Year / 2006
Roundup
- “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick” by R. Crumb (via Rebecca’s Pocket)
- The scoop on Norman Mailer’s next book. Looks like the old dog might be competing with Tom Wolfe for “worst last novel ever.”
- Douglas Coupland opens a can of whoop-ass on Canadian literature. It’s only available through the New York Times Select portal, but the gist here is that he’s declared it to be at the mercy of the Canadian government.
- The Guardian attempts to find patterns in UK bestseller lists. I know a few conspiracy theorists they might want to consult first.
- C. Max Magee on hard-to-pronounce literary names.
- Newspapers are starting to discover the Internet. At this rate, maybe four years from now, they’ll discover that the Smashing Pumpkins broke up.
- I’m surprised nobody has made the correlation between YouTube and America’s Funniest Home Videos before. Is there some pattern to be found in these videos?
- More on McCraw. It seems that McCraw has now sued former editor Jerry Roberts for $500,000. (via Romenesko)
- “Once More with Hobbits” (via Gwenda)
- Rick Kleffel is reporting from WorldCon.
- Carolyn Kellogg on The Mysteries of Pittsburgh casting call.
- “The Pressure to Be Exotic” (via Booksquare)
- Novelist Masako Bando has confessed that she threw kittens over a cliff that her pet cats gave birth to. As publicity stunts go, I’d say this was maybe a tad extreme. Why couldn’t Bando take out a full-page ad somewhere or get in a physical altercation the way that most batshit crazy authors do? The big question: how will the bar be raised here?
- MySpace: The Magazine.
The Bat Segundo Show #58: A.M. Homes
Author: A.M. Homes
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Trying to remember last night’s conquest, relying upon Jorge’s import/export skills.
Subjects Discussed: Taking on the “male menopause novel,” idioms appropriated by corporations, Kurt Vonnegut, vernacular, throwing the reader off guard, the dropping of letters, character names, donuts vs. bagels, burgers, on being provocative, novelists as ethicists, maintaining an “apocalyptic yet uplifting” tone, Katrina, Michiko Kakutani’s review, Stephen King’s plaudits and the mixed reviews, writing vulnerable male heroes, sensationalistic material, muted realism and decorum, research in Los Angeles, the ass as the great gender equalizer, charlatans and quacks, explaining life within novels, cliches, interconnectedness, Crash, Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust, money, and the relative nature of class within fiction.
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The Bat Segundo Show #57: Jonathan Safran Foer
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Dismissive of Michael Martone.
Subjects Discussed: San Francisco vs. New York, time-shifting as style, invention as experimentalism, the importance of critics (James Wood, B.R. Myers, Sven Birkets), responding to John Updike’s review, visual elements, designing Extremely Loud in Word, the use of conceptual red ink, the post-9/11 novel, United 93, making the 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers, public perception, Foer’s side of the Deborah Solomon article, interviews, the real-life inspiration for Mr. Black, Burgess’s Earthly Powers, Bertolucci’s 1900, the influence of photographs upon the text, Joseph Cornell, numbers, -ologists, “…until that day…,” Stephen Hawking, Billy Joel, laughing in the face of tragedy, the “purity” of children, and creative acts.
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Blood Car: The Next Snakes on a Plane?
So I was playing a game of “Where are they now?” with my culturally obsessed friend and Anna Chulmsky’s name came up. We wondered what had happened to the girl from the My Girl movies. Well, it was only an IMDB movie listing away before we discovered a film called Blood Car. Here’s the tagline:
In the near future gas prices have reached astronomical highs nearing $40 a gallon. One man, Archie Andrews, an environmentalist elementary school teacher, is trying to discover an alternate fuel source. While experimenting with wheat grass, Archie accidentally stumbles upon a solution. That solution turns out to be blood. HUMAN BLOOD!
That is one deranged movie idea. But I’m a warped man and I would gladly pay $10 to see this movie.
There’s a trailer for the movie at the site, which seems to suggest that the titular car has a blade in the back trunk which chops people up and uses the blood for fuel. A tracking shot reveals gas prices at around $32 a gallon. The main character has the batty name of Archie Andrews. Is it pointed satire? Or just a cheeseball grindhouse flick? More importantly, is there anyone batshit crazy enough to distribute this film? Does a movie like Blood Car have any chance in today’s marketplace?
Small wonder how the filmmakers got the domain bloodcar.com. I don’t think there was much demand.
Even so, this interview suggests that director Alex Orr has the right influences: “I’m a big Sam Fuller fan and we were just talking about stuff we could rip out of the headlines and we’d been talking about doing a horror movie for a long time and we’d keep seeing these really awful horror movies. You go to Blockbuster and it’s the genre that been excused—you know it’s just “boobs and blood” and it’s not even the right exposures, or good sound. And these films get in the video stores. And we thought let’s make a feature that somebody will get to see. And with the really, really limited resources that we had, a horror [film] seemed the way to go, and we just hopped on the back of the little gas business. So yeah it was pretty much out of frustration. We wanted to make a movie and we heard another movie sold and we jumped up and down and cussed.”
So what of Blood Car‘s future? Storywise, I couldn’t see Hollywood thinking up this premise in a million years. Moneywise, I couldn’t see them backing this.
But Blood Car shows that there’s still quite a bit of cult movie innovation out there. Perhaps we’ll know the verdict once this film hits the festival circuit.