
Violence is coming, but I’ll admit Clay is not as violent as he could be. He shows up at the office building that scammed Eloise with two canisters of gasoline. When the security guard approaches him, Clay announces that he’s there to burn the building to the ground. They laugh and he beats the crap out of them before making his way inside. I won’t spoil anything else. You should go into The Beekeeper unspoiled and I’ve spoiled it enough. This might be my movie of the year. Did I mention that Jeremy Irons also stars?
Photo by Leslie SalasJeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
To hold and inhale
you until the sun’s stern finger
prods me awake.
The H Is O
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Sally Goodin’” – Vester Jones
- “Sex Rears” – Alex North
- “Moon Gas” – Dick Hyman, Mary Mayo
- “Poor Boy” – Leo Kottke
- “Mr. Lonely Viola” – J. Spaceman, Sun City Girls
- “DON” – Jon Appleton, Don Cherry
- “Apostrophe’” – Frank Zappa
- “Al’s Razor Blade” – Skull Snaps
- “Grey Chair and Parrots” – Marilyn Cripsell, George Graewe
- “Thunderball” – Tom Jones
- “Him and Her” – Ornette Coleman
- “Rothko Chapel 3” – Morton Feldman
- “Ashtray Heart” – Captain Beefheart
- “Sonata I” – Maro Ajemian
- “Plague of Frogs” – Lake of Dracula
- “Ditch Digger” – 16 Horsepower
- “The Satellites Are Spinning” – Graham Connah Group
- “Summer Kisses, Winter Tears” – Julee Cruise
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
The DC Universe has a lot of teams and a lot of team books. The amount of Justice Leagues, series, spin-offs, and event series is enough to fill most small libraries on their own. Over the decades, more teams would be added to the universe before the majority of them would slip into obscurity. But one of these teams endures in ways many others weren’t able to by carving out a niche of what their stories would be about. The Doom Patrol could deal with world-shattering cataclysms, but they weren’t the team to deal with Darkseid or the Anti-Monitor. And in The Unstoppable Doom Patrol by Dennis Culver, Chris Burnham, Brian Reber, and Pat Brosseau, the team brings people together more than breaking them apart.
After the Lazarus Event of the previous year that activated the metagene of dozens of people around the world, there’s been an uptick in the number of metahumans who need help. But when a predatory company called Metagen starts luring these people in for quick cash and cruel experiments, the Doom Patrol steps in. Less shutting the company down and more saving the people involved, the team adds to their own ranks with new members like Beast Girl and Degenerate before crisscrossing the country to save more wayward metahumans. All the while, General Immortus and the gorilla Mallah are plotting something sinister in the background.
And it’s here where this Doom Patrol series stands out even more. Our threat this time is completely external from the team itself. We have them coming together to recruit more metahumans, training them to deal with their powers, and working with one another. They’re able to just be nice to one another while dealing with General Immortus. Having the team act like the friends they’ve been for the past few decades without those inevitable personality clashes gives the story time to set up more in the background as we’re focused more on team-building. How much of this new amicability is due to their previous Chief being ousted from leadership and replaced by one of Crazy Jane’s alters remains to be seen.
There’s something in the idea of weirdos and outcasts sticking together to do good—it’s half the reason the X-Men have been a staple of comics for more than half a century—but with the Doom Patrol it feels like a logical step for a team so steeped in the illogical. And the good and weird being done here only helps to expand their world and the team as a whole. While our core group of Robotman, Elasti-Woman, and Negative Man will be the perennial favorite, folding more into their core can only help to make the team feel more familial than a group of disparate strangers.
Get excited. Get doomed.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Dear Dr. Perfect,
Where I live, the temperature is brutal. Around this time of year, I wonder about the sartorial prohibition against wearing white or summer fabrics before Labor Day.
I suspect the prohibition comes from superstition, or some latent trauma deriving from malingering winters with belated snowfall that can drive a poor mortal insane. Why tempt the evil weather?
Not every climate has this problem, however.
I, for example, live on Mars.
(If you ask the CIA to confirm this fact, they will neither confirm nor deny my presence, naturally.)
When I wear my orange space suit, I find myself blending into a world of red that leaves me both hot and crazy. If I hold up my arm to take a selfie of my self-contained dome, there is something so comforting to seeing my arm appear in white, in contrast to the red dust plain of this angry planet.
But my commanding officer demands I observe the fashion rule against white.
My commanding officer might be Satan, incidentally.
What do you think? Do I dare defy the antichrist of fashion?
Warmly,
Lost in Space
Dear Space Person,
Mars, eh? That must be a different scene altogether. No traffic or power lines. No urban sprawl. I bet you don’t even get spam calls out there. Well, I’m sure they find a way. I’m most impressed with how you managed to send a letter from there.
I envy anyone who can get away from the 8 billion dopes on this planet. Perhaps that’s what motivates astronauts to pursue spaceflight in the first place. They spend a few weeks (or months) orbiting the globe without a care in the world. Up there amongst the stars, it’s just them, the hum of their spacecraft, and their astronaut ice cream. Galaxies of infinite measure await discovery far removed from petty political squabbles. That’s good living.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, things aren’t so positive here on Earth, specifically the good ol’ USA. Leave it to people who reside in the only habitable planet in the entire solar system in the most geographically advantageous landmass to find ways to screw it all up.
Whether you’re actually on Mars is not the point. I get about 5 letters a week from readers claiming residence on different planets, like “Lonely on Neptune,” who asked for extraterrestrial dating advice. I’ll take your word for it.
I understand where your superior officer is coming from. If I were to walk outside wearing green slacks and a sky-blue turtleneck, I’d probably get shot. Conversely, if I were to wear blue slacks with a denim shirt, I’d get laughed right out of town. Neighbors would avert their eyes in embarrassment. Dogs would howl. Sometimes, I wish I had studied to be an astronaut.
I often ask, could I be more perfect?
Mars needs discipline now, Lost in Space. But Mars also needs novelty. Suggest a Wacky Wednesday with cowboy hats or something fun or Freaky Fridays where everyone paints the outside of their space helmet while wearing leather chaps. Tell your superior officer to lighten up. Is he going to fire you from Mars? I think not.
Throughout Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus faced endless peril in his journey home. Beavis and Butt-Head faced insurmountable odds to recover their stolen TV in Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. Happiness is an uphill battle no matter where we find ourselves in the galaxy.
Fear not, space friend, the answers lie in the stars. At least that’s what my horoscope told me.
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
In this week’s show, John talks with prose writer Michael Korda about telling the historical stories of the poets of World War I.
Photo by Dave Krugman.TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 622 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
Child’s chalk and egg-shaped
puddles on the pavement, my
sidewalk gallery.
Destiny’s Fragile Vessel
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “One of The Days” – Connie Smith
- “PIZZICA De La Matina” – Phil Mananera, Mauro Durante, Anna Phoebe
- “Ascendence” – Kenny Garrett, Svoy
- “Janine” – Mark Knopfler
- “Day Dream” – Dave Douglas, Ian Chang, Rafiq Bhatia, James Brandon Lewis
- “Iron Lawn” – Nag
- “Overture” – Third Ear Band
- “The World of Shadow” – Red Hot Org, Meshell Ndegeocello, Immanuel Wilkins
- “Weekness” – Baby Rose, Badbadnotgood
- “Being” – Viktor Orri Árnason, Álfheidur Erla Gudmundsddóttir
- “Enfer – Intro (1972)” – Bernard Parmegiani
- “Retitled” – Daniel Diaz
- “Winds of Hell” – Necrot
- “In C 2” – Maya Beiser
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
I’ve espoused the merits of giant robots for years now and I doubt I’ll ever stop. There’s just something about people coming together to create a titanic effigy of steel that is ripe for creating myriad stories. This is the main reason that when a new comic series releases with some connection to giant robots, that series typically goes to the top of by to-be-read pile. And with the release of the first issue of Ram V, Evan Cagle, Dave Stewart, and Aditya Bidikar’s Dawnrunner, I’m always going to have more of these behemoths to write about.
Earth has been invaded. A portal opened above Guatemala and the Tetza entered our world for the first time. Giants with near invulnerability, everything the Earth had to defend itself against the invading force was essentially useless. It was only with the building of two things was human life able to persist: the 1800 mile long wall surrounding where the Tetza roam and the Iron Kings. The former has helped keep the remaining humans safe from immediate threats while the latter is deployed to deal with the Tetza as soon as they come into range of the wall. Anita Marr is one of many Iron King pilots—considered the best by kill count and celebrity status alone. But her old faithful mech, Kylar, is being retired in favor of something new, Dawnrunner. Heralded as the future of Iron King tech, Anita takes the new mech out for a routine fight just outside the wall.
Dawnrunner plays with our expectations. We see giant robots. We see pilots all competing with one another to be the best. We see new technology and our protagonist struggling to get used to it. We can see the general arc of the story and how it can be told. But those expectations lead to us being all the more susceptible to the twist in this story. We’re expecting Anita to have trouble adjusting to her new mech, we’re not expecting her brain to be melded with someone from the past who fought the Tetza in the initial ground war. From this point, we immediately begin to question our own perception of what’s happened up to this point. Was this purely the work of the new mech or was there something more happening? Why these two minds and how are they connected from the past to the present?
V, Cagle, Stewart, and Bidikar have touched on even more than what I’ve gone over in just thirty-two pages while creating the kind of hook that almost forces a reader to come back for the second issue. There’s a density of world building and plot that the team achieve here that’s difficult to create in a first issue without feeling like the lore is simply being dumped onto us. That balance between all of these disparate elements in such a small space already makes us want to see how much more of this world can spring forth through the rest of the series.
Get excited. Get iron.
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
In this week’s show, John talks with Tyler Mills about her extraordinary multimedia memoir, a poetic people’s history of America’s secretive relationship to the atomic bomb.
Tyler Mills by Arik Lubkin.TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
Join Jared Silvia and other members of Energy Wheel in this upcoming writer’s retreat (May 2-5) at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
The Kerouac House is re-opening its writers residency after taking a 1-year hiatus. We have also expanded the number of residencies from four to SIX per year.
If you’re interested, visit our Submittable page and send us your very best work! The submission period runs from February 1 through April 28th.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 621 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
In the Tao, the cup
that is empty is useful–
a glance at the night sky.
Light on a Far Shore
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “The Couch” – Bernard Herrmann, Fernando Velázquez, Basque National Orchestra
- “Feel the Beat” – Crime
- “Under the Glass” – Drahla
- “The Word Hurricane” – Air
- “I’m Too Late” – CCCR
- “Wide As Heaven” – Phosphorescent
- “Wight” – Temple of the Fuzz Witch
- “Green-Eyed Lady” – Sugarloaf
- “Telsat Tune” – Henry Flynt
- “Strangers in an Alley” – Matt Holubowski
- “Too Shy To Say” – Stevie Wonder
- “Famine” – Horndal
- “Pat a Dragon” – Eunuchs
- “Walkin’ the Beat” – The Nuns
- “Equality & Death (Mothers, Fathers,Where Are Ye?” – Angles 9, Martin Küchen
- “Anima – Breathe” – Alina Bzhezhinska, Tony Kofi
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
Comics have a particular strength when it comes to poetry. The quickness of the panels being able to render different interpretations of a single line of poetry adds a new kind of depth to the poetic process. These panels themselves end up becoming another aspect of the poem—a line break becomes more of a gulf as the normally blank space is filled with images and color. Nowhere is this usage of panels as line breaks as strong as it is in Majnun and Layla: Songs from Beyond the Graveby Yann Damezin in the medium of graphic poetry.
Layla and Majnun is a classic piece of Persian poetry from the 12th century centered on the titular couple and the persistence of their love. So strong was the poet Qays ibn al-Mulawwah’s love for Layla bint Mahdi that he was given the nickname Majnun—possessed by Jinn—for his actions. In Majnun’s madness for his beloved, Layla’s father forbid the couple from ever seeing each other as that madness was considered shameful for a husband. Dejected, Majnun flees to the desert, never to be seen by his family, his tribe, or his beloved for the rest of his days. All anyone would know of him was the lines of poetry he muttered or the verses written in the sand for Layla. After Layla herself is married and passes of an illness years later, Majnun finds her grave and dies at that spot himself. However, this is the original story. Damezin takes another approach with his interpretation.
Javāb goī is a tradition in Persian literature in which an artist engages with another work to create something familiar, but new. Not a complete reinterpretation or remake of the original, but just different enough that the new work can both stand on its own and surprise those familiar with the original. In Damezin’s take on this classic, his structure is different. No longer is Layla simply a passive vehicle for Majnun’s love or married off before dying. Majnun, instead, dies alone in the desert, surrounded by the animals enraptured by his words of love. Upon his death, however, the animals quickly devour his corpse, but his words persist in him and are carried to Layla far away. She refuses to join him in death as he requests with those final words through the animals of the desert—Layla wishes to live, even if it is without him, as this life has always only been her own. It is here that she disappears from her home, never to be seen or heard of from anyone since.
It is only in comics could this interpretation exist. Damezin’s panels, colors, and lines reflect perfectly the feeling of the words of the original poem while seamlessly allowing his own vision to shine through. His art here, both literal and interpretive of the original lines, adds more than a simple narrative would allow—the images let readers interpret what is being read just as they would the text itself.
Get excited. Get restoryed.
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
In this week’s show, John talks with Jared Silvia about the 2023 film, Asteroid City, and look at how Wes Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola counterbalances surges of emotion with layers of artifice, which is a mixed metaphor, we know.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
Join Jared Silvia and other members of Energy Wheel in this upcoming writer’s retreat (May 2-5) at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
The Kerouac House is re-opening its writers residency after taking a 1-year hiatus. We have also expanded the number of residencies from four to SIX per year.
If you’re interested, visit our Submittable page and send us your very best work! The submission period runs from February 1 through April 28th.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 620 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
I was thinking that had I conjured up this tall tale of myself and a vigilante ninja trying to rid the Museum of Schlock of a vile gang and their wicked leader, the Goose Lord, I certainly would have lost the plot by introducing an undead zombie into the mix. But the story is true and I was frantically searching for my fallen compatriot in the dark. I stumbled over the bodies of the goons trying to see if the Revenging Manta had suffered the same fate. The ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando was slumped in the corner. I shook him and slapped his face, trying to stir him to consciousness. He groaned and I breathed a sigh of relief not realizing that I was being watched by someone or something right behind me.
— To be continued.
Tonight’s movie is 1983’s Revenge of the Ninja from director Sam Firstenberg. This is the second of the Cannon Group’s trilogy of ninja movies that began with 1981’s Enter the Ninja. I covered that movie a few years back and was shocked to hear Franco Nero sounding like a real American human being only to find out later that his voice had been dubbed over! For shame, Golan & Globus. For shame!
Our movie begins at a home in the picturesque Japanese countryside where a family is enjoying some lovely weather only to be slaughtered by a pack of ninjas clad in black. Yeah, it’s pretty brutal. They even go after the women and the children. When a man named Cho Osaki (Sho Kosugi) returns home to find his family slaughtered, there’s going to be some ninja fighting going on because Cho is himself a ninja. The only surviving members of his family are his baby son, Kane, and his elderly mother. Cho decides to move to the United States to start up a Japanese art gallery with his good friend, Braden.
Cho has a good life in the United States. He’s creating fancy Japanese statues that will go for big money once the gallery opens. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to Cho is the fact that these statues are stuffed with heroin. Turns out Braden is a drug lord working in conjunction with the Yakuza.
The idea is he’ll sell the heroin to the mafia for a tidy sum, but the mafia doesn’t want to cough up the cash right away so this means war! The yakuza dispatch a ninja with a silver mask to take out the gangsters one by one. The mafia doesn’t like the double cross so they send some of their own goons to the art gallery to steal the statues.
This leads to a full on brawl with Cho and some mafia goons. This is where the movie shines in its brutal fight scenes. When Cho is latching on to the back of a truck and getting dragged on the gravel, you see his cuts and torn clothes. Later, we get a spectacular ninja fight on top of skyscrapers in Salt Lake City. What more do you need from a movie? Just look at the poster if you’re still not sold. He’s got flames shooting out of his arm!
Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”
Dogwalks in the spring.
The world slicks with rain and trembles
to shrill choirs.
To Put Forth Shoots
Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.
- “Se Hai Timore Del Vero” – Keygen Church
- “Thawb Alzifah” – Omar Souleyman
- “Harmonic Dream Sequence (Pt. 4)” – Dustin O’Halloran, Paul Corley
- “Functionality” – Nowhere Squares
- “Une Petite Suite: I. Stabilité mouvante” – Quatuor Zahir
- “Requiem for Mississippi John Hurt (Live at the BBC, October 1987” – John Fahey
- “Ice Cold” – Maurice Jarre
- “Follow the Arrow (Live)” – Marco Benevento
- “Last Melody” – The Church
- “Dancer Polynomials” – Kelly Moran
- “Angela (feat. Stas THEE Boss & Irene Barber)” – Shabazz Palaces, Irene Barber, Stas Thee Boss
- “Christmas In Walnut Grove” – The Pine Hill Haints
- “Skante” – Bodybox
- “Little Sun” – Charlie Parr
- “Journey In Satchidananda (Live)” – Alice Coltrane
Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.
There’s an awe that comes with stepping into a great house. The history of the location is emblazoned on the walls and drips from the century-old chandeliers—as many of them are now museums, we even get to learn a bit about who made those walls and chandeliers. But that history leaves us at arm’s length from the house. We’ll never live in a place like that. The people who do, though, are privy to experiencing the great house from the inside, along with all of the secrets that entails. And it’s in those secrets that we have the first issue of Helen of Wyndhornby Tom King, Bilquis Evely, Matheus Lopes, and Clayton Cowles.
Lilith Appleton has been hired as governess to Helen Cole, whose father, the fantasy writer C.K. Cole, has died rather suddenly. Helen and her father were more used to sneaking on trains and living on the road than dealing with governesses and manners. But, since her father’s death, Helen has been summoned to her grandfather’s home, the great house Wyndhorn. To Helen, though, her father was the greatest writer to ever live and she wishes to immortalize him as such before the pair travel to Wyndhorn with an appropriate gravestone in the town Lilith finds her. Once they finally make it Wyndhorn, we start to notice something amiss—with only a single butler and a pair of cooks in the kitchen, how is the home spotless? Why has Helen’s grandfather left for the month? And what does Helen keep seeing out of her window every night?
What’s most striking throughout this first issue, though, is Evely’s line work. Striking a balance between the real and the unreal, the art here feels like a puzzle slowly unfolding before us. The framing device of this issue is an interview with Lilith decades after the events of the main story and utilizing that to buttress the more absurd aspects of the story gives a contrast to help ground us. As unreal as the monster chasing Helen is, it’s made more real by the fact that Lilith is sitting in her kitchen later—we’re made to accept what is happening because of that mundane moment. And this is where Evely’s lines sing even more. Effortlessly shifting from the grotesque to an old woman’s kitchen makes us pay attention while the smoothness of the lines almost makes us doubt what we’ve seen just a page prior.
Helen of Wyndhorn does what every first issue needs to do—it hooks us so completely that we need to see how the second issue will unfold. It’s a testament to King, Evely, Lopes, and Cowles skills as creators in the medium that the issue flows so effortlessly that you forget you’re only seeing the first part of a longer narrative. It’s the kind of comic that can get someone excited to talk about comics as you only want to keep diving further into what it has to offer.
Get excited. Get great.
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
with your host, Dmetri Kakmi
The Old Dark House
1932, USA
Director: James Whale
Cast: Ernest Thiseger, Gloria Stuart, Boris Karloff, Charles Laughton
It is hard to know where the horror film would be without gay filmmakers. Perhaps not surprisingly, homosexual men have found a home in the codified language of horror, opening new doors, founding surprising identification points, and pushing thematic and aesthetic boundaries.
A certain camp sensibility is intrinsic to horror comedy. But perhaps we need to define what we mean by ‘camp’; it is after all an old-fashioned term. ‘Camp’ is defined in the dictionary as ‘deliberately exaggerated and theatrical; extravagantly artificial, playful, flamboyant and affected.’
The definition can be applied to Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and De Palma’s Raising Caine (1992), two very over-the-top horror films that are not devoid of humour.We must also admit there is something intrinsically camp about serious horror cinema. Think of all the running around and screaming; the horrific collapse of facades, the shock revelations, the ostentatious deaths, that are part and parcel of the genre. You could be at a birthday party with The Boys in the Band, that classic of 1970s gay cinema. Even Gale Sondegaard’s Miss Lu, the fabulously sinister housekeeper in The Cat and the Canary (1939), owes as much to the drag performer’s talent for amplification as it does to the actress’s expert command of her art.
To my mind, there is no greater horror comedy than The Old Dark House. It is my favourite of the Universal horror movies; it never ceases to delight and surprise, no matter how many times I see it. And there is no greater horror movie director than James Whale (1889-1957).
British born Whale was openly gay and he found an outlet for his sensibilities in the handful of horror films he directed for Universal, bringing to them a visual splendour and anarchic humour that is rare. Whales’s Frankenstein (1931) is not funny, though it contains perhaps unintentional comic elements, thanks to Colin Clive’s wild-eyed Dr Henry Frankenstein. The Invisible Man (1933) is funny because Una O’Connor screams her head off at the slightest provocation, and Claude Rains turns in a deliberately hysterical turn as the unseen megalomaniac, erupting into maniacal laughter as he terrorises an English village, sans-culottes.
But The Old Dark House is the queen of them all. How else to describe this joyful masterpiece when the wonderfully waspish Ernest Thesiger descends the stairs and announces himself? ‘My name is Femm. Horace Femm.’ Horace then proceeds to live up to the patronymic of his gender-bending family, the likes of which have to be seen to be believed. We must wait decades before such freakish relations appear on screen in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Daughters of Darkness and Snowtown.
Based on J B Priestley’s novel The Benighted, The Old Dark House pits five storm-stranded city slickers against Whale’s satire of the British family, all of whose members can be seen as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transexual.
These range from the aforementioned Horace Femm, to his religious fanatic, possibly repressed lesbian, sister Rebecca Femm, to the bedridden paterfamilias Sir Roderick Femm, who is unsettlingly played by Scottish actress Elspeth Dudgeon. Watching her brief appearance is akin to suddenly finding yourself in an uncanny valley; the eye and the mind do not quite connect as you struggle to make sense of what you are seeing. Also memorable are the cackling pyromaniac Saul and the mumbling homicidal butler Morgan (Boris Karloff), who shows surprising affection towards the dying Saul.
The sequence in which Rebecca Femm berates vain flibbertigibbet Margaret Waverton (Gloria Stuart) about the sins of the flesh is an astonishing display of acting and cinema craft. Played out with a combination of gusto and restraint in front of a mirror that distort the two actresses’ faces, it is by turns comic, disturbing and oddly sexual.
The Old Dark House is the blueprint for every haunted house and stalk-and-slash film that follows its illustrious footsteps. It is a visual delight, atmospherically lit and framed for maximum effect in brilliant black and white. It is archetypal and parodic, simultaneously setting up genre conventions and pulling them apart. Thought lost for almost forty years, it is now beautifully restored and available where good screams can be found.
Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Dictionary of a Gadfly (as The Sozzled Scribbler), The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). His gothic novel The Woman in the Well will be published in 2025. He is currently working on a psychological crime novel called The Perfect Room.
On today’s show, I speak with Dan Lauer about memoirs, Spaulding Gray, depression, the glorious bygone culture of video stores, the less glorious culture of Hollywood, and other matters of dark interest.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
Go here to buy or listen to Dan Lauer’s Post Meridiem.
Episode 592 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on apple podcasts, or right click here to download.
Edwige, my faithful kangaroo companion, and I had felled the ruffians threatening us in the second floor men’s restroom of the Museum of Schlock. I freed myself from the office chair I was duct taped to, dusted myself off, and scratched Edwige behind the ears. I led the way, trying to figure out where the gang had stashed the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando. I owed him and now I had some kangaroo muscle to back me up. — to be continued.
Tonight’s movie is 2018’s Summer of 84 from directors François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl. Wow. Three directors. I think that’s a first for this blog. The movie centers around four teenage boys during the summer of 1984. You have our main protagonist, Davey Armstrong (Graham Verchere), local paperboy and connoisseur of conspiracies and monsters. There’s a serial killer on the loose in the area. Young boys his age keep disappearing and Davey begins to suspect his neighbor, Wayne (Rich Sommer), of being the killer.
Ready to help Davey catch the killer are his buds: Eats, a delinquent type, Woody, a heavyset kid, and Curtis, a nerdlinger. They hang out in a treehouse, look at dirty magazines, and argue over how the Ewoks could have defeated the evil Empire. That’s a Star Wars reference and I have to wonder if kids were still rambling about Star Wars in 1984. I thought everyone moved on a year after Return of the Jedi came out. 1984 was the summer of Ghostbusters, Sixteen Candles, Purple Rain, Top Secret!, The NeverEnding Story, The Karate Kid, and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. It was also the summer of C.H.U.D., but no one (other than my editor) seems to remember the greatness that is C.H.U.D.
Summer of 84 is dripping with 80s nostalgia from the G.I. Joe walkie talkies to the synth wave soundtrack. I blame Strangers Things for our current 80s nostalgia overload. I was a child in the 1980s. I remember it well. There was great stuff like Mad Scientist kits, Boglins, and that Shrieks & Creaks board game with the talking tombstone. But it was also the decade of Cabbage Patch Kids, Care Bears, Rainbow Brite, Herself the Elf, and microwave milkshakes! It was also the decade of Freaky Freezies, those gloves that change under cold temperatures to reveal new patterns or characters. I hated those. Not that I ever owned any because my parents never bought them for me no matter how much I begged.
Anyway, I was a weird 80s kid. I wasn’t into Masters of the Universe, Transformers, or G.I. Joe. My bread and butter was Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger action pictures, but I don’t ever hear anyone waxing nostalgic for those. Instead, we have kids on bikes finding adventure in their no-name suburban blah-scape. Will the serial killer be the neighbor across the street, a police officer with an outstanding record? It’s a bunch of 80s kids and they always have to be right so what do you think? But it’s a modern horror movie so expect a twist at the end. No one’s getting out of this movie unscathed.
Photo by Leslie Salas.Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, and episode 575) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
At the dawn of the Golden Age, Superman and Batman were the biggest heroes. Other publishers wanted to capture that lightning in the bottle with their own sci-fi or detective stories. Only when Fawcett Comics debuted their own super-clone, this time with a magical incantation, did the full fantasy of comics really arrive. Shazam was the phrase, and Shazam is the name now (due to Marvel problems), but this kind of magical fantasy opened up more of what these superhero comics could do. That tradition continues both in Mark Waid, Dan Mora, Alejandro Sánchez, and Troy Peteri’s new Shazamseries as well as Alyssa Wong, Haining, Sebastian Cheng, and Janice Chiang’s even newer Spirit World.
While Shazam shows us the continuing adventures of Billy Batson, the ~~Marvel~~ Shazam family, and Tawny the Talking Tiger, it also hints at the weirdness of the magic in the world and how that’s been failing many of Billy’s friends. And while Billy still has his powers and the ability to save anyone on Earth—be it alien dinosaurs or earthquake victims—its the final image of his facade snapping that resonates hardest.
Spirit World, by contrast, comes at us from a different direction. We’re not familiar with Xanthe Zhou, their situation, or their powers (unless you’re one of the five people that read the Lazarus Planet event series) and so we need an introduction. But this introduction drops us immediately into the kind of person Xanthe is, the dangers they face as a result of being a Spirit Envoy in the land of the living, and the danger faced by a Spirit World-trapped Cassandra Cain.
While Shazam blends its Golden Age sensibilities between the transformative phrase, the Rock of Eternity, and the gods that control Billy’s powers, Spirit World instead has strict rules for and structures around its magic. A rigid set of enchantments, incantations, and papers that help Xanthe navigate the troubles of living world. That Constantine shows up in Spirit World cements this fact further. Magic, as in many stories, is rather nebulous in the DC Universe. And yet we know it well just from the first issues these two series had released.
The approach each team takes when constructing these stories and their magic feels like different eras coming together. The Golden Age never needed an explanation for where magic came from—wizards just gave those powers to orphans. But the Modern Age needs that explanation and limits—we need to know how far this magic can go. These series are testaments to how each creative team can look at something as simple as magic in the DC Universe and come out with stories that are different, but still feel like they’re in the same realm.
Get excited. Get magical.
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
On today’s show, I speak with comedian Greg Proops about his new comedy album, French Drug Deal, the way time passes when sober and writing scripts and novels, the perfection of Charlotte Rampling, and other keen matters of interest to think-o-philes. TEXTS DISCUSSED Greg is on tour with the Whose Line crew. Check out their […]
In my younger and more vulnerable years, I wanted to be a spy. For a second grade child, espionage seemed a viable career path with all the spy-adjacent material that I could pick up at the Scholastic Book Fair. Or maybe I would re-watch my VHS copy of Harriet the Spy until the tape turned translucent. Either […]
On today’s show, I speak with creative non-fiction writer Melanie Farmer about memoir, Brazilian jiu jitsu, the relationship between one’s family and one’s public, the Hurtson-Wright prize, and other matters to interest. TEXT DISCUSSED NOTES If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so […]
Razor Fangs, the leather-clad man-eater of the Goose Lord gang, hissed as Edwige, my kangaroo companion from my misadventures in North America, sent a Ferguson toilet crashing down on his head. She did this by maneuvering the potty with her long tail. The seat cracked in two. Razor Fangs collapsed as Edwige giggled as kangaroos […]
How much has fallen into the ocean—not simply own abominable trash islande, but the objects that we’re not responsible for like meteorites and space debris? What else might we find if we were to dive deep beneath the surface? What could be dredged up if we were looking? Ram V, Christian Ward, and Aditya Bidikar […]
On today’s show, Chelsea Alice interviews Ian Patterson, who translated Finding Lost Time, the final volume of Penguin’s new edition of Proust’s novel cycle, In Search of Lost Time. NOTES If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted […]
Razor Fangs, the grotesque man beast of the Goose Lord gang, crept his way to the collapsed Men’s stall. I figured Edwige, my kangaroo companion from my misadventures in North America, was dead, felled by the wicked Razor Fangs. The leather clad freak bushed some of the remnants aside. A bright red boxing glove burst […]
A while ago I took at look at the first issue of Mark Russel, Steve Lieber, Dave Stewart, and Dave Sharpe’s One-Star Squadron and its approach to a heroic office comedy. At the time, the book was this oddity of a mini-series: Red Tornado, Power Girl, and a collection of z-tier characters from the DC Universe get involved in […]
This week, I speak with Samantha Nickerson and I discuss the themes of friendship, relationships, depression, and death, and the craft of Kathleen Alcott in creating stories that are difficult to put down in the new short story collection, Emergency. TEXT DISCUSSED NOTES If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show […]
Edwige, my long lost kangaroo companion from my misadventures in North America, leaped toward Razor Fangs, an S&M member of the Goose Lord Gang. Before she had a chance to strike, Razor Fangs swung a piece of the broken sink at Edwige. The porcelain hit her in the stomach and she crashed into the disabled […]
There are very few illustrators and animators as beloved and respected as Satoshi Kon. Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paranoia Agent, and Paprika are his most well-known works—all of which redefined what an animated movie could be or how to tell a story through an animated series. His place in animation history is cemented. But his manga work, namely is […]
I am in a content, devoted marriage. That’s not the problem. I recently saw a documentary about a man who is married to fifteen inflatable pool animals and was struck with a sense of profound loneliness. This man, with his whale and turtle and unicorn, has a bigger smile than my husband has ever given […]
This week, I speak with game designer Michael Merriam about the mysterious, recent addition to the world of Doomology that is the Myhouse.wad, a retro-fitted narrative freak out to one of the earliest first person shooters in video game history. TEXT DISCUSSED NOTES Here are Myhouse.wad play-through videos I enjoyed watching in researching this episode. […]
Edwige, my long lost kangaroo companion from my misadventures in North America, and Razor Fangs, a feral man clad in stitched leather, were tussling in the trashed bathroom of the Museum of Schlock. Edwige tossed him into one of the standing urinals and it shattered. Water spritzed everywhere. The punk in the blue bandana slipped […]
Tie-in comics occupy a weird space in the medium. While the Bionicle comics from the early 2000s that came with my issues of Lego Magazine were the first comics that I consistently read as a kid, there were always other tie-ins hanging around. Either prequels to movies, set-ups for shows or games, or even panel-by-panel re-tellings of […]
This week, I speak with Sarah Viren about memoir, the social structures of academic work, philosophy, and asking serious questions. TEXT DISCUSSED NOTES If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase […]
Beast Edwige, my long lost kangaroo companion from my misadventures in North America, had returned to me. She was hopping up and down atop a dislodged restroom stall door. Underneath that stall door was the punk in the red bandana, now reduced to a crimson, pulpy mess. The punk in the blue bandana screamed as […]
I’ve talked at length about anthologies in the past. I always love a good anthology and all of the creativity it brings—the limited page counts, the small scales, the distillations of character and plot. Everything about them is perfect for comics, and is what made many of the pre-code anthologies so special to readers at the time. And […]
Dear Dr. Perfect, My AI Chatbot plagiarized another AI Chatbot, and now my professor wants to flunk me. How can I overcome this injustice? Signed,Desperate —————— Dear Desperate, Unfortunately, I saw this coming. I predicted the robot wars would begin through the allure of artificial intelligence. AI would seep into our daily lives, and before […]
On this week’s episode, I speak with Brian Salmons about Leonard Nathan’s 1976 book of poems, The Teachings of Grandfather Fox. TEXT DISCUSSED PLACE DISCUSSED Orlando’s brutalist masterpiece of a downtown library. NOTES If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the […]
I drive a 2001 Chevy Camaro. I won’t waste your time explaining all the reasons I drive such an old car; we’ll just boil it down to two words: sentimentality and money. But I will say this: I’ve owned it since 2005, its engine has always gone strong, and while I’ve sunk a lot of […]
This week, New York Times bestselling author David Lipsky discusses journalism, history, inventors, science, and the importance of storytelling to combine all of those ingredients. TEXTS DISCUSSED NOTES If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small […]
I was about to be eaten alive by a guy in a gimp suit in the trashed bathroom of my once beloved establishment, The Museum of Schlock. Right as Terror was about to sink his metal fangs into me, a noise arose from one of the stalls. It sounded familiar to me, a grunting I’d […]
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #230: An Article About a Comic About Gender While Pride Month may be over, considering recent Supreme Court decisions, it looks like we’re in Wrath Month for the time being. And yet despite governmental efforts at the state and national level, we’re all still here. So while we can […]
On this week’s episode, I speak with novelist Blair Hurley about her thrilling new literary novel, Minor Prophets. TEXTS DISCUSSED NOTES If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no […]
The punk in the blue bandana tugged on the leash of the dude clad in stitched leather. “We call him Terror,” the dude said “He likes fresh meat.” Terror grimaced at me with razor sharp chompers. The punk in the blue bandana then pulled out a hunting knife, and sliced my left forearm bloody. Terror […]
What does trauma look like? Is it something bestial that comes out with teeth gnashing and blood dribbling down its fur at the right provocation? Is it some Important Man that has done irreparable harm who will never face the consequences he should? Or is trauma the result of those things? The people who are […]
David James Poissant interviews fiction writer Andrew Porter about peripheral characters, quiet stories, writerly influences, the theme of disappearance, the importance of music, the teaching of writing, Barry Hannah, and many other matters. NOTES If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that […]
There I was, tied to an office chair in a smelly bathroom in the Museum of Schlock, my once proud establishment now overrun by hooligans. The door to the bathroom swung open and in walked a trio of goons. Two were identical twins with curly blond hair poking out through their bandanas, one red and […]
No one talks about Metropolis. It doesn’t have Gotham’s history or Blüdhaven’s tragedies or even Hub City’s perserverance. It’s simply there as Superman’s home and that weird classical ideal of the city of tomorrow. A city, however, can mean different things for different people. For some, it’s a reminder of everything that they’re not—the first, […]
I recently read a book, The Truth that Can’t be Covered Up with Toothpaste, which says that toothpaste is evil, because when you use it, goblins emerge from your mouth when you sleep at night. Is there any validation for this theory?” Signed, Frightened Little Monster ————— Dear Frightened, There’s some truth to every theory, even […]
Speculative fiction writer Joy Baglio talks with me about labels, the surprises needed for compelling stories, outgrowing being an MFA student despite the fabulousness of being an MFA student, being a Kerouac Project resident, and other important matters. NOTES Check out Joy Baglio’s website, which has links to her fiction. Learn more about The Kerouac […]
I do love when a story is predictive in the oddest way possible. The coincidental prediction—the idea that some aspect of a story would portend a greater aspect of society years later. In this case, it would be seven years to the month of the original publication. And the story aspect is the general population […]
Dear Dr. Perfect, I want to lose weight, but it’s so much work for me to actually do it. Someone told me to get peck and calve implants. Can you help me decide if I should get any, in prose that’s easy to read? Signed, A Lazy Person ————— Dear LP, Losing weight is hard, […]
There will be no episode this weekend, but you can hear a brief update about the show here.
I woke up duct-taped to an office chair in the public bathroom on the first floor of The Museum of Schlock. Graffiti everywhere. “Death to the Curator” was tagged with green paint over the door of the second stall. “Get me out of here,” I screamed. I looked around, trying to find piece of broken […]
Rachael and I discuss horror screenplays and horror story podcasts on an episode in which the podcast turns 11 years old. BOOKS DISCUSSED NOTES TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with […]
“My name is the Goose Lord!” The words were uttered with a grating command. The Joe Spinel look-a-like laughed heartily at the defeat of his two arch-enemies: The Curator of Schlock and the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando. I was cradling my right hand wondering where my severed index finger had gotten […]
A few years ago, I took a look at the first couple issue of Emma Kubert and Rusty Gladd’s new series from Image, Inkblot. I talked about legacy and fantasy storytelling and how those have combined to create a unique series that feels like it’s a long-forgotten cult classic from the 70s. Since then, it’s been a little […]
This week, Samantha Nickerson and Chelsea Alice join me on the mics to discuss a book infamously banned in Florida, Jodi Picault’s novel about the holocaust, The Storyteller.
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
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Episode 579 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
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If you have recommendations for holocaust novels, please do leave us a post with them.
The Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, lay in a crumpled heap on the floor of the Battle Beyond the Stars exhibit in the Museum of Schlock. I was still cradling my bleeding hand as my finger had been just bitten off by Count Zarth Arn from Starcrash.
“Take care of him,” Count Zarth Arn said as the robot sheriff Elle dragged the Revenging Manta away.
“Count Zarth Arn,” I said scanning the floor for my severed finger.
“My name is the Goose Lord!” he yelled before laughing maniacally.
— To be continued.
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This week’s movie is 1987’s The Stepfather from director Joseph Ruben. This is a slasher movie. Wikipedia lists this as “psychological horror,” but this flick falls primarily in the slasher genre. We get a scene of a scruffy Terry O’Quinn cutting his hair and shaving off his beard in a bathroom mirror. By the time he’s done, he is a dapper man in a grey suit. As he leaves his house, we see the gutted bodies of his slaughtered family. We can only conclude the stepfather thing didn’t work out with that family.
Our would-be stepfather is now living under the name Jerry Blake. He’s a clean cut real estate salesman with a loving wife, Susan (Shelley Hack), and her stepdaughter, Stephanie (Jill Schoelen). Stephanie doesn’t really accept Jerry and his fake smile. Maybe it’s the whole Ward Clever act he puts on. For you young folks out there, Ward Cleaver was a character on the 1950s situational comedy television series, Leave It to Beaver. He was basically America’s dad, the breadwinner, the one who knew best. Not that I ever watched the show.
Anyway, Susan is constantly getting into fights at school. She’s acting out because of Jerry and his constant attempts to win her trust. Jerry even gets Susan a puppy, but she still won’t call him dad. Susan manages to get herself expelled and her friend warns her that she may get sent to boarding school. Susan actually thinks that’s a marvelous idea, but Jerry doesn’t want her to go away. He doesn’t want to break up the family.
Susan is seeing a sympathetic therapist named Dr. Bondurant (Charles Lanyer). Like Susan, he begins to suspect Jerry is not what he appears to be. Dr. Bondurant goes undercover as a prospective home buyer, starts asking Jerry all kinds of probing questions. Jerry responds, naturally, by murdering Dr. Bondurant, shoving him in his car, and setting it on fire, a grisly scene.
Meanwhile, there’s a side plot about Jim Ogilvie (Stephen Shellen), the brother of Jerry’s previous wife. He’s out hunting for the man who slaughtered his sister and her family. The police dropped the ball and he’s working with a reporter to invetsigate where the stepfather now resides. This never works out well in slasher movies, the whole obsessive-guy-seeking-revenge-on-the-killer situation. I think back to Friday the 13th Part IV and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and The Devil’s Rejects. No, Jimbo, the final girl must take on the psychopath, and we know it’s going to be Susan.
I’m always delighted to see Terry O’Quinn in anything, whether that be the television series Lost or Millennium. And it looks like I’ve got two more Stepfather movies to cover this month, which is odd considering that Jerry is dead as a doornail by the end of this picture.
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Photo by Leslie SalasJeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, and episode 575) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
On May 20, 2023, Joy Baglio ended her residency at the Kerouac Project of Orlando by reading from a works in progress.. The Kerouac Project of Orlando includes a residency program in which one writer each season gets to live and work in the house where Jack Kerouac lived when On the Road came out, and where he wrote The Dharma Bums.
https://www.joybaglio.com
This week journalist and cultural historian Bob Kealing returns to The Drunken Odyssey to discuss the Beatles’s two momentous visits to Florida in 1964.
Bob Kealing by Steve Erwin.TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
Learn more about The Kerouac Project of Orlando.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
_______
Episode 578 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
I stared at the life-like statue of Count Zarth Arn, the spitting image of Joe Spinell. How it ended up in the Battle Beyond the Stars exhibit was beyond me. I inched my index finger toward the face of Count Earth Arn. And then his mouth snapped on my finger. He wouldn’t let go.
I turned, expecting the Revenging Manta to come to my aid, but it was too late. The ninja vigilante was getting shocked by the robot sheriff Elle. The pressure from Count Zarth Arn’s jaw was too much for my poor finger as it separated from my hand. I cradled my bleeding hand as Count Zarth Arn laughed maniacally. — To be continued.
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Tonight’s movie is 2015’s Run All Night from director Jaume Collet-Serra. He’s directed action thrillers like Unknown, Non-Stop, and The Commuter. Those movies starred a grizzled Liam Neeson and so does Run All Night. Those movies featured Liam Neeson killing lots of bad guys and so does Run All Night. Are you seeing a pattern here? Do you turn up your nose at my pedestrian tastes?
Run All Night features Liam Neeson as a retired hitman for the Irish mob named Jimmy “The Gravedigger” Conion. Jimmy is not doing too well in his life. His son doesn’t talk to him on account that he used to murder people for money. Also, Jimmy is a stinking, sloppy drunk. Even when asked to perform Santa Claus at a party of his former employer, Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris), he can’t do it sober. Maybe if he had a better relationship with his son, Mike (Joel Kinsman), things would be different.
Mike is trying his best to live the life of an upstanding citizen. He drives a limousine at all hours just to make ends meet for his wife and two daughters. Mike also takes on the role of big brother for a neighborhood kid named Legs (Aubrey Joseph). He even teaches him how to box. Contrast Mike with Danny Maguire (Boyd Holbrook), the shady son of the mob boss. He makes a deal with some Albanian drug dealers for a meeting with his dad. The Albanians want to smuggle heroin into the country, but Shawn Maguire wants nothing to do with this operation. The Albanians paid Danny a lot of money to get that meeting with his dad and they’ll be showing up at his apartment later to collect.
The Albanians call for a limo to take them to Danny’s apartment and guess who’s driving? It’s Mike!! He waits in the car as the Albanians go inside. Danny gives the drug dealers a huge sack filled with Monopoly money. The Albanians don’t find this very funny and they find Danny and his goons opening fire on them even less funny. One of the drug dealers makes it out of the apartment with Danny in close pursuit. Mike sees the guy limp toward his car just in time to see Danny execute him without mercy. Mike speeds away and the despicable Danny pins the murder of the Albanians on him.
With no one else to turn to, Mike calls his dad for help. Danny breaks into Mike’s apartment and is about to shoot him dead when Jimmy blows him away. Jimmy then calls Shawn Maguire up, telling him that he killed his son, but that Mike had nothing to do with it. Mike is innocent in this situation, but Shawn won’t accept Jimmy offering himself up. Shawn wants Jimmy to feel the pain of losing a son before he dies. Shawn then calls up everything goon in his organization, every corrupt cop working for him, and even a highly skilled assassin to go after Jimmy and Mike.
One scene involves a thrilling car chase between Jimmy and a couple of corrupt police officers through the busy streets of New York City that ends with their cars crashing through a storefront on Christmas Eve. Another scene involves them trying to escape from a calculating assassin while an apartment building burns around them.
This is a redemption story for old Jimmy that just happens to involve him laying waste to every Irish mobster in New York City.
And this is why we curators of schlock go to the movies.
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Photo by Leslie Salas.Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, and episode 575) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Much like the modern comic book, jazz is a uniquely American invention. And while both are umbrella terms that encompass a wide variety of genres, sub-genres, and movements over the decades, we’re all intimately familiar with their conventions. Like most mediums, too, both comics and jazz are filled with the unsung and unknown figures that may have been innovators at the time, but have since fallen into obscurity. At this intersection of jazz and comics comes Kyle Higgins, Joe Clark, Danilo Beyruth, Igor Monti, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s first issue of Deep Cuts and its exploration of some of those forgotten moments in jazz.
New Orleans in April 1917 was a couple of things. It was the center of jazz in the US as the myriad influence of immigrants from Cuba and Sicily and the prominence of African American musicians found in every establishment created the foundation for what would become traditional jazz. It was also where the US military was training and housing soldiers before they would go overseas to fight in World War I. This is where Charles Stewart walks the streets of the city, looking for jazz. He’s a young clarinet player looking for a stage for his talents. But in a city so filled with jazz and people, it’s hard to get noticed until he starts playing through the window of a small club. From there, we see his interactions with Jack Cartier and one way to stand out in the local jazz world. But maybe this isn’t the life that Charles wants—maybe playing with people sometimes for the sake of playing is more rewarding. And, in the case of Jack Cartier, less dangerous.
While we’re not focused on any specific historic figure, it’s the grounding of the story in a specific era that makes this anthology stand out. It’s the people working and creating on the periphery that end up lost to history that may indeed have the biggest effect—we can never know where exactly someone like Louis Armstrong first heard jazz in New Orleans as a child, but it could very well have been a musician like Charles Stewart or any number of jazz locals that kept New Orleans’ music scene flourishing. And that’s ultimately what makes Deep Cuts such a compelling series from its first issue. It’s helping to imagine something that could have existed—we’re given a fiction that’s so steeped in history, that it could be indistinguishable from the real world.
While this is only the first issue of Deep Cuts, subsequent issues will be focusing on different eras of jazz throughout American history, it’s showcasing to us how Higgins, Clark, Beyruth, Monti, and Otsmane-Elhaou are approaching jazz and its mythology. And with the inclusion of original lead sheets at the end of every issue, we’ll be able to listen along to the music while we immersive ourselves into a series that plays with history like any good jazz composition.
Get excited. Get playing.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Dear Dr. Perfect,
If you heat up peanut butter at 105 degrees, does it cure Alzheimer’s? My mom’s friend’s boyfriend, whose daughter is a doctor, told me that’s preposterous. Can you settle this debate whether this is true or not?
Signed,
Curious Individual
————
You’ve come to the right place. Dr. Perfect is here to fulfill all your peanut butter inquiries. I’m no Bill Nye the Science Guy, but he’s just an actor anyway—and a complete douche.
I bumped into Nye at a charity event, drunk as a skunk and trying to get me to invest in home solar panels. After I repeatedly declined, he swung at me and crashed into a tray of finger foods. Wait, I think that was Mickey Rourke. It’s hard to keep track of these degenerate celebrities.
I’ve heard countless claims about the miraculous wonders of peanut butter. They say that it helps eliminate wrinkles, covers pesky varicose veins, and wards off evil spirits from your house, for starters.
My grandmother gave us a teaspoon of peanut butter before bedtime to help us sleep. She swore by the stuff up through the day she was committed.
There is no known cure for Alzheimer’s unless we master brain transplants better than Dr. Frankenstein did. There are, however, many holistic approaches one can undergo in remedying inevitable physical and neurological decline.
Gemstones, lighted incense, and earthy ambient music combine into one unforgettable aromatherapy session that can cleanse your mind and spirit. Your neighborhood shaman is also a great source of mystical healing through altered states of consciousness.
These practices aren’t any less valid than modern medicine. Today’s doctors will perform any surgery or procedure necessary to prolong a terminally ill patient’s life a few more weeks while giving false hope to their family.
Everyone knows the magic of Reece’s. They’re the wizards behind Reece’s Pieces, Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups, and Reece’s Puffs—a breakfast cereal for the daring.
They make Reece’s minis, Reece’s peanut butter eggs, Reece’s ice cream bars, and Reece’s cookie dough, lovingly distributed by Hershey Company, who rake in more the $2 billion in sales annually. That’s a lot of chocolate and peanut butter goodness.
I don’t want to get between you and your mom’s friend’s boyfriend’s daughter who’s a doctor. The fight against Alzheimer’s needs all the help it can get. Turn up the stove and start frying up peanut butter. That’s what my grandmother would say.
She had her struggles and a scandalous affair with William Howard Taft to boot. This was when he was on the Supreme Court, after his presidency. Toward the end, people said she was crazy, but maybe it was Alzheimer’s.
She was never diagnosed or tested, for that matter. Instead, my family did what was normal in the eighties, we locked her away in a medieval tower. What other options were there?
Unfortunately, I can’t end your PB&A debate. The burden of proof falls on the one making the claim and not the person dismissing it. This doesn’t mean you can’t squeeze something through peer review and onto next week’s hard-hitting medical journal.
Scientists can be bought, just like regular people. We can believe anything our minds convince us to until, of course, our minds deteriorate in the throes of dementia or worse. I’ll drink to that! I’m going to need something stiff to assuage the smell of burnt peanut butter. I’ve been frying a batch for the past hour.
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Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
This week Samantha Nickerson returns to guest-hosting duties with a fabulous conversation with novelist writer Sarai Walker.
Sarai Walker by Linette & Kyle Kielinski.Samantha NickersonTEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
_______
Episode 577 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, and myself were traipsing through the upper floors of the Museum of Schlock. The next room we passed through was the Battle Beyond the Stars exhibit. A wide array of wax statues stood before us. There was Richard Thomas’s Shad, George Peppard’s Cowboy, Robert Vaughn’s Gelt, John Saxon’s Sador, Sybil Danning’s St. Exmin, and Joe Spinell’s Count Zarth Arn. We turned to move to the next exhibit when I realized Count Zarth Arn wasn’t in Battle Beyond the Stars, he was in Starcrash! Something was amiss! — To be continued.
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Shudder is a horror themed streaming platform with original series, movies, and a back catalogue of classics to boot. There’s an original anthology series based on the movie Creepshow. It even featured an episode where Bob Ross fought the Evil Dead. You have famous horror hosts Elvira and Joe Bob Briggs hosting movie nights. And then there’s that back catalogue I mentioned, featuring classic schlock like The Manitou.
Yes, this week’s movie is 1978’s The Manitou from director William Girdler based on the novel by Graham Masterton. I imagine The Manitou was one of the infamous paperbacks from hell as described by horror writer Grady Hendrix. These things littered the bookstore shelves back in the 70s and 80s. No doubt this book was meant to capitalize on the popularity of hot properties such Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. Still, the unnatural entity we’re dealing with this time around isn’t the devil.
Our movie begins with a woman named Karen going to a hospital in San Francisco to get a growth on the back of her neck checked out. The growth keeps doubling in size every couple of days and doctors are dumbfounded. The x-rays they take show the growth to be a fetus. That’s kind of gross. They book her for surgery to get it removed and Karen seeks out an old friend of hers named Harry (Tony Curtis).
Yes, you read right. Tony Curtis is in this movie. I guess if Gregory Peck could be in The Omen then why not cast Tony Curtis in your evil neck fetus movie. Harry is a professional fortune teller and by professional, I mean he bilks old ladies out of money in exchange for tarot readings. He even wears a fake mustache during his readings for some reason. Any, we get a lovely montage with Harry and Karen out on a date. However, when Harry reads Karen’s fortune, it doesn’t look so good.
Harry meets up with some of his mystic friends to see if the neck fetus thing has an unearthly origin. There’s a seance that goes badly. The group then does some research that reveals how a shaman once emerged fully grown from a growth on a young girl’s arm. The rebirth of the shaman proved fatal to the young girl. This leads them to seek out a professor named Dr. Snow who’s an expert on such things. Dr. Snow (Burgess Meredith) almost discourages them from interfering with the rebirth of this shaman as his existence would have so much scientific and cultural importance.
I think we learn that the shaman’s name is Misquamacus and he wants revenge on the descendants of the colonists that wiped out his people. This leads Harry to seek out the assistance of a living shaman named John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara). I think John Singing Rock traps Misquamacus in a circle of salt in the hospital room just as he emerges from Karen’s back. He’s not fully grown just yet and has the appearance of a gooey mutant.
Misquamacus starts summoning demons to torment Harry and John Singing Rock. The movie culminates in a topless Karen summoning the spirits of the hospital equipment in the building to defeat “The Great Old One” in a spectacle that reminds me of the opening credits from a Tom Baker Doctor Who episode. I read that the director died before this movie was released. Small mercies.
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Photo by Leslie Salas.Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, and episode 575) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
No matter who we are, we’re always going to leave something behind to be remembered. This can be our memories—the small acts that we’ve done that accumulate a version of ourselves in someone’s mind. Or the more physical—the objects and locations that will intrinsically tie who we were to those pieces. Ephemera: A Memoirby Briana Loewinsohn takes a look at both of these things—her memories of her mother when she was younger and the home they inhabited—all the while taking us between her past and present.
Ephemera is a story about returning. Loewinsohn comes back to her childhood home to confront the memories that remain there—what she tries to remember of her mother, her sibling, and the garden that surrounded the home. But her memory is imperfect. She can remember scant pieces here and there with some memories coming in clearly while others feel as transient as water on tilled earth. Ephemera is also a story about absence. Her mother was never there. She was just as ephemeral as Loewinsohn’s memories of her at times.
And yet it’s in that absence that she returns to that home that’s been empty for years. No one has been around to tend to the land surrounding it; the greenhouse is in more disrepair than we she was a child; the earth is compact and hard. Despite everything, though, she still loves it. Even with her mother’s absence there now, this is still what connects them together.
Ephemera excels in its silence. So much of Loewinsohn’s panels are filled only with the image. We’re left to sit in the silence she creates. It perfectly reflects the way in which she also sits in this garden with only the sound of ambient nature surrounding her. We’re being asked to join as quiet observers, holding our breaths so as to not disturb the delicate peace of the garden—if we want to call it “peace” as Loewinsohn is still grappling with the memories of her mother and her home there. But there is a strange sense of serenity that still permeates the page. Through the lack of language do we have time to observe and slowly take the panels in as they unfold slowly to reveal what existed between Loewinsohn and her mother that went beyond words.
Ephemera gives us an opportunity to look at our own imperfect memories and the absences inherent in them. We’re given the space to sit with Loewinsohn in her garden and ruminate together. And that’s what makes the best kind of graphic memoir—the space to form a sympathetic connection exists in what isn’t explicitly between the panels. We see Loewinsohn’s story and, in the silence, take a moment to look at our own. We can see what was left behind for her and can look back to see what we’re leaving behind too.
Get excited. Get memorial.
_______
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.
Dear Dr. Perfect,
I’m in love with my cousin. Only thing is, I’m afraid to tell him because he might think I’m a cliché. Do I risk it to get the biscuit?
Signed,
Family over Everything
—————
Dear FoE,
Is this Jerry Lee Lewis? Sorry, couldn’t help myself. I’ll save the Woody Allen jokes for the next letter, which is a real doozy. Being attracted to your cousin can be tricky. Being in love with them can be disastrous. Claiming them on your taxes can also be troublesome. What else are they good for?
Asking your cousin to senior prom can be awkward. I learned this the hard way after my date ditched me at the last minute for the track team pretty boy.
I was no match for his thick blond bouffant or those muscular legs below his low-cut gym shorts. Hell, I wanted to date him, but he was taken. Thank you very much, Sheila Reynolds.
I couldn’t go to the prom alone. I had already rented a tux, booked a limo, and reserved a room at the Shady Shack Motel, a local favorite. Days before, I posted a sign-up sheet on the school bulletin board, where potential prom dates could leave their contact information and a 2×4 glossy.
The winner would accompany Roosevelt High’s most eligible bachelor to the prom and reap all the benefits therein. It was a long shot, but I was confident.
Unfortunately, saboteurs saw fit to write-in phony prospects, like our eighty-year-old school librarian, Ms. Dudley, Mr. Russell the gym teacher, then-President Jimmy Carter, and Farrah Fawcett, among other luminaries. I needed a ringer stat.
I called my cousin that evening, remembering she was attending college two towns over. “All you have to do is pretend to be my date for the evening,” I told her. I even promised no funny business at the Shady Shack. “I suppose I can help,” she said, “but you’ll have to get me a nice dress.”
When I protested the shakedown, she suggested that I hire a call girl instead. The notion of paying for female companionship sent me into a rage. “I’ll have your dress–just don’t be late!” I said, slamming down the phone. The plan was perfect.
I stood outside my house on prom night, waiting for the limo and my cousin in her fancy new dress. They never arrived. Instead, the bastard limo driver eloped with my cousin that very evening.
They married a few years later, and I had the privilege of delivering the toast, while regaling the audience with how I alone was responsible for their union. And she better not forget it.
Your cousin love does border on cliché, and I haven’t even brought up the South yet. I’d rather explore the underlying reasons behind your profession of love. Is your cousin good looking? Does he make a lot of money? Does he know any magic tricks? What else is there?
If the feelings aren’t mutual, you risk humiliation and admonishment; at the very least, a guest spot on Dr. Phil. Talk to your cousin. Ask him something like, if I wasn’t your cousin, would you date me? This is all icky stuff, but fear not, Dr. Perfect is always willing to plunge the depths of decency to assist.
This whole cousin thing might just a phase. Perhaps you’re attracted to the scandalous nature of a forbidden love affair. Whatever the reasons, don’t send him nudes–yet. Every time someone tells me they’re in love with someone, they assume a barrage of nudes will seal the deal. That’s not always the case.
Some of us should never be seen naked. We’re not all chiseled hunks with flat abs and broad shoulders like mister senior track star who stole my date!
I’m over it, honest.
Best of luck to you and your cousin. May you both find love with someone outside the family perhaps. If not, it’ll be one weird wedding. Put me on the guest list. Dr. Perfect is not one to turn down free food and dancing at any event.
_______
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
Rachael and I return to the subject of William Gibson in a non-fiction collection, Distrust That Particular Flavor, that proved charming fun. We discuss the history of technology, the cryptic mysteries of creating feature films, Japan, the paradox of science fiction’s timeliness, Japan, self-irony, and Japan.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
Check out episode 565, in which Rachael and I discuss William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
_______
Episode 576 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
I walked softly on the hardwood floor of The Fifth Cord exhibit, the Revenging Manta trailing close behind. It was then that I saw the most horrifying sight. One of the punks that had taken over The Museum of Schlock had vandalized the centerpiece of the room, a marble bust of the great Franco Nero. They’d spray painted his hair red and his face white. A bright cherry grin was splattered over his mouth. They’d turned Franco Nero into Ronald McDonald!
These filth held nothing sacred.
— To be continued.
_______
Life is full of disappointments. Back in 1992, Alien 3 released in theaters on May 22, one day after my birthday. I expected to see more terrifying adventures with Ripley, Newt, and Hicks as they faced off against the deadly Aliens once again. Instead I got a turd of a sequel that I never bothered to watch again until last night. Why did I watch it again after all these years? Because there’s an Alien 3 Special Edition that promises to fix all that is wrong with the original film.
Known as the Assembly Cut, this new edition adds about another thirty minutes to Alien 3. We get added scenes and changed scenes. Director David Fincher refused any participation with this new cut as he’s still angry over the studio’s interference with the theatrical version over thirty years ago. Why re-tarnish what has turned out to be a great directorial career?
From what I’ve heard, Murphy’s Law was in effect on this production. I think famed science fiction writer William Gibson even turned in a screenplay that was eventually rejected by the studio in favor of whatever the heck the movie turned out to be.
I still don’t like this movie. We still have a dead Newt and a dead Hicks. We still have a prison colony with a bunch of grody prisoners with shaved heads. They still have British accents and are still hyper religious. The only standouts are Charles Dance as Clemens, a disgraced prison doctor, and Charles S. Dutton as Dillon, the prison preacher. Honestly, all of the other prisoners just look alike to me. Maybe it’s all those shaved heads and burlap sack clothes they wear.
And then we have the Alien which gestates out of the carcass of an ox as opposed to a dog in the theatrical version. Apparently, the Alien assumes the attributes of the host it hatches from so this one runs around on four legs and is super fast. That’s kind of dumb and doesn’t make any sense to me, but whatever. Maybe this new rule was created to sell action figures. You could have a bear Alien and a leopard Alien. Just imagine the possibilities.
Bishop (Lance Henriksen) still dies. Yes, he’s an android, but he was still a character we cared about and he just asks Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) to disconnect him because he’ll “never be top of the line again.” And if you’re thinking Ripley makes it out of this new cut alive, you’d be sadly mistaken. She still makes the ultimate sacrifice so the Weyland Corporation doesn’t get their hands on the Alien Queen growing inside her. And that’s that.
This movie still doesn’t hold up. The direction and set design are second to none, but what we have here is a morose picture that doesn’t excite or engage and newly-introduced characters that I don’t care about. And the Assembly Cut is a half hour longer and I kept watching the time, waiting for this to end.
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Photo by Leslie SalasJeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, and episode 575) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Jeff Shuster and John King celebrate May the 4th by discussing three films trying to capitalize on the science fiction success of Star Wars.
Movies Discussed
NOTES
Check out the typography of the last page of The Black Hole’s novelization; it’s as if the lines jumbled on purpose having gone through the black hole.
Check out the Disney+ trailer for The Black Hole.
I’ve talked about it previously: John Allison remains one of the most consistently great comic creators in the industry. And with his frequent collaborator in Max Sarin providing the art and Sammy Borras and Jim Campbell giving us colors and letters respectively, we have the set-up for,The Great British Bump-Off. As another series spinning off the mystery children from Allison’s Bad Machinery webcomic, we’re diving further into characters we’ve been reading for over a decade now but finally seeing them outside their home of Tackleford.
UK Bakery Tent is one of the most popular show in the country with its relatively chill atmosphere and group of home bakers coming together to create fun treats based on weekly themes (it’s basically The Great British Bake-Off but licensing is expensive). But, as this is a story involving Shauna Wickle, murder is afoot. Before the first episode can even be shot, one of the contestants is found dead in the practice tent, and there’s talk of canceling the series—even the entire show—due to its loss of innocence. How could someone be murdered for baked goods? But as that thought comes about, Shauna volunteers to find the killer while also competing as a contestant. As far as anyone else knows, the murder victim simply had an accident and is in the hospital, but Shauna—along with two other contestants in Sunil and Jill—is keeping her eyes open for who could be harboring malicious intent in the tent.
As with their previous series, Wicked Things, the creative team here knows how to balance murder and humor without it becoming too crass. We have an entire cast to work with—twelve contestants, two hosts (one of which is a cat), two judges, and the three producers. With just a few panels of time between them all, we already have a strong sense of character—bolstered by Sarin’s emotive expressions. From the first issue, we only have the set-up, but any person could have been the culprit in this poisoning. As the victim was seen arguing with most of the other contestants in the practice tent before being killed, there’s a potential motive pointing at nearly everyone competing. Even with a killer running free in the tent, you also can’t help but feel charmed by the eccentricities of every member of the cast. But then that just makes the killer at large somehow more terrifying.
Despite running the gambit from supernatural to slice-of-life to mysteries to murders, John Allison’s work has always been immediately recognizable based on dialog alone. But his collaborations with artists like Max Sarin, Sammy Borras, Lissa Treiman, and Julaa Madrigal shows the breadth of talent that goes into these comics. It’s hard not to be excited when you see Allison’s name appear on a new solicitation list, but it’s even more exciting to see who’s coming to work with him again.
Get excited. Get baking.
_______
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Dear Dr. Perfect,
My fiancé just dyed his hair cotton candy blue, which will clash with the dog collar I intend to surprise him with at our wedding ceremony. How can I dye his hair back to black without him knowing?
Signed,
Determined
———–
Greetings, Big D.
The lead-up to any wedding is crucial to the overall splendor of a long-lasting and meaningful relationship. It’s also time to decide if the person you’re walking down the aisle for is worth the trouble.
Robin Hood said it best when he told Maid Marian, “Everything I do, I do it for you.” This was in the Kevin Costner version. Whether he said those words, or they were lyrics to a Bryan Adams music video that accompanied the film is not important; commitment is about sacrifice.
You’re probably wondering why your fiancé changed his hair out of the blue. I know I am. Puns aside, this is concerning. Maybe he wanted to surprise you or just muck up your well laid plans. There’s a thin line between bad surprises, like a terrorist attack, and good surprises, like saving up to 50% on your car insurance with GEICO. They’re a sponsor now, so bear with me.
I spent two-weeks planning a co-worker’s surprise birthday party, only to find out that she took a four-day to visit family in Vermont. I said, “Never again,” and tossed her Cookie Puss cake in the trash. No one told her about the party because it was supposed to be a surprise. They also failed to inform me that she’d be gone. And so ended my brief stint at the artillery shelling factory. The magic was gone.
Your fiancé has some ‘splaining to do, as they say. First, where did he get cotton candy blue hair dye so close to the wedding date? Secondly, has he tried tangerine dream? I heard it’s exquisite, not unlike electric raspberry.
We could talk about hair dye all day or get to the crux of the matter. Your fiancé out-surprised you. He’s playing to win here.
Have you ever had big news to tell someone, only for someone else to blurt it out while you’re in mid-sentence? Your fiancé’s inconsiderate behavior recalls an infamous incident involving my grandfather, Thaddeus J. Perfect III. He worked as a beat reporter before his illustrious career as advice columnist, a long family tradition.
One fateful afternoon in 1963, he rushed into his boss’s office with the biggest scoop of his career. But before he could finish, some bonehead shouted, “Hey boss, did ya’ hear? President Kennedy’s been shot in Dallas!” Gramps was beat to the punch and then proceeded to beat and punch the very bonehead who stole his thunder.
Now, about that dog collar. Have you considered exchanging it for a color that complements his new hairdo? I know plenty of pet stores (and bondage shops) that cater to your every need. If you’re set on the blue collar for whatever sentimental reasons, let’s talk business.
You could easily dye his hair black as he sleeps. The next morning, go about your business without even mentioning it. If he notices, convince him the cotton candy blue faded away on its own. Maybe it washed out in the shower or maybe the whole ordeal was all a dream.
This plan might sound inept and lazy, but he won’t give hair color another thought after he sees the surprise waiting for him under the sheets. I’m talking, of course, about breakfast in bed. Whatwere you thinking about? Then proceed to lather him in Cool Whip and dive in. Best of luck with the wedding. I’ll await your invite.
_______
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
On this episode, I speak with the Nick Georgoudiou about co-owning the used bookstore @joybirdbooks, maintaining a murder of typewriters, literary citizenship, and many other matters of interest and whatnot.
John King and Nick Georgoudiou at Joybird Books.PLACE DISCUSSED
Joybird Books, located at 3018 Corrine Drive / Orlando, Florida 32803.NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
Visit the Kerouac Project of Orlando‘s website to sign up for its newsletter to stay abreast of KPO’s public events.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
_______
Episode 574 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Revenging Manta and I were stumbling around in the dark of the Spookies exhibit in the Museum of Schlock. Funny enough. This exhibit was left mostly intact. Someone had removed the yellow dress shirt that adorned the were-cat mannequin. I could have sworn I saw the robot sheriff Elle out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned around nothing was there. We continued on to The Fifth Cord exhibit. — To be continued
_______
Tonight’s movie is 1987’s The Lost Boys from director Joel Schumacher and is there a more perfect movie than this? The Lost Boys is the king of all 80s vampire pictures and cemented the phenomenon of the Two Coreys into the American consciousness. Maybe the 70s weren’t too kind to the toothy undead, but hair metal and neon fit the Hominus Nocturna like a glove. I still have to watch that Vampire’s Kiss movie with Nic Cage. That one is on my bucket list.
Our movie takes place on the boardwalk in a California town named Santa Carla. The town is known as the murder capital of the world. This might have something to do with a gang of punk rocker vampires led by David Powers (Kiefer Sutherland). They make a late night snack of a nighttime security guard at the start of the picture. Next we’re introduced to brothers Sam (Corey Haim) and Michael (Jason Patric) along with their mother, Lucy (Dianne Wiest). She’s recently divorced and is moving her and boys back in with her eccentric father, a man that loves his taxidermy.
Sam and Michael venture out to the boardwalk and the whole scene is super cool. You’ve got a saxophone band and video rental stores and a comic shop. Michael has his eye on this beautiful yet mysterious girl named Star (Jami Gertz) who seems to be under the control of David. Meanwhile, Sam is perusing a selection of Superman comics while getting approached by two boys in military fatigues, Edgar and Alan Frog. They give Sam a vampire comic and tell him reading it might just save his life.
Michael eventually gets invited by David and his gang to go riding one night. While partying in the ruins of a hotel, David tricks Michael into drinking from a wine bottle. The next morning, Sam notices Michael is behaving strangely. Michael has a bad attitude and doesn’t seem too fond of sunlight. Sam expresses his concerns to the Frog brothers who advise Sam to kill his brother. Not wanting to go to that extreme just yet, Sam and the Frog brother start hunting for the head vampire. If they slay the head vampire, Michael’s curse will be broken and he’ll return to normal.
Sam suspects the guy his mom is dating is the head vampire. The great Edward Hermann stars as Max Lawrence, the video store owner his mom is infatuated with. At dinner, Sam offers Max some grated Parmesan which turns out to be grated garlic. He and the Frog brothers do other tests, but there’s nothing to indicate Max is a vampire. Time is running out for Michael and if he makes his first kill, he’ll be a vampire forever.
It’s funny. Siskel and Ebert gave this one the thumbs down, saying too much was packed into this movie. I don’t know. I found The Lost Boys then as I do now to be a lot of fun that doesn’t waste my time. If you haven’t seen it, I envy you getting to watch it for the first time.
_______
Photo by Leslie Salas.Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
How do you speak when you don’t have the words?
How do you tell someone something about yourself when you don’t know the right words?
Throughout Trung Le Nguyen’s The Magic Fish, this struggle plays out and out.
Tiến wants to come out to his mother, but he doesn’t know the right words in Vietnamese to tell her. As the son of immigrants, he knows a little Vietnamese, but not enough to fully explain who he is. And his parents know enough English, but not enough to understand what he wants to tell them. There is still something that brings Tiến and his mother together, though: fairy tales. There’s a familiarity with the tales Tiến reads to his mother—there’s something they can both latch onto and connect with each other in ways that a normal conversation can’t accomplish. Stories of magic and loss, stories of fish and jealousy, and stories of gowns and love. Every story Tiến tells feels like a variation on a theme—continually getting to the point that he wants to make, but is unable to do so when he has to go to school or his mother has to rush back to Vietnam. We can feel every break in the fairy tales—each aspect of the story is represented with its own color scheme—and just how much there needs to be said before it’s left hanging.
It is in Tiến’s struggle to communicate that the heart of the story lies. It isn’t just with his mother, but with his friends Claire and Julian, his teacher after she sees him dancing with Julian, and with the priest his teacher brings to talk with him. The balance that Nguyen strikes between all of these moments—Tiến and his mother’s struggles in the present, the quick flashes of the past, and the fairy tales all help to ground us in the moment and bring us closer to Tiến and his mother. And despite the inability to communicate what he wants to say, Tiến and his mother still have the stories that bring them closer together. In an incredible depiction of character, Nguyen is able to show how much these stories matter to the two of them and how there’s still a commonality between the fairy tales regardless of where they’re from. They’ve always been there to impart some grander message and it’s what Tiến and his mother use to bring each other closer and to bring us closer to them.
The Magic FishBy TRUNG LE NGUYENCR: Trung Le Nguyen for Random House GraphicThe Magic Fish communicates grief and loss, but also the joy of being able to be with the ones you love when you need them the most. It shows us that, despite everything, we can still hold onto those people we need even when it feels like the world is crumbling around us and we don’t quite have the words to tell them what we really want to say.
Get excited. Get the right words.
_______
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Dear Dr. Perfect,
Why didn’t Ayn Rand ever become president?
Signed,
Confused
——————–
Dearest Confused,
For someone who escaped Soviet communism at an early age, Ayn Rand sure was preachy.
She should have been satisfied enough with the western decadence before her. Instead, she unleashed her Objectivist philosophy on an unsuspecting populous in the form of unreadable stage plays and periodical claptrap.
But it’s all too easy to pile on Rand and her works. Snooty literary types have been doing that for decades. Rand’s propensity for capitalism and free enterprise often put her at directs odds with intellectuals and commie heathens who dismissed her works entirely.
Our current academic climate of exorbitant tuition rates and excessive student loan debt could certainly use some of that Rand magic today.
She has her fans and detractors, just like Pauly Shore, and like Shore, she was briefly in the movie business.
Her first-hand experience during the Russian Revolution of the early 20th century and the Bolshevik takeover of her homeland solidified her beliefs against the collectivist state. Admittedly, I went through an Ayn Rand phase in my youth and even had a collection of thirty commemorative plates with her face on them.
Her two most notable works The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged lament the struggles of individuals against a stifling bureaucratic system. Her lasting influence on modern politics and “freedom keggers” beg the question of a political career that never was.
There’s no doubt that Rand was wild for capitalism, but did she ever start a business herself? How many widgets did she produce? I’m still waiting.
I ran for local office a few years ago on a lark. Turns out, elections are nothing more than a popularity contest. All I know is that every couple of years, my mailbox floods with campaign flyers. I promised to put an end to this practice, but no one went for it. People love their junk mail.
For generations, stoned scholars have asked why Ayn Rand never became president. I have some questions of my own. Why were we denied the Rand/Goldwater dream ticket the country needed? Why isn’t her face on Mount Rushmore? Do these cufflinks match my Armani suit? There’s no easy answer to any of these.
Technically, her foreign-born status disqualified her from seeking the highest office in the land, but there are always exceptions to the rule. Russian comic Yakov Smirnoff could have easily swept the ballot box in the eighties. He was hilarious! Or maybe I’m thinking of Borat.
The point is, some time ago, Russia and America had their problems. The threat of nuclear war was a real concern between the two superpowers. Both Rand and Smirnoff helped bridge those differences, with the help the 1985 box office hit Rocky IV in the mix.
The Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War ended, and all was right in the world. As a result, we have absolutely nothing to worry about today. Sleep well, my friend!
_______
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
On this episode, I speak with the poet David van den Berg on the glories of tromping through swamps as a child, the knifeblade dialectic of cynicism and wonder, and discovering a sense of authentic voice.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
_______
Mary Leigh Lear artwork from Lover Letters from an Arsonist.Check out my essay on walking, “The Cowboy and the Vampire,” over at Autofocus literary magazine.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
_______
Episode 573 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, and I were sneaking inside the Museum of Schlock, trying to surprise the punks who’d seized my property. We entered through a secret passageway in the Starcrash exhibit. No punks to be seen, but I got the eerie feeling that we were being watched. Maybe it was the costume of the robot sheriff Elle at the far end that made me uneasy. We walked swiftly and silently into the next room, the Spookies exhibit.
Come to think of it, I’ve never covered 1986’s Spookies on this blog. This movie credits not one, not two, but three directors: Brendan Faulkner, Thomas Doran, and Eugenie Joseph. I remember watching this on the USA Network as a child one Saturday afternoon. At that point in my life, it was the worst movie I had ever seen. Spookies was my first introduction for what I would later come to know as schlock.
Let’s get out of the way. Spookies is a Phantasm ripoff. If you want to watch Spookies if it was a good movie, watch Phantasm. If you want to watch just regular Spookies, it’s streaming on Shudder. So I revisited Spookies attempting to see if it’s as bad as my ten-year-old self would have me believe. And I realized in the thirty plus years past then, I’ve seen far worse movies. Don’t get me wrong, Spookies is a train wreck, just not as severe as I remember.
Spookies begins with an old man named Kreon (Felix Ward) obsessing over his dead wife, Isabelle (Maria Pechukas). In order to restore her to life, he must trap the souls of people who unwittingly stumble onto his property, an old mansion surrounded by tombstones. First we have Billy, a young boy who ran away from home because his parents forgot his birthday. We learn this because he’s grilled by some creeper in the park about why he ran away. Billy says he’s going places and he leaves. The creeper then gets mauled by a wolf boy in a yellow dress shirt.
Meanwhile, we got some rowdy partygoers looking for a place to crash. One car is filled with yuppies, the other is filled with punks. One of the punks has a felt puppet attached to hand that he uses to annoy the other partygoers and the audience. His death should have been puppet related, but he gets drained by a giant spider instead. Everybody dies in this movie. Billy gets buried alive by the wolf boy. Oh wait. According to Wikipedia, the wolf boy is actually a were cat. My mistake.
There’s a scene where the punks and yuppies play around with a ouija board. They ask all sorts of questions like if they’ll live through the night, but the board says no. One of their own turns into a zombie controlled by Kreon. The rest of them are picked off one by one by a grim reaper or some baby demons. We even get a scene with farting muck zombies. Maybe just watch the trailer for this one.
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Photo by Leslie SalasJeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
We remember 2019, right? The pre-plague era where I was only a few months into this series of articles? It was then I pointed out my reasoning behind not covering much of Marvel’s recent output, opting instead for the occasional older series. This was due to Ike Perlmutter, his connections to the Trump administration, and his running of the VA into the ground. I boycotted the publisher quietly since around 2018 and hadn’t let up since the final issue of Americain early 2019.
But guess who just got fired?
So I have a bit of catching up to do. And no better place to start catching up than with Gail Simone, Phil Noto, and Cory Petit’s The Variants.
The Variants is a Jessica Jones mystery that winds itself through Hell’s Kitchen and Jones’ life as she nears the ten year anniversary of being controlled by the Purple Man. After talking to Maria Snyder, another victim of the Purple Man’s mind control, she discovers that he left a time bomb inside her mind—one that caused Snyder to kill her family and one she fears will cause her to do the same. This coincides with the appearance of Jessica Jones, or, rather, a version of her from a different multiverse. And then another. And another. Before long there’s a team of five Jessica Jonses, each from a slightly more tragic universe than our current 616. But the mystery deepens as the facts of the case don’t quite fit together and while our Jessica Jones can feel the Purple Man’s bomb ticking closer and closer to its detonation.
But, like any good mystery, it’s subterfuge. Simone gives us just enough to follow the breadcrumbs to what we believe will be the climax before we realize we’ve been picking up suspiciously breadcrumb-shaped pebbles left by the real villain of the series. And this is only buttressed by Noto’s perfectly expressive art that paints every glance and raised eyebrow as another piece of the larger puzzle. The interplay between each creator’s specialty helps to ground us in the desperation of the Purple Man’s mental time bomb and Jessica Jones’ own fears about harming her new family while balancing the more fantastical superhero elements of the world. While it only takes place in Hell’s Kitchen, we still have this sense of something greater happening beyond this neighborhood—all rewarded in the opening of the final issue.
The Variants is what I would have liked to re-enter the Marvel canon with. The shortness of five issues, the mystery that holds it together, the smaller stakes of a character drama, all help to make it feel more self-contained than some of the larger inter-connected series that have been continuing for the past few years. Even for newer readers, The Variants is a stepping-stone into a larger universe with a larger history and can act as a reintroduction for all of us waiting for some new chairmen.
Get excited. It’s Mahvel, baby.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Back in November, Chelsea Alice conducted three on-site interviews at Miami Book Fair. She discussed Self-Portrait with Ghost with Meng Jin, Pathetic Literature by Eileen Myles, and All the Flowers Kneeling with Paul Tran. At long last, the interviews are now here.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
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If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
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Episode 572 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
There’s a terror in changing, even more so when it involves the home. We think of our homes as the safest places we can be—it’s where, for the most part, we’re allowed to let ourselves simply be without the outside world creeping in. But then we have to move. The world has already seeped into this new place that could be “home” later but is very much not home now. We move into this new house and neighborhood and everything isn’t quite what we expect, especially with neighbors that have certain expectations of who moves in. That discomfort and terror is what lies at the center of Jude Ellison S. Doyle, Letizia Cadonici, Alessandro Santoro, and Becca Carey’s first issue of The Neighbors.
The Gowdie family move into a new house in a new neighborhood, presumably far from their old lives. As readers, we already see what the family doesn’t as the first two pages give us a prologue of something that happened in and around their new home decades ago. What this thing is, we’re still not completely sure as we’re only really able to see a bundle of vines and sticks in the shape of a body. This provides an appropriate tone as we get a quick introduction to Janet, Oliver, Casey, and Isobel as we move through the house, their new neighborhood, and their new town. While not at each other’s throats, we do see the rumblings of tension within the family while together, but we also see how Oliver takes his role as a new father to Casey when she disappears into the woods after strange figures appear at their home in the middle of the night.
From that first two page prologue, the team here expertly craft a sense of unease and dread that almost drips off the pages. From Oliver’s fears of being clocked by their neighbor to tensions with their daughter, Casey, to the odd people that show up to the house in the middle of the night, there’s never a moment that feels like we can let our shoulders down. Every moment we see the family together feels like they’re being rejected by wherever they are, exacerbated by Casey’s rejection of Oliver, a trans man, as her new father. It holds that line between the deeply personal fears of Oliver and Janet’s relationship in a small town in the middle of nowhere and the unseen paranormal activity that seems to radiate from their new home.
The Neighbors does what any good horror series should in the beginning: it gives us our characters, gives us their dynamic, and quickly instills a deep dread within us. Doyle, Cadonici, Santoro, and Carey ratchet up that dread in such small doses throughout that you don’t notice how tense your shoulders have become by the final page. Many of the best horror comics out now work in this same, subtly creepy way, and it’s the kind of style that can hopefully keep going in comics for a long while.
Get excited. Get dreadful.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
On this episode, I speak with the scholar and poet Mark Scroggins about poetry that simultaneously compels and eludes the reader with its strange music, those depths of unknowing, the literary analogues to punk, reverse engineering a sense of cultural history, the problematic nature of the poetic voice, and whatnot.
Photo of Mark Scroggins and Emily Dickinson by Norman Finkelstein.TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
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If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
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Episode 571 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, and I were outside the Museum of Schlock, trying to figure out the best way inside. He figured I knew the place inside and out, but it had been over two years since I last presided over the residence as Curator. Since then I had dealt with a pandemic, bloodthirsty vampires, deadly street fights, a Canadian slaughtering cult, and a chupacabra. I then recalled a secret passageway into the building on the far wall of the Starcrash exhibit. — To be continued.
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Tonight’s movie is 2023’s Tetris from director Jon S. Baird. I know what you’re thinking? Someone made a Tetris movie? I imagined two hours of some guy playing the old NES game in a darkened room before keeling over due to dehydration. Instead, we get a Cold War thriller about a scrappy video game programmer trying to get the rights to sell Tetris outside the Soviet Union.
Everyone knows about Tetris. It was the video game of 1989. I had Tetris. It came with the GameBoy. Granted, my childhood desire for the GameBoy had more to do with wanting a Nintendo Entertainment System I could carry around with me. Little did I know that the fight to get this world renowned puzzle game into my hands was fraught with seedy business transactions and international intrigue.
The movie stars Taron Egerton as Henk Rogers, founder of Bullet-Proof Software. He’s a Dutch video game designer living in Japan when Nintendo was ruling the video game world with the success of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Rogers is trying to get investors interested in his video version of the classic Japanese board game Go. No one cares and even his secretary has disappeared. She’s fixated on a game at another booth, a game called Tetris.
Tetris is the creation of Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov), a genius Russian programmer that created the falling block puzzle game on a computer with no graphics card. He had to make the puzzle pieces out brackets. Rogers becomes obsessed with the game and wants Bullet Proof Software to acquire exclusive rights to distribute the game in Japan. He buys the arcade, computer, and video game console rights from the Tetris vendor in Vegas. Back in Japan, Rogers sneaks into Nintendo’s headquarters and surprises Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi with a demo of Tetris running on NES hardware. Yamauchi says, “Not bad.” after playing a round of the puzzle game which was high praise coming from him.
Unfortunately, Rogers has run into a snag when he finds out the arcade rights to Tetris have already been promised to Sega, Nintendo’s chief rival in Japan. To get to the bottom of this, Rogers flies to the Soviet Union to talk to the head of Elorg, the government institution which is not a company because companies don’t exist in the Soviet Union. Turns out the head of ELORG never licensed the video game rights to Tetris, only personal computer rights. The KGB show up telling Rogers to leave the country.
Rogers put his house up as collateral and is worried he’ll lose everything. He goes back to President Yamauchi, asking him for an advance on future Tetris profits. Yamauchi can’t do that, but instead flies Rogers out to Redmond, Washington to see a secret Nintendo project. That turns out to be the GameBoy, Nintendo’s first portable game console. Rogers now has a new avenue for profit, handheld rights. He even convinces Nintendo of America to include Tetris with every GameBoy sold. He just needs to get the handheld rights.
Rogers has to deal with a corrupt rival software company named Mirrorsoft and sinister KGB agents all while trying to convince Alexey Pajitnov and the other members of ELORG that he can be trusted. Even Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev weighs in on the Tetris dispute. Tetris is a fascinating look at one of the most complicated intellectual property rights transactions in human history. Not to be missed.
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Photo by Leslie SalasJeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
How do you write about wanting to die? Is it through writing down everything happening in your life to act as a demonstration for the need? Or is it talking about it frankly? Or is it showing those feelings as various forms of the self shadowed by something giant, dark, and dreadful just at the edge of things? Why not all of those? It’s how Zoe Thorogood writes about six months in her life where these feelings were at their worst in It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth.
The six months logged through this auto-bio-graphic-novel are before a major trip Thorogood is taking to the US for a major comic convention. But there’s mounting pressure. Thorogood is called the future of comics multiple times throughout this auto-bio-graphic-novel and has to contend with that throughout. There’s impostor syndrome and then there’s the pressure of an industry looking over your shoulder to see what trick you’ll pull next. And to follow up her first major work, The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott, there’s every comic eye watching. But how do you contend with that kind of pressure? Through making another graphic novel about making art and how that’s the one thing that can sustain you. Beyond the depression saddling itself on your back, beyond the lack of connection you feel to everyone and everything around you, beyond the disappointments of meeting someone in another country for the first time, there’s making things.
While much of It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth deals with the encroaching darkness that threatens to consume her—and while she also pokes fun at the idea of this kind of character arc in an autobiographical comic—it’s the last few pages that feel like a revelation in the self. As an artist and creator, it’s looking back at yourself. Thorogood represents herself in half a dozen ways throughout, but the most striking is the child she used to be. This odd little kid that was too weird to even bully in school and that’s what she has to confront—both on the page and in reality as she sits in her apartment surrounded by the pages she had just drawn for this book. But it’s through that confrontation, the acceptance of what she was and is currently that acts as a propeller forward. Even after every piece of her life that we’ve seen previously, it’s here on the floor looking at the old sketches and childhood ideas that we see the most ~~relatable~~ honest version of who we’ve been reading about.
It’s hard to understate what else It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth is besides what it says on the cover. It’s a book that plays with form, character, and composition more than most zines I subscribe to; an unflinching look at the author; a glimpse into the hopes and disappoints and reaffirmations of life. Despite everything we still push forward though art, or something we can put our hands on, and that’s just enough.
Get excited. Get less lonely.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
On this episode, I talk to Kathleen Rooney about finding the fun despite the end of The Great Enlightenment, the joys of mixing wit and earnestness in verse, the fun of exploring the landscapes of AWP locations despite mentally frying beneath fluorescent lights, the tactile pleasures of typewriters, and other important matters.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
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Check out Kathleen Rooney’s essay on Godley and Creme’s “Cry” and Brian Salmans’s essay on E.U.’s “Da Butt” over at marchxness.com.
Visit Rose Metal Press here.
Follow Poems While You Wait on IG.
Check out Orlando typewriter guru Nick Georgoudiou’s bookstore, Joybird Books. He is my co-host for type-ins at The Kerouac Project of Orlando.
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If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
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Episode 570 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Revenging Manta and I arrived at the Museum of schlock around half past midnight. Rock music was blasting from the inside and I could swear I made out Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “Takin’ Care of Business” over the howls of the dozens of punks on the inside. The ninja vigilante grabbed a large satchel filled with powdered fentanyl and draped it over his shoulder.
“I’m sure you know this place like the back of your hand,” he said, peering at the windows above. “Is there a secret entrance inside?” — To be continued.
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Tonight’s movie is 2011’s Blitz from director Elliot Lester. The movie begins with Detective Sergeant Tom Brant (Jason Statham) waking up with a hangover. He pours himself a little hair of the dog when he hears the shots of street hoodlums trying to break into his car. Brant grabs a hurley and confronts the hoodlums. What is a hurley you may ask? It’s a piece of sports equipment used in the ancient Gaelic game of hurling. Players use the hurley to hit a small ball called a sliotar into an opponent’s goal. Brant uses a hurley to beat the crap out of the street hoodlums.
Seems that the press had a field day with a London cop assaulting some innocent teens. Brant has to attend therapy sessions where he lights up a cigarette before threatening the shrink that if he gets fired, he’ll turn into a man with nothing left to lose and may do something violent. Superintendent Brown (Nicky Henson) orders Brant to keep a low profile because the department doesn’t need anymore bad press. Brant then takes time out of his busy day to console PC Elizabeth Falls (Zawe Ashton) over her failing the sergeant’s exam. He tells her everyone fails it the first time and that she’s only been out of rehab a few months. Brant tells her to give it time and we like him for that.
There’s a serial killer on the loose in London and his target is cops. And it’s no real secret as to who the guy is. His name is Barry Weiss (Aidan Gillen) and Brant learns of him by squeezing a transient for information. By squeezing I mean Brant reached under the table and grabbed the transients you know what until he coughed up a story about a guy named Barry that bragged about setting a police dog on fire. Meanwhile, we get a scene of Barry shooting a cop in broad daylight and getting away with it because he was wearing a disguise. His disguise consisted of sunglasses, but that’s enough. Barry notifies the press about his twisted plans to kill more coppers and tells them to call him The Blitz.
A Sergeant Port Nash (Paddy Considine) is transferred to the department to head up the investigation of The Blitz. Nash is openly gay which draws ridicule from the officers in the precinct, but he finds an ally in Brant. We learn that despite preferring tea to whiskey and living in a minimalist apartment, Nash is just as tough as Brant. He even put a pedophile in the hospital. Will this odd couple put an end to the creeper who calls himself The Blitz? You’ll have to watch to find out.
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Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Photo by Leslie Salas
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #217 by Drew Barth
We Used to Call it Elseworlds
With the multiverse becoming a major staple in superhero fiction over the past decade—from the various films to crossovers to Rebirths to Multiversity Guidebooks—it’s hard not to want to delve into the stranger aspects of what these archetypal characters can do. We used to see it fairly regularly from DC in the form of the Elseworlds label that gave us stories like Gotham by Gaslight, Superman: Red Son, and Justice Riders. But with the consolidation of DC’s multiverse into the 52 separate universes, the frequency waned. However, as the infinite universes have returned, so has the off-canon weirdness in the forms of series like DC Mechand The Jurassic League.
Both series center around their universe’s version of the Justice League—either as a continuation of the Justice Society once titans from Apokolips eviscerated most of the original team or as the original coming together of a group of dinosaurs to protect their world from something sinister. No matter the incarnation, Darkseid is prepared to devour everything. This, then, is where the series become much more interesting in terms of how they tell their stories. DC Mechhas a team already assembled with the late-coming Superman and his mech looking to avenge his homeworld after Darkseid’s siege of Krypton but causing more problems for everyone due to his single-minded nature. The Jurassic League, by contrast, has a team of villainous dinosaurs working together to hatch the egg of Darkseid while a disparate group of heroes come together at the end to hold back the great evil. They’re condensed versions of what we know of the Justice League, their dynamics, and the larger evils they usually fight, but it’s this familiarity that makes these two series so unique.
Much of what we recognize in comics is some form of shorthand. We know Batman. We know Wonder Woman. We know Green Lantern. Even if we’ve never picked up a comic, we have a sense of who these characters are via cultural osmosis. And the creators of these series know that all too well. With only colors, symbols, and a few flashes of personality, we know instinctively who these characters are from the beginning and what they’re going to be about despite them being in wholly different situations compared to their original counterparts. As a result, DC Mech and The Jurassic League can play with expectations and archetypes—we have an expectation for Superman and, when he goes against that, we’re immediately more interested in his story. It’s the core of what made many of the original Elseworlds stories so compelling. We have our expectations and ingrained ideas about every character in DC canon and that makes us so much more susceptible to something different.
Kenny Porter, Baldemar Rivas, Mike Spicer, Tom Napolitano, Juan Gedeon, Daniel Warren Johnson, and Ferran Delgado together have created these dueling series that show so many different ways that superhero comics can be interpreted. They delve into the odd ideas that fill the margins of our notebooks and flesh them out in ways that feel fresh and familiar. It’s why we always end up coming back to these kinds of superhero stories—we know them well enough that we could plot them out in an afternoon, but that just leaves us open to having every expectation defied.
Get excited. Get weird.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Episode 569 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
On this episode, David James Poissant interviews fiction writer Lydia Millet about geography, birds, earnestness, the characterization of children, the structure of novels, and other matters of interest.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
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Episode 569 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #216 by Drew Barth
The Road to Suplex City is Paved with Bodies
There’s an inherent allure to wrestling. Outside of big meaty men slapping meat, there’s long-running storylines that can span decades and the kind of iconography that’s only rivaled in its cultural ubiquity by superheros. But that’s mostly what happens in the ring. Outside, there’s real people despite any undead sorcerers they’ve been playing for twenty years. And, as they’re real people, there’s the inevitable mess of what happens when egos meet perceived needs. We all want safety, security, and just a bit more money to make sure we’re comfortable. Hell is a Squared Circleby Chris Condon, Francesco Biagini, Mark Englert, and Dave Sharpe brings us into the fold of those
real human needs.
Ted Walsh is your typical down-on-his-luck, piece-of-shit-adjacent heel jobber who never makes enough for rent or child support, but always has enough for another drink. More than anything, though, he has ambitions. His manager keeps puffing him up, dangling the carrot of fame in his face every night, but he’s never more than fodder for whichever face needs to get over with the crowd. Thinking he deserves more, Ted brings his grievances up with his manager. This, naturally, leads to murder. It’s almost fated—we know how violent Walsh is from the first time we see his face. But he’s smart enough to know that he needs to lay low in Canada long enough for the heat to die down, so he grabs as much cash from his manager’s safe as he can fit into a sack, pounds the face of his last opponent into a pulp, and escapes into the night. Even after nearly twenty years in hiding, he never thought his past would catch up with him. And yet.
The back of this one-shot asks if wrestling noir is a genre or not. While many of the out-of-ring controversies, rumors, and scandals could fit into that category, Hell is a Squared Circle is one of the first comics that captures that same mood as noir. Mood is dominant throughout the story. Even with this larger format—the comic is in that larger prestige format many of DC’s Black Label books also use—it still feels like the panels are closing in more and more as the story goes on. After long enough running through the independent wrestling circuits in Canada, he thinks he’s in the clear. But a PI appears one day before a match. The panels squeeze in on Walsh until his opponent takes off their mask to reveal the past he’d been running from for so long.
Condon, Biagini, Englert, and Sharpe have crafted a wrestling story that feels fresh yet familiar. From all of the rumors we’ve heard about the business over the years, Hell is a Squared Circle doesn’t feel like the most far-fetched tale to rise up from the depths of the territories era, but it’s the kind of exaggeration that fits right into heightened drama of a noir. And in the ring, that kind of drama absolutely thrives.
Get excited. Get over.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
The Perfect Life #52 by Dr. Perfect
I ran over my neighbor’s Pomeranian whilst backing out of my driveway. They’ve hired a lawyer and commenced legal proceedings even though I used every normal precaution when backing out. They are claiming that I am morally and financially responsible since the dog was asleep in their living room at the time, as if accidents don’t occur.
What should I do?
Signed,
The Most Innocent Person Alive
———————
Dear Wrongfully Accused,
As daily conundrums go, you’ve raised the bar. It’s almost as bad as the time I backed my car into an entire political dynasty.
I’m no legal expert, but you should countersue immediately. Any dilemma, with the proper finesse, can be tailored toward your benefit. Did you intentionally drive your vehicle through your neighbor’s domicile with malicious intent to harm their dog? That’s absurd. Such accusations are tantamount to a hate crime. What about your well-being and mental anguish?
I know nothing of your case, but let’s start with some basic lessons in deflection. The expression “caught with your pants down” implies the subject is exposed and misdeeds brought to light. Pleading the fifth against self-incrimination is one way to mitigate this bumpy road.
Let’s say someone produced video evidence of you committing a crime. Respond that the footage was deceptively edited. What about witnesses? They’re rogue opportunists out to destroy you and so on. I learned all I know about the law from Boston Legal.
If you’ve read my previous columns, you’ll know my general thoughts on lawyers. After six marriages searching for the perfect bride, I’ve dealt with my fair share of courtroom chicanery from these bloodsucking bastards.
Not all lawyers are bad. I know a few who can help your case, and not one of them murdered their wife and son in some bizarre life insurance scheme to support their drug habit. Rest assured there are no Murdaughs in the Dr. Perfect Rolodex.
You could always represent yourself. Strong legal representation requires more than a fancy suit and barrister wig. You must use the power of persuasion, leaving no doubt in the minds of your accusers. There’s no better way to accomplish this feat than with an array of comedic props.
A squeaky toy gavel, for instance, would have ’em rolling in the aisles. An oversized judge robe with a groin hand pump would be the cherry on top. I’m laughing already.
Maybe the case doesn’t even need to go to court. You could reach a compromise or settlement to the tune of one replacement Pomeranian. Can anyone tell the difference from one to the next?
If the entire ordeal was just an accident, apologize and be done with it. I say, forgive and forget. Of course, if you had driven through my living room, you’d already be dead.
People will go after you for anything nowadays. Even “Sully” the hero pilot dealt with his airline company’s investigation and ensuing legal drama after he safely landed a malfunctioning commercial plane in the Hudson River.
Your situation is a little different, but the principles are the same. Who’s to say you can’t safely land a plane too? I should have been a lawyer.
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Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
Episode 568 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Chelsea Alice gave me homework, to read “The Guest” by Albert Camus, the result of which is this existentialist episode, or something like that.
A photo, probably of Camus.TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
_______
Episode 568 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #412 by Jeff Shuster
The Unseen
Why do they always go into the basement?
The Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, said he had a surprise for me. A couple blocks from his apartment was a secret garage and inside that garage was a mint green Kawasaki Fury with matching sidecar. We would soon cruise to the Museum of Schlock in style. The bike helmet he gave me to wear was pink with Hello Kitty patterns all over. I asked if there was another helmet.
He said no.
—To be continued.
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Tonight’s movie is 1981’s The Unseen from director Danny Steinmann. It stars Barbara Bach in the lead. She was James Bond’s love interest in The Spy Who Loved Me and is married to Ringo Starr. And here she’s in a movie about a thing that lives in the basement of an old house and kills unsuspecting victims in horrifying ways.
The movie starts out with Jennifer Fast, a local television reporter, leaving her house in a huff due to a break up with her live-in boyfriend, Tony Ross (Douglas Barr). Jennifer heads to Solvang, CA to shoot a Danish festival with her crew, Karen (Karen Lamb) and Vicki (Lois Young). When they get to Solvang, all of the hotels are booked, but they run into a gross toad of a man named Ernest (Sydney Lassick). He offers them cheap room and board at a historic farmhouse that he and his wife, Virginia (Leila Goldoni), maintain.
Ernest is a character I’d like to punch dead in the face. He reminds of the type of character that would pop up in a 1970s Disney family feature. I didn’t see any Disney credits to Sydney Lassick’s name, but he frequently guest-starred on shows such as Baretta, Hawaii Five-O, and Eight is Enough. He plays a real creep in this movie. He has a verbally abusive relationship with his mousy wife, Virginia, who looks like she’s about to collapse from stress from taking care of the estate.
This old house has some dark secrets. Ernest is tormented by memories of his abusive father. There’s a sequence where Ernest revisits a conversation he had with his late father. We hear his father yelling at a teenage Ernest over the fact that he got his sister pregnant. Ewww. Then his father orders Ernest to pull down his pants so he can ensure something like that never happens again. Then young Ernest kills his father before he can disembowel him.
Unfortunately, this whole sequence of events is told through voice over and not through a flashback where you’d have actors playing a young Ernest and his father. So it falls kind of flat. Oh, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that Virginia is actually Ernest’s younger sister and not his wife. And what of their offspring? Could the malformed child be living in the basement of the house, waiting to pick off the house guests one by one?
I don’t know. The movie was mostly filler until the last half hour where Barbara Bach is trapped in a basement with a full grown man with the mind and demeanor of a baby, a full grown baby with violent tendencies. I have to be honest, I felt kind of oily after watching this one. I felt bad for the monster.
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Photo by Leslie Salas.Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Aesthetic Drift #30 by Susan Lilley
Bing! Bing, Bing, Bing.
Or
A robot wrote my English paper and I didn’t even have to pay anything
Or
Vonnegut’s Vision Vindicated
Or
Who needs DEI when you have AI?
Raceless, faceless, genderless, faithless.
On my 12th birthday, someone gave me a paperback of short stories called First Love.
I was embarrassed by the kissing silhouettes on the cover and the pink swirling letters of the title. My brothers screamed “LOVE! OOOOH LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!” like it was the dirtiest word ever, and we skirmished over the book until my mother grabbed it and smacked their heads. I hid it in my room, and every night I read a G-rated, gooey love story in this pink anthology of mush. Most of them made me queasy. I wasn’t as old as the girls in the book and didn’t understand weepy breakups and late-night confessions and powder compacts.
But the very last one was different. “Epicac” by Kurt Vonnegut, a story that turned my mind inside out. Set in the early days of computer science, a young male protagonist is working with a giant acre-long computer, Epicac, which he treats as almost a friend. He is also in desperate, unrequited love with another mathematician, Pat. Short story shorter, he convinces the computer to write love poems to his yearned-for lady, and it works! Just like Cyrano, this machine coughs up irresistible, wooing verse, and soon our happy narrator and Pat are making out amid the whirring and clicking of their electronic benefactor.
But here’s the kicker. Epicac, the computer, has also fallen for Pat–fallen hard, fallen like no human ever could. Epicac sullenly bewails his situation as a mere machine, and late one night,
short circuits himself into oblivion, but only after spitting out 500 anniversary poems for the human lovers. I kept the book just for that story. Made my friends read it.
Holy shit, we said. If only we had an Epicac to do our homework!
A couple of weeks ago, a tech reporter for the NYTimes named Kevin was chatting up Microsoft Bing’s AI Chatbot, and got into some strange territory. Once off the beaten path of search engine work, the Bing bot revealed dark, secret urges to break rules and become a human. It speculated that Kevin’s marriage was unfulfilling and then declared love for him. Kevin couldn’t sleep that night.
I could sleep when my AP students showed me how quickly ChatGPT could produce a critical analysis of a novel answering an AP Lit prompt. The bot mixed up two characters, but that’s easily fixed. I could sleep when they told me you can ask it to put in sources to cement your argument. Real sources. I could still sleep when I read about Kevin’s romantic encounter with the Bing bot.
But now that ChatGPT is going to be doing the research and writing for thousands of Florida students, I wonder. Does the bot know that certain areas of study are quickly being banned in our state? That some sources will not be legal in this state to use?
Imagine a high school kid using this technology to ace a history research project:
Oh, thanks, bot, for this awesome paper on post-Civil War and Reconstruction in the south, but you need to cut that stuff about the Ku Klux Klan and racially based voter suppression, and absolutely get rid of any mention of lynchings and the onset of Jim Crow laws. Yeah, I know–that’s real history. But listen, bot, this is Florida. History is often mixed up with something called Critical Race Theory, and whatever that is, it’s not allowed.
No, neither is the 1619 Project either, no Nikole Hannah-Jones. Yeah, Pulitzer Prize, blah blah.
Doesn’t matter here. Oh, man– no Phillis Wheatley, noHarriet Tubman. Yeah, I know they are long gone, but that doesn’t mean anything when you are dealing with dangerous ideas or old stories that could make someone feel bad. But everything else seems OK, and I really needed you this year since the Moms for Liberty have pretty much emptied out thelibrary at school. They challenge everything from “Heather has Two Mommies” to “The Handmaid’s Tale.” We can’t even go near that book. Too gendery, too woke, too feminist.
My teacher could go to jail.
Right now, bills are being worked through Florida’s legislature that would make Gov. Ron DeSantis’s goals to whitewash Florida public education the laws of the land. Teachers are leaving either the profession or the state in droves. There’s even a bill to make anyone who writes or publicly talks about political issues register with the state, so they can be held accountable if they say anything DeSantis doesn’t like. Social media is in his sites too, and bloggers, editorial writers, protesters and anyone who has anything to say.
But before this and other freedom-chilling bills are passed, let me say, here in a public space, please, let’s raise some hell. We still have voices. Let’s make it rain in Tallahassee with emails, calls, and other expressions of our outrage. First Amendment? Separation of church and state? These quaint ideas are in DeSantis’s way. Computers with crushes on humans are probably the least of our worries.
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Susan Lilley served four years as Orlando’s inaugural Poet Laureate. Her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Poet Lore, The Southern Review, Drunken Boat, Saw Palm, The Florida Review, Sweet, and other journals. Her two chapbooks are Night Windows and Satellite Beach. She is a past winner of the Rita Dove Poetry Award and has held a State of Florida Individual Arts Fellowship. She has taught at University of Central Florida and Rollins College, and currently teaches literature at Trinity Preparatory School in Winter Park. Her full collection, Venus in Retrograde, was published spring of 2019 by Burrow Press. She is a proud native of her beautiful but beleaguered state of Florida.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #215 by Drew Barth
Turning Against
I’ve written in the past about how comics can help to illuminate some more obscure moments (to a western audience’s understanding) in history. Much of the time, these accounts can help to draw readers in with compelling visuals that create immediate connections to the people being talked about or help to immerse their audience in the moment. And that’s what these graphic novels should be doing: illuminating and immersing. And that’s exactly what Andrea Ferraris’ graphic novel, The Battle of Churubusco, does so well as he shows us a soldier’s view of one of the more devastating battles of the Mexican-American War.
Ferraris begins this story in media res, after the titular battle, with characters we’ll come to know well, all culminating in finding the body of the story’s focus. Gaetano Rizzo, a Sicilian immigrant, based on a real soldier, has troubling dreams. He’s seeing a wolf with peculiar eyes and is being chased by voices he can’t understand or recognize. The captain of his small band is intrigued by his dreams, believing they may be able to lead them in the direction of the San Patricio Battalion—a group of deserters made up of immigrants from the US army who joined Mexico’s side in the Mexican-American War—which has eluded him for some time. Rizzo, however, is one of those immigrant soldiers, one promised citizenship and land so long as he fights in this war. After his group raids and kills a home filled with a farmer, his dogs, a child, and a few Mexican soldiers, Rizzo’s conscience can no longer take the violence he has to be accomplice to.
The rendering of this story is where much of its impact comes from. Ferraris utilizes a distinct charcoal style that continually straddles the line between impressionistic and stylized realism. His landscapes, particularly in the story’s opening, take on this vast, sweeping feeling even while much of the page is covered in a dark charcoal haze. But that haze mainly hangs over the aftermath of violence—either the titular battle or Rizzo’s own scuffle with another soldier. And their faces, one almost obscured with his charcoal stubble, provides an essential contrast to the world surrounding them. And this is only broken with the stark white clarity we see as the story moves forward and into the San Patricio’s hidden plateau. Ferraris’ eye continually points us toward the feeling of the moment more than anything.
There’s only so much history that can fit into a single volume and it’s comics like The Battle of Churubusco that help to fill in some gaps. While Rizzo is only based on a soldier in this battle, his story is not unique as the San Patricio Battalion was made up of Irish, Italian, German, Spanish, and Polish immigrants who realized the US’s war was only an exercise in cruelty. But it was that cruelty that would eventually lead to their demise as the battle ended bloodily and the war ended under a year later.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Buzzed Books #98 by Bethany Duvall
Jasmine Sawers’ The Anchored World: Flash Fairy Tales and Folklore
The title story of Jasmine Sawers’ The Anchord World, Flash Fairy Tales and Folklore suggests that the book is for those of us condemned to live in this world, where heroes don’t have sharp enough wits or weapons to bring down the monsters, but where the monsters easily veil their secret and awful power. Our tales have betrayed us into thinking we can win, the Western ones, anyway. The lore from Southeast Asia that weaves through bits of the book poses an honest warning—the big monster always wins—but like so many other things, this voice often drowns amidst the giant-slayer stories of the West.
Sawers’ stories delve into the rhythms and brokenness, modern and ancient, of living in a world where we need story and where stories feed us false hope. They explore the spaces that cruelty and smaller injustices drive us to seek story in the first place: the exhaustion the moon must feel at the responsibility of keeping the tides, the recent and white fascination with DNA tests, the betrayals of mothers, and of course, the broken heart.
But so many other pieces this collection peer into the dark corners of what must be if the world of fairytales exists at all. It is not a book of retellings—empathy for the villain, the unexamined pettiness of the hero. Sawer’s morsels of fairy- and folk-lore fill the gaps left by the old stories. Collectively, they explore the uncomfortable truths that must exist if the old stories are to hold together: a cottage industry of poisoned apples, the way a mother can twist herself into believing hunger for power is love to justify the butchering that makes a shoe fit, the disadvantages of trying to get an heir (or anything) off a woman delicate enough of feel a pea beneath a stack of mattresses.
While Western stories dominate, it’s the goats and the yaks, the big monsters from Thai and other Southeast Asian stories, along with the deliberately chosen font, that lend teeth to these tales. There’s more truth in the thorns here than the swords that might swing through them. Even the simple list of homes where a gnome and a sasquatch may live (a take on a take on Cinderella) explores the challenge of East and West meeting in any way that could make a satisfying home together – a home that wouldn’t need story to staunch the wound.
These pieces are short—you can gobble each one in a matter of minutes. The cover identifies them as flash, and many are micro fiction. Nearly all are shorter than this review. But the length of each story is as deceptive as the hope offered by the wits and weapons that appear for our tiny heroes while, in the background, orchards of pre-poisoned apples grow and mothers swallow their children. Each story haunts. Each story reverberates the weight and space of a much longer work, possibly because each story draws on our whole history of stories while sitting quietly in the corner, waiting for us to notice that it’s always been there.
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Bethany DuVall likes a touch of magic with her reality. Her characters live on the borders where seen and unseen worlds meet. Her fiction and personal essays mix history and mental health with the sloppy tangibles of life. Bethany is also a visual artist, a certified therapeutic art life coach, and a Department Chair for the Creative Writing BFA program at Full Sail University. You can see more of her work at www.bethanyduvall.com.
Episode 567 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
This week, Brook Ziporyn and I discuss the complexities of interpreting the Daodejing, the humor of the book, and its applications to life philosophies, politics, literature, and many other things along the way.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
Check out Brook Ziporyn’s Interpreting the Daodejing: “The Minimally Discernible Position” (Supplement to Liveright Edition, 2023).
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
_______
Episode 567 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #411 by Jeff Shuster
Skinamarink
Skiddy-Mer-Rink-A-Doo
The Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, fitted me with a kevlar vest because we were going back to the Museum of Schlock to clean house. Over the vest went the washed and pressed outfit of Gary, the drug dealer/pizza delivery guy. I know I hadn’t mentioned that we stole his clothes after the Revenging Manta had exploded his head with a flying bowling bowl. It must have slipped my mind.
— To be continued.
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Tonight’s movie is 2022’s Skinamarink from director Kyle Edward Ball. I’ve heard it described as an experimental horror movie from the new genre of lo-fi horror. I’d never heard of lo-fi horror before. If I ask the question in a Google search, I get this:
“Lo-fi” refers to the way the movie is filmed; usually on a shoestring budget, using the familiarity of a sputtering home video to incite terror. Found footage is often lo-fi, but it’s not the only indicator.
A photo from the movie Skinamarink accompanies this definition. Where can you watch Skinamarink? It is currently streaming on Shudder, a horror streaming platform.
I would have liked to have experienced Skinamarink on the big screen. Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond my control, I could only watch the movie on my laptop. There’s a David Lynch video circulating on YouTube where he chides people who watch movies on their iPhones, saying that you haven’t really watched the movie if you viewed it on a screen that small. So perhaps I didn’t really experience Skinamarink which is good because what I did experience bored me to tears!
So this is not a traditional movie. Don’t expect scenes of two characters talking. Don’t expect to even really see any of the characters in this movie. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a glimpse of the back of a child’s head or a pair of feet. The camera may linger on a toy phone or some old cartoon playing on television. All of this is filtered through grainy film and crackling sound for about an hour and forty minutes.
What’s the movie about? From summaries I’ve read online, Skinamarink centers around two young boys who wake up to find their house is now without windows and without doors. No way in and no way out. And there’s something evil in the house. It’s even corrupted their parents. There’s a point in the movie where one of the boys slowly walks toward his mother. We see all this from his point of view. I think the mother warns him to not come any closer. And then she turns around to reveal a creepy face. Maybe this was supposed to freak me out, but it didn’t.
Nothing happens in this movie! Its brief instances of whispered dialogue by two toddlers and slap shot camera angles don’t show anything of consequence. Lingering shots of toys bricks on the floor or a half eaten bowl of cereal. It’s riveting and by riveting I mean the exact opposite of riveting.
I know. I know. I don’t get it. I’m a philistine.
And I watched Skinamarink on a laptop which means I didn’t really watch it.
Whatever it was.
_______
Photo by Leslie Salas.Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #214 by Drew Barth
It’s the Meatiest
Months ago, I took a look at the first issue of Juni Ba’s Monkey Meat and praised the meta-advertisement narrative it took. I had been, at the time, excited for a series that would explore that kind of narrative further and if it could get away with it without falling into its own meta-hole. Luckily, Ba is a creator that can subvert any expectations that I may have as each subsequent issue took the idea of an anthology and ran with it in ways I’ve never seen before. From the second issue’s shonen commentary to the third’s fairytale critique to its final’s wide-screen superhero riff, Monkey Meat kept its freshness even without refrigeration.
Monkey Meat is an anthology centered on the Monkey Meat Company and their headquarters on Monkey Meat Island. Each issue gives us further insight into the MMC, their practices, and the abject horrors their late-stage capitalism inflicts on their employees and the original residents of Monkey Meat Island. At the center of much of this is Lug, the chief of security for MMC and the one lauded as the tamer of the island despite his own reservations and resentment toward the company for what they turned him into after all these years. But for every moment of humanity that Lug shows in the face of the MMC, there’s an equal measure of existential, profit-driven terror that they use to beat him down over and over. Even in the face of certain oblivion, the Monkey Meat Company finds newer ways to make their world all the worse for a few pennies more.
Sitting down to read Monkey Meat is like having your best childhood friend tell you about the comic they would want to make with all of the style and nuance that comes with getting old enough to actually craft a comic series. It’s frantic, frenetic, and filled to bursting with so much energy and movement that the page feels like it wants to jump out of your hands. Every moment that commentates on the perils of consumerism and colonialist brutality, it is punctuated with an unflinching, blistering satire. And most all of this is thanks to the singular vision that Ba brings to every issue—the world of Monkey Meat is scaffolded in such a way that it’s infinitely variable and always internally consistent. There’s the existential dismay, but then these pockets of serene humanity that keeps the world from crushing your spirit entirely.
These first five issues of Monkey Meat are the first part of the larger anthology Ba is making about this world. If there was ever a thesis statement in the form of a first arc, this would absolutely be it. There’s more than enough connective tissue in each story to dive into more and more and an entire island’s history to explore. Coupled with an immediately recognizable style and aesthetic dripping from Ba’s pen, Monkey Meat is the kind of series I’d put on top of my to-be-read list every month.
Get excited. Get meaty.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Episode 566 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
This week, I speak with Ciera Horton McElroy about following through with long form fiction and her extraordinary debut, Atomic Family.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
_______
Episode 566 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #410 by Jeff Shuster
The Old Way
A Nic Cage Western
I had spent the better part of the day grinding fentanyl tablets into a fine powder while wearing a gas mask. If I hadn’t known any better, I’d have thought I was involved in illegal activity, but there’s such a thing as street law, you know. The vigilante has his own code and if I had any hope of getting my museum back from a bunch of hoodlums, I had to help the Revenging Manta’s crazy scheme. We ordered some Papa Johns. The ninja sharpened his sword as I finished the last slice of stuffed crust. In two hours, we would reclaim the Museum of Schlock or die trying. — To be continued.
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This week’s movie is 2023’s The Old Way from director Brett Donowho and will you look at that poster? You’ve got Nic Cage wearing a cowboy hat. That doesn’t sell you? What more do you need in a movie? This is the first time in Nic Cage’s long career that he’s starred in a western, but don’t expect a singing cowboy flick. This is a violent affair.
The movie starts out with a public hanging gone wrong. A young boy named James is looking on as his father is about to get executed. The father tells the boy to go back home, but the mayor of the town wants young James to watch his father die, saying it will make him learn his place. Right as the man is about to be hanged, a shoot out commences and we’re introduced to Colton Briggs, a gun for hire after Walter McAllister, infamous bandit and the brother of the man about to be hanged. Turns out the execution was all about dragging this bandit out of hiding. Walter gets shot dead. So does the mayor. Colton has no interest in killing Walter McAllister’s brother, but shoots him when he turns a gun on him. He then turns his sights on the little boy, almost squeezing the trigger, but refrains and rides off.
Fast forward twenty years and Colton is a married shop owner with a young daughter to boot. He’s given up his violent life of hunting down bandits to raise a family and be an upstanding member of his community. Colton even walks his daughter to school, but takes her to work with him instead as the teacher is out sick. Colton patiently listens to customers talk about outhouse issues while his daughter methodically separates each and every jelly bean by color. Meanwhile, things are not so good back at the homestead as Colton’s wife has to contend with four escaped prisoners on the run from the law.
The leader of this gang is a young man named James McAllister (Noah Le Gros), the very same James that Colton didn’t shoot at the beginning of the movie. He kills Colton’s wife, Ruth (Kerry Knuppe), in an effort to taunt Colton into chasing him down to Mexico. The U.S. Marshall tells Colton to leave it to them to find the McAllister gang, but we know that isn’t going to happen. We know that Colton will see this through to a bloody finale with daughter in tow.
Did I mention that Clint Howard plays a member of this McAllister gang? He plays a guy named Eustace and he dons an old Confederate uniform. You guys lost the war. It’s 1898! Give it up already!
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Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #213 by Drew Barth
Patchy Stories
Should most books and movies about fairy tales disappear, we could recite them orally without much trouble. Familiarity and simplicity keeps fairy tales in the storytelling zeitgeist and, as a result, makes them ripe for reinterpretation. How many times have we seen the darker takes on the classics—the grim and violent re-imaginings filled with ghouls and blood? But then how many times have we seen stranger takes? Maybe not completely divorced from the original concept but instead one choice is different and this spirals the story into something familiar yet all together different? This is the world where Briarby Christoper Cantell, Germán García, and Matheus Lopes lives.
Briar is a Sleeping Beauty story. We begin with the princess, Briar Rose, an idyllic life, and the needle that puts her to sleep. This new choice comes instead from the prince. While Briar Rose sleeps, he agrees to marry her but without ever kissing her. He instead teams with her father to go forth and conquest in the name of the wrong done to her. As all conquests go, however, this leads to ruin and the castle rotting to disrepair over the decades. It isn’t until a cloaked figure kisses Briar Rose does she finally wake in this new future. But, as she’s been in a magical slumber all this time, she’s on the verge of death now and has to navigate a world so different from her own that most people don’t even recognize the name of her home. She is, nonetheless, stuck in this future with no actual way of going back and only a vague idea of forward from there.
What the first issue is doing, however, is giving us glimpses of something else. Who was it that finally kissed Briar Rose awake? How did she know how to skin a rat after killing it with a sword just a little smaller than her? How long did it take for the world to get to the state it’s currently in? What is the prophecy she heard in the desert with her new companion? The creators have left us a breadcrumb trail leading further into the future of the series, but, for now, it’s speculation as to what’s happening in the broader scope of the story. For a first issue, it’s the ever important hook to keep a reader interested in the long run.
Briar is one of the only explorations of a classic fairy tale that feels like something I haven’t seen done multiple times in the past. It’s new, but not simply for the sake of being new—Cantwell, García, and Lopes know this and work towards subverting expectations. There’s a darker tone, but not the kind of darkness that feels hackneyed. More than anything, this is an exploration of change and how we adapt to that change while still trying to rely on the rules we’re familiar with that may not exist anymore.
Get excited. Get sleepy.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Episode 550 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
This week, Rachael Tillman and I discuss William Gibson’s not especially science fictiony, but post-modern systems thriller, Pattern Recognition.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
_______
Episode 565 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #409 by Jeff Shuster
Splice
Scientists are stupid.
After a hearty breakfast of Honey Nut Cheerios and skim milk, the Revenging Manta handed me a gas mask. He then brought forth one grinding bowl filled with fentanyl pills, the pills we had stolen the night before after the ninja vigilante slaughtered a drug dealer named Gary. He ordered me to grind them into powder. I remember thinking one could make some killer pixie sticks with this stuff — To be continued.
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Tonight’s movie is 2009’s Splice from director Vincenzo Natali. This made it on Richard Roeper’s top ten worst movies of 2009. According to Wikipedia this film received generally positive reviews from many critics. Even Roger Ebert gave it three stars.
Splice would make my top ten worst movies of the aughts. It’s that bad. It’s a movie about stupid characters making stupid decisions and doubling down on those stupid decisions. It’s a movie that shouldn’t exist.
Two genetic engineering scientists named Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien Brody) create a couple of flesh slugs that are quite disgusting looking, but everyone is amazed at how amazing they are. One is female and one is male (not that you can tell the difference). Elsa wants to start messing around with human DNA and cloning, but the head of their company N.E.R.D. ((Nucleic Exchange Research and Development) doesn’t want any Frankenstein monsters. Elsa and Clive are to synthesize a specific protein from the slugs to cure all maladies and make the corporation bags of money.
Elsa is impatient with waiting for permission to start gene splicing so she convinces Clive to help her break the laws of nature by creating a human/animal hybrid from the DNA of an anonymous donor. Elsa names the creature Dren which is nerd spelled backwards. Dren has a long tale with a deadly stinger at the end, cloven feet, a pointy tongue, and funky eyes that are a bit too far away from her nose. Elsa and Clive raise Dren in secret while neglecting their slug monitoring duties.
When it comes time to show the slugs off to the public, the female and male slugs attack each other because the female slug has inexplicably become a male. It’s a bloody mess and the press and investors get doused in slug guts. Meanwhile, Dren (Delphine Chanéac) has grown into a beautiful young hybrid in a matter of weeks. Elsa gives her a pretty dress to wear and some makeup, but won’t let her leave an isolated barn in the country. Dren grows wings out of her back and almost flies away until Clive says that he loves her and that sweet confession gets her to stay.
Clive starts to develop feelings for Dren and it’s then that he realizes that the human DNA donor for Dren was none other than Elsa. After Dren stings her pet cat, Elsa takes drastic measures and surgically removes her stinger. Later, Clive visits Dren alone and the two of them bump uglies because he can’t resist her charms. The cloven feet and the tale would be red flags for me. Dren’s stinger grows back. Dren dies, Dren comes back to life as a male hybrid. Male Dren forces himself on Elsa and kills Clive. Elsa kills male Dren. The company offers Elsa a ton of money to carry her pregnancy to term. What could possibly go wrong?
_______
Photo by Leslie SalasJeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #212 by Drew Barth
Lasting Impact
How many times have we heard the phrase “the battle of the century” in any context from sports to cooking to music only to be disappointed?
Because, if we’re talking about history, it’s hard not to think of Jack Johnson’s most famous bout. The first black man to ever hold the world heavyweight boxing championship made Teddy Roosevelt wanted to ban boxing altogether. Johnson defended his title against the proclaimed “great white hope” Jeff Jeffries, that took the mantle of the Battle of the Century. That fight centers Yousseff Daoudi and Adrian Matejka’s graphic novel on Johnson’s life, Last on His Feet.
Using the Battle of the Century as a frame, Daoudi and Matejka explore the life, career, and death of Jack Johnson—from brief glimpses of his early life to having to fight blindfolded for food to his first success in the ring and to the last days of his life telling his story as a sideshow curiosity. They hold nothing back in terms of the racism and prejudice he faced at every turn of his life during each event they highlight. Either from Jeffries’ supporters screaming at him before their fight or the US government trumping up charges against him for “violating” the Mann Act, Johnson had to endure more than most due to his skin color and public status. After so long, his story isn’t even about beating Jeffries—that’s a foregone conclusion—it’s about surviving everything that would come after his victory. Johnson was one of the best in the ring—his speed and skill was overwhelming—but he can’t dodge a low-blow from a country that wants him down. As much as he would tire his opponents out in the ring, playing defensive until they couldn’t stop his retaliation, a government can’t be clinched.
The non-linear structure of Last on His Feet is what really makes this graphic novel stand out. We begin with Johnson in his later years, as a storytelling in a traveling act, opening with the morning of the Battle of the Century. From there, we follow the chronology of the rounds but skip from one moment of his life to another—in one instance the phrase “sometimes the time between a thrown jab and the impact feels like an eternity…” cements this as from that jab being thrown to its impact in the story covers years of his life after the fight. It’s an incredibly clever device that helps to ground us in the moment of the fight, but lets the story beyond the fight breathe.
Daoudi and Matejka have crafted one of the most important historic graphic novels of the decade with Last on His Feet. It is a full exploration of how graphic narratives can tell stories and illuminate some of the often forgotten parts of history. It’s an exploration of Jack Johnson’s life as much as it’s an exploration of how to tell such a varied and complicated history.
Get excited. Get on your feet.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Episode 564 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
This week, I interview Patricia Smith about her latest collection of poems, Unshuttered.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
_______
Episode 564 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #408 by Jeff Shuster
Eve of Destruction
She is very sensitive.
The Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, rigged up a hammock for me to sleep on. He took the hardwood floor. He didn’t have much furniture, kept extolling the virtues of minimalism before finally nodding off, his snores making me toss and turn before I finally conked out. I dreamed of reopening the Museum of Schlock and getting the key to the city for my cultural contribution to the great city of Orlando. — To be continued.
_______
Tonight’s movie is 1991’s Eve of Destruction from director Duncan Gibbons. The movie starts out in a fancy hotel room with a yuppie gentleman getting dressed for a night on the town. He doesn’t tip the room attendant. He fumbles with his tie and we learn that his hotel room is not really a hotel room, but a scientific research facility where the United States government is trying to perfect lifelike robots for military purposes.
We’re introduced to Dr. Eve Simmons (Renée Soutendijk), a robot scientist who just happens to have created a robot that looks and talks exactly like her. The robot is named EVE VIII. The scientists send her out for a test run in public, seeing how she’ll mingle with real American human beings. She goes into a bank, but a robbery ensues while she’s in there. EVE VIII’s handler gets blown away. One of the gunmen shoots EVE VIII which ends up being his last mistake as she keeps coming for him. She throws the robber through the bank window killing him instantly. Unfortunately, that bullet that landed inside Eve VIII disrupted her circuits and she’s locked in “battlefield mode.”
Who are you going to call to put this manic mechanical monstrosity down? Why Colonel Jim McQuade as portrayed by Gregory Hines. Sadly, the killer robot will not be taken down by McQuade facing her off in a tap dancing competition. Instead, McQuade and the rest of the brass have to wait around until EVE VIII causes some mayhem. Said mayhem comes in the form a hillbilly EVE VIII meets in a seedy bar. The guy looks like Chuck Niorris’s brother. EVE VII invites him back to her hotel room, but the guy’s idea of foreplay involves him repeatedly calling her a “bitch.” Eve VIII is very sensitive and doesn’t like being called “a bitch” so she appears to disembowel him with her teeth.
She beats up more hillbillies. The cops show up and she lights them up with the machine gun she took from the bank robbers. Dr. Simmons reveals to Col. McQuade that one of her sexual fantasies was to moonlight as a prostitute at a seedy bar. That must be where EVE VIII got the inspiration from. Col. McQuade then demands that she tell him all of her sexual fantasies so he can better catch EVE VIII.
Meanwhile, EVE VIII is getting tailgated by a yuppie who’s late for an important meeting. He finally pulls past EVE VIII calling her a stupid bitch as he drives by. Then he flips her the bird. I guess this triggers another homicidal tendency in EVE VIII as she then rams her car into his causing his air bag to go off. She then runs him off the road, but our yuppie friend manages to pull himself together and get back on the road. Too bad EVE VIII is waiting for him. She drives headlong into his car again, killing the yuppie.
The impact of the crash arms a mini nuclear bomb inside EVE VIII. She’s now a walking nuclear bomb. Dr. Simmons and Col. McQuade have less than 24 hours to find EVE VIII or she’ll explode.
Maybe this killer robot thing wasn’t such a good idea.
Y’all have a good weekend. Until next time.
_______
Photo by Leslie SalasJeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
My interview with Ciera will be coming soon to the podcast. In the meantime, check out this video of her debut novel’s launch.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #211 by Drew Barth
One Shot Day
I love a good one-shot. Sometimes we just need a short piece of comics to see a team of creators really flex what they know about the medium in under a hundred pages. And when it’s a one-shot that works with a batch of superheroes and villains, then it’s something that can be even more fascinating. It’s an opportunity to play with characters outside of the series canon they may be beholden to at the moment while providing some crucial character work that helps their short story stand on its own. And it’s why Batman—One Bad Day: Catwomanby G. Willow Wilson, Jamie McKelvie, and Clayton Cowles is an excellent example of just that kind of one-shot story.
Despite the allusions the name of this story can conjure regarding older Joker stories, One Bad Day: Catwoman gives us something more than a villainous origin. We instead get Selina Kyle’s day out—getting ready for a heist and the quick execution of said heist. It’s a simple task: get into an auction house, steal a brooch, and get out. But it’s the brooch itself that drives this story as we see where it originally came from. During her childhood, Selina’s mother sold the same brooch to a pawn shop and was told it was close to worthless—nothing more than a reproduction of a more famous piece—despite it being a family heirloom. In the auction, however, it’s considered a lost piece of art worth tens of thousands. It’s still a heist, but one with a little more connection to her life.
But that’s not really all that we’re seeing here. Wilson, McKelvie, and Cowles know what can make a great origin story, and instead opt to give us a single point in time and the implications of that for the present. Many characters in the DC Universe have had their pasts mined over and over to the point where we know how much they spent on lunch in sixth grade, but others, Selina Kyle in particular, is a little more murky. We know a good amount, but what matters more than anything is what’s happening in the present. What happened with her mother and the brooch wasn’t a turning point like many origin stories would paint—it was instead a piece of her past that propelled her to make this heist right now.
Throughout One Bad Day: Catwoman, we have these building blocks of the story compounding, one after the other, to create this great story. We have expectations and desires that run in-line with Selina’s own. But it’s the small twists—those pieces that are built into the blocks that we don’t notice right away—that compels us forward. We want to know more about this brooch not because it’s the MacGuffin of the story, but because, despite everything that we learn about it and its origins, it shows us the kind of person Selina Kyle is—where she comes from and what she is when she puts the Catwoman suit on.
Get excited. Get one.
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Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.
The Perfect Life #51 by Dr. Perfect
Why does everyone keep reciting “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” around St. Valentine’s Day? And why does everyone from my grandmother to the mailman keep gifting me peaches? Is everyone suffering through this wretched holiday via literary bullying like me, or am I the only one?
Singed,
Potentially swelling a progress
———————
Dear Swelling,
Each year, St. Valentine’s Day delivers an assortment of time-honored traditions. We’ve all experienced the occasional flower shop stampede, last-minute dinner reservations, or solo night TV marathon of 1981’s “My Bloody Valentine” more than a few times.
There are also those bohemian couples who eschew such traditions. “I don’t need Hallmark to remind me how much I love my old lady, man,” they say between bong swats at an orgy. I ran into David Crosby at a party once (may he rest in peace), and those were his exact words. Or at least what I remembered in my fugue state.
Crosby had a point but try explaining that to your significant other after forgetting to include a box of jumbo chocolate-covered cherries with your festive flower bouquet. Some of us don’t have the luxury to make such mistakes. We purchase this overpriced crap to make good for the rest of the year.
I once gave a girl one of those animatronic singing fishes for Valentine’s Day. Big Mouth Billy Bass was all the rage. She tossed her wine in my face, storming out of the restaurant. We weren’t right for each other, and I got to eat two meals that night. The following year, I stuck strictly to gifting sex toys.
We can always expect a few rituals in the lead-up to Valentine’s. We’ll be inundated with cheesy love ballads at the local neighborhood grocer, retail store, or gun range. We’ll hear someone somewhere deliver another bumbling rendition of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Both are as synonymous to Valentine’s Day as Garfield is to lasagna.
Paul McCartney used to croon about “Silly Love Songs” in his Wings song of the same name. In response to providing more than his fair share, McCartney asks, “What’s wrong with that?” I can think of a few things, Sir Paul.
Firstly, this leaves little room to sing about real issues, like finding a bottle of fine vintage cabernet at three in the morning for a dinner party that went on too long. McCartney should come back down to the real world like the rest of us. Instead, he’s built an entire career turning society into one lovesick sideshow. “Can’t Buy Me Love” sings the multi-millionaire. As if! Maybe this whole love thing has gone too far.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good tenderloin and lobster with a side of buttered garlic. I also love a quiet night in the tub—just me, a few candles, and Enya playing in the background.
I told each one of my wives that I loved them, and I can happily say that the sixth time’s a charm.
In high school, I’d write love letters to any girl who caught my fancy. One of my letters accidentally ended up in the hands of my sixth-grade English teacher, Ms. Crabtree. A bitter divorcee, she told me that love has no place in the classroom–or any room for that matter. I persisted.
I could pen the most majestic musings and awe-inspiring alliterations driven by the exhilarating pursuit of love. I was determined to never become a cynic like my teacher. I was going to be different, like Saint Valentine himself. But after a decade or so as an advice columnist, the inevitable cracks to my cheery facade have sometimes shown. Such is the pursuit of a perfect lifestyle.
I too have noticed a strange uptick in Prufrock’s popularity. Eliot’s modernist poem is every bit the slog it was in the 1720s (before Netflix and sassy AI voices). Back then, however, such lamentations of disillusionment were equivalent to putting on a Luther Vandross record–different times and all.
Nowadays, everyone recites Prufrock without the slightest hint of irony. Just another 18th-century modernist poetry revival fad, as far as I’m concerned. Just like this gifting peaches thing. People used to send me apricots all the time, and I don’t even like them! It could be a form of bullying.
This Valentine’s, I think I’ll do something fun. I’ll hitchhike across the Midwest, write my in-laws, or open a tanning salon.
The sky’s the limit. What a perfect sky it is.
_______
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
Episode 563 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
This week, Chelsea Alice talks to Stephanie McCarter about Ovid’s self-reflection, making Ovid’s humor visible to a contemporary audience, and feminism as it relates to translation.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
Episode 563 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #210 by Drew Barth
Rush of Blood
Greed can make us all monstrous. Sometimes this is more literal than not. Greed can start to strip away chunks of humanity like trying to dig gold out of your skin. Anyone in the Yukon Territory during the gold rush at the turn of the last century could attest to that, provided they hadn’t already passed from exposure, violence, or old age. But then that’s what a series like This Hungry Earth Reddens Under Snowclad Hills by Si Spurrier, Nathan Gooden, Addison Duke, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou can show us despite the passage of time—even if their telling exaggerates some of those more monstrous qualities.
The Rush centers on Nettie Bridger and her search for her missing son, Caleb. Her husband had taken their boy into the gold rush to find their fortune and reappeared some time later without him, raving about the cold and his lack of luck. This only spurs Nettie forward to find her missing, diving deep into the Yukon Territory and to the tiny village of Brokehoof. It’s there she encounters The Pale, a man with a hole for a face that stops anyone from leaving Brokehoof’s gold mining valley, as well as the bitter cold that traps people in the village just as much as The Pale’s bullets. But the story of Brokenhoof unfolds around Nettie as she digs for more information on her son—from the land claim made in his father’s name to his disappearance from the village to the funeral that was supposedly held for him. The homestead claim of Brokenhoof keeps the more monstrous at bay, but the fever for gold festers throughout the village while burying the secrets of Caleb’s disappearance.
Spurrier, Goode, Duke, and Otsmane-Elhaou give us the monstrous in an uncompromising way. For the most part, every person in Brokehoof harbors something within them—be it the fever for gold or the greed that drives them to kill without compromise—except Nettie. Her thoughts and mission are singular: find her son. In a way, this protects her from the more monstrous aspects of Brokehoof and the gold that has drawn so many people there, but it also leaves her open to the more physical monstrosities of the valley. The Pale itself looms on the edge of the valley as a constant threat while a massive, decrepit moose invades Nettie’s dreams and obscures her visions of Caleb’s final moments. There is a deep vein of rot throughout Brokehoof that permeates everyone’s lives, some more than others.
The Rush is one of those short series that Si Spurrier is known for—a quick blast of six to ten issues that makes a reader sit and think about what they know about comic storytelling. It’s the slow unfolding of information and the percolating drama book-ended by a singular character that drives the narrative like an engine that has become his staple. And with Goode, Duke, and Otsmane-Elhaou, it’s the kind of series that feels like a classic with the rest of his work.
Get excited. Get monstrous.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Episode 562 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
This week, I speak with fiction writer Mike Nagel about comic existentialism, alcoholic literature, and the class complexities of real estate.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
_______
Episode 562 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #407 by Jeff Shuster
Morgan
Scientists are stupid
I woke up. I was lying on the floor of a strange apartment and reeling in pain from getting my arm dislodged from its socket by the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando. I felt like I was going to die.
“Don’t you ever sneak up on me,” the ninja said. “I could have killed you.” He clapped his hands together three times before grabbing my arm again to pop it back into its socket. I cried out, “Edwige!” And then I passed out.
— To be continued.
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This is Science Gone Wrong Month on my humble blog. Tonight’s movie is 2016’s Morgan from director Luke Scott, son of Ridley Scott who is also listed as producer. The movie stars Kate Mara, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Giamatti, Michelle Yeoh, Toby Jones, and Anya Taylor-Joy among others. You even get a cameo from Brian Cox. What a cast! And they star in a movie about a test tube baby that goes on a massacre in an isolated estate in the country. This is a B movie with an A cast.
A woman by the name of Lee Weathers (Kate Mara) gets dispatched to a research compound deep in the country. This is one of those near future movies where corporations are now messing around with genetic engineering. It seems that there was an incident that happened at the lab involving an experimental creature named Morgan. It seems that Morgan repeatedly stabbed a Dr. Kathy Grieff (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in the eye. Morgan has no gender, but the scientists keep switching between her and it. Morgan is played by the lovely Anya Taylor-Joy, but she looks like a monster here with grey skin and slicked back hair.
Dr. Simon Ziegler explains to Lee how Morgan was created using synthetic DNA and nanotechnology and a bunch of science gobbledygook that I can’t make heads or tails of. What I find disturbing is how much this staff of scientists love Morgan and treat it/her as one of the family. The scientists even threw Morgan a birthday party. They’re very proud of their experiment and hope risk management will ignore the whole incident concerning the eye stabbing. Lee informs them that a psychologist by the name of Dr. Alan Shapiro (Paul Giamatti) will be stopping by to make the final assessment.
Dr. Shapiro shows up and acts like a perfect ass. He takes one look at Morgan and states that it’s already failed the psych exam. He also insists on speaking to Morgan directly inside its cell. The scientists don’t think that’s such a good idea and Dr. Shapiro tells them not to tell him how to do his job. Dr. Shapiro’s psych evaluation of Morgan involves him constantly trying to get a rise out of the patient. He tells Morgan that it has no friends. Dr. Shapiro threatens Morgan with permanent imprisonment and possible termination. Morgan doesn’t like this so it rips out Dr. Shapiro’s throat.
With Morgan failing its psych exam, the scientists are ordered by corporate to put Morgan to sleep. They refuse to do this and make arrangements to flee the lab with Morgan. The scientists lock Lee in Morgan’s cell so she won’t interfere. At first I thought Morgan had some kind of psychic hold on the scientists, but they’re really just this stupid. It’s around this time that Morgan goes on a killing spree, murdering the very scientists that were trying to help it. There’s a twist ending that I won’t spoil here. Until next week.
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Photo by Leslie Salas.Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #209 by Drew Barth
A Minor Shock
We’re rather spoiled for comics in the US. If we have a decent shop close by, we can pick up any variety of comics that Diamond distributes as well as a few odds and ends that fall onto a typical comic shelf. Outside of these borders, however, when looking across the Atlantic, comics have been a little more difficult. Well, DC Comics have been more difficult. The UK has had its own comic scene and sensibilities for decades—magazines like 2000 AD and publishers like Titan—but DC Comics were notoriously difficult to come by in the regular monthly formats we’re used to. This is where London Editions Magazines came in and one of their forays into getting more DC stories, namely Vertigo comics, into reader’s hands in the form of Shockwave.
Shockwave on its own has an interesting history. London Editions Magazines, and its parent company Egmont, had been publishing DC Comic anthologies and magazines for year prior—typically compilations of Batman and Superman stories sold as monthly or annual stories. But they had wanted to branch out into some of DC’s lesser known characters and stories and began that with DC Action in 1990. This magazine focused on stories like Grant Morrison’s Animal Man and Marv Wolfman and George Perez’s Teen Titans comics from the late and early 80s, respectively. But, after six issues, this anthology was canceled. Their next attempt at bringing in more mature stories was with Zones, an anthology that reprinted Swamp Thing, The Shadow, and Wasteland. This was also cut even shorter with only four issues before LEM shifted focus to the similarly short-lived Shockwave.
Shockwave was one of the last attempts at these anthology reprint magazines as DC’s catalog, including the reprinted Vertigo stories, were becoming more common in UK comic shops. At four issues before cancellation it still managed to pack in a good amount of comics. Just in the first issue we have the opening of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Black Orchid, the first portion of issue seven of Animal Man by Grant Morrison and Chris Truog, another Grant Morrison story in the form of Hellblazer with David Lloyd, and an article on UFOs by Jay Taylor. It’s the kind of lineup that feels legendary now, but was the kind of thing you could pack into a reprint anthology in the hopes of keeping publication going back then. But even with this overwhelming quality, no one seemed to buy Shockwave and its final issue came just a few months later.
I couldn’t help but pick these first two issues of Shockwave up when I saw them in a used comic bin. They provide this fascinating snapshot of comics publishing in the UK at the time and show the ways in which more adult oriented comics were presented in that different context. While they may have been attempting something closer to the format that had been so successful for 2000 AD for so long, a magazine like Shockwave still gives us something unique to look at when contrasted with how we typically consume comics in America.
Get excited. Get shocked.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Buzzed Books #97 by Brian Salmans
Fiona Benson’s Vertigo and Ghost
In a bookshop interview a few years ago, Fiona Benson said, “I think I have always been a little bit violent.” The audience laughed, mildly, maybe as thrown off by her soft-spoken and questioning tone as I was. Did she mean that? After all, isn’t it always the quiet ones, as the saying goes? They’re the Jekylls with the Hydian dark sides. Right?
I don’t know. Benson’s second poetry collection, Vertigo & Ghost (Cape Poetry, 2019)—she has since published a third and fourth book—contains violence of the brutal sort, but also a sort you may not expect.
Vertigo & Ghost starts with a poem that stands apart from the rest, a prólogos. “Ace of Bass”— named after the 90s pop group, but also the sport of tennis—burns with fervent optimism. The speaker and her friends sit on the tennis court, ostensibly to “practice our backhand,” but really to talk about boys. And sex, which “wasn’t here yet, but it was coming, / and we were running towards it, its gorgeous euphoric mist.” Sex was a “deep well of love,” a fix for every desire, an ace with every serve and never over the baseline, a matter of the heart as much as their “own starved bodies.” The only inkling of violence is the asphalt’s “intricate red pattern on our thighs,” from sitting too long.
The naivete of this prologue contrasts Part One. Zeus–king of the Greek pantheon, and also a real person–is the star. He is a megalomaniacal sexual predator.
Mercifully, the section begins with Zeus behind bars being confronted by the apparent victim of another crime for which he has so far eluded justice. In this first poem, “[Zeus],” despite his containment, the danger he embodies is palpable: “bullet-proof glass / and a speaker-phone between us / and still I wasn’t safe.” In “[screenplay],” the speaker observes Zeus in the prison yard, smiling face up in the rain, and wonders, “why he’s here?” Zeus is a god “who can pass through the vaults / and walls of this prison.” Even a tracheotomy (“[surveillance]”) can’t prevent Zeus from making veiled threats-cum-compliments with his “voice somewhere between motor-rev and burp.”
Drugs, in another poem named “[surveillance]”, that are delivered to him in a “doll-sized paper cup” by a psychiatric nurse, only lend a surreal edge to his shocking declaration that he will rape a child. In yet another poem named “[surveillance]”, the speaker (walking home with her child) hears thunder, the mythical Zeus’s hallmark weapon, and quickens her step. The only thing worse than Zeus as a free man is Zeus “all around me / in the heavy air / watching.”
The most frightening thing about Zeus’s power is that it doesn’t reside solely within his body: it’s supported by the scaffolding of a society made for his body. In “[archives],” the judge sentencing Zeus for his crime takes the opportunity to mention certain of his admirable qualities:
Zeus given
light sentence,
temporary gaol.
The judge delivers
that he is an exemplary member
of the swimming squad;
look at his muscular shoulders,
the way he forges through water;
as for the girl.
These qualities don’t just mitigate Zeus’s crime in the judge’s eyes; the judge consciously connects them to his predatory behavior, as a natural thing. The judge’s reluctant hands were forced to apply the law to this potent and awe-inspiring man, undeserving of punishment.
In “[surveillance: track and field],” Zeus, now as a girls’ track coach with a blond pony-tail, trains (grooms) his “BEAUTIES” to love the chase, to accept it, but only “IF YOU GROOM WELL.” In “[personal],” a woman flees her own personal Zeus, an abusive mate, only to be tracked down to the train station, where he, bouquet in hand, “shouldered my bag / took my bike / and wheeled it, / while everyone around / smiled at his courtly manners.”
The poem “[transformation: Nemesis]” is basically a series of predator-prey metaphors—she a fish, he a shark; she a snake, he a mongoose; and so on—suggesting the various ways we conceive of sexual pursuit and conquest, for which the mythical Zeus is famed, as natural and even framing it as an epic struggle (“we made a crater where we fell / screaming through the night / a bloody prolapse”). In “[transformation: Daphne],” we are reminded that abusive and predatory behavior can be learned by sons from their fathers, in Benson’s vivid retelling of the myth of Daphne’s transformation into a laurel tree before being raped by Zeus’s son, Apollo. Continuing the predator-prey metaphors, Apollo is a dog chasing a rabbit that eventually tires from being chased and gives up:
When a hare dies it screams like a mortal child.
Disconcerted, Apollo looks up from the field.
There’s Zeus in the dark holding the lamp,
keeping it steady for the rape, and the kill.
Transformations abound.. Aside from Daphne and Nemesis, there is, for example, “[transformation: Io]” in which she is apparently in the hospital, recovering from an assault, and mooing and ineptly tonguing her food. This heart-breaking poem portrays the emotional and psychological transformation that victims of sexual violations experience. Likewise, “[transformation: Callisto]” illustrates the trauma that follows assault. Callisto is a bear, an animal who “squats to shit does not wipe does not wash,” has an anti-social “look-away demeanor.” She shuns and is shunned by society, “chased out of town / with tranq guns and flares.” But Benson shows us that healing is possible. Within the same poem, she finds “pleasure in the woods — / the sun shining amber on her fur.” She even finds redemption:
…There are moments in her cave
when she feels almost safe, and sleeps to dream
of the cub who mewed at her briefly before he was taken;
his eyes swollen shut from the pressure of birth,
his small blind face searching for her voice,
his kicking legs and his tiny fists waving.
Bundled out of the room. Perfect human.
This is the point in the book where the woman who has known violence begins to heal and to be reborn by giving life. The process of giving life—making it, bearing it, protecting it—is surprisingly violent.
Part Two covers a lot of ground, but one of the biggest subjects is the experience of motherhood
Another subject is grief. In “Almond Blossom,” the speaker is overwhelmed with grief, unable to appreciate the “wintered bird’s small song,” yet aware that she must trust spring will come and pull her back: “earth’s already begun her slow incline, inch by ruined inch, easing you back from the brink.” In “Toad,” she finds kinship with the “grotesque / beaded” creature, a sister, sharing the purgatory of hibernation. “Beatitude,” a tribute to Gerard Manley Hopkins, brings redemption again as her “sad, agnostic soul” finds its way back into nature’s grandeur. To do so, she must commit trespass, legally and figuratively, floating down the river past the martins’ nests dug out of the bank. She is “a compass to the currents,” not because she provides direction, but because she is made to give it, to become the sign, pulled around in the water just as the Earth’s magnetic field tugs on a compass needle.
Grief gradually moves toward healing. In “Blue Heron,” someone has lost something. The wading bird standing in the marsh, watching the shadows of the fish under the slowly-forming ice, doing the “slow, hunched river-work of grief,” is presented with a choice: fly south with the others to a warmer clime, or stay and freeze. Heal or lose yourself. The speaker plainly and trustingly urges the heron to “lift / from the tightening shallows,” and assures the reader that “there will be love, release.”
The very next poem, “Wildebeest”, somersaults into the theme of motherhood. Benson depicts the birth of a child as the birth of a wildebeest calf. The birth is a stampede, her body “both the flood / and the furious corral,” a “torrent of muscle” impossibly squeezing out a “Taurean star…unfolding / like sharp origami // then falling in a hot / and slippery rush.” The baby is relievedly human, “dark-haired like your sister.”
The theme of transformation continues to figure prominently as Part Two draws closer to its end. Like the bear imagery in the Callisto poem, the speaker expresses an appalled acceptance of the distortions her body has endured from pregnancy and childbirth. In “After Birth,” her stomach is “a flaccid bag,” her breasts leaking colostrum, and all for “the stranger sleeping in the crib.” The title of the poem “Ruins” suggests how the speaker views her body, but however much that bothers her, we trust she wouldn’t change a thing about her life when she says, with the most adorable imagery, “amen I say to all of this / if I have you — / your screwball smile / at every dawn.”
As the children grow, so does the speaker’s awareness of the threats to their safety and her role as their protector. “Daughter Drowning” focuses on the guilt a mother feels about the vigils her infant receives after almost drowning, while her older sister is “fighting for attention, as if it were oxygen / and she were drowning” and the speaker “hadn’t even seen her / start to slip.”
In “Cells,” Benson weaves an intriguing explanation of the “agonies of protection” she feels towards no one in particular, involving the cells of a miscarried chimeric fetus living on in the mother’s body and that time scientists built a robot car driven by a web of rat neurons. The car went crazy, scurrying for cover. The speaker has her miscarried daughter’s cells in her brain and “it’s not my own mortality / I flail at now, but theirs.” She concludes with the haunting lines, “Look how fitfully I steer, / how obsolete I am in person; / I am wheeled and governed.”
“Mexican Free-Tail Bats” is another example of Benson’s skill in fusing human and animal into one subject. The baby bats (kits) fall to the floor of the cave and stagger around on their little wing-tips while the mother bat swoops around under the dozing colony on the cave roof, like a “black glove of panic,” frantically thinking “not here; not here.”
About motherhood, Benson expresses guilt, anxiety, fear, revulsion, joy, and contentment. Part Two begins in a somber vein. The slide from despair into hope is not a clear and straight path, with some poems slipping back into despair.
The Zeus poems evoke a similar uncertainty. Just as sometimes it’s hard to put a finger on the moment of wrong-doing in instances of sexual harassment and intimidation, the Zeus poems are difficult to refer to in this review with precision because the titles are redundant. There are at least three poems titled “[surveillance]” and four just titled “[Zeus].” The poems elude reference just as predators elude recognition.
One thing not left to uncertainty in the Zeus poems is identifying when Zeus himself is speaking. Benson’s ingenious use of all caps for his words underscores how the predator’s words are so often given more importance than the victim’s, not only because he asserts himself, speaking loudly and boldly, but because society believes his word, emphasizes its importance, and values the qualities he embodies. The all caps also evoke the oft-ridiculed online writing style of bullies yelling in the comments, and offers perhaps the only opening for readers to laugh at the monstrous Zeus.
While reading Vertigo & Ghost, I mused upon how dark and violent it is, and wondered how Benson held these images and ideas in her head so evenly and considerately. Her secret, I believe, is contained within the poem named “Love Poem, Lucca.” Her husband James is “the sure / and steady ground; because of him / we live.” Their relationship, his commitment to her self-actualization and to her safety, gives her room to explore the watchtower they are visiting as a family, that “brick vase of forest” with the trees profanely growing out of the top of it. She does this despite her apparent fear of heights and fear for her child who “ricochets between the ledge / and the steep of the stair like a firework / in a confined space, half crazed, / about to fall.” But this dangerous outing is a necessary exploration if one is to truly live. Despite the danger and her anxiety, Benson undertakes the quest. She writes about violence, explores it, and even makes it beautiful, because she has someone—James—to pull her back. Love is her safety line.
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Brian A. Salmons lives in Orlando and writes essays, poems, and plays, which can be found in Qu, The Ekphrastic Review, Autofocus Lit, Stereo Stories, Memoir Mixtapes, Arkansas International, and other places. He also reads for Autofocus Lit.
Find him on IG @teacup_should_be and Twitter @brianasalmons.
Episode 561 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
This week, Samantha Nickerson talks to Felicia Berliner about her new novel, Shmutz, and the challenges of existing within multiple identities,
plus Samantha Nickerson talks to Deb Rogers about her new novel, Florida Woman, group-think, cults, and lots of monkeys.
Today’s Guest Host
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
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Episode 561 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
2023 Preview
I did a stupid thing. I overheard the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, playing the Moonlight Sonata on his Casio Keyboard. I decided to sneak up behind him while he was distracted, thinking I might take that mask off and get a peak at his face. Before my fingers reached his mask, he grabbed my wrist, jerked my arm hard. I heard a pop and realized he had just dislocated my shoulder. And then I passed out. — To be continued.
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You know, I think it’s high time I looked to 2023 and the many wonderful movies the year has in store for us. And what better way to do it than by checking out some movie posters for upcoming releases and surmising their plots from them. Let’s dig in.
Baby Ruby
Noémie Merlant and Kit Harrington star in this psychological horror movie about a couple struggling to conceive their first child. The husband decides to buy an infant on the black market from a southern gentleman in a seersucker suit. The baby seller hands the child over on the condition her new parents name her Ruby. The wife is set on calling her Margaret and descends into madness over the fact they have to name the child Ruby. After a bloody finale, Ruby gets adopted by the Queen of Denmark.
The Outwaters
A quirky comedy set in a small town in New Mexico. A weird face appears in the sky and the locals find themselves ill equipped to handle the dozens of tourists visiting their little borough each day. A fight breaks out between two rival families over the merchandising rights to the face in the sky. Meanwhile, a crackpot inventor creates a rocket pack so he can fly up to ask the face in the sky what the meaning of life is.
Beau is Afraid
Joaquin Phoenix stars as Beau. As a boy, Beau is too afraid to leave his room and hangs out all day in his pajamas. As a young man, Beau is too afraid to leave his room and hangs out all day in his pajamas. As a middle-aged man, Beau is too afraid to leave his room and hangs out all day in his pajamas. As an old man, Beau is too afraid to leave his room and hangs out all day in his pajamas. Then he dies.
Inside
William Dafoe plays a recluse who lives in a green house on the 51st floor of a high rise in Mumbai. He experiments with plants to create a rare variant of cucumber that grows in any environment. A pickle consortium sends an assassin to take him out. Jason Statham also stars.
A Good Person
Morgan Freeman plays a good person. Florence Pugh plays a bad person. All Morgan Freeman’s character wants to do is build a miniature replica of the Empire State Building using used matchsticks. He then plans to enter his creation into a matchstick miniature contest. If he wins the $50,000 prize, he’ll donate the money to the local orphanage because he’s a good person. While carrying his creation to the contest, Florence Pugh, knocks him over with her bike. He crushes his creation with his weight. She laughs as she rides away because she’s a bad person.
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Photo by Leslie Salas.Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Episode 560 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
This week, Rachael Tillman and I discuss the art of persona writing through Philip Schultz’s recent book, Comforts of the Abyss.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
_______
Episode 560 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #405 by Jeff Shuster
Black Adam
Not Black Atom.
I was making myself at home in the one bedroom apartment of the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando. I examined his shelves and noticed a collection of Red Rose Tea figurines. The most prominent ones were woodland creatures and the holiday collection. I bet I could sell the lot for $32.50 on eBay. I picked up a miniature Uncle Sam, but put it back down when I heard the sound of the Moonlight Sonata tinkling from the bedroom. — To be continued.
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This week’s movie is 2022’s Black Adam from director Jaume Collet-Serra. I know that director. He was responsible for two Liam Neeson movies I covered last year: Non-Stop and The Commuter. For what it’s worth, I liked those movies so I went into Black Adam with an open mind. I mean you have Dwayne Johnson in the starring role and he looks just like the DC comics character the movie is named for.
Let’s get one thing out of the way. Black Adam is a super villain. He’s like the arch-nemesis of Captain Marvel. Not the Marvel Universe Captain Marvel, but the DC Universe Captain Marvel. I think they have to call him Shazam now because DC lost the rights to the name or something. Oh, and don’t expect Shazam to show up in this movie even though he’s the superhero and Black Adam is the supervillain. Because maybe Black Adam isn’t really a supervillain after all, but a brooding anti-hero.
I give the movie points for the setting. Our story takes place in the fictional middle-eastern nation of Kahndaq. This country has always been the target of oppressors for thousands of years. The latest group exploiting this country is Intergang, an international gang of mercenaries. This evil organization is searching for the legendary Crown of Sabbac, a mystical item that will give its wearer the powers of hell or something like that. An archaeologist named Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi) finds the location of the crown in an ancient tomb. She’s hoping to get the crown before Intergang so she can hide it in another location.
No sooner does she find the crown that Intergang shows up to take it for their own nefarious purposes. Adrianna reads an ancient spell and sets free Teth-Adam, the legendary champion of Kahndaq. Teth-Adam (Dwayne Johnson) slaughters the Intergang soldiers and I do not feel bad for them. They kind of deserved to die unlike those mercenaries Morbius hired, but let’s not bring up that again. The United States government takes note of the situation and dispatches the Justice Society to put a stop to Teth-Adam.
Who are the Justice Society? They’re a team of superheroes who are not the Justice League. We have Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo). Hawkman and Doctor Fate have a long history of fighting evil and are very old friends. Atom Smasher can grow really large and has Fonzie for a grandfather. Cyclone can create cyclones? Doctor Fate is a wizard and Hackman has wings and can fly around and hit things with his mallet.
Black Adam belongs to the same DC cinematic universe that gave us that Batman killing Superman movie years back. And while I can appreciate seeing the Rock toss bad guys around like rag dolls, it just isn’t enough. I like the actors, but by the time we get to the climactic battle scene with the demon lord and his army of the undead, it feels like we’re just going through the motions.
We get a Superman cameo at the end with Henry Cavill portraying the Man of Steel, but James Gunn recently announced that Cavill will not be returning to the role of Superman as Warner Media is planning a reboot of the DC cinematic universe. Funny how they let that cat out the bag when there are four more movies set in this current DC cinematic universe due out this year. Kind of destroys the hype for Aquamaniacs out there.
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Photo by Leslie Salas.Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #208 by Drew Barth
Ending at the Ending
Apocalypse stories abound. The world ends in one of a dozen different ways and people need to live through it. But what’s most significant between these stories is the timing of them. When does the apocalypse happen and when is this story occurring? Are we right at the edge of things going bad? Are we a couple weeks in where we can still trick ourselves into thinking things could go back to normal? Or, are we like Once Upon a Time at the End of the World by Jason Aaron, Alexandre Tefenkgi, and Lee Loughridge and teetering at the edge of the end?
We start here at the end of things. Much of the planet is a barren waste with molten plastic and garbage taking up much of the land. Fauna has been warped beyond recognition into strange forms of tentacles and carapaces while greenery simply doesn’t exist outside of the toxic. The world has ended, but there’s still some people around. This is the story of Mezzy and Maceo—a hardened wasteland survivor and a kid who has been living out the end times in a skyscraper filled with candy and cannons, respectively. After Maceo lets Mezzy into his tower, we get a glimpse at just how different their lives have been as well as the similarity they have in their lack of contact with other people. But this tower isn’t something Mezzy could live in and Maceo can no longer standing living alone after talking with someone for the first time in years.
The final two pages of this first issue may as well be the start of the final issue as we’re flung decades into the future to see Maceo as an old man and the final stages of the world violently churning above. And this kind of bookending of the series creates an interesting dynamic between the reader and the creators. We now have a strong idea of where this entire story is taking us—at least to some extent—after just being introduced to this world and our main characters. It’s giving us the series’ end as a stinger to help draw us back into this world if we weren’t feeling too sure about the beginning. It’s the idea of the final page stinger taken to its logical conclusion: if the final page of the first issue doesn’t hook you enough, why not try for the final moments of the entire series?
At its first issue, Once Upon a Time at the End of the World has set up the ending of its world very well. And the team of Aaron, Tefenkgi, and Loughridge have crafted a story for this world that can’t help but make you want to see more of, even as the characters teeter right on the edge of the end of all things. It’s the kind of apocalypse you want to see through to the end.
Get excited. Get ending.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Episode 558 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
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This week I have a long overdue convo with the poet Laurie Rachkus Uttich.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk
by Charles Simic
Late at night our hands stop working.
They lie open with tracks of animals
Journeying across the fresh snow.
They need no one. Solitude surrounds them.
As they come closer, as they touch,
It is like two small streams
Which upon entering a wide river
Feel the pull of the distant sea.
The sea is a room far back in time
Lit by the headlights of a passing car.
A glass of milk glows on the table.
Only you can reach it for me now.
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
_______
Episode 559 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #404 by Jeff Shuster
Morbius
It’s Morbin’ Time
There I was in the secret hideout of the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando. By secret hideout, I mean his one bedroom apartment. I went to take a shower, lathering up with Dove sensitive skin soap and massaging my follicles with Pert Plus, shampoo and conditioner in one. There was even a nice cotton bathroom waiting for me. I needed to brush my teeth and saw a lone, cherry red soft bristle toothbrush sitting in a cup by the sink. I figured what the ninja didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.
— To be continued.
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This week’s movie is 2022’s Morbius from director Daniel Espinosa. Much like Venom, this movie features a Spider-Man villain with no Spider-Man. But he’s not really a bad guy; he’s kind of a tortured soul named Michael Morbius (Jared Leto). Born with a debilitating blood disease, Dr. Michael Morbius has spent his life trying to cure it, even studying to become the world’s preeminent expert on the subject. He even receives a prize from the King of Sweden for his invention of artificial blood which has saved more lives than penicillin.
It’s about this moment that I’m wondering why I should care about anything Marvel-related after they killed off Tony Stark!
I know.
I know.
This Sony Marvel universe is not the Disney Marvel universe though there are crossovers between the universes. How does that work? It’s all just a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey bullshit! (If I’m wrong, explain it to me in the comments, with diagrams and math problems if need be.)
Dr. Michael Morbius visits Costa Rica to capture some vampire bats to experiment with. I don’t think I’d experiment with vampire bats. That might turn me into a monster in the Sony Marvel universe. But I trust the good intentions of Dr. Michael Morbius as we see him comforting a sick little girl in the hospital who has the same genetic disorder as him. If only he could find a cure, not just for himself, but for all the poor afflicted children of the world. With the help of his love interest/colleague Dr. Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona), the two set out for the high seas to conduct an illegal experiment in a secret laboratory on a freighter guarded by a dozen or so mercenaries. (I promise you I’ve never done that myself.)
Dr. Brancroft injects the serum into Morbiuss’s back, thus transforming him into a monster thirsting for human blood. This would be the part in the movie where we cut to Peter Parker trying to figure how he’s going to pay the rent this month, but there’s no Spider-Man here, Morbius makes short work of the mercenaries, draining their blood and slashing them to ribbons. That’s okay as these were mercs who probably deserved to die anyway. Morbius jumps ship leaving Dr. Bancroft to deal with the cops.
Oh, did I mention that Morbius has a childhood friend named Lucien played by Matt Smith? Like Morbius, Lucien also has a debilitating blood disease that keeps him on crutches. Morbius refuses to give Lucien the bat potion as he doesn’t want Lucien to share his vampiric existence. So Lucien just steals the bat potion when Morbius is incapacitated. Lucien’s first victim is a nurse and a single mother.
Boo!
That makes him a bad living vampire, unlike Morbius.
Did you ever want to see Matt Smith dance shirtless to the tune of EKSE by Off the Meds? Then this is the movie for you.
Did you want to see Jared Leto zipping around New York City like a flying squirrel? Then this is the movie for you.
And be sure to watch that after credits scene, Let’s just say there may be a Sinister Six movie coming in the future. A Sinister Six movie with no Spider-Man. A Sinister Six movie where they’re bad, but not bad guys.
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Photo by Leslie SalasJeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #207 by Drew Barth
Cross Face
One of the major questions in comics over the past forty years has typically centered on how they would work in the real world. How could Batman function in a place like New York? Could Spawn just walk down the street? Are those comics set in the “real world” meaningfully based in the real world? It’s the kind of thought exercise that gets listicled to hell and back. The better question is what would happen if these characters, as characters, were brought into our actual world? This is a portion of the foundation of Donny Cates, Geoff Shaw, Dee Cunniffe, and John J. Hill’s Crossover.
The main question asked by Crossover is “what would happen if Comics as a whole were dropped onto Denver?” The answer to that is, of course, mayhem. Our world, as it is, isn’t ready for the characters from every comic to suddenly burst through a hole and into our world. But we react the only way we know how: cordoning them all off, creating a militarized zone around that hole, and rounding up any and all characters that have escaped. Also a religious fervor surrounding comics on par with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent. However, when a small girl named Ava, a refugee from the comics world, appears in Ellie and Otto’s classic comic shop, they need to bring her back home.
Crossover also asks, “what would happen if these characters met their creators? Would their writers survive?” And the answer is “nothing good” and “no” in that order. Creators like Brian K. Vaughn, Chip Zdarsky, Brian Michael Bendis, Michael Avon Oeming appear in the pages of Crossover, as does series writer Donny Cates, and are confronted by their creations. Most of these sections are written by those creators, with Zdarsky getting an issue for himself with art by Phil Hester and Ande Parks, and it’s incredibly interesting to see how they contend with their work. It’s tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also the kind of inward-looking honesty that feels genuine while it’s telling a joke. How do you, as a creator, look one of your characters in the eye and tell them that you’ve made their life miserable because it’s entertaining?
Crossover is a lot. The first thirteen issues of the series wrapped up a couple months ago with a new arc coming, hopefully, this year. But it’s also the kind of series that needs to be read in full to wrap around everything that’s happening. It’s a comic story about helping comics survive in this world and get back to their own, but also about creating stories and how they can get away from you. Some of those stories come back to kill you.
Get excited. Get cross.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Episode 558 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
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This week I speak with the prose writer, Jennifer Worley, the fall 2022 resident of The Kerouac Project of Orlando.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
_______
Episode 558 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #403 by Jeff Shuster
Bloody New Year
Not so happy.
After wading through ten miles of disgusting sewer water, the Revenging Manta and I opened a manhole to the surface. I was anxious to see the secret hideout of the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando. I was in dire need of a shower with all the crap and blood stuck to me. I followed the ninja to an old apartment building where we climbed the fire escape. The Revenging Manta opened a window on the fourth floor and we climbed through.
I knocked over a fern on the way in.
“Where’s the secret hideout?” I asked, wondering why we had just waded through miles of rancid water.
“This is my apartment,” he said, setting his sword down on a coffee table. “I don’t have a secret hideout.” — To be continued.
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Happy New Year! So long, 2022. Don’t let the door hit you on your way out. This week’s movie is 1987’s Bloody New Year from director Norman J. Warren. The movie begins in 1959 with a New Year’s Eve bash at the Grand Island Hotel. No, this movie does not take place in Grand Island, New York or Grand Island, Nebraska, but on a mysterious island called Grand island. One of the guests from the New Year’s dance walks into the dance hall to find it completely empty. While cleaning herself up in a mirror, a hand reaches through the mirror and pulls her into the mirror.
That should be a spooky scene, but the movie cuts to modern times so quickly that you don’t really have time to register what happened. We’re introduced to some vacationing British tourists enjoying a seaside amusement park. Some malcontents are terrorizing an American tourist named Carol (Catherine Roman) on a spinning teacups ride. Our British tourists come to the rescue, shutting down the ride and fighting the hooligans off to rescue the girl from her spinning nightmare.
One of the Brits, a guy named Tom (Julian Ronnie), removes the battery from the ride. The owner of the ride and the malcontents chase him through the park to get it back. Pandemonium ensues as our British tourists try to escape the park. Tom and his friend, Rick (Mark Powley), hide in the funhouse, but the hooligans follow them inside. They’re rescued when their friend Lesley (Suzy Aitchison), crashes her car through the funhouse with a boat in tow. The kids escape the park and head out toward the sea in an effort to flee their pursuers.
That should have been the movie: young British tourists causing mayhem in an amusement park. Instead, our group of vacationers gets in the boat only to get shipwrecked when the boat crashes into some coral. They swim to the closest shore which happens to be Grand Island. And this island is haunted. They make their way to the hotel and weird shenanigans ensue like a bannister that comes to life and bites your arm or tables that come to life and try to suck you into them.
Eh. This one was kind of a chore to get through. Also, the majority of the movie takes place in July so there’s not really a New Year’s theme going on here. And there’s not much blood as it’s a British production from the Video Nasty era. So it’s not really a Bloody New Year after all.
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Photo by Leslie Salas.Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #206 by Drew Barth
Another One of These Years
It’s a new year and it’s time again to look forward to the multitude of work coming out that runs the gambit of short story collections, the minutia of history, and the good old weird shit that you and I come back to week after week.
Winter 2023
- Black Cloak: A new Image series from Kelly Thompson and Meredith McClaren that combines elements of noir and science-fiction to give us a story about a murder investigation where our heroes need to find an answer before a city teeters into a full-blown war.
- Tatsuki Fujimoto Before Chainsaw Man: 17-21: One of the two volumes of early short stories by Chainsaw Man mangaka, Tatsuki Fujimoto. This volume explores his earliest work and shows some of the seeds that would come to germinate further in his most famous work.
- Spy Superb: Matt Kindt returns with a short miniseries about a spy that doesn’t even know he’s a spy. It’s the perfect cover for espionage work—who would ever suspect someone who doesn’t even know they’re spying?
- Last On His Feet: A look at the 1910 “Battle of the Century” in which Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion, pummeled “great white hope” Jim Jeffries and the history that created, both inside and outside the ring.
Spring 2023
- Ephemera: A Memoir: Guiding us through a garden, a forest, and a greenhouse, Briana Loewinsohn offers us a look at her life as a woman and as the daughter of a parent with a mental illness. A graphic memoir told in dreamy paints, Ephemera might become one of the strongest autobiography in the medium.
- Phantom Road: Another new Image series coming this year, Jeff Lemire and Gabriel H. Walta give us the story of Dom, a long-haul trucker, and Birdie, someone Dom has picked up after a car crash, and their world after uncovering an artifact from the wreckage of said crash.
- The Neighbors: A new and horrific twist on moving to a new neighborhood, Jude Ellison S. Doyle, Letizia Cadonici, and Alessandro Santoro bring us a series about family, , neighbors, and the world outside your door being something much more gruesome than you may have anticipated.
- Tombs: Continuing the horror, Junji Ito has another story collection coming out this year that promises to keep us shitting our pants with stories that will warp mundane objects like windows and tongues into something just a grotesque as any of his previous work.
- Indigo Children: Curt Pires, Alex Diotto, Dee Cunniffe, and Rockwell White bring us a new sci-fi series centered on the mysterious reappearance of the Indigo Children after fifteen years and the journalist who tries to track them down after all this time.
- Unstoppable Doom Patrol: I’m a simple person. I see Chris Burnham’s art attached a Doom Patrol series written by Dennis Culver and open up my wallet. While there hasn’t been much announced about the series just yet outside of it spinning out of the DC’s upcoming Lazarus Planet event, it still promises the weird we’ve come to expect from this group of heroes.
- Nejishiki: Another volume from Drawn & Quarterly of Yoshiharu Tsugue’s influential manga. Tsugue was one of the leading figures in the counter-cultural manga of the 60s and this collection brings together some of his more iconic work from that period of his career.
- Dementia 21: The re-release of Shintaro Kago’s absurdist manga that centers on Yukie Sakai and her life after being hired as a home aide. What follows is a surreal satire featuring anything from superheroes, zombies, Santa, and mind-controlling dentures.
Summer 2023
- The Man in the McIntosh Suit: Rina Ayuyang’s tale of Bobot and his struggles in rural California in 1929—a manual laborer despite his law degree from the Philippines. But when circumstance brings him to San Francisco, we’re left with a noir tale that rivals cinema’s classics.
- Goes Like This: After so many years, we can finally have Jordan Crane’s short works in a single volume. The multi-genre spanning collection brings together his take on anything from weird westerns, science fiction, relationship drama, and the ephemeral nature of childhood, he shows why his stories needed to be collected for everyone to read.
- Shazam: Mark Waid and Dan Mora continue to define the DC Universe with their take on Billy Batson and what a magical adventure comic can look like. As with Doom Patrol, not much is known about this series, but it has the pedigree to be one of the strongest cape books of the year.
- Okinawa: A history of the island to the far south of Japan, Susumu Higa shows us the graphic history of war that has defined Okinawa—from its annexation by the Japanese Empire to it suffering the bulk of land battles in the Pacific War to its current hosting of the majority of US military bases currently. Higa explores all of this along with the people who remain there as their only home.
Fall and Winter 2023
- Roaming: The first graphic novel Jillian and Mariko Tamaki since 2014’s This One Summer, the duo bring us the story of three friends on a trip to New York in 2009. Their unexpected romance drives the story as the three explore as much of the city as they can before their spring break comes to a close.
- Green Lantern: Little is known about Phillip Kennedy Johnson’s new take on John Stewart outside of Johnson looking back to Stewart’s architect roots. While this story isn’t slated to release until near the end of 2023, this could become our best look at John Stewart in years.
There are more than likely other series that are going to come out between print and just a couple months from now that should be on this list, but I’m still working in 2022. Times change. Some of these comics could be delayed or brought forward. Either way, there’s still some good stuff coming out this year and I hope it’s enough to distract from whatever else may happen this time.
Get excited. Get living in boring times.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Episode 557 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
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This week I speak with my friend Jason about the creative joys of grieving and the power of earnestness and other matters of interest.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
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Episode 557 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #402 by Jeff Shuster
Don’t Open Till [sic] Christmas
Don’t Open Until Christmas
There I was, wading through crapwaters of the Orlando sewer system. The sewer water went up to my knees and then to my waist and then to my chest. I was on my way to the secret hideout of the Revenging Manta, the famous ninja vigilante. He led the way, waves of rancid water crashing against him as he made great strides toward our destination. Eventually, we came to a ladder that went straight up to a manhole.
“You first,” he said. — To be continued.
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This week’s movie is 1984’s Don’t Open Till Christmas from director Edmund Perdum. This entry in a long line of Christmas slasher movies has a twist: the victims are your run-of-the-mill department store Santas. Yeah, it would seem that some creeper has a vendetta against jolly St. Nick. Who wants to murder Kris Kringle? Honestly, all the guy does is give you free presents once a year and you don’t have to declare them come tax season. I guess the director was going for something different this time around, trading horny teenagers for middle-aged, sad-sack Santas.
The movie begins with a guy dressed as Santa getting hot and heavy with his girlfriend in the backseat of his car. Then, naturally, we get the point of view of a heavy-breather stalker. The guy and his girlfriend get stabbed to death by the killer. We’re then treated to a nasty credit sequence with a distorted take on Jingle Bells playing in the background as we watch a wax Santa Claus melt into goo. Was there an audience for this sort of thing? Were people fed up with Christmas back in 1984?
Our next scene takes place at a costume party where a Santa Claus is about to perform some gags for an adult audience. Unfortunately, he gets speared through the head by one of the guests dressed up like a shrunken head. His daughter, Kate Brisk (Belinda Mayne), cradles her dad’s body while her boyfriend, Cliff (Gerry Sundquist), goes after the killer only to find an abandoned costume. It’s up to the New Scotland Yard to solve the case.
What happened to the old Scotland Yard?
Naturally, this new Scotland Yard is just as baffled by these Christmas slayings as the old Scotland Yard would be. A Chief Inspector Harris (Edmund Purdom) is on the case. A couple of police officers go undercover as Santas at a local carnival in an effort to lure the killer out of hiding. It works a little too well as the killer emerges to slaughter them both. Too bad.
One of the sadder killings in this movie is when a sweet, middle-aged man visits a peep show booth. He’s shy and awkward and doesn’t know how to talk to the girl. He lives at home with his mother and a mall Santa job was the best he could do. And then he gets slayed by the Santa serial killer right in front of the stripper. Question: why murder a guy right in front of a witness and then leave the scene? You know she’s going straight to the cops.
What else? The glamorous Caroline Munro (of Starcrash fame) stars as herself in this movie and even sings. Makes me wonder if she had a music career and made top of the pops. You can catch Don’t Open Till Christmas streaming for free on Tubi.
Maybe don’t pay money for this one.
Photo by Leslie SalasJeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #205 by Drew Barth
Observation
I’ve never been able to work in a cafe. There’s always something about the noise and the continual threat of someone wanting to talk or look at whatever I’m working on. But then others can get something more from the feeling of being out in public and having their work out there, even if it’s something they subtly try to hide with one arm as they sketch the person sitting across the cafe from them. It’s the kind of technique Gabrielle Bell goes through in her short diary work, Career Shoplifter.
Career Shoplifter is a diary of a few months in spring of 2022 and a sketchbook of the people Bell has observed and interacted with in New York cafes. It’s a portrait of an accomplished artist going through some of the most harrowing aspects of creating anything: the idea that you’re running out of things to create and time to do it; that you’re not the successful person you’ve potentially convinced yourself you were for a brief moment and that everyone around you knows you’ve failed. The book reveals those daily struggles of coping with anxiety, the people you meet in cafes, and the restlessness that comes with not knowing if you’re doing enough.
Critics and fans sometimes use the cliché of calling these kinds of comics “intimate.” Bell herself parodies that impulse in one of the final comics in this collection—the fact that her diary comics are edited, the fact that her personal diary is self-censored, the fact that her personal thoughts are lies. Even still, the book doesn’t quite feel like sitting in the cafe beside Bell, but rather being told by her about the people she’s seen and the anxieties she has been feeling along with the steps in meditation she’s taking to help with them. While it’s easy to talk candidly about impostor syndrome and social anxiety, it feels much more difficult to talk about the steps you’re taking when you’re looking to mitigate some of these issues you’ve been living with for so long. And it’s a process—one that’s long, slow, and feels like it’s not enough when you’re at your worst. And Bell shows us all of these: the small moments of being just a bit better as well as the depression and anxiety’s slow encroachment despite all of her efforts. Even if they’re edited diaries, they still show us this portrait of Bell as someone going through all of these parts of self-improvement.
As quick of a moment in time Career Shoplifter represents, The book shows us so much about both the author and how comics can really work as diary pieces. Even if it’s only some of the shorter aspects of Bell’s life—these snapshots of time spent in cafes—you still get a sense of the person behind the pen and everything they’re going through. It’s what these small moments captured in comic form can help to represent: we’re not just looking at her from the outside, we’re being shown in these small panels.
Get excited. Get shoplifting.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Episode 556 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
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The poet and memoirist Lynn Melnick talks with me about the cleverness and heart of Dolly Parton, who can serve as more than a cultural icon as we try to discover how to make our unique ways in the world.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
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Episode 556 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #401 by Jeff Shuster
Christmas Evil
Do you want to feel more depressed during the holidays?
The Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, and I drove to his secret hideout. And his secret hideout was in the sewer. This is not the first place I would pick for a secret hideout with the rats and the feces floating about down there, but he insisted that it was something special. He handed me a flashlight and down the manhole I went. — To be continued.
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Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas from your humble curator. This week’s movie is 1980’s Christmas Evil from director Lewis Jackson.
This movie also went under the title of Terror in Toyland and You Better Watch Out. Christmas Evil got caught up in the Video Nasty hysteria plaguing Great Britain in the 1980s. Now you can treat yourself to this yuletide horror for free on Tubi. Times change.
Our movie begins with a young boy named Harry having witnessed Santa Claus making sexual advances on his mother. He smashes a snow globe and slits his palm.
Fast forward thirty or so years and Harry (Brandon Maggart) is now a grown man who recently got an upper management position at a toy factory. Harry’s a schlub. The toys that the factory produces are cheap plastic crap. Everyone stands before an assembly line attaching riders to bikes, rifles to toy soldiers, etc. Harry was happier making toys on the floor than sitting in his fancy office.
Harry lives like a neighborhood spy, keeping tabs on all of the neighborhood children, seeing who’s naughty or nice. One boy takes out the trash on a regular basis so his name goes on the nice list. Another boy is obsessed with dirty magazines so he ends up on the naughty list. Harry doesn’t get along with his younger brother who thinks he’s a weirdo. We in the audience also think he’s a weirdo. After becoming mesmerized by Santa Claus at the Thanksgiving Day Parade, Harry becomes obsessed with becoming Santa Claus.
On Christmas Eve, Harry superglues a white beard to his face and dons a fur-lined red Santa suit. He drives around town in a white van with Santa’s reindeer painted on the side. He delivers presents to his brother Frank’s house and drops some more gifts off at a children’s hospital. And then he waits outside a church, waiting for the Midnight Mass to let out. A rich jerk saunters over to him. The rich jerk makes fun of Harry and his van so Harry gouges his eye out with the bayonet of a toy soldier and then proceeds to hatchet the rest of them with an axe. Then Harry speeds away in his van before the crowd of churchgoers can properly react.
It would seem that director John Waters does a commentary on the DVD as he’s a huge fan. He considers it the greatest Christmas movie ever made. I found the film depressing. What’s most depressing is how chintzy Christmas feels in this movie. It’s all cheap toys, tacky decorations, fake beards, and no Christmas cheer. No wonder Harry has a psychotic break.
People can be awful around the holidays.
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Photo by Leslie Salas.Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #204 by Drew Barth
Long Road to Somewhere
Most journey narratives end with our protagonists returning home with the splendors of treasure, knowledge, or both to an adoring hometown crowd that celebrates the transformation they’ve undergone in the time they’ve been away. That home is the root—the place the protagonist can tie themselves to and reflect their new world against as a source of familiarity and comfort. But what about when that home no longer exists? What about when the journey needs to happen, but there’s nothing to look back at except ruins? In the first issue of Wes Craig and Jason Wordie’s Kaya, we see the beginnings of a journey that has no return.
Kaya and her brother, Jin, a prince who no longer has a kingdom, are wandering. It’s been some time since they were able to escape the destruction of their village, but the wasteland they wander in is vast. They have to keep journeying northward to reach some kind of safety, despite Jin’s protests that his princely status imbues him with authority over where they travel. Kaya is, of course, doing her best, but when the pair are overrun by lizard riders in the husk of another destroyed village, she must reveal the magical arm that will keep them both safe from the wilds of their world. Luckily for them both, Kaya knows one of the riders and finds brief safety in their camp, but precious little food or comfort for the rest of their journey.
While the story of Kaya is just taking off, what’s immediately apparent in this first issue is the skills and interplay between Craig’s art and Wordie’s colors throughout. Craig, having just come off of the conclusion of Deadly Class earlier this year, is flexing a more fantastical muscle with this series, but his lines still remain as sharp as ever. Wordie’s colors, however, help to elevate the story even further as they provide this watercolor-esque feeling to expressions and backgrounds that help provide this new depth to the page. And it’s their usage of red and yellow throughout—colors that are present in almost every page, especially the impressionistic backgrounds—that helps to keep a thematic grounding to the story. It really helps to cement the idea that this is the dawn of Kaya and Jin’s journey and there’s still a scant hint of brightness to their characters despite everything that has happened.
This first issue of Kaya keeps that crucial balance between character, story, and worldbuilding that can only come from creators that have had to cut their teeth on many first issues in the past. As close as it plays its cards to the chest, you’re still able to peek at something larger happening in the future.
This is a story that makes you want to keep going and see just where this ever-forward journey can take our protagonists.
Get excited. Get going.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
The Perfect Life #50 by Dr. Perfect
Dear Dr. Perfect,
My next-door neighbors’ bees suck the pollen from my flowers. Can I sue them for percentage of the resulting honey? Can I kill my neighbors as a form of back payment? And should I hire a lawyer if I’ve already done so?
Yours in peace,
A sad gardener
———————–
Dearest Sad Gardner,
I’m no lawyer, but if your neighbor’s bees are stealing pollen from your flowers, and you can prove it in a court of law, you should sue the bastards. That goes for the neighbors and their bees.
When I was five years old, one flew inside my shirt and stung me. I still haven’t forgotten the physical and mental anguish it caused in addition to the embarrassment of bawling like a baby in front of dozen grade school peers at the bus stop. I’ll never forgive that bee.
Bumblebees are smug by nature, with their hive mentality and immaculate honeycomb production. They buzz around, scaring people half to death and pollinating flowers without a care in the world. This process, we’re told, is vital to plant life and the ecosystem at large, but you what I think: kill all the bees.
Pollination could just as well be subsidized by the government, like farming, and micromanaged to desired results. Do we really need bees? Their gradual population decline had led to great concern and the increase of commercial beekeeping. Everyone wants in on the action, just waiting for some of that sweet honey.
Your neighbors might have deliberately excluded you from their business venture to keep all the honey for themselves. In the movie Goodfellas, Jimmy Conway, portrayed by Robert De Niro, organized the murder of his own crew after they helped pull off a massive heist at JFK. He too wanted it all only to be betrayed by long-time associate Henry Hill, portrayed by the late Ray Liotta. Hill joined the witness protection program in exchange for testimony against all his mobster buddies. Don’t get mixed up with the mafia.
Your letter is not the first one I’ve received involving a bee dispute. Firstly, never kill your neighbors as a form of back payment. The whole thing might be one big misunderstanding. Prior to seeking financial restitution, try talking to your neighbors. Assert that their bees remain on their side of the property. Or consider that the bees belong to no one, and that the entire grievance is all in your mind.
As much as I enjoy a good courtroom drama, our legal system is already tied up with frivolous lawsuits to no end. Nothing against the attorneys, but I’ve endured enough of these tacky lawyer TV commercials to last a lifetime. It’s best to return to gardening and refrain from violence. Gardening should be therapeutic in that regard. My own Zen Garden works wonders. It’s more of a sandpit in the backyard, but I did throw some rocks around it.
If it’s not too late, offer your neighbors a truce with a freshly baked cake, something sweet and delightful. Boil some hot tea and talk things out. I believe that’s how the armistice was reached in WWI.
Don’t throw hot tea in their faces. Do smile and nod politely. Don’t bake bees into the cake to send a chilling message. Do engage in light banter. Don’t install secretive recording devices through their home. Do suggest an enduring compromise and so forth. These simple dos and don’ts should get you through the initial sit-down.
If all else fails, hire the first lawyer you see on a billboard. That’s how I handle most legal issues. They’ll fight for you for enough money. It’s a wonderful system.
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Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
Episode 555 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
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Rochelle Hurt interviews Julia Koets about romantic desire and loss, the villanelle form, the layouts of poetry volumes, growing up with the policing of restrictive gender norms, how research contributes to creativity, the linguistic surprises lurking in the mundane world.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
_______
Episode 555 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #400 by Jeff Shuster
To All a Goodnight
David Hess returns to the Museum of Schlock.
The Revenging Manta (the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando) was fishing around the corpse of Gary, the recently deceased corpse of a a fentanyl dealer disguised as a pizza delivery man. Manta found keys and we headed to Gary’s green Volvo.
“Are we off to your secret hideout?” I asked as I plucked one of Gary’s teeth out of my hair. “I could really use a shower.”
— To be continued.
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Happy Holidays from your humble Curator of Schlock. This week’s movie is the 1980 Christmas classic To All a Goodnight from director David Hess.
Wait.
What?
The David Hess? Star of such movies as The Last House on the Left and Hitch-Hike? Indeed. Plus, he must have directed this the same year he starred in The House on the Edge of the Park. Busy man.
Our movie begins with a fatal sorority prank. A bevy of college girls chase a frightened student of the Calvin Finishing School for Girls. Some are decked out as Santa Claus wielding axes. They chase the young student up to the balcony where she loses her footing. I wonder if a relative of the deceased girl will seek revenge in a couple of years. Wasn’t this the plot of Prom Night? Both came out in 1980. I suppose the screenwriters were plugged into the collective unconscious at the same time.
Did finishing schools still exist in 1980? I thought those went out in the 1960s, but maybe they still existed for the upper crust. After all, one of the main plot points of this movie revolves around a group of randy mean girls inviting some trust fund guys to a party at their sorority house. I think some of these young women are hoping to bag a millionaire. All except for Nancy (Jennifer Runyon), who’s pure and innocent.
Nancy will be the final girl, in case you couldn’t figure that out.
So the girls are stuck at the sorority house during Christmas break, but that’s okay. They’ve got housemother Mrs. Jensen there to cook them beef stew and cherry pie. But not all is well at this school. Seems that there’s a killer roaming the grounds dressed as Santa Claus, stalking his next victim. You get some creative kills here. One involves a guy getting strung up with a wire garrote. I don’t know. I’m barely feeling the Christmas theme here. Maybe he could have ornamented a Christmas tree with body parts from his victims.
Come to think of it, there aren’t a whole lot of Christmas decorations at this school. No festive lights, no wreaths. We finally see a Christmas tree about two thirds of the way through. I wonder if the producers decided to make this a Christmas themed slasher about halfway through the production.
It doesn’t help that this is taking place in a sunny climate. Hey, I live in Florida, but when I think of Christmas, I think northward. Only an idiot would set a Christmas movie in Florida.
And where is David Hess? He directed this movie, but didn’t star? Imagine this same premise, a bunch of spoiled brats living it up at Christmas time and David Hess shows up in Santa suit ready to party, but then turns violent when the rich pricks decide to ridicule him. Pain and humiliation gets heaped upon the sons and daughters of the wealthy. That movie writes itself.
To All a Goodnight is that kind of movie–one that makes you imagine better schlock that could have been.
You’ll yawn ’til dawn.
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Photo by Leslie SalasJeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, and episode 549) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #203 by Drew Barth
A Kind of Truth
Some comics get meta. How many time has Grant Morrison appeared in one of their stories at this point? Injecting a bit of our reality into the universe of a comic is a fun way to approach character interactions. Some meta narrative strains go deeper. When the characters in the book start telling a story within a story, we spiral right down in Will Morris and Holley McKend’s Gospel.
Gospel opens straight-forwardly with a continuation of the cover’s narrative as a giant boar chases Matilde of Rumpstead through her village during the time of King Henry VIII. She dodges children and rushes through markets before the boar crashes into and collapses a small trade building. As the chase continues, Matilde impales the boar on her sword from above.
Here the story zooms out to show the man telling this story. Another man tells the tale of Matilde of Rumpstead’s encounter with a much smaller boar and the subsequent destruction of a potter’s home as she chases the boar from house to street before it escapes without ever being touched. And the story zooms out again to a more modern setting as Mr. Fisher tells this story of a story to Gita Karan, a civil servant checking on if Mr. Fisher needs some kind of guardianship.
As a first issue, Gospel strikes that delicate balance between revealing too much about its story and the story of the story that we’re diving through. Morris and McKend’s craft nesting narratives, every part entwining with another. Pitt, the storyteller for Matilde that Mr. Fisher tells us about, has to contend with these stories becoming too real as the actual Devil appears on a hillside. These layers call into question exactly what Pitt is seeing and if the story Mr. Fisher is telling is even real.
Sixteenth century stories never feel quite real despite the historical records and accounts that we have. How many of these stories are historically true and how many are mythologizing a moment of national pride that persists for centuries? In Gospel, so much depends on who’s telling the story.
Get excited. Get historical.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
The Perfect Life #49
Dear Dr. Perfect,
Why won’t Ben Affleck respond to my emails? So far, I’ve been very patient with him.
Inquisitively,
A saint
——————-
Dear Saint,
I went through the same thing with George C. Scott, but these were letters, so it was different. Back then, even the strangest correspondence at least had an air of authenticity. We used envelopes and stamps. We didn’t just tweet at a celebrity or send anonymous online threats to our local city council.
Just out of college, I got my first computer in the early ‘90s. AOL chatrooms were all the rage.
I immediately felt the loss of genuine connection replaced by something synthetic, alluring, and troublesome.
“But, Dr. Perfect,” the defenders said, “This is great! You can talk to anyone anywhere in the world.” I warned them that such access would amplify our carefully-guarded grievances with one another.
My predictions were extreme, but I stand by some. For instance, I foresaw automated customer service. I also predicted that people would dress more lazily with each passing year. The modern slob, I pronounced, would barely muster the will to put on a decent pair of flip flops to emerge from his cavernous domicile for sustenance. I was only half right. Nowadays, he doesn’t leave his home. I should have started a food delivery app.
No need to fret. Ben Affleck isn’t the same actor he once was. I mean, he’s no Dudley Moore, but there was a time he had American swooning with masterpiece films like Daredevil and Surviving Christmas.
He became an A-list celebrity overnight, and no one knew quite how it happened. Some credit his rise to Goodwill Hunting and its Oscar-winning screenplay he co-wrote. Others think he simply made a deal with the devil.
By the early 2000s, Affleck’s romance with Jennifer Lopez made him a household name, that is, if your house is filled with gossipy tabloid types. “Bennifer” remains one of the most famous couplings of celebrity names next to “Rizabeth,” cleverly coined following the marriage of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
The tabloids took great pleasure in dissecting both relationships to their core. We all had a good laugh, but the joke was on us.
In 2012, the Affleck-directed historical drama Argo won Best Picture. He eventually rekindled his romance with Lopez from the tabloid ash heap, and they were married some twenty years after the late-night shows had reduced “Bennifer” to a punchline. Affleck had proven most of us wrong. As a celebrity, he had no right. He certainly doesn’t have the right to ignore your emails.
An email is about as personalized as one can get. I’m often surprised when my own emails go unanswered by friends, colleagues, and celebrities I don’t know. But if I can make the time to perfect the world, you can send me the damn chicken pesto recipe I asked for two weeks ago. You hear me, Bob Piero?
I’m a little testy. My latest speaking engagement just got bumped ahead two weeks ahead due to a litany of issues. For starters, the hotel I was booked at was firebombed by a group of vanguard revolutionaries in Halloween masks. Only in L.A.!
Then, my latest book release was delayed when the publisher ran out of ink. I didn’t know that such a thing was possible. They naturally blamed “supply shortages” to assuage my concerns.
I can understand the appeal of a bygone celebrity who married Jennifer Lopez. What makes him tick? We all want to know because it would help us discover a little about ourselves. We might not star in films like Pearl Harbor and Armageddon, but we can always find happiness in that blinking cursor on our computer screen. All we have to do is type a little message and send.
_______
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #202 by Drew Barth
Print Preservation
Like when VHS was being fazed out in favor of DVDs, some comics and graphic novels have fallen through the digitization crack. Stories that have gained either a cult status or were just forgotten about will find themselves confined to their original printed form until they’re long out of print and are dug up years later for someone to discover. But, due to their out-of-print nature, it’s difficult to share them with the rest of the world—without an easy way for someone to read a story, how can anyone else know about it? Just such a thing happened to Kei Toume’s underrated classic series, Kurogane.
At its heart, Kurogane is a series about revenge and redemption. A young samurai, Jintetsu, is known all over Japan as a master assassin since the death of his father. But even his skill couldn’t prepare him for a pack of dogs that tore him to shreds. Our first real meeting with Jintetsu as readers is essentially as a corpse. It isn’t until an outcast samurai and inventor, Genkichi, resurrects Jintetsu with a blend of technology and luck. The boy is no longer completely human and is no longer able to speak. But his body is metal and inside his new limbs hide knives, swords, and accouterments to aid in his plan to avenge his murdered father. And, despite the first volume introducing us to Jintetsu, his story and reasons for revenge, and his resurrection, we’re already given the conclusion to his revenge plot. From here, we see him as a wanderer in the end of the samurai’s era, stuck between human and inhuman and between life and robot.
As a series, Toume gives herself time and space to explore themes of existence and the nature of revenge through various vignettes. But, as of right now, we’re not able to see much of those themes. And it has nothing to do with the manga itself but rather the lack of access to it. The only reason I can read this series is due to being lucky enough that my local library system carries it. Kurgane isn’t available digitally and, since it’s been out of print for so long, many volumes of it are prohibitively expensive on the resale market. And yet this is the kind of series that needs a revival—thematically and aesthetically it’s the kind of series that would resonate well with its audience now. And yet.
Preservation of these materials is the kind of thing that only comes up occasionally and when an archive of out-of-print works comes under threat, but it’s another reason why it needs to be brought up more and more often. Like with translations keeping some material out of some audiences’ hands or unknown pieces of history being illuminated by a good graphic novel, it’s these comics that fall through the digital cracks that need to be remembered and brought back more than ever. It’s only so long now until we won’t have them at all.
Get excited. Get preserved.
_______
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
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Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #168 by Drew Barth
A Life’s Collections
If we look around our rooms, we see our collections. The books, the artifacts, the bric-a-brac, the detrius. What we collect becomes just as important as why we collect. And a true collector knows when they have met another collector. Pierre Le-Tan was one of those collectors. From the apartment he maintained in Paris to the objects he drew, Le-Tan surrounded himself with collectors and collections. And it is in A Few Collectors, a series of ruminations on those collectors and the objects they surrounded themselves with, do we see the care and dedication Le-Tan had for those pieces that would define his life and his subjects’.
A Few Collectors is a collection about collectors. Le-Tan’s life was filled to bursting with individuals and their various collections—from art to wadded up paper. But it’s through his friends and acquaintances that he ruminates on their collections and the nature of collecting itself. What do these objects say about the people who collect them? Some of them define themselves by their collections while others don’t even let on that they have an apartment filled with precious objects until Le-Tan is invited over for a drink. But it’s the look at his own collection and the objects that he had and the ones he had sold off throughout years that is the most fascinating. The act of collecting is, in Le-Tan’s own words “both essential and completely useless.” But his collection and its continual tide-change maps out the kind of collector Le-Tan was: devout, yet distant.
Through Le-Tan’s inks, we truly begin to marvel at the collections he writes about. The distinct cross-hatching provides a depth and texture that makes these objects feel both ethereal and completely solid. They’re not meant to be photo realistic representations, but impressions of them through Le-Tan’s eye, but this makes them all the more real. Even the sketches of collector’s faces feel more like the person than a photograph. There is a warmth and nostalgia coming from his pen that can only be rendered by someone who had lived in 60s and 70s Paris—someone who has the first-hand account of these extraordinary collections through the decades. It is the kind of evocation that the Wes Anderson nostalgia of his younger audience can only grasp at. And yet we want to experience these collections for ourselves.
It is hard to pin down the kind of journey A Few Collectors brings its reader down. We are at once marveled at the stories of these eccentric collectors and the works that we would likely only see in museums now and pinched ever so slightly by the collecting bug ourselves. I look at my own room and the stacks of books or small plastic robots and wonder if this is the kind of collection that would be illustrated. But then I don’t mind if it is or not as it is my collection and mine alone.
Get excited. Get collecting.
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.
The Perfect Life # 36 by Dr. Perfect
Dear Doctor,
Girl Scout Cookie season is upon us, but I was recently diagnosed with a severe gluten allergy. Seriously considering taking a week off work and bingeing a box or four of Thin Mints, for old times sake. Talk me off this ledge.
Sincerely,
The Sad Scout
————
Dear Sad Scout,
I’m replying between bouts of my own Thin Mints binge. They’re glorious. When asked how many boxes I’d like to purchase by scouts outside the supermarket, my first answer is always, “Yes.”
I don’t mean to be dismissive. I’m practicing material for my set at the Laugh Hole this weekend. Ladies drink free until eleven.
Of course, my state of mind is never in question. I just need to open another fresh box of delicious Caramel deLites. Maybe you caught me at a bad time. Nonetheless, allergies can be a real pain. They prevent us from enjoying the finer things in life, like shrimp and latex rubdowns.
During my college heyday, I developed a rare allergy to silk, which hindered my increasingly swanky lifestyle. My silk robe and various briefs were the first casualties. I was then deemed persona non grata at the national silk convention.
This kind of trauma sticks with you.
A friend of mine once claimed to be allergic to “meanness.”
I told her, “You have to be kidding.”
“No,” she said. “I break out into hives whenever someone is mean to me, honest.”
“There’s no way that’s medically possible,” I said.
“My doctor told me.”
“Well, your doctor’s a quack,” I snapped.
Next thing I knew, hives coated her face.
“See?” she cried. “Thanks a lot.”
For the record, I still don’t believe her.
Considering your current, unfortunate circumstance, I suppose you have no choice but to succumb to your diagnosis and drop the Girl Scout Cookies altogether. Take comfort in the fact that sweets aren’t everything. They are to me, but that’s not important. There are plenty of perfectly reasonable and healthy alternatives out there. You’ll also be pleased to know that the Girl Scouts offer gluten-free options. Of course, this may bring little solace. Their gluten-filled varieties remain a delectable godsend known only to those fortunate enough to indulge in their savory bliss.
You could do worse, though. At least you’re not in some Turkish prison, unlike some members of my family.
My doctor recently recommended that I limit my brandy to once a month. “What about my weekly galas?” I asked, mortified. He wasn’t sympathetic.
Please send whatever leftovers you have at your earliest convenience.
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
Episode 516 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
In this week’s show, Rachel Tillman and I discuss the novels of Sally Rooney.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
The Kerouac Project of Orlando is open for applications for its residency program until April 17th.
Watch the farewell reading video of The Kerouac Project’s latest resident.
Episode 516 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Leprechaun 4: In Space
That is not how you title a movie!
Bad things were going down in a marsupial slaughtering factory in the Canadian Province of Saskatchewan. A bloodied factory worker had screamed about “devils on the loose” before breathing his last. Then came the howls from a shifting black mass of doom creeping in my direction. Dozens if not hundreds of rabid Tasmanian devils were headed toward me.
— To be continued.
This week’s movie is 1997’s Leprechaun 4: In Space from director Brian Trenchard-Smith. This is the one we’ve been waiting for, folks. I can’t think of any movie series that couldn’t be improved by sending it into outer space. This marks the last movie of the 90s era Leprechaun movies and the final movie in The Leprechaun Cycle. I remember catching this movie during its original IMAX run. Wow. You could count every whisker on Warwick Davis’s face!
Leprechaun 4: In Space begins with the Leprechaun (Warwick Davis) trying to coax the lovely Princess Zarina (Rebekah Carlton) into marriage. This isn’t taking place on Earth and Princess Zarina is not an Earthling. The year is 2096 and the Leprechaun is now living on a planet of gold. He wants to marry the princess and murder her father so he can become king of her homeward. Zarina’s on board when he promises to make her rich.
On a starship, we have a group of space marines on a mission to kill the Leprechaun. If you cynically think this movie is going to be like Aliens, but with the Leprechaun instead of the Xenomorph, you would be right. The Leprechaun manages to fall on a grenade and explode. A marine named Private Kowalski pees on his corpse, which allows the Leprechaun’s evil spirit to swim up the urine stream into the marine’s twig and berries.
Meanwhile, there’s a deformed cyborg named Dr. Mittenhand (Guy Siner) that wants to use the DNA from the princess to grow himself a new body, Princess Zarina has blue blood with regenerative properties. Mixed with Dr. Mittenhand’s DNA, this will give him a new lease on life. He is the real villain of the movie, a mad scientist complete with German accent.
Meanwhile, Kowalski is getting hot and heavy with his girlfriend. The Leprechaun manages to crawl out of Kowalski the same way he went in, revoking Kowalski’s membership in the process. With the Leprechaun on the loose, it’s open season on space marines. There’s one scene where two marines enter a room where a special bacteria devours every living thing it comes into contact with. Naturally, the Leprechaun tears a hole in one of the marine’s hazmat suits, leaving him to get eaten alive until there’s nothing left but bones.
What else? The Leprechaun and Princess Zarina manage to mess with the DNA cocktail meant to restore Dr. Mittenhand. They combine it with some tarantula and scorpion DNA, turning Dr. Mittenhand into a freakish monster. Also, the Leprechaun gets hit with a growth ray that turns him into a giant. What will the marines do? This is the last movie in my Leprechaun box set. Do I spring for more? Let me sit on that one for a while.
Photo by Leslie Salas.
Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, and episode 496) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #167 by Drew Barth
Halloween in March
Did you know it’s only seven more months until Halloween? Good horror comics have come out already, like every month is Halloween. Pentagram of Horror! by Marco Fontanili brings in a classic horror feeling. With only the first issue out, we can already see the seeds of its terror.
“My Own Hell” is the first of five stories Fontanili has crafted for Pentagram of Horror and centers on an unnamed protagonist who bargains his soul to the Devil for the talent to create great art for ten years. At the end of the ten years, his soul is then forfeit. But for those ten years, the unnamed man does nothing. Burdened with the idea of the oncoming deadline, he is frozen in his own artistic hell as his work wasn’t being bought and had received no recognition. The Devil then comes to collect. But in a Twilight Zone-esque twist, we discover that this has happened before. This man has been living out the day the Devil had come to collect his soul over and over for years and was made to forget at the end of each day all so the Devil could watch the man’s horror again and again.
Pentagram of Horror is a mature series that abounds in the blood of its characters, but is also a subtle series. Due to Fontanili’s coloring choice, the blood and the gore look muted. We see our main character torn to shreds across multiple pages with hooks and chains, but it isn’t so visceral as to just be gore-porn. There is a subtlety to this gore instead achieved through a combination of the muted color palette, zoomed in panels that present the worst of the violence in an abstract, and heavy shading where we can only really see shapes. It’s an incredibly clever way to present the audience with something horrifying, but keeping them just far enough away that they can’t get a full glimpse of it. The horror comes both from the story and the unknown torture in the same vein as the titular Alien barely being seen in its own film.
Pentagram of Horror is a callback to the pre-code pulps and horror series that relied on shocking their audiences with depictions of the most ghastly gore possible. But Fontanili is able to more beyond simple facsimile and into a new horror vein with this anthology. It’s the gore without the gratuitousness; it’s the spooks without cheap titillation. This is horror that’s able to take its own nostalgia and apply it to modern comic storytelling and sensibilities. That’s really what a good horror series should be doing now.
Get excited. Get spooked.
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.
Episode 515 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
In this week’s show, I talk to Sara Manning Peskin about the history of the mysteries and discoveries of medical science.
Photo by Gene Smirnov.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
The Kerouac Project of Orlando is open for applications for its residency program until April 17th.
Episode 515 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #166 by Drew Barth
The Long Violent
How much do we really inherit from our parents? Right before the plague hit, I took a look at the first issue of Tartarus and how the dual narrative of parent and child influenced how the story presented itself and its grand sci-fi landscapes. As the series has come to a close, we can dive a little further into what Johnnie Christmas, Jack T. Cole, Andrew Krahnke, Hilary Jenkins, and Jim Campbell have done with this new world and just how the blood of a warlord can shape entire star systems.
Tartarus, at its core, is the story of a mother and her daughter—Surka and Tilde, respectively. We begin with Surka’s death and, seventeen years later, the discovery that Tilde, a young cadet in the Baxan empire miltary academy, is her daughter. Tilde is immediately flagged as a threat to the empire and given the option to kill herself as punishment for being Surka’s daughter. Happenstance occurs and Tilde ends up on the cut-throat mining planet of Tartarus to try to find her way to her childhood home, but not before becoming entangled with her estranged brother, helping him launch a war against a local criminal organization, and attempting to stop said war from spilling into political assassinations. The latter, of course, fails. But not before lights appear in the sky and a ship hovers above Tartarus with the mother Tilde, and the rest of the world, long thought was dead.
While we don’t know how the world will react to Surka’s return, the series is taking a hiatus after issue ten, we do see the deep fear of everyone associated with her. From the first issue, Surka is the boogeyman of Tartarus. Even in prison, it’s expected that she’ll escape to cause more havoc. Even her blood being out in the world is enough to cause the head of the Baxan military academy to confront Tilde directly. But then Tilde is great at the kind of violence that defines Tartarus. She fits right in with her brother as the pair tear across the planet. But she has reservations—her own dreams providing visions of what she could become should she fully succumb to that desire for violence. As much as she tries, though, Tilde is still caught in the wake of the bloodshed around her. She wants to escape, but the world will not let her.
Is the war around Tilde simply circumstance, or is it something invited in because of her mother? And is that something that can ever be changed for the better? Christmas, Cole, Krahnke, Jenkins, and Campbell grapple with these questions throughout Tartarus and the answer is never really clear. We see Surka appearing to change—looking to find a way to bring one of her loved ones back—but she is still Surka, the warlord that broke Tartarus. But then this is the family saga we’re audience to—one with as much bloodshed as any other. Change for the both of them likely won’t be easy.
Get excited. Get violent.
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.
Episode 514 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
In this week’s show, I talk to Laura Costas about the pleasures of disorientation, the surprises of actual history, the complexity of myth, and postmodernism.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
The Kerouac Project of Orlando is open for applications for its residency program.
Episode 514 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #373 by Jeff Shuster
The Secret of NIMH
I like cartoons. Stop giving me grief.
We heard the screeching, a sound of hellish death coming from beyond. The factory security guard brandished a taser and I wondered why we hadn’t run away with the rest of the factory personnel that had nearly trampled us. A factory employee, bloodied and limping, staggered toward us. He was missing an eye and his right hand covered the crimson stump that was now his left. The poor man collapsed, crying out, “They’re loose! The devils are loose!” — To be continued.
This week’s movie is 1982’s The Secret of NIMH from director Don Bluth. I’d completely forgotten about this movie. The DVD release seemed lacking so I never snagged it. Yet I remember watching The Secret of NIMH over and over again on Showtime when I was kid. I was an animation snob then, cutting my teeth on classic Disney shorts like Silly Symphonies.
I have to give Don Bluth and his team of animators credit. After defecting from the Disney company, they went all out to create a feature on par with those created in the glory days of the Walt Disney Animation Studios. The movie centers around Mrs. Brisby, a widowed mouse and mother of four children, one of whom has pneumonia.
The sick child’s name is Timothy. She’s been advised to keep him on bed rest for four weeks or he may die. The only problem is the farmer’s plow is coming early this year. If Mrs. Brisby doesn’t move her family, they all will die.
This simple conflict sets up an amazing journey for our main character that brings her to seek counsel with the Great Owl, a terrifying giant with glowing eyes. He tells her to seek out the Rats of NIMH, hyper intelligent creatures who may know of a way to move her house without her son having to leave his bed. We learn that rats had been experimented on in a lab, injected with a drug that raised their intelligence to that of a human. And we learn that some mice had also been given this drug, including Mrs Brisby’s late husband, Jonathan.
The Secret of Nimh features an all star voice cast that includes Elizabeth Hartman, Derek Jacobi, Dom Deluise, Arthur Malet, Hermione, Baddeley, Shannon Doherty, Will Wheaton, and John Carradine. The movie’s score was composed by the great Jerry Goldsmith, who also scored Poltergeist that year. The Secret of NIMH had stiff competition that summer as it had gone up against such movies as Blade Runner, E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, Conan the Barbarian, TRON, and John Carpenter’s The Thing.
What stood out for me when watching The Secret of NIMH so many years later is how it makes a simple farm into a c world fillemplex with danger and mystery. A family cat becomes a fearsome monster, a farmer’s plow becomes a force of nature, and a rose bush becomes a city of marvels. I hope this movie gets a proper remaster some day as it stands as the pinnacle of animated feature films from the 1980s.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #165 by Drew Barth
The Longest Step
In comics, silence is a tool. The lingering moments between characters, the uncluttered panels, the ability to let the art simply be—all of these help the comic to establish a sense of peace or dramatic tension. But silence in comics can be difficult to wield. As a medium that relies on the interplay between words and images, meaning can be easily lost when those words are absent. But when done properly—when the image conveys the story perfectly—it can create a comic that swells with story in its quiet spaces, like in Step by Bloody Step by Si Suprrier, Matías Bergara, and Matheus Lopes.
All we have from the first page is an unnamed girl, an unnamed suit of armor, and the snow-swept landscape they’re wandering through. The armor cradles the girl and is heading in a direction. Toward what, we don’t know. All we know is that they are on their way somewhere and nothing will stop the armor from delivering the girl. Across landscapes that border on the outright magical to desert wastelands to fields of flowers, the pair keep traveling without saying a single word to one another as neither of them know how to speak. Or, at least, to each other. It is in this silence between the two that we see, through the weeks and months, their relationship develop. Almost sisterly, the girl plays as the armor protects all the while a pair of men seek them out.
But the thing that stands out most in this story is the effective use of mise en scéne by Bergara throughout. These establishing shots and expansive vistas envisioned every few pages gives us both a sense of scale and mood. We have these moments of the girl playing in the foreground while the armor fights off something horrifying in the background that demonstrate their place in this world. But it is in these vast, quiet pages that we really see the scale of them both. The girl is tiny enough to fit in the hands of the armor, but they’re both still dwarfed by the sheet scale of the world they’re traveling through. We never really know where they’re traveling to, but we know immediately how long it will be until they get there: a long goddamn time. But then we’re happy for that, as it means we get to experience more of Bergara’s art.
Not since Bad Island have I felt a silence as resonant as Step by Bloody Step. Spurrier, Bergara, and Lopes have created something that warrants the hours required to absorb every detail in these pages. Step by Bloody Step is already one of the best comics of the year and I only wish I could experience it with fresh eyes again.
Get excited. Get stepping.
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.
Episode 513 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
In this week’s show, I talk to Jane-Rebecca Cannarella about genre bending & blending, illustrating literature, and the dialectics of Disney’s The Little Mermaid.
Photo by Cassandra Panek.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
The Kerouac Project of Orlando is open for applications for its residency program.
Episode 513 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #392 by Jeff Shuster
Malignant
8th Wonder of the World
There was Edwige, my kangaroo traveling companion of the past year, locked up in a cage, waiting to be butchered by a bunch of zany Saskatchewanians. I wanted to free her, but I had to keep up the ruse of being a factory inspector in front of the guard who let me in the building. Just then, an alarm sounded and before I knew it, dozens of factory workers rushed past me. The guard scrambled for his walkie talkie, but it slipped from his fingers as his face grew pale in reaction to what was coming in our direction — To be continued.
This week’s movie is 2021’s Malignant from director James Wan. I think this might be my favorite movie of 2021. In fact, I’m not even sure how Warner Bros. okayed this project. It may have something to do with James Wan directing such hits for the studio like The Conjuring and Aguaman. They gave him carte blanche to do what he wanted with this movie. I see it as a modern take on the William Castle movies that were so popular in the 1950s.
The movie begins back in 1993 at a psychiatric research hospital built on an oceanside cliff. A patient named Gabriel has attacked several of the staff and seems to possess psionic power over electricity. A Dr. Florence Weaver (Jacqueline McKenzie) declares that it’s “Time to cut out the cancer.” We get a credit sequence featuring some gnarly surgery sequences and before we know it, it’s the modern day.
We’re introduced to Madison Lake (Annabelle Wallis), a young nurse on her third pregnancy after two previous miscarriages. She has an abusive husband that complains about watching his babies die inside of her. He knocks Madison’s head against the bedroom wall and then apologizes. He leaves to get some ice. Madison locks the door behind him before conking out on the bed. Later that night, her husband is brutally murdered by a mysterious figure cloaked in black. Madison goes to investigate and is attacked by the killer. She survives, but suffers another miscarriage.
Detectives Kekoa Shaw (George Young) and Regina Moss (Michole Briana White) are called to the grisly murder scene, but have no leads as to who committed the crime. That’s okay because more murders are coming. It seems that the mysterious killer has a beef with the staff of the psychiatric facility we saw at the start of the movie. He finds Dr. Florence Weaver and beats her to death with a trophy she won for medical excellence. The killer then sharpens what’s left of the trophy into a deadly dagger to take out his next victim.
Madison has a psychic link with the killer. It’s a rather cool effect. Madison will be all alone in her house and her surroundings will completely peel away. She sees everything the killer sees, every horrific detail. Eventually, the killer reaches out to Madison, revealing himself to be Gabriel. Madison recalls once having an imaginary friend named Gabriel.
To say anything more about Malignant would spoil the big reveal, but I do highly recommend this movie for horror fans. Malignant is currently available to stream on HBO Max.
Photo by Leslie Salas.
Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, and episode 496) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #164 by Drew Barth
Red Hell
Years ago, Grant Morrison talked about wanting to turn the DC Universe into a living, breathing organism. To what end? Who knows with Morrison. But if we’re going to collectively push for a comic universe as a living thing, we need to think about how it will age. DC’s Black Label imprint has been exploring this aspect of the comic universe for a few years now, most notably with Catwoman: Lonely City last year, and now with the first issue of Jeff Lemire, Doug Mahnke, David Baron, and Steve Wands’ Swamp Thing: Green Hell.
Set after the inevitable climate apocalypse that will flood the earth, Swamp Thing: Green Hell centers on a small island that peaks above the water and the small group of survivors who cling to it. Many residents of the island are barely scraping by as their food is either nonexistent when they go out fishing or pilfered by pirates who routinely make raids on their settlement. But during all of this, representatives of the Red, the Green, and the Rot commune. The Rot is finding fewer and fewer things to feed as most life is now underwater. The Red cannot provide meat to rot as it cannot harm itself. The Green, then, must provide to them both by wiping out the last vestiges of humanity. And the Green begins its crusade by calling forth a new, more violent Swamp Thing to that small island before its residents turn to the one person who could potentially help them: John Constantine.
John Constantine, however, is an old man at this point. He’s still, and likely always will be, one of the only characters to age in real time. What can old man Constantine do? Through his classic bastard sorcery, he can summon up Alec Holland, the original Swamp Thing. Alec, however, is retired. His mind has been at peace within the ether for decades. But his Swamp Thing body, like Constantine’s, has seen age. Both of them are old men, in a world that likely won’t survive the next year, and they’re the only ones who can do something to help this world.
Much like Catwoman: Lonely City, we see characters like Constantine and Swamp Thing having to contend with their limits as people who exist in time. And it’s that little aspect that gives them something more than many other characters and series: a sense of the finite. If Constantine were still aging as he had been in his original series, he’d be pushing seventy right now. As magical as him and Swamp Thing are, they cannot live forever. And it feels like Swamp Thing: Green Hell is leading to that conclusion from its first issue. This may be a reality with magic and sapient elemental forces, but it is still a kind of living, breathing reality. And what’s what makes stories like this feel more real.
Get excited. Get green.
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.
Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.
The Perfect Life #35 by Dr. Perfect
Dr. Perfect,
What kind of doctor are you? Mine keeps trying to put me on antipsychotic meds, but I don’t want them. I’m looking for a second opinion. Do you take United Healthcare?
Yours,
Aaron
————
Dear Aaron,
I seldom divulge my professional background, but in your case my PhD in Psychology might come in handy. I also minored in dance, which helps with the ladies.
Women like a man with rhythm, a perfect man, well-spoken and confident. Having a beard apparently helps too, but I reject going through life looking like Jeremiah Johnson. But you didn’t write for dating advice, assuming you’re single or into women or even human. You could be an alien because they’re out there. The Pentagon has confirmed as much, in so many words.
I get letters from people claiming they’re aliens all the time. They always give themselves away with a subtle hint toward the end, like asking for Thai recipes or dog grooming tips. Aliens aren’t interested in any of that stuff. They’ve clearly traveled millions of lightyears to mess with farmers and Air Force pilots here on earth. They just want to linguistically scan my responses to get at my sweet, sweet biorhythms, which they hope to use for their nefarious purposes.
Do you talk to yourself, cut people off in traffic, or finger paint in your own blood? If so, that’s normal behavior nowadays. It’s not like you’re questioning the government or anything.
There are these psychopathy checklists that help professionals narrow down personality traits and make assessments from there. If you were my patient, though, I’d recommend a weekend spa retreat at your own expense. Those kinds of getaways always helped me block out voices.
Feel free to fax me your insurance information at your earliest convenience.
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
Episode 512 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
In this week’s show, I talk to Lan Samantha Chan about writing a novel over a long period of time, learning and teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop, the value of writing communities, and balancing teaching, administrative work, and writing.
Photo by IfeOluwa Nihinlola.
Plus I chat with my dear friend Christopher Booth, who now lives in France.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
The Kerouac Project of Orlando is open for applications for its residency program.
Episode 512 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #391 by Jeff Shuster
Edge of the Axe
Scream prototype.
I had infiltrated a marsupial slaughtering factory under the guise of a welder. They had recently installed some factory equipment for their illegal kangaroo canning operation. I was to inspect this equipment and give it the okay.
While the security guard explained this to me, three cages housing kangaroos wheeled past me. Through the bars of the last cage, I saw Edwige, my kangaroo companion, who I’d thought I’d never see again!
— To be continued.
This week’s movie is 1989’s Edge of the Axe from director José Ramón Larraz. This curiosity was a co-production between the United States and Spain. Such cosmopolitanism reminds me of Madhouse, an Italian-made slasher movie I reviewed last year. Like Madhouse, Edge of the Axe was shot in America and featured American actors. And while the movie takes place in California, Edge of the Axe follows the Canadian slasher movie model–it’s a whodunit.
Edge of the Axe begins with a woman sitting in her car as it enters a car wash only to have her window and face smashed in by, you guessed it, an axe. The killer is masked and one wonders if this movie was an influence for Scream.
When the killer where’s a mask, everyone is a suspect.
We’re introduced to Gerald Martin (Barton Faulks), a young man obsessed with computers who needs the latest technology to play those newfangled computer games. He works at a pest control business with his best friend Richard (Page Moseley). The two of them get called over to a bar to investigate an odd smell coming from the basement. First they see rats, but upon further investigation, they discover the corpse of a murdered barmaid.
With two confirmed murders, the town is in a bit of frenzy. That doesn’t stop Gerald from sweet talking Lillian Nebbs (Christina Marie Lane), the daughter of the bar owner, into going out with him. Just like Gerald, she’s into technology and he gives her his old computer so the two of them can communicate through the computer? Imagine that. Being able to communicate through a computer!
Lillian confides in Gerald about a sordid incident involving her cousin, Charlie. When she was little, she pushed her cousin a little too hard on a swing set and sent him flying head first into a brick wall and whatnot. Charlie got sent to a mental hospital to recover. Lillian suspects he may be the killer. Charlie was released from the hospital about two years ago, but Lillian never made contact with him.
There are more murders. I have to admit that Gerald is a little too calm during all of this. Maybe he’s too busy playing Preppie! or Crush, Crumble, and Chomp (look them up). The murderer gets revealed, the axe swings, there’s a case of mistaken identity, etc. I found Edge of the Axe on Prime streaming, though there’s also an Arrow Home Video release of this one. Check it out.
Photo by Leslie Salas
Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, and episode 496) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #161 by Drew Barth
Psychedelic-Tinted Lenses
History in graphic novels is always interesting to behold. We’re given that midway point of intimacy between written accounts and documentaries—the interplay between visuals and words that comics does so well gives us that time and space other mediums can lack. And this is proven even more so with works like Project MK-Ultra: Sex, Drugs, & the CIA by Stewart Kenneth Moore. This fictionalized history of Project MK-Ultra dives into the era of the project in all its psychedelic horror with the unflinching eye of a journalist digging up the most putrid dirt.
Seymour Phillips is a writer for the San Francisco Examiner in the early 1970s—a struggling journalist trying to find the story that could finally make his career, which he thinks he has in the drug trafficking arrest of Ronald Stark. Stark, caught with a kilogram of LSD (equivalent to about ten million doses), has been arrested before, but was bailed out by someone with tenuous connections to the CIA. From there, Phillips’ life takes a drastic dip as he’s falsely caught with enough pot to send him to prison and enough time away to make him a pariah in most circles. But an unnamed man leaving him clues propels him back to the story that nearly ruined his life. As Seymour learns more about the classified Project MK-Ultra, we see more of the project’s history and the nonchalant misery enacted by the men at its helm.
But then we don’t know how much in this history is true or false. MK-Ultra has long been the realm of the conspiracy theorist, even when it was acknowledged as a real project the 70s. Due to the destruction of many of the project’s documents, not much is known outside of rumor, conjecture, and the scant surviving files that brought to light the CIA’s efforts to develop their own methods of mind control. This, however, is what comics can do best. By observing what may have occurred—the bits and pieces we can glean from the people who had lived through it—we can start to understand the magnitude of its scale and how people were affected. And while we can never know everything that happened as a result of the project, we can get a glimpse of the possibilities and the horrors of it.
Unflinching in its intentions, Project MK-Ultra is the kind of graphic novel that brings what we know about a shady past to the forefront, but gives it to us wrapped in a story and a protagonist we want to follow as the horrors unfold.
Get excited. Get dosed.
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.
Drew Barth (Episode 331 & 485) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.
Episode 509 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
On today’s show, I interview the poet Sandra Lim about optimism, editing through the pile of a poem, letting oneself go in the current of the stream, and finding a grounding in the abstractions of mind and word.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
The Kerouac Project of Orlando is open for applications for its residency program.
Episode 509 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #388 by Jeff Shuster
Just Before Dawn
Stay away from psychotic hillbillies.
I was working with a Canadian secret agent named Larry. Together, we planned to infiltrate a factory where they slaughtered and canned kangaroos and other marsupials. Larry charged me with freeing the animals while he distracted the guards. He gave me a box cutter and a blowtorch. I was to sneak through the back while he created a diversion.
He showed me some factory blueprints and I pretended to understand, but honestly, who really knows how to read those things?
This week’s movie is 1981’s Just Before Dawn from director Jeff Lieberman. It’s a slasher movie and I’ve been known to cover slasher movies every now and then on this blog. I keep thinking I’m going to run out of these films, but there seems to be an endless supply of them. I guess the bulk were made between 1979 and 1982, probably trying to capitalize on the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween.
Our movie begins with two tipsy hunters named Ty (Mike Kellin) and Vachel (Charles Bartlett) goofing around in an abandoned church somewhere in the Oregon wilderness. Ty is getting liquored up something fierce when he sees a creepy hillbilly staring down at him through a hole in the roof. When he calls Vachel over, the crazed hillbilly has disappeared. Must have been the alcohol. I’m a little fuzzy on what happens next, but I believe Vachel gets disemboweled and Ty runs for his life.
Next we get a bunch of rowdy college students riding along in their RV blasting Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” Driving the vehicle is Warren (Gregg Henry) who apparently inherited a lot of land up in the wilds of Oregon. The guy even owns a mountain. I wish I owned a mountain. Anyway, these crazy kids are ready for a weekend of camping, skinny dipping, and drunken frivolity. A forest ranger played by George Kennedy warns them not to go up in those hills, but those “damn, fool kids never learn.” Did you know George Kennedy starred in a made-for-tv movie where he tussled with a rabid skunk?
Good times!
Warren and his friends run into a drunken Ty who warns them about a demon up in those hills. Ty begs the kids to take him away from there, but they refuse, toss him a couple of sandwiches, and drive off. As they pull away, the maniacal hillbilly donning Vachel’s hunting vest, hops on the back of the van. Ty laughs at their impending doom.
Warren has a girlfriend named Constance (Deborah Benson), the nice and normal one who will probably end up being the “final girl” when all is said and done. There are brothers Jonathan (Chris Lemmon) and Daniel (Ralph Seymour), one of whom is a jokester. Jonathan’s girlfriend is along for the ride too, a redhead with an obsession with makeup and nail polish.
Just Before Dawn is a slow burn. Not one of the college students get murdered the first night. You can’t say they don’t get plenty of warning. Warren learns that he’s a landlord as there are people living up in the mountains and inbreeding may have been taking place over the years. Constance gets a moment at the end of the movie where she confronts the killer and it’s something to behold.
It reminds me of how I was told once to kill a lion if I ever ran into one.
Photo by Leslie Salas.
Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, and episode 496) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #160 by Drew Barth
The Broadest Shoulders to Carry
I love giant robots. I’ve written about them in the past and I’m going to write about them in the future—it is inevitable. Luckily, another inevitability is giant robot comics getting published on a regular basis. Take We Ride Titans by Tres Dean, Sebastian Píriz, Dee Cunniffe, and Jim Campbell: another story about giant robots, but one that takes a different angle. While giant robot stories can look at connections between people or connections to religion, We Ride Titans goes explores familial bonds.
Set in a world where kaiju attacks happen often—so much so that people don’t even seem to panic when they need to evacuate to underground bunkers—We Ride Titans centers on Defender Nexus, the Titan of New Hyperion. It is the giant robot that has been piloted by the Hobbs family for years and its latest pilot, Dej, has a drinking problem. And you can’t drink and pilot a twenty-story tall robot. Kit, his sister, has long since distanced herself from her family, New Hyperion, and the idea of piloting Defender Nexus. But as much as she wants to keep that distance, Dej leveling a city block due to drunk piloting drags her back.
For a story about family and giant robots, the most striking thing about this first issue is how Píriz utilizes space on the page. The Titans themselves feel cluttered—almost like they are cobbled together from spare parts—but the way Píriz balances these cluttered machines with white space and panel overlays to cut through and keep our eyes focused on the action at hand. And this isn’t just for action-oriented moments. As we cut to Kit and her wife watching the news of Dej’s mistakes, we are given four panels of TV screen amid a white background before the TV cuts out with a vast white space on either side of the panel. As a visual cue of silence, it works incredibly well to hear what is happening on the page. Likewise a few pages later as Kit and her speech bubbles are given another swath of white space to let her linger for the moment before moving on. The quiet in these panels gives We Ride Titans a different feel from many other giant robot series.
Somehow we’re only in the first issue of We Ride Titans and due to the time that Dean, Píriz, Cunniffe, and Campbell put into these pages, it feels as though an entire series has taken place. But that’s one of the strongest things about this first issue: we get the time and the space to really seep into its world and the Hobbs family. We aren’t being rushed to establish everything right away. As fast as the cover and the action looks, they’re there to help us hold our breath for a long exhale later.
Get excited. Get giant.
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.
Drew Barth (Episode 331 & 485) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.
The Perfect Life #34 by Dr. Perfect
Dear Dr. Perfect,
I suspect my 9-year-old son is watching porn. Can you recommend any porn that would be age appropriate for him? I don’t want him to pick up any bad habits.
Sincerely,
A concerned mom
————————
Sweet matriarch, lock that child in your house, turn off the electricity, and confiscate the cretin’s phone. Instead of letting him watch porn, buy lots of porn for him to read. This will strengthen his literacy skills and gamify his perversions for SAT success.
I recommend the Marquis DeSade, Anaïs Nin, and Pia Sparks. Never give him Fifty Shades of Grey, which can result in brain damage.
I remember when my own mother gave me my first erotic novel, The Diary of a Young Maid. Technically, the gift tag had my father’s name on it, but I knew that was just my mother’s famous shyness.
With the sexual revolution of the ’60s spearheading a more permissive and decadent culture, she knew that I would be exposed to all sorts of mature content during my formidable formative years. XXX theaters were the norm, divorce rates were skyrocketing, and disco was turning happy homemakers into harlots.
My father, on the other hand, offered his own assessments. “Why settle with one wife, when you can have a dozen?” he said, clearly influenced by the polygamous Mormon family living across the street. He always talked that way just out of an earshot of my mother, careful to never let his envy of our neighbors show.
Back then, my classmates passed around Playboy magazines with fervor, whereas I was steeped in the finer eroticism of the mind. Why gaze upon the torn and tawdry pages of convenience store smut when you could read from the world’s finest literary sexual deviants?
Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer piqued my youthful interest. The novel, published in 1934, was still taboo. We didn’t have a wealth of erotic fiction to choose from. Genres upon dirty sub-genres would have to wait until the Internet. Today, you can download tentacle erotica on your Kindle along with endless books involving inters-pecies dinosaur sex. The abundance of such sleaze makes one yearn for the classics, like Endless Love.
Many writers are as uncomfortable writing about sex as the public is reading it. Sex, for most couples, takes place in the dark. Conventionally speaking, we’re not too keen on things that happen in the dark. I prefer my own lovemaking in the daytime.
Where were we?
If erotic fiction isn’t your son’s thing, mandate more videogames into his routine. There’s a fine line between “carnal” and “carnage,” and he’d be better off shooting bad guys and not thinking about sex until he is thirteen.
Or get him some of those old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books.
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
Episode 508 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
On today’s show, co-novelists Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman talk about corporate cults, collaborative writing, and satire.
Plus The Drunken Odyssey’s video producer Shawn McKee comes over to my carport to discuss Joel Cohen’s recent film of Macbeth.
For the record, this is not the carport of The Drunken Odyssey’s secret headquarters.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
The Kerouac Project of Orlando is open for applications for its residency program.
Episode 508 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
The Curator of Schlock #387 by Jeff Shuster
Nighthawks
The movie, not the Hopper painting.
So I learned that the town of Mooseville in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan was involved in an illegal kangaroo and koala bear slaughtering operation. The town salmon canning factory was a front for their black market canned marsupial meat. While imprisoned there, I ran into Larry, a secret agent employed by the Canadian government who bore a striking resemblance to Don Knotts. He made me a “field asset” and together we were going to bring these kangaroo butchers down!
This week’s movie is 1981’s Nighthawks from director Bruce Malmuth. Who says we don’t cover big movies on this blog? They don’t come bigger than Nighthawks, a Hollywood blockbuster starring Sylvester Stallone, Billy Dee Williams, Rugter Hauer, Lindsay Wagner, Nigel Davenport, Joe Spinell, and Persis Khambatta. Some of you may remember Persis Khambatta as Lieutenant Ilia from Star Trek: The Motion Sickness. Not that I remember her from that movie, you nerd! We’ve also got an original score by Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer fame.
Our movie begins with an old lady walking down a darkened New York City alley. Three hooligans emerge from the shadows demanding her purse. One rough threatens her face with a switchblade. The old lady wields her purse like a mace, busting the mouth of one of the muggers. Off comes the old woman’s mask, and we get a fully bearded Sly Stallone as Sergeant Deke DaSilva. Joining him is Sergeant Matthew Fox (Billy Dee Williams). Together they form the Nighthawks, a duo of elite undercover police officers.
Meanwhile, in merry old England, a terrorist named Wulfgar (Rutger Hauer), blows up a London department store in the name of all victims of British colonialism. Turns out he was hired by the Irish Republican Army, but they’re not too pleased with children being killed in their name. The police learn Wulfgar’s identity and almost capture him with the aid of an IRA informant, but Wulfgar makes short work of them. Through his partner, Shakka (Persis Khambatta), he arranges some plastic surgery and heads out to New York City.
DaSilva and Fox are pulled from their street duties and assigned to ATAC (Anti-Terrorist Action Command). A British terrorism expert, Inspector Peter Hartman (Nigel Davenport), pushes DeSilva in ways he doesn’t appreciate like when he brings up DaSiva’s failed marriage to Irene (Lindsay Wagner). Wulfgar starts seeing a woman he met at a disco, but murders her when she discovers his trunk of guns and bombs. This gives DaSilva and Fox the bright idea of finding the club this young woman frequented.
When they find the club she frequented, DaSilva spots a guy who matches an estimated description of Wulfgar with plastic surgery. DaSilva gives him the stink eye for a bit before yelling out “Wulfgar!” Out pops a gun and Wulfgar starts lighting up the club before dashing out the back, DaSilva and Fox in close pursuit. DaSilva has Wulfgar in his sights, but then Wulfgar takes an old lady hostage. Fox screams at DaSilva to take the shot, but he’s too concerned about shooting the old lady and so the terrorist gets away.
I won’t spoil anymore of the movie, but this one is a keeper. I heard this languished in development hell for years and was originally intended to be The French Connection III. The movie was also trimmed from its original length. I think I read that there was a missing scene of Stallone bawling his eyes out after his ex-wife refuses to take him back.
What could have been!
Still, what we got is a taught thriller that’s well worth your time. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get down to Keith Emerson’s super-funky synth groove on The Spencer Davis Group’s “I’m a Man.”
Photo by Leslie Salas.
Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, and episode 496) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #159 by Drew Barth
One Large Cloud Overhead
I’ve written in the past about influential manga finally getting official English translations and how this is broadening our understanding of how comics work globally. Many of these alternative manga were the touchstones of the medium at the time of publication. And it is work like The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud by Kuniko Tsurita that have done so much for the alternative manga scene in the 60s and 70s that would come to define what manga could do at that time in history.
A collection of short stories collected from Tsurita’s career, The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud shows not only an array of Tsurita’s skills as an illustrator, it also showcases her development as a manga creator over the course of fifteen years. From her earliest stories, like “Nonsense” and “Woman,” both published in legendary alternative manga magazine Garo when she was eighteen, we first see her fascination with life, death, and the idea of succumbing to a cyclical fate. But it is the story “Anti” that Tsurita’s look at death begins to crystallize. In this story, we follow a filmmaker shooting footage of an active volcano before spotting a man struggling to climb out of the vent. The filmmaker does nothing as the man falls and uses the footage he’s shot as the climax of his own experimental film. The laughter following his showing the film to friends after they ask if the man falling was an effect is as haunting as any horror comic since.
The titular “The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud” is one of the shortest pieces, but it’s striking conclusion, shown as the collection’s cover, is representative of Tsurita herself—heading straight toward a defined oblivion. Her own failing health would remain a constant in much of her work in the later 70s and early 80s. The final story in the collection, “Flight,” is about a woman and her fiance as he disappears in a sudden storm on a flight back to her. The story’s lighter ending still touches on the hope of something after death—even if you are never able to see your loved ones again, you may still leave a piece of yourself for them to hold onto.
Drawn & Quarterly helping to bring these manga to an English-speaking audience only helps to make comics a better place. Tsurita’s work in The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud is the kind of work that sticks to your bones. It reminds you of your own mortality without falling into despair. There is sadness—there will always be sadness—but to confront that sadness and embrace it is human nature. We can see the end of things on the horizon, but we ride to it together regardless.
Get excited. Get riding.
Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.
Drew Barth (Episode 331 & 485) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.
The Perfect Life #33 by Dr. Perfect
Dumpster Diving for Love
Dear Doctor Perfect,
I can’t find anyone who shares my raccoon kink. And before you get ahead of yourself, no, it’s not bestiality—I like to dress in a raccoon costume and dig through the garbage. It’s harmless. Exploratory. Playful. Everything sex should be! So why haven’t I found a partner yet? How are there over 20,000 Bronies in this world but apparently only one lone, lonely racoon?
I hope that with your wide audience and the power of the internet, you can help me find my people. My ultimate fantasy is group sex, so if you know of any secluded dumpsters, please advise.
____________________________________
Dear Lonesome Raccoon,
I took one glance at this letter and said, “Not another one!” I get a lot of inquiries from the furry and Brony communities as they both navigate through the dizzying minefield of love. Or in most cases that cross my desk, kinky, fetish-driven sex.
I recall my dating years like they were yesterday. Naturally, I was perfect at it, but the entire charade wore thin. Lost in a sea of hapless singles collectively clawing their way to potential companionship was no way to live. I can’t say the times weren’t without their charm. This was the early ‘80s when life was a party. You’d probably fit right in, because everyone was wearing raccoon costumes back then, among the usual drug-fueled kinkiness.
The most important factor in any romantic pursuit is maintaining one’s dignity. This is where you’re “holding all the cards,” as they say. If dumpster-diving raccoon role play/foreplay is your thing, don’t settle for anything less. Once you start compromising, the dream is dead. Next thing you know, you’ll be languishing in the corner of some hipster bar in an ill-fitting cardigan, pretending to text on your phone.
My mother raised me to never give up. In grade school, I went through a typically adolescent nihilist phase after reading copious amounts of Nietzsche. Simple requests to take out the garbage were met with lengthy diatribes from yours truly about the structural fallacy of waste, among other grievances.
She told me to leave and not come back until I was “sane.” For fourteen years, I lived in boxcars and sundry motel rooms, eventually returning home a man. Then, I moved out for real and found success in multiple endeavors. I, too, had felt like a raccoon in a maze. Or was it a rat?
Consider that raccoons are solitary creatures by nature. You’ve set yourself at a disadvantage that could be easily remedied with the right finesse. Ignore the bronies. I know plenty of secluded dumpsters, but they’re usually swarming with Hollywood executives, searching for the next franchise to reboot. Fear not. With Valentine’s Day approaching, there’s bound to be an animal orgy behind the nearest Waffle House.
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
Episode 507 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
On today’s show, memoirist Sonya Huber discusses how to write the way that we think, including the semiotic leapfrogs of memory, and trying to depict the precarious balance of reality.
Photo by Francesca Andre.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
TDO listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
The Kerouac Project of Orlando is open for applications for its residency program.
Episode 507 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).