brendan halpin

Watched two really good works of fantasy media within the last week. One was Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. This, as many others have said, was a fun, funny, rollicking adventure movie with a great “found family” theme and wonderful performances top to bottom. (Hugh Grant is an especially delicious craven villain) You do not have to know anything about D&D to have a fun time watching this movie, but if you do know something about D&D, it will only add to the fun. Unless you’re one of those killjoys who would point out that this two-hour movie would probably take months to run as a D&D campaign because of how incredibly much combat slows down the game. But I digress.

Fun adventure movies are few and far between. Pixar always wants you to cry, and Marvel somehow got a sense that they’re Important, and so the idea that you can have a good time at the movies watching a bunch of folks do something difficult and heroic seems to have gotten lost. I’m glad this movie found it.

On TV, I watched a really good fantasy show. Karen Pirie (on Britbox) doesn’t have magic or wizards or Owlbears, but it does feature a familiar fantasy trope: the incredibly competent cop who will stop at nothing to solve a case, even if it means taking on the entire power structure of the city.

If you can suspend your disbelief and remind yourself that this is only a fantasy, you’ll have a very good time with this well-acted, cleverly-plotted show. Lauren Lyle is especially winning in the title role, but there really isn’t a weak link in the cast. Of course it’s easier to turn in a good performance when you’re working from a good script, and Emer Kenny’s adaptation of Val McDermid’s novel (I was impressed enough by her 1979 to want to watch this because it was based on her writing) is really strong.

Fantasy media is fun, but it’s important to remember that if you see a guy in a robe on the street, he’s not going to be able to do any actual magic, and, similarly, you shouldn’t expect the folks in your town cosplaying dedicated, hyper-competent, deeply moral characters like Karen Pirie to actually be like that.

[Tangent: I watch a fair amount of British fantasy police shows, and everybody is DS this and DI that, and I think there’s a lot of opportunity for a “DS Nuts” joke that nobody has thus far taken advantage of. I hope British TV will get on this ASAP.]

#review #tv #movie #fantasy

This is the song that led me to Roky Erickson. There’s a strange cover of this song on the Minutemen’s Three Way Tie For Last album, where Mike Watt is recorded playing a slow, acoustic version of the song over the phone.

Roky’s version, which kicks off 1986’s Don’t Slander Me album (Not an all-time classic like The Evil One, but still a pretty great record), is propulsive and hard-rockin’ and really sells the idea that Bermuda is an evil place with an irresistible allure.

My late wife Kirsten used to get enraged by this song. “Bermuda is a really nice place! Of course you want to stay! It’s beautiful!” But of course this isn’t about the real Bermuda so much as the idea of Bermuda.

Which you need to know a little bit about the 1970’s in order to fully get. The Bermuda Triangle, a particularly hard to navigate area of the Atlantic Ocean, has been the site of numerous airplane and ship disappearances. In the 1970’s, people proposed the idea that aliens were hanging out here and abducting people. Or that there was, like, a dimensional portal here, or whatever.

This idea was HUGE in the 70’s. As a kid, I was almost as scared of the Bermuda Triangle as I was of quicksand. Which is saying something.

So it’s here that Roky sets his song. In the innocent Devil’s Triangle (the more sinister alias of The Bermuda Triangle).

Does it call and haunt you? Make you wonder? Make you want to go?

Roky’s version on Spotify

Minutemen Phone version on Spotify misidentified as “Hittin’ the Bong”

This is a weird book that I think only a big-name author like McDermid could get published these days. I picked it up because Scotland and also because of my ongoing project to read and watch more mysteries that don’t center police detectives.

(This is partly due to my political problems with police forces in general, but also the police detective has just been done to death, and I can’t stand the cliches of cop fiction anymore. Oh, he’s haunted by that one case? Oh, he drinks too much because he’s seen to much? Oh, he has a daughter and struggles to be a good dad despite the aformentioned drinking and caring too much about the job? Feh. Seen it. And then seen it again. And again.)

But back to 1979. It’s about a plucky young woman who gets stuck writing dumb “women’s page” stories and kind of lucks into becoming an investigative reporter. But here’s what’s weird about the book: the structure. The first two thirds of the book center on the nuts and bolts of putting two big investigative stories together. This is pretty compelling, but it’s neither mysterious nor particularly suspenseful. The last third concerns a murder that is ultimately solved offscreen by the police for which there are only really two suspects.

In short, this is a crime novel that features a lot of crime and almost no mystery or suspense. That’s why I think it’s weird. The protagonist is winning, but I’m not sure I’ll be on board for the next one. Then again, I’m not sure I won’t be. Like I said, It’s weird. I’m still making sense of it.

#review #books

Recently watched the Netflix offerings Dear Child and The Woman in the Window. Both featured excellent performances and both, weirdly, left me feeling a little unsatisfied at the end.

Dear Child is a German six-episode series about a young woman and a young girl who escape from domestic captivity and how the mystery of who they are and what happened to them unravels. It’s well-acted top to bottom, with Nalia Schuberth turning in a fantastically creepy performance as the child, Hannah. I hope Germany treats its child stars better than we do, or else that she takes the money and leaves the profession for ten years.

The Woman in The Window is a Netflix movie starring Amy Adams as an incredibly wealthy (that house! In Manhattan, yet!) agoraphobic in yet another riff on Rear Window. Here, as in Dear Child, the performances are fantastic, especially Amy Adams, who does a really fantastic job bringing a complicated character to life. Julianne Moore and Bryan Tyree Henry (you may remember him as the highlight of Bullet Train) are great in supporting roles, and Gary Oldman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Anthony Mackie are all wasted in small roles where they’re not asked to do very much. This is especially true of Oldman, who yells three times, and Leigh, who has, I think, 2 lines. Just a weird flex to put such talented actors in roles where you don’t give them anything to show what they can do.

Both the show and the movie, though, fail to stick the landing. The twists in The Woman in the Window are pretty good, but the final twist was just kind of meh to me. I guess the big reveal felt pretty mundane compared to what came before. Masquerade was a terrible movie and No Way Out was a pretty good movie, and both of them had big reveals that made you go, “WHOA!”. That’s not the case here. My reaction was, “hm. Interesting.”

Also, fun fact: did you know that almost getting murdered can cure your agoraphobia? Apparently that’s the case! Why would a movie lie about such a thing!

Dear Child has a lot of very satisfying twists, but literally every punch in the series is telegraphed, so that when it lands, it doesn’t really land. Here’s an example that will spoil very little. One character puts a hand on another character’s hand when they’re sitting next to each other. The second character moves the first character’s hand away. Two episodes later there’s a big reveal that these two had an illicit affair. And, like, duh!

It’s like that with every twist in the show, but the most egregious (and here be veiled spoilers, so proceed carfully) is that there’s a character whose face isn’t shown at all through 5 episodes. So naturally I’m thinking, “oh, he’s a character we know from somewhere else!” Nope! Just a guy!

Anyway, both were entertaining and had five star potential and three and a half star execution.

#review #netflix #tv #movies

We begin with a Phil Spector wall of sound type drumbeat, like it’s going to be “Be My Baby” or something.

And then Roky launches into the song, whose lyrics follow in their entirety:

I walked with a zombie

I walked with a zombie

I walked with a zombie

Last night

There’s no chorus. Or maybe there are no verses. In any case, the song is just repeating this over and over. The guitar leads change, there is a solo, and sometimes there are backing vocals going “he walked with a zombie.”

Though most of Roky’s songs are nowhere near this simple, this is kind of a quintessential Roky Erickson song. It’s a joke, and it’s also not a joke. The backing vocals let us know Roky sees the humor in the whole thing, but also, it’s creepy.

I like to resist biographical interpretations of art because it needs to make sense whether you know someone’s life story or not. But I heard once (and it’s impossible to confirm this info in the internet, so it may be bullshit) that Roky wrote this about spending the night on a locked ward shuffling around with someone zombified by psych meds.

Whether this is true or not, the repetition does manage to creep me out—this isn’t a run-for-your-life adrenaline scenario. The horror here is the mindless repetition.

I will just add that there’s some science to suggest that chanting is good for your mental and physical health, and so perhaps there’s an element of that here too.

Or maybe I’m overthinking.

The song shares a title with a very good black-and-white Val Lewton horror movie but seems otherwise unrelated. Unlike the next one we’ll listen to.

Here’s the studio version on Spotify. Here’s a live version from 2007 on youtube. There are multiple live recordings of the song, so if you want to get all zen with it and just hear these words repeated over and over for like 20 minutes, you can totally do that.

Let’s start with the opening track of Roky’s masterpiece album, The Evil One.

I guess garage rock is the best way to characterize the music, though I struggle to find an example of another artist whose music sounds like this. It’s surprisingly dense, as in addition to the lead guitar there’s some kind of screeching guitar sound going on in the background. There are also credits on the album for electric autoharp (!), so I guess that’s on here somewhere too.

Anyway, Roky asserts that he’s been working in the Kremlin with a two-headed dog. I used to think this was just some weird EC-Comics-fueled fantasy, but of course there was an actual animal torturer in the USSR who made such a monstrosity. Apparently it lived for 4 days.

Some of the lyrics are pretty inscrutable, even by rock lyrics standards, which is to say they are English words (mostly) but don’t actually follow the conventions of English language usage. So we get, for example, “Relaxed be nyet brought back,” and “pain does not look our hell” which, like, I dunno. Still, the more I listen to this, the more coherent it gets. It’s a meditation on cruelty.

So we get images like “children nailed to the cross” and “sickening sweet sight left and right”—basically the verses come at the idea of the fundamental wrongness of the experiment and the fact that it inflicted tremendous suffering on innocent creatures.

In other hands, this song might be unbearably depressing, but the hard rockin’ nature (even with the presumably guitar-generated dog howl at the end) makes it feel more angry than despairing.

This is the kind of interesting tonal high-wire act Roky pulls off throughout this album. “working in the Kremlin with a two-headed dog” sounds absurd and even funny, and it is, but it’s also a real-life horror. Play it loud.

Here’s the song on Spotify. Here’s a YouTube video of a live performance from 1980.

Happy Spooky Season, everyone! The most wonderful time of the year! (No, we don’t have to wait for October 1. I try to keep Halloween in my heart year round, but also, the candy is on the shelves in CVS, kids, so it’s Halloween time!)

I’d love to do one of those 30 horror movies in 30 days challenges, but I’ve tried that before and usually crapped out before I got to 10.

So this spooky season, I’m launching a new feature here: Roky Erickson Song of the Day*!

* I probably won’t actually do one every day. Just warning you ahead of time.

Anyway, if you’re not familiar with Roky Erickson, he was the lead singer of The 13th Floor Elevators in the 60’s, pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to a drug charge and spent a few years in a locked facility. He then got back into music, but, for a while anyway, his music took a dark detour into demons, vampires, gremlins, and zombies.

He also wrote a couple of absolutely brilliant Buddy Holly pastiches. Then he took a break from recording and touring, at least partly due to his mental illness, and he came back in the 90s with a far less spooky focus. He toured right up until his death in 2019.

I saw him on his final tour—he was clearly not well physically, sat the entire time holding a guitar he didn’t play, and he seemed to get lost in some of the verses of his songs. But the band was absolutely on fire and he still had one of my favorite rock and roll voices and it was a great night.

His lyrics are often semi-coherent, but what I love about his music, apart from the aformentioned rockin’ and his excellent voice, is that he was able to use it to give us glimpses into the nightmare world he lived in for a few years and to break down, at least partially, the barriers between us and him.

Breaking down barriers is something great art does, and, to me, Roky was a great artist. His scary songs are actually scary because he was completely sincere. There’s artifice there, sure, but the horror wasn’t a joke to him, and it’s not to me either.

I return to his music every Spooky Season. This year, I’m taking you with me.

Addendum: special shoutout to the clerk in the basement of Philadelphia’s 3rd Street Jazz and Rock, an absolutely fantastic record store, who answered my questions about Roky Erickson and got me to buy Don’t Slander Me back in 1987.

Today’s Globe has an article about how bathroom renovations in Boston Public Schools are behind schedule. It quotes Vernee Wilkinson of School Facts Boston, “a parent advocacy organization.”

But here’s the thing about School Facts Boston. It’s not a parent advocacy organization. In fact, it’s unclear exactly what it is.

Here’s what we know: it was founded in 2019 by failed mayoral candidate/anti-public education activist John Connolly. According to Maurice Cunningham, who knows about such things, it was initially funded by The Barr Foundation, a “philanthropy” that funds a lot of education privatization initiatives.

On its website, School Facts Boston says it is a nonprofit. (It was incorporated as such with the Massachusetts Secretary of State). But it has not filed a form 990 with the IRS. It has a “family advisory board” but does not seem to have a board of directors. It lists no employees.

But on John Connolly’s LinkedIn, School Facts Boston is listed as his only job since 2018. I doubt he’s been volunteering this whole time. So who does he work for? For that matter, who at the group is a paid employee, and who’s a volunteer? How much money do the highest paid employees make? At legitimate nonprofits, this info is all on the Form 990. Here, it’s a mystery, despite School Facts Boston’s assertion on their website that they are “committed to transparency.”

So, okay, this whole organization is shady as hell. Who cares? The education privatization space is riddled with astroturf organizations funded by big pro-privatization donors: Democrats for Education Reform, National Parents Union, Latinos for Education, etc. School Facts Boston is just one more.

But here’s the thing—Vernee Wilkinson, who may or may not be an employee of School Facts Boston, was quoted in an article in the Boston Globe today about school bathrooms. The article, written by James Vaznis, identifies her as being “of School Facts Boston, a parent advocacy organization.”

A quick search for Vernee Wilkinson’s name on the Globe website shows she has been quoted in stories about the Boston Public Schools fourteen times in the last three years. Is there any other parent advocate who gets a call from the Globe once per quarter?

So this is why it matters. This organization has an outsized voice in issues of Boston Public Schools, and we don’t even know who they really are. We don’t know who signs the checks. We don’t know how many employees they have or how many actual BPS parents they represent.

(I suspect it’s not that many. A Wayback Machine archive of their website from 2020 says they’ll be expanding their Family Advisory Board to 40 members within a year. It still says that today, and there are only 13 members)

The Globe’s education coverage was bought—oh, sorry, funded—by The Barr Foundation a few years ago, so it’s pretty unlikely they’ll unmask who School Facts Boston really is. But if you know, feel free to tell me!

#Boston #education #BosPoli

I missed this when it came out, probably due to having a small child at the time. But I saw that it was Stuart Gordon adapting Lovecraft and thought it might have some of the wonderful over the top gonzo comic energy of Re-Animator or From Beyond. It didn’t, but it was still pretty good!

It’s essentially an adaptation of The Shadow over Innsmouth, inexplicably moved to Spain, where the town in question is called Inboca. Get it? The effects are mostly practical, which is good because the few bits of low-budget 2001 CGI are…really horrible!

But what’s really captured well here is the horror of the whole town being comprised of people slowly transforming into horrors from the deep. This could be done very comically (as it was by me in my Scooby-Doo fanfic The Velmanomicon!), but Gordon manages to make it genuinely disturbing and completely devoid of The Incredible Mister Limpet references, a feat I was incapable of!

There’s some gratuitous nudity, and the big reveal and the ending didn’t quite work for me, but overall a nice, creepy diversion!