Horror content.  As opposed to horrible things.  Horror movies are so diverse, like movies writ more broadly, and can have so many different good qualities.  Humor, wit, suspense, thrills, and… art.  On the cinematically sophisticated end, observe the movies of Kiyoshi Kurosawa.  He does a good job of transcending international boundaries, I’m not sure how.  Maybe it’s the focus on modern life and anxieties, which Asia and the West do have in common.

I just feel like much of the time when I watch Japanese TV or movies, it’s too Japanese to connect with, and the exact opposite happens with this Kurosawa.  It’s not like he’s making American-style movies either, tho maybe he has a big influence from the more realistic end of film noir, or some cinema I’m not even familiar with, from France or whatever.  He did do at least one French movie.

So, Sakebi (叫) aka Retribution.  The spooky ghost ladies you expect from J-Horror, but in this one, they’re in the bright light of day.  This movie isn’t considered one of his classics, but it’s got layers.  And humor.  And horror.  And an artist’s meditation on the creation and destruction of the urban realm.  The funniest scene is feminist revenge fantasy.  I’d probably ruin the joke to say more.

And the ending is sad and horrible and could make one feel big something.

This is where I got the ghost meme from yesterday’s article.  The trailer, content warning for a moment of convincing dead woman:

Find it with subtitles somewhere and watch it.

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So I’m three and a half volumes into listening to the Elric books by Michael Moorcock and I haven’t been Inception’d into the sensory deprivation tank full of urine yet, so I thought you might wanna know my thoughts.  Spoilers?  Not very big ones.  Also these books are old as hell so who cares?

Reminding me of Vampire Hunter D by Hideyuki Kikuchi.  The writing is a lot more blunt than I would have imagined for the towering gothickal shadow he cast over the genre.  Kikuchi’s book may well have been influenced by it.  Indeed, the dispassionate kinda evil pretty men with long white hair that recur in anime might all be descendants of Elric; I don’t know enough deep cuts of Japanese culture to be sure.  That said, Elric is a lot more emotional than Sephiroth or Sesshomaru or Benten or etc etc.  One emotion in particular: Fear.

It’s really common for writers on both sides of the Pacific to characterize a cool badass character as never feeling fear.  I get where they’re coming from.  Cool, badass, it’s a power fantasy, and we’d like to imagine ourselves in hardcase mode as immune to all such weaknesses.  But this trope does feel pretty damn stale by now, and it always undercut the ability for the story to feel like it has real stakes.  If the worst a hero would feel in defeat is annoyed or angry, that’s a lot less intense than him feeling afraid of serious injury, torture, whatever consequences.

So that’s kind of nice, even if the character is still an outrageously special specialboy.  Ladies love Elric.  Apparently he can lay pipe with the best of ’em.  Dickmatism as the kids say.  The stories are not at all explicit about it, but one gal is a queen and is like “i know u killed my bro but take my kingdom, just gimme that somethin somethin.”  He’s characterized as having poor health, in the first book only sustained by drugs, and this specifically manifests as weakness.  What’s his stroke game like if he has no stamina?  He manages to say no to drugs by getting a cool demon sword that sucks souls and gives Elric the life energy, but in at least one of the subsequent books he still needs the drugs.  Had he gone too long without soul sauce?  Book didn’t say.

One disappointment is that he doesn’t show near as much skin as he does on book covers.  About half the search results for Elric art, he at least has his arms and leggies out.  If u got it flaunt it, boy.

Oh, I didn’t really say what I meant by the writing being blunt.  Let’s put it this way:  If this were a movie, almost all of the dialog and much of the characterization would have to be original.  It could not rely on the source material.  In the books, Moorcock just tells you things about Elric.  In a movie, you’d have to show them.  The pivotal character moments have no real buildup, they’re just plopped on you.  It feels like short stories, where there’s no time to characterize through prose and you really just need to spell out what’s going on, if the plot has any complexity at all.

I once wrote a short story wherein I earned the love story through writing, really hard pressed to keep it under 9k words.  I do think the Elric books started as short stories and were collected, at least some of them, so that’s probably why it’s like this.  It mostly feels heavy-handed in the first scene of the first book, where his whole backstory and main conflict are just dropped on you like some Acme traps on Wile E. Coyote.

I wonder about Moorcock’s monster inspirations.  How original are his beasters?   They seem pretty original, but some people know more obscure monster lore than I do; maybe they aren’t.

Oh yeah, and one more thing struck me funny.  One of the books is called The Weird of the White Wolf.  The White Wolf is Elric and he’s having a weird.  But the book doesn’t tell us what the fuck a weird is.  The weirdest thing in the story is how he makes a bunch of really bad decisions for no obvious reason.  The worst is when the dragons come out and he is just totally unprepared for that.  He knew the dragons were there.  Even if he was like, fuck it, let’s do this even tho we’ll be dragonbait, he should’ve been bracing for it the whole time.  Instead when they come out it’s like Moorcock remembering they exist for the first time in pages.

But it’s all big dark fantasy bigness.  Sleesh slash.  Kill the guys, win the prize.  But feel empty inside.  That’s all I’m there for anyway.

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I don’t listen to audiobooks, usually music, but I had an annoying task to do, of the type where more mentally engaging material was useful.  Because I don’t have the pirate skillz and am not paying for services I’d rarely use, I sought an audiobook for free on yewchoob.  I’d had some idle curiosities about Celtic mythology and listened to a bit of that, but the people reading it were too cringe for me.

I remembered I have some interest in writing a dark fantasy or two in the future and so could use some education on the subject, so I looked up Elric of Melniboné.  Despite still being under copyright, there it was, and the reader was a fairly skilled thespian type.  But the production was a lil low-budget.

You ever hear a wheezing breath and realize it’s you?  I assumed that’s what was happening to me, but I came to realize this thespian is acting his lil ass off while his partner is snoring near at hand.  It’s funking hilarious.  I do find it just tolerable enough to keep on.  Maybe I’ll get through the whole thing eventually.

First impressions: The prose is more bare-bones than I would have imagined.  The simplicity is intentional, I think, to evoke mythology.  Sometimes it’s all edgy dark majesty, sometimes it’s wish fulfillment power fantasies just this side of My Immortal.  Elric is the specialest boy.  I’m mildly entertained.

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I’ve heard “fanny” is a dirtier word in the UK than in the US, but don’t care enough to google it.  There was a US band called Fanny back in the days of yore, which I’d never heard of, but popped up on my yewchoob recs.  The four ladies in the band were all great rock musicians, but I also think it’s especially cool that there were some biracial filipinas in the mix – the sisters on guitar and bass, June and Jean Millington.  Drummer Alice de Buhr is super cool (and now married to a woman, aww*), pianist Nickey Barclay was on some extra Ray Manzarek shit.  They really looked like a group of characters, as rockers should.  If this video plays for you, observe:

The whole playlist of that performance on some German show is available as well.  You’ll recognize some cool covers, I don’t know what of their originals were hits or how big they were at all.  I got curious and hunted down a performance by the sisters in a more recent year.  Check this out too:

Nice funky bass there.  Guitar sister can shred.  The end of the German show is the song “Special Care” (flashing light warning) which they really build to an intense climax without overstaying their welcome.  Good times and great oldies, as my extinct local oldies station used to say.

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*on the rainbow representation, seems like jean-june-alice-nickey would be nope-L-L-B, if i got that right, if it matters.

Hey anybody here remember the Wham Rap?  Is this song for or against leaning on welfare when you’re young and sexy?  I literally can’t tell.  The lyrics about how people should not do things they do not enjoy, those feel earnest.  But the characterization of the narrator, who advocates living off of welfare programs, is as selfish, looking out for number one.  It’s ironic people see social welfare as greedy when the main reason rich people don’t want to pay a reasonable tax to support society is because of absolutely inarguable baldfaced greed.  People “on the dole” need food and shelter.  Rich people don’t need a second yacht.  They just fucken don’t.  Anyway, dubious politics aside, it’s a bop.  Glad I remembered it exists.

One could make a whole study of references to welfare in music, and what they say about social perspectives.  Roots Manuva had a song called Mind 2 Motion with the line “Social survivor still scratching on, I’ll pay that money back when I get my hit song.”  This is eminently reasonable.  Rely on what you need when you are needy, pay your taxes when you are not.  And yet, I heard that he’s just another boring conservative greedlord.  Unsurprising if true.  One day Biggie Smalls was talking about how he lived in the projects and suffered poverty, feels blessed by his wealth.  The next he was literally saying “fuck the world, don’t ask me for shit.”

Sticking to the UK for another moment, commie rapper Bobbi from QELD and Pavlov’s House reliably hates on working for a living.  Warnings for flashing lights, doom-tinged chorus, and tankie feelz.  Austerity politics will get you feelin’ that kind of way.

The USA has its own communist rappers.  Boots Riley from The Coup is the number one guy on that scene, blowing up the World Trade Center on an album cover before that became unpopular for reasons.  But on the topic of social survivin’, I’d like to quote Killer Mike’s guest rap on The Coup’s WAVIP:  “I’m over here with the welfare recipients, we ain’t ever payin’ but we stay gettin’ shit, I am with the people on the bottom fella, we gon’ riot loot rob ’til we rich as Rockefeller… The one percent better learn this shit is VIP, if we don’t nut up everybody gonna D-I-E.”

There are more low-key ways to say Fuck a Job.  In Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s seminal extremely hateable dogshit buttrock classic “Takin’ Care of Business,” the drunk guy on the mic sez, “If you ever get annoyed, look at me I’m self-employed, I love to work at nothing all day.”  I don’t know why I find that more offensive than intentionally offensive punk rock on the subject.  All he’s saying is “get an easy job.”  Could be worse.  I just don’t like the genre.  Speaking of punk rock on the subject, little known Desperate Bicycles had a song about making rock, with a very likeable message.  Backup vocals by the literal child on the drums.  “It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it.”

As for the intentionally offensive punk rock on the genre, the Dead Milkmen have two strong examples.  Nutrition is an all-around classic, covered by other bands, well-liked, and a good tune.  It captures the vibe of feeling like you were born to work but just don’t wanna, feeling simultaneously petulant and ashamed about it.  A lesser tune with a more didactic message, just literally “fuck working,” is Chaos Theory, from a later album.  “I used to get up and do my job, now I enjoy doing nothing better, I think I’ll go bum around, I think I’ll enjoy this lovely weather.  Maybe some day there’ll be a revolution, maybe some day we’ll have meaningful jobs, until that day I’m gonna be lazy, I’m not gonna be no working slob.  I am the god of unemployment, the antichrist of the american dream, I used to fight for church and country, but now I don’t give into the corporate schemes.”

That’s just being a bitch about it.  Not saying that’s my number, but I did spend a few years on unemployment at one point, and spent a lot of time back then walking around under blue skies.  Like the part in One Bourbon One Scotch One Beer when George’s landlady saw him leanin’ up against a post…  This could go on forever.

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Edit to Add:  How in the fuck did I forget Agenda Suicide by The Faint?  Content Warning:  The Obvious, Generally Grim as Balls.