Link Proliferation: “Paradise on Earth.”

"Hunky vampires or Barack Obama."

By way of McNally Jackson's blog, which I bite from every week or so 'cause it's awesome, comes a jeremiad about the rise of what the autho dismisses as middle brow escapist genre lit amongst college kids.

From the article:

n 1969, when Alice Echols went to college, everybody she knew was reading "Soul on Ice," Eldridge Cleaver's new collection of essays. For Echols, who now teaches a course on the '60s at the University of Southern California, that psychedelic time was filled with "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," "The Golden Notebook," the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the erotic diaries of Anaïs Nin.

Forty years later, on today's college campuses, you're more likely to hear a werewolf howl than Allen Ginsberg, and Nin's transgressive sexuality has been replaced by the fervent chastity of Bella Swan, the teenage heroine of Stephenie Meyer's modern gothic "Twilight" series. It's as though somebody stole Abbie Hoffman's book -- and a whole generation of radical lit along with it.

Last year Meyer sold more books than any other author -- 22 million -- and those copies weren't all bought by middle-schoolers. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the best-selling titles on college campuses are mostly about hunky vampires or Barack Obama. Recently, Meyer and the president held six of the 10 top spots. In January, the most subversive book on the college bestseller list was "Our Dumb World," a collection of gags from the Onion. The top title that month was "The Tales of Beedle the Bard" by J.K. Rowling. College kids' favorite nonfiction book was Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers," about what makes successful individuals. And the only title that stakes a claim as a real novel for adults was Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns," the choice of a million splendid book clubs.

Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they're choosing books like 13-year-old girls -- or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.

I'm honestly conflicted by this article. Mostly I want to dismiss the writer's smug assumptions about the value of genre lit and deflate the self-important image of the '60s as a sort of golden age of intellectualism. Honestly, are college students really all the worse off because we read about Obama's vision for a liberal tomorrow instead of swallowing Cleaver's theories that the rape of white women is a legitimate weapon in the race struggle?

On the other hand, this news is slightly grimace inducing. I'm reminded of Pauline Kael's sad quote: "When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture."

What Horror Movie are We Today?

Today we're Primeval.

From the UK-based Sky News wire: 'Monster Crocodile' Bites Girl's Head Off

A crocodile has bitten off a 10-year-old girl's head after knocking over the canoe she was travelling in.

She was on her way to a floating school on the Agusan Marsh in the Philippines when the huge reptile capsized the boat, the provincial government said.

The girl fell into the water during the attack on Saturday, but her headless body was not discovered until two days later.

A classmate who was with her was rescued by a man who had been escorting the pair in another boat, said Ruel Hipulan, head of the private group which runs the school.

"It's a monster crocodile," he said. Witnesses said the crocodile was about 30ft (nine metres) long.

Martians Go Home!

Music video goodness with a "Space Invaders" twist from Röyksopp.



Portrait of the Dictator as Young Man

I first met Kim Jong Il in October 1959. He was a senior at the elite Namsan Senior High School, and I was a 27-year-old professor of Russian at the Pyongyang University of Education.

Kim Hyun Sik was the infamous North Korean dictator's private Russian tutor for more than 20 years. Over at AlterNet, Hyun Sik presents an extended portrait of the early years of the now possibly insane tyrant.

From the article, on Jong Il's installation as commander in chief of the armed forces:

A short while later, Kim Jong Il was named the commander in chief of the Korean People’s Army. And a big sign inscribed with Kim Jong Il’s words, “A world without North Korea need not survive,” was duly installed at the exhibition hall, the nation’s flagship display of achievements in industry, technology, engineering, and agriculture.

On the eugenic policies of Jong Il:

Living under a totalitarian regime requires a daily suspension of disbelief. Nowhere is that more true today than in North Korea, where otherwise ethical people contort themselves into untenable moral positions because they’ve bought into the oft-repeated notion that their country is “Paradise on Earth.” Simply to survive in North Korea, citizens must believe they are living in a chosen land. And when ideological indoctrination morphs into reality, the dictator need not even be nearby to spread fear. Not if average people will do his bidding for him.

All of which is bad news for those who don’t fit into Kim Jong Il’s ideal of a healthy, vital citizenry. In the people’s paradise that is North Korea, disabled -- even short -- people are considered subhuman. In 1989, Pyongyang hosted the World Festival of Youth and Students. In preparing for the international gathering, the entire nation was encouraged to outdo South Korea’s hosting of the Summer Olympic Games the year before. Pyongyang’s event had to be bigger and more glamorous. One such method was to purify the revolutionary capital of Pyongyang of disabled people.

Six months before the festival, the government rounded up all disabled residents of Pyongyang and sent them away from the capital to remote villages. The majority were clockmakers, seal engravers, locksmiths, and cobblers who made their living in the city. Overnight, they were forcibly deprived of the lives they had known.

. . .

My friend, a well-connected physician at the time, told me that he had been ordered by the Communist Party to pick out the shortest residents of Pyongyang and South Pyongan province. Against his conscience, he went out to those areas and had local party representatives distribute propaganda pamphlets. They claimed that the state had developed a drug that could raise a person’s height and was recruiting people to receive the new treatment. In just two days, thousands gathered to take the new drug.

My friend explained how he picked out the shortest among the large group. He told the crowd that the drug would best take effect when consumed regularly in an environment with clean air. The people willingly, and without the slightest suspicion, hopped aboard two ships -- women in one, men in the other. Separately, they were sent away to different uninhabited islands in an attempt to end their “substandard” genes from repeating in a new generation. Left for dead, none of the people made it back home. They were forced to spend the rest of their lives separated from their families and far from civilization.

On Kim Hyun Sik life now:

Thirty years have passed since I last saw Kim Jong Il. Upon leaving Pyongyang, I spent some 10 years in South Korea. And now I am living in the United States, the land of my so-called mortal enemy.

. . .

In 1991, during a stint as a visiting professor in Moscow, I was approached by a South Korean agent. He brought me incredible news. He could arrange a meeting with my older sister, who had fled to the South during the Korean War and later moved to Chicago. Arranged by South Korea’s national intelligence agency, it would be the first time we had seen each other in more than 40 years. All that time, we thought the other was dead. I was overcome with emotion. She begged me to come back to the United States with her and become a minister -- our mother’s dying wish for me. Although I could not return with my sister, it was one of the happiest moments of my life.

Our joy was short-lived. Another agent who had allowed us to use his house as a meeting spot was, in fact, a double agent working for the North. I received instructions from the government to return home the very next day. But I knew very well I couldn’t; I would be killed as a traitor. I anguished over what my failure to appear would mean for my family back in Pyongyang. It’s bad enough for a soldier or a student to defect. But I knew intimate details of the ruling family’s inner circles. Surely they would view my betrayal as a personal insult.

I never returned to North Korea, and I never saw my family again. A few years later, I heard from a well-placed South Korean minister that my family had been sent to a gulag and murdered, the innocent victims of my treasonous crime. To this day, I know nothing of the details of their deaths, or whether they blamed me as they perished.

Movies: What a croc.

Welcome screamers and screamettes. Today your humble horror host gives you yet another reason to never venture into the developing world. We covered the hazards man-eating plants pose. Today we discuss the real and imagined dangers posed by giant crocodiles.

At the heart of Michael Katleman's 2005's giant crocodile flick Primeval is a genuine monster story: the story of the real Gustave.

The Real Story

Reports of the real Gustave began to surface in 1998. At first, they seemed incredible. Fishmen who made their living freediving in Burundi's Lake Tanganyika reported that several of their number had been devoured by a giant crocodile. They claimed this beast would show up every few years, kill several humans, and then vanish again for several years.

In 1999, French ex-pat naturalist Patrice Faye identified the giant croc. The creature was enormous: it measured about 20 feet in length and weighed a ton (making the animal about twice the size of the average adult male crocodile). The average male crocodile lives on 45 years, but Faye estimated that this animal was at least 65 years old. The animal had numerous scars from small arms fire. In one reported incident, soldiers fired AK-47s at the crocodile as he dragged down a 15-year-old student. The croc didn't seem phased by the weapons and, in the words of one of the soldiers, "swallowed the bullets."

Faye dubbed the beast "Gustave."

Park records of the animal's frequent disappearances from it "home" in the Rusizi National Park showed a correlation between this croc's absences and numerous fatal crocodile attacks along the Rusizi River. Combining park records and the reports of locals, Faye estimated the killer croc might have claimed as many as 300 victims. Controversially, Fay suggested that Gustave was not attacking humans for food. Crocodiles are not gluttonous eaters by nature. After one large kill, a single croc might not eat again for a month. By contrast, this beast would go on violent binges, attacking, in one instance, 17 human victims in the span of three months. In 2004, over the course of two bloody weeks, Gustave took five victims all within two days of each other. Faye's grim conclusion is that the animal kills for amusement.

In 2002, efforts were made to capture Gustave. A giant steel cage was built, but Gustave easily spotted and then foiled the trap. One year later, Gustave vanished. It was widely believed that he was killed by one of the heavily-armed rebel factions fighting in Burundi's off-again, on-again civil war.

In 2007, after a nearly four-year absence, Gustave appeared again. He attacked a group of fishermen, killing one of them. Since then, Gustave has been hunting the Rusizi.

The Fake Story

With such a horrific monster in the starring role, the saddest thing about Primeval is that it simply never catches fire. Despite it's truly horrific inspiration, the film never rises above the status of B-grade horror fluff. It takes the real croc, the real horrors of Burundi's civil war, and the template of the real effort to catch Gustave, and turns it all into a generic action flick with a big croc as just one of the many dangers our rag-tag team of jungle flick archetypes must deal with.

The film follows Tim, a reporter who is in the doghouse because 1) he seems incapable of buttoning most of the buttons on his shirt and 2) he just botched a story and libeled an important government official. As a make-good, he's assigned to hottie reporter Aviva and sent to Burundi to capture Gustave. Tagging along is Steve the cameraman, played as comic relief by former 7-Up pitchman Orlando Jones. Once in Burundi, our first world heroes meet up with the inevitable Great White Hunter and the naïve Ineffective Intellectual Scientist.

What follows is a pretty much by the numbers story of the hunters becoming the hunted as a semi-convincing CGI Gustave turns the tables on our heroes and begins snatching them up one by one. The croc doesn't look bad – though one of the least convincing scenes involving Gustave happens pretty early in the flick and this throws off the disbelief. Take a lesson from Jaws, kids: save the monster for the end.

Viewers are also treated to many of the standard Dark Continent Adventure plot points: there's a ritual dance by native shamans, the white woman gets sexually menaced by a savage African, somebody contrasts the beauty of the country with it brutality, and so on. The inherent racism of some of these tired stereotypes occasionally becomes weirdly explicit, as in a bizarre "joke" Orlando Jones makes about slavery being not so bad in as much as it got his people out of Africa. You might not find this stuff offensive, but I'll wager you won't find it particularly funny or interesting either.

This generic story template is given a slight tweak, however, by the introduction of a second, concurrent storyline involving murderous rebel soldiers and their mysterious leader: the bloodthirsty "Little Gustave." (As an aside, in real-life, the croc was named after the rebel leader and not the other way around.) Actually, it is in these scenes that the flick finds some of the petrol so missing elsewhere. Katleman is an able action director and his flick really snaps along when he pits his heroes against human protagonists rather than CGI monsters.

Primeval is a middle of the road flick. It is too solidly built not to deliver on a minimally sufficient level. If this thing showed up one lazy afternoon on cable, you probably wouldn't hate yourself for popping some popcorn and flopping down on the couch. But that's about as far as this flick is going to take you.