I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: MUDHONEY-“Halloween” (1988).

Mudhoney recorded a cover of Sonic Youth’s “Halloween” just two years after the original was released.

Mudhoney, a deliberately noisy and abrasive band recorded a deliberately noisy and abrasive version of this song.  And yet at the same time, it doesn’t hold a candle to Sonic Youth;s version for deliberate noise and chaos.

On the other hand, in many respects the Mudhoney version is better.  It feels more like a “real song” with the guitar, bass and drums all playing along fairly conventionally.  It follows the same musical patterns as the original, with that same cool riff, but it just feels…more.

Mark Arm sing/speaks the lyrics more aggressively and less sensuously than Kim Gordon did.  In some way it helps to understand the original song a little more, as if they translated it from Sonic Youth-land into a somewhat more mainstream version.  Although it is hardly mainstream what with the noise and fuzz, the cursing and the fact that it lasts 6 minutes.

It feels like Mark emphasizes these lyrics more than the others although it may just be that the songs builds more naturally to them:

And you’re fucking me
Yeah, you’re fucking with me
You’re fucking with me
As you slither up, slither up to me
Your lips are slipping, twisting up my insides
Sing along and just a swinging man
Singing your song
Now I don’t know what you want
But you’re looking at me
And you’re falling on the ground
And you’re twisting around
Fucking with my, my mind
And I don’t know what’s going on

Happy Halloween

[READ: October 24, 2018] “From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet”

Just in time for Halloween, from the people who brought me The Short Story Advent Calendar and The Ghost Box. comes Ghost Box II.

This is once again a nifty little box (with a magnetic opening and a ribbon) which contains 11 stories for Halloween.  It is lovingly described thusly:

The Ghost Box returns, like a mummy or a batman, to once again make your pupils dilate and the hair on your arms stand straight up—it’s another collection of individually bound scary stories, edited and introduced by comedian and spooky specialist Patton Oswalt.

There is no explicit “order” to these books; however, Patton Oswalt will be reviewing a book a day on his Facebook page.

Much respect to Oswalt, but I will not be following his order.  So there.

I am often puzzled by stories like this.  What inspires an author to write an A-Z type of story, in which each letter of the alphabet represents something in a story?

It’s not that they are bad, and this one isn’t.  It’s just that they’re so…odd.  Have 26 stories to tell?  Why not organize them around the alphabet?

I also cannot figure out for the life of me what this has to do with chocolate.

So Ellison has created 26 little vignettes that are sci-fi or mildly horror-ish in nature.  They all follow the “A is for Atlantean” format an are all a couple of paragraphs long, with the exception of one or two that are much longer.

So…

A is for Atlantean is about what really happened to Atlantis (they knew it was coming).
B is for Breathdeath which is a little black flower that is common all over space except on earth.  It just awaits the next opportunity to show off its spores.
C is for Cushio a boy who was assembled after he was savaged by a forest creature. He became the stuff of nightmares.
D is for Dikh a writer who seems to be being absorbed by the ground around him (I have to wonder if this is an attack or a joke on Phillip K. Dick.)
E is for Elevator People, those who accidentally hit the B button two extra times and wind up never coming back up from the subbasement.
F is for Flenser.  The Flenser are kind–they wipe clean the slates of the minds they encounter.  They are the pale people standing on street corners; theirs is  terribly lonely existence.  Be kind to them.
G is for Golem.  In its entirety: “Golems are goyim that always wanted to be Jewish.  But they never suffered enough guilt.”
H is for Hamadryad.  Is it a wood nymph, a venomous serpent or is it the wood from which this all arose.  Be careful what you touch.
I is for Ice Crawler which came out from under the polar icecaps and are looking for good skins.
J is for Jabberwock which is a creature kept in a Hindu monastery.  They are trying to get it to breed to keep its lineage alive, despite the horrors of it.
K is for Kenghis Khan.  In its entirety: “He was a very nice person.  History has no record of him.  There is a moral in that, somewhere.”
L is for Loup-Garou.  Had the protagonist come from Ireland or Sweden, he would not have known his neighbor was a werewolf, but he had come from Czechoslovakia, and that means he has a job to do.
M is for Muu Muu.  In its entirety: “One should always wear one if one has more than six or seven arms.”
N is for Nemotropin who have a Contest to rid themselves of undesirables.  They were a violent species and at least one has escaped their homeland and landed on earth, which might explain a few people.
O is for Ouroboros about the giant worm coiled on itself.
P is for Poltergeist which is about Fred Morris a Chicago White Sox player in 1919 who just might have been one.
Q is for Quetzalcoatl tells us that everything we know about the creature is wrong
R is for Roq is about the flying city of Detroit (it’s up there) and the golden roq which attacked it.
S is for Solifidian the Sorcerer.  This story is four pages in this book–much longer than the others, and is about mild-mannered Harry Solifidian a man who seemed to be able to possess people (and the woman who seemed to possess him).
T is for Troglodyte those creatures who eat all our garbage (except for plastic containers).  We owe them a lot.
U is for Uphir the demon chemist and doctor who has trouble with a malpractice case.
V is for Vorwalaka.  Count Carlo Szipesti was a vorwalaka (vampire) who moved to a commune in upstate New York where his beard accent and nocturnal habits allowed him to fit right in with the young people there.  The Count was found dead after feeding off the residents–health is often linked to morality you know
W is for Wand of Jacob is the story of Alfred Jacobi a seventy-two year old man who has never been bothered on the streets of New York City despite being nearly blind. Perhaps it’s the staff that he carries with him.
X is for Xaphan a demon of the second order.  He proposed that the heaven be set on fire.  “Pay attention to stories about the melting polar ice caps. Xaphan is programming for Armageddon and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”
Y is for Yggdrasil.  In its entirety: “The legendary Nordic ash tree with its three roots extending into the lands of mortals, giants, and Niflheim, the land of mist, grows in Wisconsin. Legend has it that when the tree falls, the universe will fall. Next Wednesday, the State Highway Commission comes through that empty pasture with a freeway.”
Z is for Zombie.  Howard Hughes did not die in 1976.  He died in 1968.  But wealth has its privileges.

Cool stuff, but not especially scary.

However: Pattom Oswalt offers a Postscript to the box in which he tells us that Harlan Ellison passed away a week after he wrote the introduction.  He talks about the loss that readers will feel “like part of the secret fuel for 21st-century imaginative literature has been drained away.:

About this selection:

a brilliant collection of 26 pastiches that range from horrifying to hopeful and demented to disquieting.  It’s the best core sampling of theman whose essence is impossible to capture in any of his single works.