Bissette Blather
Invite Me Into Your Home Today, and I Will Talk Your Head Off

No time to post my followup to the Video Watchblog 'Favorite DVDs of 2007' list this morning, but my Massachusetts amigo David Kraus just posted a looooong podcast interview with yours truly, so you can listen to me yammer about the current state of horror movies, the nature of the genre, and the emergence of the current DVD horror renaissance from the 1980s-90s video black and 'gray' markets and more.

Here's the link to Dave's Nine Panel Nerds, where my podcast conversation with Dave awaits you --

-- and please, post comments to Dave's podcast site! While you're there, check out the other podcasts; I particularly enjoyed the Godzilla Thanksgiving chat, and the Halloween horror comics free for all.

Dave and I will be doing this again soon -- we've planned a show on my drive-in, nabe and grindhouse memories, which some of you should find entertaining.

Gojira sez: Pass the duck sauce -- or else!

*Speaking of Thanksgiving with Godzilla, this Thursday is the night for the fund-raising Christmas Godzilla dinner with Brattleboro, VT's Asian Cultural Center of Vermont. A reminder:

Please come to the
LOCAL & ASIAN DINNER WITH GODZILLA & FRIENDS
All ages welcome.

THIS THURSDAY December 20th 5:30-7 pm.

* Celebrate local businesses and agriculture of Southern Vermont
* A fundraiser for the Asian Cultural Center of Vermont
* Brought to you by local farms, restaurants, and other friends of the Brattleboro area
* A buffet with time to network and socialize.
* Food includes: Delicious soup and dishes made with local winter vegetables and prepared by local cooks; chicken; ribs; fish stew; rice pilau; curry; spring rolls; sushi; hummus & tabouleh; desserts; coffee; cider; and
more!
* Then view a presentation by Harvey Nystrom on 'Godzilla and Friends.'
* Suggested donation: $40 per person for this dinner event. (More welcome! Less is OK, too)
* Location: America's Best Inn, 959 Putney Road. (Wheelchair accessible)
* Directions: 2 miles north of Main & High in Brattleboro, 1/4 mile south of the I-91 Exit 3 roundabout, near the junction with Black Mountain Road.

* Asian Cultural Center of Vermont's fundraising has two goals:
1. Match funds from the State Tourism/Marketing Department for out-of-state marketing and promotion of southern Vermont, especially around the upcoming Vermont Samurai Kaiju Film Festival in September. Also, related to this goal: Help raise funds to underwrite the cost of screening the Samurai and Kaiju films to lower the cost to the movie goer. Kaiju (Japanese for 'mysterious beast') is the genre that has brought Gozilla-type movies. Samurai are traditional warriors.
2. The Cultural Center is taking its Bhutan Textiles exhibition overseas to Thailand and will be co-sponsoring an April exhibition in Chiang Mai! Help us bring Brattleboro and Vermont to Thailand!

* Any help spreading the word will be appreciated: Looking for more people to consider supporting these efforts. Partial ($25 to $200) or full underwriting of any of the following would help a lot: $250 will... cover the cost of one screening of a samurai or Godzilla-type film; cover the cost of space rental and staffing for an festival evening; provide access to promote the Festival at an out-of-state conference or convention; amounts needed for the Thailand exhibition are more.

* Tell more people about the Local & Asian Dinner. Everyone welcome.
* If you cannot come to the Dinner, we still need your help.

For further information, contact Adam Silver, (802) 257-7898 ext. 1 or 2, (802) 579-9088 (cell) or e-mail to: acc.vt@verizon.net,

or visit the Asian Culture Center's website.

* The good folks at Trailers from Hell, one of my favorite online sites about movies, have been posting some marvelous stuff of late.

Makeup maestro Rick Baker's commentary on the trailer for I Was a Teenage Werewolf is a real gem (as is the trailer!),

though he fails to mention that teen werewolf Michael Landon indeed later reprised his role in an affectionate, satiric episode of Landon's TV series Highway to Heaven.

Recently, they've also posted Baker talking about the 1960 George Pal classic The Time Machine, Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) on the 1972 cannibal classic Deathline aka Raw Meat, and a delicious slew of counterculture 1960s gems like Privilege, Wild in the Streets and Psych-Out. John Landis's commentary and presentation of the preview of International House (1933) prompted Marge and I to watch the DVD (available in Universal's W.C. Fields Comedy Collection Vol. 1, which I happen to have on my shelf), and we had a grand time with this truly bizarre Pre-Code curio.

Here's the whole lineup of Trailers from Hell, spend some down time enjoying these this week.

Speaking of this week, though,

they are "posting, sans commentary, the original British trailer for what we at TFH regard as the greatest Christmas movie of all (as well as one of the finest Dickens adaptations): Brian Desmond-Hurst's 1951 Scrooge, released in America as A Christmas Carol and a baby boomer staple on local tv stations for decades."

Enjoy! Marge wholeheartedly agrees; we'll be watching her copy of this beloved Alastair Sim classic on DVD on Christmas Eve, which is Marge's tradition. And now, our tradition.

And with that, have a Terrific Tuesday!

2 AM

Yep, up at 2 AM, working on the Neil Gaiman book...

Marge and I nodded out around 9:30 PM. We did so after a day of work for both of us, an afternoon of heavy snowfall -- and inch an hour! Via dumb luck, I got home from my CCS teaching for Thursday around 3 PM, tired one shot at climbing our driveway (unsuccessfully) and then had to completely scrape the driveway down with my trusty shovel to get my car up to our garage (said driveway is paved, but steep and buttery snow/slush is a climb-killer; knowing the storm was coming, I laid out a top-to-bottom ripple of road salt to make the shoveling easier and more immediately effective mid-storm). As luck would have it, Marge's car came cruising up our road just as I was turning around in our neighbor's oh-so-enviable flat driveway. So, we both easily made the climb to the garage, and were home together after only three of the eventually 6 inches of snow we have to this point had fallen. A blessing.

Actually, we conked out for the night after a modest dinner (soup and garlic bread) and pleasant evening and after enjoying the Seymour Hicks 1935 British A Christmas Carol aka Scrooge. It's one of the lowest-budget of all theatrical Dickens, but a treat thanks to Hicks and the actor who plays Bob Cratchit, but that's neither here nor there -- it's part of Marge's seasonal Christmas movie viewing ritualistic lineup, and I went for the ride with her merrily. Alas, Bob Clark's Black Christmas isn't part of Marge's lineup; I'll have to watch that alone this year, now that Danny's long out of the nest. Sigh.

Anyway, we went to sleep. Drifted off around 9:30 PM, with Tuco sidling up between us (he loves to sleep up by our shoulders; we often wake up with his head or paws on one or both of us). Off to Sandland, folks.

My dreams, though, began to circle the same sort of scruffy dream-locations -- Marge and I living comfortably, but surrounding by encroaching industrial squalor; I wander off our property to a neighboring abandoned house/structure, again and again, in different dreams, one following another, each ending with increasingly discomforting "I'm stranded in an abandoned house/room/basement" scenario --

____________

Last dream I remember from tonight:

Marge and I are living, later in life, in a ranch-style house stranded in what has become an industrial stretch of Vermont road. I walk out our back door and wander up our lawn to look down at the gas station nearest us, just north, as a second life-size animatronic fiberglass dinosaur -- a goofy, cartoony Apatosaurus ("Brontosaurus" to you old-timers) -- is delivered. As the crane lowers it into position, I take in the whole expanse: shit, we used to live in such a nice, secluded neck of the woods. It's all built up now: gas stations, convenience stores, some sort of industrial park, a procession of self-storage acre-eating facilities. Ah, shit.

All that remains to us is a now-oddly shaped patch of about two acres I'm now standing on, which connects to a now-abandoned structure behind our acreage. Despondent at the sprawl surrounding us, despite the cool pair of giant fiberglass dinosaurs, I decide to go and see if I can still access the abandoned house. The guy closest to my age who used to frequent the property was comfortable with my using it as a studio once, and I'd left some of my stuff there with his permission. I make my way to the place -- no lights, but the door is unlocked. I go in and start poking around, a little uncomfortable.

As I do so, it's evident that everything once here is long gone. Even the walls are stripped of wallpaper, and it looks like somebody has partied here in recent times: bottles, a stained mattress, a little bit of garbage, even 'old sex' smell in one grimy room. I continue until I'm heading down into the cellar, which has an odd rippled-glass ceiling and narrow stairway.

I go down the stairs, tentatively, and look around in the half-light. Even the furnace is gone, it's just bare cement flooring and roughhewn walls. I realize, now even more uncomfortable, I can't go back up the stairs: the entry seems to have merged with the glass ceiling, and there's no way up back to the main floor! Hmmm, can I make it through one of the narrow little windows to the lawn?

A light streams in the window I'm looking at as I weigh my option -- headlights. Who's here? And how will they cotton to my being here -- ??
_________________

As I say, these patterns of dreams had circled variations on this kind of 'stuck in urban sprawl/stuck in a room in an abandoned structure' scenario all through my sleeping, and this finale -- the headlights, the rush of claustrophobia and not wanting to be found, trapped, in the cellar -- was the last straw. Fuck it, I want out of this dreamspace for the night!

I woke myself up, made myself lurch to the bathroom, then decided to just get up and work on the book project for a few hours before returning to sleep... after all, the book project is, in my waking life, arguably the 'abandoned housing project' I'm wandering in (till we're done): exploring someone else's (in this case, Neil's) "houses" is preoccupying my days. The anxiety over "an old neighbor about my age" is likely tied to the need to bother Neil with some last-minute questions for the book, and ongoing attempts to contact old cronies, also for the book. I feel like a pest, an interloper in this process. Neil's away writing, he doesn't want to be bothered -- and I don't know if these old friends want to hear from me after all these years -- so, dreams.
Of old houses.
Encroachment.
Trespass.
Not wanting to be 'found' -- you get the idea.

So, wake fully, engage, work, get sleepy, find a new dream space. It usually works (welcome to the writing life)...

...and, yes, the shoveling of soft powder snow lays ahead of me once daylight arrives.

I look forward to it.

_________

An addendum to yesterday's post (corrections have been made to the post itself, below):

1. Adam Silver of the Brattleboro VT-based Asian Cultural Center wrote me to point out that I -- well, actually, he -- got one thing wrong in yesterday's post: "One date correction: The Rumi Sema (last item in what you put in) is SUNDAY the 16th, not Friday. Mea culpa." Thanks, Adam!

2. This is the link to the Asian Cultural Center site, hosts of the upcoming Godzilla dinner, etc. -- check it out. I didn't have this in reach when I posted yesterday, apologies.

Bon appetit!

_________

Have a flatulent Friday!