YouTube Obsession

After some legal issues in the off season for slandering a private equity owned minor league ballpark over-charging fans, Baseball Doesn’t Exist and it’s podcast counterpart has returned.

As someone who can’t make the time to follow baseball how I want to, this show really breaks down all the news I need for the MLB. They do so with the air of bros I worked with in the many physical labor jobs I’ve had over the years. Very comforting.

Watching

Of the “Universal Monsters” er…Universe, I’m most familiar with it’s spin-offs, remakes and nostalgia films. Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein was a family favorite growing up and I watched it roughly 30 times before I even read the source material. I finally watched the original film last year and thoroughly enjoyed it. Of the other “Monsters” I mostly know them through cultural osmosis and the Goonies derivative Monster Squad.

I want to change that this year starting with The Creature from the Black Lagoon from 1954.

You can see elements in this scene that have been translated to later horror films. Most notably Silence of the Lambs.

The “Gill-man” design is fantastic and watching him swim is one of the more creepy things in the movie. It also makes me wish there was a “Best Stunt” award at the Oscars because the actor in the suit swimming under water makes it look so easy and natural. It would ruin the rest of the movie if the creature’s movements looked like a dude swimming at the YMCA.

Also, Julie Adams as the stunning Kay Lawrence is just primo diva worship. She’s on a riverboat in the amazon for weeks and her hair is always SAT. No frizzy or limp looks from miss Lawrence she is always permed and full like she has her own hair staff at the ready.

MM

The next Universal movie we watched is the lesser discussed The Black Cat from 1934. Starring both Boris Karloff and Bella Lugosi.

I really liked the entire atmosphere of this film. Boris Karloff’s Hjalmar lives atop a WWI mass grave in his Art Deco mansion, his angular coldness reflected in the stainless steel surrounding him. Anyone familiar with occultism will instantly recognize his character as a heavily fictionalized Aleister Crowley. Which adds another meta layer to this wildly pre-code film.

By contrast, Lugosi’s repentant Vitus, emotional and always at the edge of losing his cool, attempts to end his guilt by killing his former superior officer; Hjalmar. What follows is a game of patience, tension and deception that works on so many levels.

Not only do you have the wealth literally built on the corpses of dead soldiers but even our dead bodies, through the heavily implied necrophilia, must always be in service to those in power.

For only being 80 minutes long, it really goes places and I highly recommend.

Reading

As I have mentioned in the last few posts, there have been some crazy personal events happen since the beginning of February this year. All is well and it’s getting better everyday, but when under duress, the last thing my brain can handle is thoroughly reading a book. As a result, I read no books in February. I continue to read newsletters, essays and articles but full attention on a book last month was just impossible for me.

That being said, I finally finished a book I started in Puerto Rico: Life During Wartime by Lucious Shepard. The quick pitch: Imagine X-Files set in a Tom Clancy story about U.S. invasion of Grenada. The long pitch is that it’s a thoughtful, philosophical and magical realism take on war, it’s effects on the human mind, culture, the never ending arms race and who really benefits from all this war.

It opening two-thirds is a great and mysterious set up. Much like Remedy’s Control, it embraces high-strangeness and gives spooky vibes. Weird elements that are only slightly removed from reality, a view just a bit askew.

This book is also incredibly horny. I support horny media, more media should be hornier but even I was getting worn out by all the overly descriptive sex by the last third. I will compliment Shepard though, even the most egregious description of SA was ultimately useful to the story and I have a hard time saying it went to far. Uncomfortable and shocking maybe, but I’m grateful for books that shock me.

However, the final act never quite came together for me and it really struggled to wrap everything up. Though I mostly attribute this to the flaw of paranormal sci-fi genre: Knowing what is happening is less fun than the mystery.

Listening

As mentioned above and in the last few posts I have really leaned on my comfort media go-tos to stay sane during this difficult time and no podcast does that better than 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back.

It’s just great when when funny people, Mike Nelson of MST3K fame and Connor Lastowka of RiffTrax, get together and riff on books that undeservedly sold millions of copies. It’s a great, low stakes podcast that I recommend to everyone.

Also, I am inexorably tied to the lore of the show since I forced them to read Modelland by Tyra Banks.

Other Notables

** Glad he had the balls to say it out loud. 

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** Austin Walker breaks a 2 year video drought to post an emergent story from Marathon