Living Down to Expectations

It never ceases to amuse me when i do book events and get placed near uppity writers of self help or bios or whatever and they gimme the stink eye as if i am scaring customers off. Oh, people. So caught up in feigning what a pro writer should be but never getting the community of it that makes it fun.

Booky Business

Hey there Lords and Ladies of Awesomeland.

I am here to tell you that I am going to be part of a pretty rad event here in Flint and if you’re into books and in the general sorta vicinity you should come out.

For reals.

I mean, where else can you pick up the WHOLE Ringler Collection in one place…in uh, May?

NO WHERE!
That’s where.

And you can get the books from me, this here guy writing these words which you are reading so it’s like the present becoming the past.

You just read real live science fiction.

AHH!

Brains and minds blown everywhere.

So, yeah, you should come to this and check me and some other awesome writers out.

Do it.

The Horror Movie As Gross-Out Joke

   There is something about horror, extreme horror, that plays a bit like a classic gross out joke. Oh, you know the kind, the baby in blender sorta jokes that kids tell each other on the bus ride home. The sorta jokes that you tell when an adult isn’t around because you know they won’t understand how funny it is, not knowing that some of those same adults made up these creepy dead baby jokes. Horror and humor are really close to one another. Really similar. Both are all about the delivery and the punchline. They just go in different directions because of the tone. Tell a joke about a clown standing in the middle of the street with a pie in his hand at mid-day and it’s funny, tell the same joke and it’s midnight and it suddenly becomes unnerving. There’s the rub. So, seeing how close these things are, it’s  no wonder that there are horror comedies that come out from time to time, mostly to poor reviews and reputations. Horror and humor are hard to do, especially when you mix the two. Ah, but the gross-out joke, well, that’s something a little different. A gross-out joke is quick and dirty, nasty and mean, and it is never going to be well received by the masses.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present The Human Centipede: Full Sequence, the ultimate gross-out joke.

   Now before you laugh at me, hear me out!

I have been avoiding watching Human Centipede 2 since it came out. As soon as people began seeing the film the reviews were all over the map but mostly were bad. And not JUST bad but horrible. Everything I read really worried me. I liked the first film all right, it wasn’t amazing, but it was a fun movie and was a lot funnier than disturbing, something I hadn’t expected. What I was reading about the sequel though reeked of pretention and absurdity and someone out to just top themselves. Little did I know that these reviews were accurate yet wrong.

So wrong.

What you have with HC2 is the horror film as absurdist gross out joke. This is a film that plays both as a joke and as a middle finger to people who were so appalled by the first film, a film that, truly and in the same way, Goodfellas plays as a comedy. There is a point in ‘realism’ and in realistic films where things become SO real, SO horrific that it becomes comedic. It isn’t funny to see Spider, the hapless go-for in Goodfellas, get shot and killed but the way it plays out IS funny in that world. It is funny because it is absurd. So too is HC2 funny because director Tom Six doesn’t take this nearly as seriously as his critics do. He is making films that are brutally tongue in cheek. Now, that isn’t to say that he’s a genius and auteur so much as he is a teller of dirty jokes, and honestly, pretty decent ones. The second film is his answer to critics who 1. thought his first film went too far and 2. to people who question what might happen if someone ‘sick’ were to take horror and extreme films too seriously. So plays HC2, as a ridiculous cautionary tale of a man so obsessed with the first film that he decided to make his own human centipede. The film is shot in black and white, is absolutely dripping with pathos and explanations as to WHY the man is how he is, and the film is far, far more disturbing in how the centipede comes together yet…it’s all so funny. It’s so over the top, so overly-‘real’ that you cannot help but laugh. And if you have doubts just wait until the climax of the film. This film plays the gross-out card so strongly that you realize he is playing it for comedy. The first film was so effective because it was pretty restrained, yet he still got lambasted for his over the top themes and ideas. So why not go all the way to ‘11’? Give the people what they want.

And that is the beauty of this film. This movie is ALL about the audience, and all about giving them what they wanted. They wanted a bizarre, disgusting film and so he gave it to them. And then he essentially flipped them off. And honestly, Six got what he wanted. Got such a reaction that the thing was haphazardly banned for a moment. He wanted to make a sensation and did. He made a movie so cinematic and ridiculous (and well made, he is an awfully competent director) that people really thought it was this abomination that would fog minds and stain the culture.

Yet…

It’s a joke.

The entire thing.

This film is meant as a lampoon of his original film. It plays in a way that is similar to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, a film that had nothing new to say so it said the same thing as a joke. And that is why I liked HC2. Because sure, he is still going to make a third film (though it’d be funnier if he were always working on it but never releasing it), but there never needed to be more than one. And he knew it. I would never claim HC2 is art but it is surely not the trash people purport it to be. It’s essentially one long, dirty joke that people will either have a taste for or not. This film does not re-define horror, does not endanger society, and i t surely doesn’t pee all over cinema. This is a movie, nothing more, nothing less, and the more weight people ascribe to it only serves to prove out the point of the film, that we get too darned uptight about movies. That sometimes a movie is just a movie, and doesn’t need to be more, do more, or say more.

   Sure, you don’t have to like the film, you don’t have to even see the film, but people need to get it into their heads that, well, it IS just a film after all. And one that isn’t medically accurate. It even says as much.

Art, the great Art that people will talk about for ages, is around us, all the time around us, and it isn’t for us to decide what will last the test of time and what will be Great and impactful to the people generations ahead of us, but let’s let them decide if this film is great Art, great Trash, or just a pretty fun movie. We have better things to worry about, like how the heck you can make a fifty person centipede. My mind boggles at that one.

…c…

(I write stuffs other than blogs. Honest! www.meepsheep.com)

Taking Back Horror

Horror, at its heart, is about the war at the base of human existence, the war of evolution and instinct. Evolution tells us we have to keep moving forward because we have no choice, we must move forward to survive but instinct warns us to be wary of moving ahead too quickly because there are perils ahead. A great part of horror, specifically the films, has been about letting our curiosity outreach our rationality. Yet, without that spirit of adventure we lose one of the things that make us special as a race. Ah, but it also has caused a lot of pain and damage as well. But as go humans, so goes horror. Horror seems to always be at a crossroads where its makers waffle between leaping forward with new styles, new types of films, and new ways to tell stories and following the path that was laid out in the past. For some reason it seems like it always has to be one way or the other though, there’s no real balance.

For me, horror works best when it IS balanced, when modern ideas are melded with classic techniques. It is taking a unique approach to a familiar subject. Horror, when it works, taps into our fears in such an intimate way that it haunts us and becomes part of that old fear, forged to it forever. And you can argue over how nothing is scary in the modern world or ‘horror’ is dead (like they claimed irony was dead) in the face of a world full of real life terror but the fact is that Man has always feared the Unknown and sometimes we need to cling to the fear of a specter, of a monster, of an invader from beyond because it allows us to quantify and classify and indeed defeat or overcome these things, something we can rarely do in our day to day lives. Horror serves a purpose, even if some of us don’t want to admit it, because it’s like they say, better to deal with the devil you know (the actual Devil), than the one you don’t (some masked person entering your home in the night set on disrupting your life or worse).

The thing is that horror is out of balance right now. Horror’s creators chase whatever trend is popular and drive it into the ground, neutering the fear and the thing behind it. Why do we mock the undead and vampires now? Because they became overused and trite. It isn’t that they became romantic, in the case of the vampires, or too slow in the case of the undead but that they became too familiar. In the hunt for money horror has become a genre focused on the easy scare, the easy dollar, and the easy out. Times change, and so do storytelling techniques, that’s natural, but when things start to become a problem is when the horror films become interchangeable to the public. ‘Oh, it’s a zombie, it’s just like ‘blah-blah’ or ‘I hate vampires, they’re just like ‘blah’. And it’s true that horror runs in cycles, that these trends are not new, but it’s that now you have not just books, you have television shows, you have movies, and you have made for video and television movies that clutter the landscape. And the thing is, if all of that stuff was good we wouldn’t have a problem. Alas, that’s not the case. It’s that the crap, and there is a lot of it, overpowers the good stuff out there. This isn’t a matter of taste so much as quantity and quality. Personally I get a kick out of the found footage films. It’s a novel concept and when done well really brings horror films back to what makes them so potent – that instinctual feeling of terror when something isn’t right and we’re powerless in the face of the unknown. Once those found footage films became popular though the trickle down effect kicked in and all you need to do is go to a video store, look through what’s streaming on Netflix, or just look at the new releases to video and you see the glut of found footage movies we’re getting. What makes it worse is these get-rich-quick schemes are all about that first idea – the found footage – and little else. Logic, acting, direction, story, all of that goes out the window. You can dress it all up with gore, with nudity, and with sensationalism. Other films hide their faults with similar tools or with the quick editing that has become so popular in videos and modern action oriented films. Don’t like the way the movie’s going? Just wait, there’s probably a boob or spurt of blood in the next reel. And I dunno that we hate zombies and vampires so much as we hate poorly done representations of them.

Horror, like anything else, when it hits the mass market is all about money. When it leaves the campfire it is about the numbers. And that’s fine. It’d be great to think that horror could be treated like Art, and done for the love, and to varying degrees it is, but that love must always be tempered by cost and return. Movies and books are not inexpensive to produce and create. The more expensive a thing is the more important it is to make some money back to 1. pay back the investors that believed in the projects and 2. to filter out what works and what doesn’t. Now, the second part there is always up for debate as what ‘works’ and doesn’t is usually up for debate and a matter of popular opinion, but the first is just a truth. If the stuff doesn’t make money, it won’t be made. You have to accept that there will be hackneyed ideas and retread terrors, and that’s part of the deal. But the thing is that that is pervading and infecting the genre. It has become so that every new idea has to be sold as a retread of a different era. ‘Oh, it’s an homage to the ‘70s’ or ‘It’s just like an ‘80s movie’ have become selling points. And sure, there were great movies from both eras but why are we so focused on selling the past and not the present? Every horror out there was inspired and influenced by what came before it. OK, got it, let’s move on. Let’s look ahead.

Let’s take back horror!

And how do you do it?

How do you take back a genre?

By taking the genre seriously. Sure, we’ll have the trends, we’ll have those that chase the dragon of what is hot at the moment but what if we started using those works as springboards to new ideas and new perspectives? Take CHRONICLE for example, a film that took what was being down with horror and the found footage films and used it to tell a story about people with superhuman powers. Horror should be leading the charge, not following the pack. Horror is where you can take chances, where you can take risks, and where you can push boundaries. Sure, horror is damned for those very reasons but it also opens things up for creators to tell more personal, more daring, more dangerous stories. Instead of focusing on the film’s beats – open with scare, go to friends, go to sex, go to false scare, go to death, go to friends, go to scare after scare, go to revelation, go to final battle, go to false ending, go to climax, go to jump scare, end – we need to be looking at how we can play with what has been done before. Doing this is not always successful but it’s the risks that have the greater payoffs. THE THING was considered a flop, a disaster, yet now, so many years later, it’s a horror classic. That’s what we need to chase, the monsters, the ghosts, the FEAR, not the money. The money will come if we do our jobs well. If we make good product. And it is product, whatever it is, and it must be treated with respect because it is, in many instances, someone’s money on the line, but it also must be its own animal if it is going to be something that people remember and return to. And that’s where the balance is – balancing the art and the money. The past and the present. The evolution with the instinct.

Horror is about the intimacy of the moment because deep down you are truly alone when you are terrified. You can fear for others, sure, but terror, horror is about YOUR fear, and how you deal with it. That’s what so many of these mass produced films miss, that you can tell a big story, a little story, a mass marketed story, it doesn’t matter, and still be effective, but only if you make that fear an intimate thing. And nothing I write here will change the greater picture but it’s only by looking at how things are sometimes that we can change, and if we want to have more classic horror films, more films that we will remember and return to, more horror we’ll read time and again, then we need to start getting back to what makes horror so impactful, and that’s the terror, the intimacy, the instinct, all while we keep an eye on evolving the genre to keep it fresh and potent and living.

Not easy things to do, but the fun is in the challenge, and in the horrors yet to come.

…c…

www.meepsheep.com where I have all manner of terror just waiting for you

Reign It In

There’s a lesson you need to learn, and learn quickly, as you go out and start doing art shows, book shows, conventions, or get involved in putting together events – the need to reign it in.

What you find, in all of those scenarios, is that you are entering a world that while new to you has existed for a while, and because you are entering it you are suddenly disrupting things.  This doesn’t mean you are trying to do anything bad, or wrong, or will ill intent, but that in all of these areas there is a lot of passion, a lot of investment (personal and financial) and a lot of time has been spent to establish these things and people so as soon as you start joining the party it creates a ripple effect.  And some people will welcome you and others won’t, and you just have to roll with it and understand – the quicker the better – that any poor reception to you and what you do may be simply because you’re new, and not because you are You.  The Arts are very volatile, and things have gotten very compacted.  People don’t look to a great variety of the Arts for entertainment right now and there is not much funding for it so it makes things difficult to find places to sell, promote, and to connect.  You joining the party just makes it that much more compacted.  So there are bound to be some colored feelings towards what you are doing.

The thing is though, people need to get over it.

No one owns the Arts, or any arm thereof. There needs to be new artists, writers, conventions, art shows, movies, music, everything. We need the inspiration and outlet.  We need to keep pushing our universe outward.  An example is that a lot of traditional writers hate/d e-books.  They’re a perversion of the Art.  Well, the market changed.  Tech changed.  People’s needs changed.  And unless we’re willing to let literature and stories disappear we all need to accept that the Times change and we need to evolve with them.  The wise writers stopped fighting and the rest, well, the rest are waiting for the asteroid to finish them off with the rest of the dinosaurs.

With so many of us using social networking to promote, sell, and connect it also makes things much more pressurized because comments are instantaneous, feedback is immediate, and grudges can form and become arguments and spin out of control in a matter of moments.  The temptation to return fire when someone starts calling your work, your professionalism, and what you are doing into question is too strong sometimes to resist.  And once you respond you can easily forget that you’re online, that what you are saying is being seen by the world, and that what may have been a mere disagreement or misunderstanding can suddenly become a caustic war that damages both sides. You get so wrapped up in the pettiness that you lose sight of the bigger picture and that is your reputation.

People pay far more attention to petty squabbles than we think.  Our minor wars that we may get over in a matter hours or days will leave a stain that lasts far longer.  So for the price of our frustration, for the price of letting someone get to us, or for our own hubris in thinking we have the right to attack others we have damaged our own cause.  Perhaps fatally wounding it and all the work you’d done.  And that is what people forget – that the good things we do last but that the bad things seem to last forever.  At least as far as forever can last in this digital age.  Mounting a campaign of hate on someone, what they do, who they are, or what you think they are saying about you will only lead to damaging your own credibility and all of the work you’ve been doing.

Reign it in.

You have to.

The internet and social networking is not the place for vendettas, grudges, or romantic drama. It can’t be because our social networks are our new faces to the world.  That’s why we post happy things, happy pictures, and all of the great things we do in our lives and not the struggles we have, the sadness, the sorrow, and the frustrations.  Sure, some of us are less filtered than others but even then we must be aware of what we’re putting out there.  And that is even more important when it comes to professional work.  A loved one or friend may forgive our temporary madness but the world often will not.  So we must reign it in and always remember that in business of any sort, even in the Arts, you have to treat everyone better than they treat you because you never know when you’ll need a friend, a favor, a job, or a new client.

It’s hard.

It sucks.

But if you can’t keep control of your temper and cannot watch what you put online and out to the world when you are upset then maybe the focus needs to be more on that, and less on what dream projects you may have stirring within.

…c…

BOOKS!

(e-books only .99 cents!)

www.meepsheep.com

Somewhere In The Middle

The funny thing about Truth, as I have mentioned in the past, is that it’s always changing, always evolving and is many times more about the feeling and not the fact.  And that’s fine.  We are emotional beings and who we are is always changing and as that changes our perceptions will change as well.  As a kid you can be bullied by someone constantly, not beaten up but bullied.  Ten years later you can both be friends.  Someone you knew your whole life as a friend can one day be seen with new eyes and become a lover.  The Truth changes. Perception changes.  It’s the facts that make things dicey.  That’s where the ice gets thin.

I was chatting with a friend online (because I’d like to think I won’t be caught saying I ‘chatted’ with anyone outside of online), catching up on where we are in our lives and the place I live came up – Flint, Michigan.  My friend came from Flint, has family had lived here, and she went to school here.  She loves Flint and still has people she cares about that remain here.  And because of her love for Flint and the people she still has here she has fear and honestly, I can’t blame her. At all.

Flint is not the city it once was.  If you are from this area you know that very well, and if you are not from here then you have a perception of what it’s like.  For most people they imagine Flint as a war zone.  A burned out hull of a city with people living on the streets, poverty festering like and infection, and gunfire the music to make love by.  See, for many, they don’t want to let the facts get in the way of the Truth and a lot of people love to see Flint as a Murder Capital, as a dangerous place where blood runs down the gutters.  The facts don’t support that.  But Truth and the facts aren’t the same.

There has been, for a few years now, this strange anger towards Flint, this dark glee that man take when describing the many, many problems we have here.  All it takes is an annual survey of unhappy cities, or dangerous cities, or poor cities, or some other silly stat filled rhetoric.  All it takes is a blanket stat and not on the ground facts.  Which is not to say that stats are not facts, because they are, but they leave out so much.  A stat shows a couple was married for twenty years.  Facts show that he beat her throughout the marriage but she stayed because they had a child together.  Facts and stats.  Facts and Truth.

Things are not ever what they appear.

They are somewhere in the middle.

Flint is dangerous.  I will not make any bones about that.  But every city is dangerous.  And every town is dangerous.  Anywhere humans populate can become dangerous in some way.  That’s something we forget, that it’s we humans that create the danger, not the cities.  It’s the poverty, the frustration, the racism, the sorrow, the greed that causes the crime and its brethren.  It isn’t about politics, it isn’t about race, it’s about the human spirit.  It is about conditioning.  If you live in darkness and are told you will always live in darkness then why seek the sun?  If you are unhappy, and always have been, why would you seek an alternative?  But these seem like excuses.  Maybe they are.  Maybe the facts here are that sometimes humans just do bad things.  For any one of a million reasons.  The misfiring of something that predisposes one to do things that many others don’t do.  Society only lasts as long as we agree to play by the same rules or pretend to play by them.  Otherwise there is chaos.  And chaos serves no one but the self, and the self can’t survive a heck of a long time in chaos.  But chaos is not is going on in Flint, it is despair.  It is the despair of a city that is trying to re-invent itself.  I will never tell you there are not problems here, that it is not a time of trials here, but neither will I tell you that the notion that the city should be bulldozed is ridiculous.  Is madness.  We abandon things to easily in this nation of America.  Walk away when things get hard.  When they get worrisome.  You cannot just walk away from people though.  You cannot walk away from history.  There is an anger towards Flint because it seems to symbolize the change in the national economic machine.  Once we were nation of industry and the world turned to us for many of their goods and that has changed.  Cars can be made for less in other parts of the world and that has lead to the change of the auto industry that employed so many in America.  And with that change it has hurt a lot of cities that were not ready to transition to another industry and so the American dream, as we knew it, changed.  Down with big business.  Down with corporations. Down, down, down.  And it was like a bad break up where you don’t want to see, or hear from the person that is out of your life.  Thus it was for cities like Flint, who served as constant reminders of the dangers of trusting your entire future in the hands of a company that must, in the end, always serve the master, a slave to the dollar.  Flint was a prime example of what could happen.  Arrogance, bad investment, faulty trust, greed, despair, and egos run rampant and the foundations of cities start to crack.  I can’t tell you I know WHY things like this happen but I can tell you why I love this city and why not everything you hear is Truth.

Flint is beautiful in the Winter. During the holidays. When snow blankets the brick streets of downtown and the arches are lit with colored bulbs.

The city has so many beautiful old homes, waiting for someone to love them again and to remind them what it meant to be beautiful.

We have these wonderful man-made falls that, when they turn them on, are spectacular. They fill floating ponds, cascade down into pools. They are a mix of craft and design, magic and metro.

There are sprawling, beautiful parks here that make you forget, if just for a little while, that you’re even in the city.

Flint has something called the Weather Ball that is sort of our adopted mascot here. It is a huge lit ball that sits atop the Citizens Bank Building and will change colors according to the temperature  – blue is cold, red warm, yellow is…something else. It was a genuine mascot for the bank many years ago but not serves as a beacon to those of us who love Flint that we are either home or nearly there. It is our True North.

Then there are the people. I have met so many creative, passionate people here. And everyone says that because it is true everywhere. Here though, in spite of such hard economic times, in the face of adversity, in the face of a culture that appreciates galleries but doesn’t buy art these people still play music, write, sing, dance, and create art. They still follow their passion, even when there’s no money in it. That’s pretty amazing.

And then there was a woman, a wonderful woman that was so impassioned about community service and helping other people that she created an organization to do just that. And in so doing she touched hundreds of lives and she helped change the life of the person writing this now. A woman who made me see that there is beauty in helping those around you.

These are just the thing I can think of now. Sitting here. They are not stats. They are not Truths, they are not even necessarily facts, but they are real things that matter, that make Flint so beautiful and unique.  There is more to this place than the violence, and the crime, and the poverty.  We are not defined by that.  Take the worst moment of your life, and magnify that a thousand times, and now think about it.  Seriously.  Now remember that a city is not a human, is not governed by the lifespan of one human, but lives for decades, for centuries, and so it must be seen through new eyes.  It must be seen over the long term.  It must be seen in the long view.

Things are not perfect in Flint, MI, and my friend is right to worry.  If you are not careful you can get hurt here.  And being careful is not always going to matter because sometimes violence just happens.  Just strikes. But that violence can strike anyone, anywhere.  There are more opportunities in a city with as many struggles as Flint has but there are plenty of crimes committed in the rural areas too.  What I guess I wanted to tell my friend, to tell you, is that this is not a perfect place but it’s a real place, a place where you can have an impact, a place where you can change things.  If just in small ways.  Sometimes the risk is worth it if you believe in something.  And I believe in Flint.  I don’t know hat fate will always have me here, living here, but I love it here now.  The city’s people drive me crazy, for sure, but I don’t blame the city for that.  I blame the politics of people.  I hope for a time where we will all look out for one another here, will work to stop the violence and to end the despair, but that is a long term project and to really work on it you need to be on the ground.  It’s unfair to look at stats from afar and condemn or praise a place outright knowing that what you say or write will change the future for that place.  In fact, by your saying these things you can make your words a prophecy.  And I am not saying someone should lie to save someone’s feelings but that context is needed.  For a city its size Flint has a lot of problems, but without understanding why, without looking at why and trying to explain why it’s like saying all the people in Paris are happy because it’s Paris.

The truth is somewhere in the middle.

Flint is not perfect, nor is its people, but we’re working to make things better here, against all odds, and that matters.  So I tell my friend, don’t fear for we that live here, because we have made that choice.  And by choosing we have taken an active part in our futures.  That is all anyone can hope for.  I will be as careful as I can, and I will hope the people I love will do the same and I will look out for people and hope they do the same.  But this city is no different than any other, and that is my own truth that I have no real facts to prove that people would believe.  Save for this – Flint has so much strength, so much love, so much fight left in it, like Detroit and any other city on the ropes in America, and I refuse to give up on it just because it’s what we as a culture tend to do now.  Because giving up is not Truth, is not fact, is not a statistic, it is cowardly, and there’ve been enough cowards that called Flint home and now’s a time for people willing to stand up and try to be the heroes this city needs.

I love Flint.

And that won’t change.

That’s a fact.

Meep!

…c…

FHC Presents – Dr. Macabre’s Musical Massacre

After a very disappointing setback with our previously planned event the FLINT HORROR CON has a new event planned for April 7th in Downtown Flint