Stuff: Back to the ol' drawing board.

So I was watching Monster Squad the other night. Normally I wouldn't admit that. Watching Monster Squad, like masturbation, is a youthful pleasure that can still be enjoyed by adults, and is even fun to do in groups on the rare occasion, but isn't something we need to discuss. But we need to discuss it momentarily because of the shirt pictured above.

Early in the movie, we find the vaguely gayish duo at the core of the titular squad getting sternly lectured by their school principal for the unspeakable crime of drawing monsters in their science class. In those early scenes, the squad's soon to be commander and chief is wearing the shirt you see above.

While watching the movie, I thought to myself, "Self, you could totally make such a shirt and sell it on the Internet. Nostalgic horror bloggers would trade you currency for it. That currency could then be exchanged for other goods and services."

I got so excited by the idea of monetizing this hobby of mine and separating you, my dear readers, from your hard-earned cash that I did some web browsing to find an image of said shirt.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one with this undeniably brilliant idea.

So, the bad news is that I still have to work for a living. The good news: You can wrap yourself in a t-shirt that proclaims your deathless love for the movie that made the existence of werewolf testicles canonical.

Music: Torture tunes.

The Wall Street Journal has a short article on some of the songs and musicians that the U.S. military has used to "enhance" their interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The number one tune on the WSJ's short list is disheartening.

1. Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA"
It should stand as no surprise that a large majority of the songs used in Guantanamo Bay consisted of seemingly patriotic ditties like Springsteen's most famous American anthem. One Spanish citizen accused of being linked to the terrorist network Al-Qaida claimed his interrogators played this song the majority of the time during his entire two year stay in the Cuban prison. However, Clive Stafford Smith, the legal director of the UK human rights charity Reprieve, noted that it may not have been the most patriotic choice since "the message of the song is harshly critical of American policy, condemning the war in Vietnam and describing a veteran's effort to find work."

Is there any modern pop song with a weirder political life than the Boss's anti-heroic, bitterly pointed tune? When Springsteen originally conceived the tune, it was low-fi, minimalist number that could have easily found it way on Nebraska or Darkness on the Edge of Town. Eventually, Springsteen decided to go for a cognitively dissonant epic feel that would, at once, be both an ironic take on bombastic American triumphalism and a sonic statement that elevated the size of the story to the point it could not be ignored.

At least, he thought it couldn't. The protest tune quickly became a hit and then, with greater irony than Springsteen could conceive, it became the campaign theme song for Ronald Reagan. Springsteen demanded the Reagan campaign stop using his tune, but the damage was done. It's virtually impossible not to hear this clear non-celebratory song and not catch a disagreeable whiff of (thoroughly undeserved) Reagan Era jingoism.

Though even that doesn't beat the irony of the fact that a song about a forgotten veteran of the archetypal American military quagmire has been refashioned for use as a weapon in our latest foreign adventures.

I wonder if the soldiers blasting this music at prisoners ever listen to the lyrics and ponder how they'll be treated when they come back home. Like the vet in the song, they'll be returning from a massively unpopular conflict into an economy that most likely can't reabsorb them. It must be odd, doing this nation's dirtiest work, all to a soundtrack that serves to remind them of how disposable they are.

The article doesn't discuss the efficacy of blasting loud noise at prisoners, but a discussion of prolonged and repetitious exposure to loud noise appears in John Conroy's Ordinary People, Unspeakable Acts: The Dynamics of Torture. In 1971, twelve Irish prisoners were rounded up by the British government as part of an anti-terrorism push called Operation Demetrius. The prisoners formed the test case for the application of the Five Techniques: a torture regimen devised by the British and Irish governments that included wall-standing (rigid standing positions that prisoners kept until their muscles gave out), hooding, subjection to noise, deprivation of sleep, deprivation of food and drink. The combined affect of these techniques is horrific and potentially deadly. Notably, one of the prisoners interviewed stated that, of all the things that were done to him, he could only remember one of techniques clearly: Years, later he still vividly recalled the noises he was exposed to.

R.I.P.: Say goodnight, Nessie.

In a biography of firebrand revolutionary propagandist Thomas Paine, I once read the theory that, prior our modern moment, it was simply easier to be an accomplished Renaissance man. Paine, who not only gave voice of aborning young republic's revolutionary ideals but was also an engineer and architect of minor significance, was downright myopic compared to some of his contemporaries. To explain this riot of talent (and, perhaps, to assure readers like myself - a man who gets tired pondering a trip to the bank a mere five blocks away - that we're not inadequate in some way) the author proposed that it was easier to make lasting achievements in a broad range of fields back then because, in the late 18th Century, so much still had to be done. The bar to entry in to, say the physical sciences was lower because a man with homemade equipment and a few clever insights was on the cutting edge; as opposed to now, when particle colliders the size of small towns are making the breakthroughs.

As reassuring as this idea would be to somebody like me - whose life is not only not-revolutionary, but perhaps falls slightly short of mediocre (though I've come up with some really funny t-shirts designs that, somebody, I'll maybe put up on Cafepress or something) - I don't think its accurate. After are, the modern age still mints the occasional polymath.

Here's the NY Times obit of Robert Rines: inventor, educator, legal innovator, composer, and monster hunter:

Dollars to doughnuts, Robert H. Rines will be mainly remembered not for holding more than 800 patents, starting a law school or writing music for the stage, but for his dogged pursuit of the Loch Ness monster.

But Dr. Rines, who died on Nov. 1 at his home in Boston at 87, may have outlived the fabled Scottish creature he pursued for more than a quarter century. He had come to suspect that the beast died during his hunt, leaving him to search for a skeleton.

Dr. Rines died of heart failure, said his wife, Joanne Hayes-Rines.

Dr. Rines took the most convincing underwater pictures of what might or might not have been the Loch Ness monster, so convincing that in the mid-1970s scientists from Harvard and the Smithsonian expressed serious interest. Others were intrigued by his innovative search tactics: He hired a perfumer to concoct a scent to attract the creature and trained dolphins to carry cameras.

In the end, Dr. Rines, a lawyer, said that though he had failed to meet the standards of science, he was sure he could persuade a jury of the monster’s existence.

"They can just call me crazy, and that's O.K. by me," he said in an interview with Boston magazine in 2008. "At least I won't go to jail for it, like Galileo."

Dr. Rines was far more than a garden-variety monster hunter. He was spectacularly polymathic.

He developed electronic gear to improve the resolution of radar and sonar images that is used in Patriot missiles, found the wrecks of the Titanic and the Bismarck and helped pave the way for ultrasound imaging. His patented hinge for chopsticks is less noticed but quite clever.

"Few Americans have made such a sweeping contribution to the process and business of inventing as Robert Rines," said a biography prepared by the Lemelson-M.I.T. Program, which recognizes outstanding inventors and is run by the engineering school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As a prominent patent lawyer, Dr. Rines greatly influenced the Congressional rewriting of patent laws in 2000, according to Fortune magazine.

In 1973, Dr. Rines founded the Franklin Pierce Law Center to train law students in intellectual property law. It is the only law school in New Hampshire.

Dr. Rines's first love was music, and his family cherishes his story of playing a violin duet with Albert Einstein at a summer camp in Maine when he was 11. He said he played better than Einstein.

As an adult, Dr. Rines combined with the director and actor Paul Shyre to form a theater company to stage plays by Eugene O'Neill and others. He wrote music for most of their dozen or so Off Broadway productions.

He wrote the campaign song for "Hizzoner!" — a one-man play about Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia of New York, written by Mr. Shyre and starring Tony Lo Bianco. The play was shown on public television in 1984 and ran on Broadway in 1989.

Robert Harvey Rines was born on Aug. 30, 1922, in Boston. His father, David, a patent lawyer, helped him try at 6 years old to patent a pocketknife with a fork, spoon and other things. But the idea was already patented.

Robert fell in love with music even earlier and began to play the violin at 4. By high school, he had formed a band, the Six Aces of Rhythm, and was taking composition classes at Harvard.

He left high school early to study physics and engineering at M.I.T., but soon decided he would rather go to Harvard. His father said no, and so he deliberately flunked out. His father kicked him out of the house. He reconsidered and graduated near the top of his M.I.T. class in 1942.

He joined the Army Signal Corps, where his experience in M.I.T.'s radiation laboratory proved critical in helping develop the Army's top-secret Microwave Early Warning System. His radar and sonar patents grew out of this work.

He later worked as an assistant examiner at the patent office in Washington while earning a law degree from Georgetown in 1947. In 1972, he received a doctorate from National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, since he was there anyway to help Taiwan develop a patent system. He later helped the People's Republic of China regularize its patent process.

Dr. Rines's passion about the Loch Ness monster was kindled in 1972 when he was in Scotland on his honeymoon with the former Carol Williamson, his second wife.

They were enjoying tea with a friend whose home overlooked the loch. Their host remarked, 'I say, is that an upturned boat?"

What they saw was a big, grayish hump with the texture of an elephant’s skin. It rose four feet out of the water and seemed to be about 30 feet long. They stared at it for 10 minutes.

"I don't care what anybody thinks, you have to find out what that was," Mrs. Rines said.

The obsession had begun. There were many trips to Loch Ness, with Dr. Rines applying his sophisticated sonar techniques to find "Nessie." In 1976, the Academy of Applied Science, an organization Dr. Rines had founded, teamed up with The New York Times in 1976 in a joint quest. Results were inconclusive but made interesting newspaper articles.

Dr. Rines later found evidence that the loch may overlay what was once an ocean floor, suggesting to him that a seagoing dinosaur may have adapted to freshwater. But after the 1970s, Dr. Rines and other seekers stopped seeing monstrous manifestations. He thought his quarry may have died.

Dr. Rines taught at M.I.T., Harvard and Franklin Pierce, started a salmon farm and set up several companies to market his inventions. His Academy of Applied Science shifted focus from aiding unusual experiments, like hunting down Bigfoot, to encouraging students to invent.

Dr. Rines's first marriage, to Dorothy Kay, ended in divorce, and his second, to Miss Williamson, ended with her death in 1993. He is survived by his wife, the former Joanne Hayes; his sons, Justice and Robert; his daughter, Suzi Rines Toth; his stepdaughter, Laura Hayes-Heur; and four grandchildren.

His inventions that live on include a way to use ultrasound radiation to treat cataracts that he conceived while having his own eyes examined several years ago. His dream of inventing something to stop tornadoes never materialized.

Comics: Change the record.

One of the oddest things about Max Brooks's popular zombie-centric franchise - the highest point of which is the critic and fan fave novel World War Z - is how haphazardly it all hangs together. The cornerstone of the whole thing is his '03 Zombie Survival Guide, a goofy spoof of the then wildly popular Worst Case Scenario books and their imitators. A gag impulse-buy book, the book and it's author then appeared in Brooks's second book, World War Z: The premise of that novel's oral history conceit is that Brooks was selected for the job of oral historian because his well-known writer of a zombie survival guide is considered essential reading by the humans that made it out of the zombicaust. Aside from the tonal shift - the guide is clearly a goof, but the novel (though often hilarious in the way any really obsessively detailed consideration of the impossible inevitably is) takes its premise as seriously as it can - there's a sort of continuity error insomuch as Z assumes a guide written after a single, global zombie outbreak, but the guide assumes that there have been many outbreaks of differing magnitudes. The latest addition to the franchise, a graphic novel expansion of a section from Brooks's original guide titled Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks, mixes the premises of the first book and the tone of the second. Recorded Attacks posits that zombie outbreaks of varying severity have been a regular part of human existence since the Stone Age and, within the Brooksian world of zombies, certain cultures have highly developed responses to fighting the undead. Though the tone of new graphic novel owes more to WWZ than the tongue-in-cheek meta-ness of the guide.

The comic begins with a hypothetical attack on a tribe of prehistoric humans. From there, readers go to ancient Egypt (where the removal mummies' brains takes on a new significance), the borders of the Roman Empire, and so on, in a rapid tour of zombie/pure strain human history.

Eagle-eyed readers may spot the conflict between this opener and the title of the book. After all, the point of the label "prehistoric" is to underscore the fact that the period in question produced no historic record. Brooks repeated breaks his conceit that the stories in his book are "recorded" attacks. Later, he tells the story of an outbreak that was later reported as a slave rebellion. He actually ends this story with the narration telling us that there was no record of what really happened in that incident, causing readers with a bias towards narrative logic to wonder how, then, could it be in a book pretending to be a collection of recorded attacks.

Those head scratching paradoxes aside, the stories are, on the whole, rather fun. The book's standout is a series of interconnected bits that infect humanity's grimmest crime - the 400 plus years of the Atlantic slave trade - with the zombies. There's an effective and creepy parallel between the predation of the slavers and the cannibalism of the zombies. Ibraim Roberson finely done black and white art is up to the task. He handles the rapid shifts in time confidently and his action and horror scenes are suitably lively and grisly.

In fact, the only thing the book really suffers from is the fact that the zombie markets been absolutely glutted for nearly a decade now. A competently handled, reasonably clever work like Recorded Attacks might have been great in '02, but now it is not only the victim of a crowded field, it trails behind Walking Dead, the definitive comic treatment of the whole zombie thing. There are those who can't get enough of the shambling dead. Such readers will find more than enough to enjoy here to make the book worth their time. For readers fatigued by this endless zombie moment we seem to find ourselves in, this will seem like more of the same.

Link Proliferation: "To join a cuib, an initiate had to suck the blood from self-imposed slashes in the arm of every other member of the nest."

I totally flaked on this last Friday, but I meant to hip you to a great post by Zoe, the amazing blogger of the high strangeness that is Zoe in Wonderland. In the trademarked Zoe style, the post follows a single thread of thought through art, history, religion, and murder, excavating the twisted roots of a Bolivian religious tradition known as "La Diablada." I don't want to ruin it by stepping all over the post's content. Well worth the click. Read on, McDuff.

Movies: Learn to live like an animal.

Though it may be the product of some sort of strong blow to the head - most likely suffered in childhood - I actually enjoyed Jonathan Henseigh's 2007 Welcome to the Jungle, a clumsy first-person-shooter jungle romp that owes a huge debt to the vastly overrated Cannibal Holocaust and the still hotly debated Blair Witch Project. And I say that knowing, on an objective level, W2tJ is a very, very dubious flick.

The plot of W2tJ is simple: Four ex-pats - one stick-up-the-butt couple and one boozin' and sexin' pair of goofs - living in Fiji get wind of a old white dude spotted amongst the cannibal tribes of New Guinea. After a bit o' research, the quartet decide that the mysterious white shadow must be none other than the vanished Michael Rockefeller, who vanished in the cannibal jungles of New Guinea in 1961. (The true story of the young Rockefeller is fascinating and, while it hardly justifies the "based on a true story" tag this flick gets, it does justify a quick Google exploration of your own.) Visions of tabloid gold dancing in their head, the quartet grab some jungle-grade camping gear, get two camera, and set off into New Guinea to find the famed missing scion of the Rockefeller empire. In the tradition of Cannibal Holocaust, they run afoul of locals - from crafty urban traders to the cannibals that act as the film's final baddies - and, in the tradition of BWP, they turn on one another under the stress. As a result, our heroes fare little better than characters from either of W2tJ major inspirations (indeed, one is even dispatched and displayed in a manner that alludes to Holocaust's infamously grisly girl-kabob gag).

There's ample reason to consign W2tJ to the dustbin of horror film history. Primarily, there's the first-person camerawork. Taking all the wrong lessons from Cannibal Holocaust, W2tJ mixes what appears to be vérite style third-person shots with first-person subjective camera work. But, unlike Holocaust, there's no in flick justification for the back and forth. Consequently, there are several scenes where the viewer is left pondering whether or not they are supposed to think anybody is behind the camera - a distraction that break you out of the film and diminishes the impact of the visual style by underscoring how contrived it is. Even when the film does fully commit to the premise of first-person p.o.v.'s, the conceit make a hash of certain scenes. Most notably, there's a scene is which our young cannibal kibble run into a particularly testy set of New Guinean military patrolmen. There's some sort of dust-up between the smart-ass male of the group and one of the army men, but the whole thing happens mostly off scene and what we do see, shot in low-light and with the camera's stabilizers set to Parkinson's, is fairly incomprehensible. One could argue that this sort of low resolution opacity fairly mimics the nervous isolation of our main characters and communicates to the viewers as sense of their own frightened ignorance of what's going on. But the result of repeatedly leaving the viewers literally and metaphorically in the dark doesn't heighten the tension. Instead, it give the viewer the sense that plot incidents are happening willy-nilly, so investing the mental bandwidth to attempt to puzzle out what's happening and why we should care seems like a bad call. The result is a sense detachment. We begin to feel like what we don't get wasn't getable and doesn't really matter.

But let's accentuate the positive!

W2tJ was sot on location, in jungle surroundings so beautiful that its almost cheating. There are a few set ups in a the flick that, despite the hand-cam conceit, look epic. Given the ever increasing quality and portability of film equipment, it's kind of a mystery why small budget filmmakers don't get out more. If you lack the budget to create the lavishly squalid dungeons of Jigsaw, go find a rotting hospital structure like the one that practically stars in Session 9. Think of the brilliant way the birch trees in Blair Witch became a grim, minimalist series of white slash marks on a pitch-black background. You aren't going to get that in a studio. Perhaps it's a genre-specific distrust of the beautiful: Other than the occasional final girl, horror too often seems to pride itself on the rigor of is grotesquery and see the beautiful as a sort of softening, feminizing indulgence. There also a distinctly American strain of fantasy that focuses on the intrusion of violent or uncanny of the quotidian - a manifestation of America's defensively suburban mentality - that has long replaced the early modern gothic of Poe and Hawthorne or sci-fi-hued apocalypses of the early Atomic Era. The sets for such horrors are cookie-cutter tract homes, shopping malls, and high schools proms. There's little room for for the spectacle of beauty in such flicks; it's a cinema of touchy possessiveness, a horror that wants you off its lawn. In contrast, there's an expansiveness to W2tJ visuals that is pleasing. It wants to explore new places and pit its characters against the challenges that await those bold or foolish enough to venture forth. It speaks to a sense of heroic questing, rather than peevish insularity. That said, Henseigh's vision falls a bit short of the naturalistic poetry in recent Aussie flicks like Wolf Creek, Rogue, or Black Water. In those flicks have an almost pagan vibe. Nature is vast, ancient, and possessed of a brutally serene indifference to the activities of the mortals who intrude in her realm. Steeped in classic action tropes, Henseigh treats his jungle more as a series of tests for his characters rather than something that exists on another plane of being.

W2tJ also gets points for being happily free of the untidy, ill-concived "philosophical" baggage that makes Cannibal Holocaust such a particularly embarrassing failure. Admittedly, the "who are the real savages" nonsense in Deodato is little more than a beard, a clumsy bit of misdirection meant to justify the film's energetic wallowing in exploitation extremism; but it's a beard Deodato seems determined to sell. We get our cheap kicks smothered in in a overly generous helping of the unearned and juvenile revelation that modern man can be cruel; a philosophical "discovery" that is all the more embarrassing for the fact that Deodato doesn't seem to believe it himself as he takes pains to make the cruel documentary freaks who act unlike any of other folks in the flick. (Curiously, the idea that all humanity is inherently evil and incapable of evolution past its most essential and savage core must be a great comfort to artists from formerly fascists nations who must otherwise ask themselves the less comfortable question of how rational, well-meaning human beings commit unspeakable evil.)

In contrast, W2tJ plays strictly for kicks. This isn't without its problem: The specters of Burroughs, Haggard, and the worst of Kipling haunt the film, not full exorcised by the native's bloody revenge at the end. But we're mercifully spared the hectoring voice of the filmmaker trying to convince us that he's speak great truths. In this aspect at least, W2tJ is far superior to is deluded predecessor.

Henseigh's cannibal flick also shows cannibals that act like humans rather than excitable zombies: They hunt their food carefully and strategically, they ration out their meat, they even keep a separate butchery and killing field so as to not litter their home with messy people parts. That's a real step forward in the presentation of cannibals.

W2tJ is great film. In fact, with it's occasional lapses into visual incompetence, I can't even say its a very good film. Furthermore, because its aims are so much more modest than Blair Witch, it never achieves that flick's creeping existential dread. However, it's a honest flick with some well-made scenes. If there's room enough on your Netflix queue for such easy and unremarkable pleasures, you could do worse.

And now, because we've all got it stuck in our heads now . . .

Music: "My Heart Was Stolen in the Outer Realm."

The band Sea Wolf, named after the 1904 Jack London novel, is really just one dude: Cali native Alex Church. The rest of Sea Wolf is pressed into service as needed. Here, Church and company do "Wicked Blood" of Sea Wof latest long-player, White Water, White Bloom. The video is a charming homage to the lo-fi pleasures of z-grade sci-fi/horrors like Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Stuff: My bloody shower time?

If you're anything like me, you like your hot morning shower, but wish it could somehow be more ominous. Hygiene is all good and well, but where's the menace?

And if there could be a sort of visual "shower/gas" holocaust gag embedded into the experience, all the better.

Screamers and Screamettes, we're in luck. I give you Chris Dimino's Gas Mask Shower Head!