Tag Archives: Vampires

…And I feel fine/No future for you!

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Well, I guess the Rapture didn’t happen, huh? Not today, I guess. I mean, I’m still here. You’re reading this, so I guess you’re still here too, huh? The sad thing about “The Rapture” is that, well, besides it being a fictional event in a set of fables in a funny book of short stories about wizards and demons and old world customs, is that… well, I just don’t know anyone who would be going up in this fantastical sounding Rapture thing. It’s just for the good, right? Well, all the people I know are bad, bad people… And I guess I wouldn’t have it any other way.

from here.

Oh well, a shame. But I suppose the Internet will quickly find something else for itself to get excited about, right? But there’s still us and there’s tomorrow and a little more juice to be squeezed out of whatever could be “the future” and there’s whatever could possibly come with that…

Mad linkage:

Here’s 10 other recent predictions for the End Times that didn’t come true either.

German insurance firm held orgy to reward salesmen.

Learn how to tie your shoes right.

Quite possibly our first look at Tom Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.

Kirk Cameron vs. Stephen Hawking.

Ricky Gervais on The Office‘s finale.

If you do go up in the Rapture, don’t worry, the atheists will take care of your pets… for a price.

An excerpt from Chris Adrian’s new novel.

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”

-Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

by Beth Hoeckel, from here.

What really goes on in Area 51?

A volcano in Iceland called Grímsvötn has erupted.

Twitter shit about the Rapture from yesterday.

Inside the Robert Redford biography.

Stephen Fry joins The Hobbit.

New discovery about mosquitoes reveals why vampires will never exist.

Speaking of which, Joe Jackson is still a bloodsucking piece of shit.

from here.

“The future is already here… It’s just not even distributed.”

-William Gibson

David Lynch to release an album later this year.

The visual impact of gossip.

The story of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s doomed/failed/totally fucking crazy would be adaptation of Dune to become a documentary. Here’s Dan O’Bannon talking about it a little.

Related: the team up between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney.

Just checking: Still no Rapture, right? Whew.

NBC cancels Outsourced. Good.

The trailer for the new film by Miranda July.

Carrie is being remade and Stephen King suggests Lindsay Lohan for the lead.

from here.

This trailer/movie looks really terrible: Horrible Bosses.

This trailer looks so so, but the movie will probably suck: Another Earth.

It’s Pilot Season! Trailers for (just a few of the) new TV shows that were just picked up:

Awake. Which… looks good, looks interesting, but I just don’t see a TV show that I would follow/watch for years and years there. Funny how both it and Another Earth‘s trailer use that song by the Cinematic Orchestra.

Alcatraz. The latest from the J.J. Abrams camp… The 4400 meets Prison Break, featuring Sam Neill and Hurley from Lost. This looks ridiculous, and I’ll watch it and just hope that it’s not another letdown like Fringe.

Person Of Interest. Another from J. J. Abrams, although it seems like it’s mostly just his name on it and the real creative juice is from Jonathan Nolan, writer of The Dark Knight and brother of Christopher. Looks interesting-ish, but Jim Caviezel? Was that really necessary?

A trailer for the documentary on the showrunners of all your favorite TV shows.

And a nice guide to the shows that didn’t make it to the Fall 2011 season.

“The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.”

-Dennis Gabor

I had a dream a while back that the world was ending… It was an odd dream, but not a terrible one, I guess. It’s just not something you can prepare for, the end of the world. You can’t ever really be ready for it. You just gotta keep on living, don’t you? And loving and listening to music and dancing and pursuing impossible things and enjoying mundane moments and people and doing all kinds of stupid shit. Take things seriously but maybe enjoy the ridiculous things that surround you just a little bit more? I don’t want to tell you something terribly cliched, like… Live every moment like it’s your last!

No, don’t do that. You’ll probably hurt yourself trying to do that.

But maybe every once in a while, take a single moment and consider that it is your last moment on this beautiful, insane planet, and just really ponder that. And think about what you would do if it wasn’t. Beam yourself into the future and peek in on yourself and see what you’re up to. Take a vacation into the future and see who you are there. Interview yourself and find out what went right and wrong in your life in the moments/weeks/months/years between now and then, and take good notes. And when you come back to the present, remember that little trip. Remember that time you went to the future and appreciate that you’re back here, and now, and then go there again.

The anniversary of Bikini Atoll is coming up.

Chinese “dinosaur city” reshapes understanding of prehistoric era.

Brittany Julious is sexy.

The kind of guys who stay single?

The Cat Rapture for Caturday!

Neil Gaiman on Gene Wolf.

Grant Morrison to write a movie about dinosaurs vs. aliens, Barry Sonnenfield to direct.

from here.

RIP “Macho Man.”

The fashion of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Fleetwood Mac to reunite in time for the end of the world.

The never before seen original ending to Alexander Payne’s Election, which is much closer to the book’s ending.

I don’t think I’m all that crazy about these Odd Future guys.

Skeeter Davis and Henry Moore.

Tom Cruise is a lonely robot repairman.

from here.

How to survive a mass extinction.

Plot details from the upcoming Tim Burton/Johnny Depp big screen version of Dark Shadows.

Will the internet destroy academic freedom?

A history of bedwetting.

Bionic hands! The future is now!

A good prank for the Rapture.

Oh well, hopefully this one was good practice for the next time the world (supposedly) ends. Still plenty of time to get your Rapture Playlist just fucking perfect. No sleep til 2012!

“The only water in the forest is the river.”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Last week it was the third three episodes of the current season of Doctor Who, with a planet called America and the moon landing and Richard Nixon and aliens you completely forget about once you turn your back and then pirates and alien medical Sirens and this week it’s dead spaceship graveyards and the creepy disembodied voice of Michael Sheen and a mad woman who’s bigger on the inside and who might just be “The Doctor’s Wife” and also the guy who brought you The Sandman is writing the words…

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“People care what I think. I have a prestigous blog, sir!”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Once again, RIP Party Down. Goodbye, Roman.

from here.

The graveyard blog.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

By the always genius Tom Gauld. See also here.

Samhain.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Another year, another Halloween.

The inevitable is upon us: the year is almost over.

You find yourself out somewhere, you’ve got a drink in one hand and your cell phone in the other. In your stomach is chocolate and booze. On one side of you is a girl in a leotard with cat ears on and she’s telling you what an asshole her ex is. On your other side is a girl dressed up as sexy Mother Teresa and she’s sleeping with the other girl’s asshole ex. Trick on one side of you, Treat on the other, and your drink is almost empty. It’s getting colder now outside and darker earlier and earlier. It’s time to start self reviewing and battening down the hatches.

via Google today.

Last night I got into a conversation with someone who told me that they hated Halloween. They didn’t see the point of it anymore, they said. I have to say that I wasn’t exactly super enthused about this year’s festivities but in a way, I still feel like Halloween is one of the last pure holidays available to us.

The various Halloween decorations sold to you  leading up to tonight feel more welcome in your home, I feel, than the Christmas ones. And the fact that the Christmas decorations start rolling out in store aisles as early as October now doesn’t make the sentiment that comes with them feel any more genuine or less hollow. But there’s still a kind of joy in those who put up something around their house with the intent of scaring a person or reveling in a bit of annual darkness.

Then there’s the candy. That one’s self evident, I think.

The movies. Halloween movies, or the movies that they play on TV around Halloween or the ones you specifically seek out because of this holiday, they aren’t just seasonal. They’re timeless, in their own special, twisted, beautiful way.

from here.

There’s always a mood that can strike a horror fan for movies about witches or demons or zombies or psycho killers or what have you and that mood isn’t solely isolated to Samhain. It’s just amplified there, maybe.

Besides, there’s just a handful of true, genuine Christmas cinema classics and the rest is bullshit. A movie can feature Rob Lowe in a pullover standing in front of a Christmas tree or feature an orphan meeting an angel who cures his syphilis or whatever, but that doesn’t mean I want to watch it. And as far as “holiday cinema” goes, Christmas is Halloween’s only real competition, and just like the holiday itself, it’s an empty category.

Never mind the fact that Halloween is the last real holiday where you can be yourself. You can be independent. Maybe you need to put on a costume and go out and get drunk and pretend to be someone else for a few hours after the sun sets, but it’s worth it. Maybe that’s how you need to express yourself. Either way, it’s your time. Enjoy it. After this it’s Thanksgiving and your circa Christmas fare, and you’re surrounded by family and you have to pretend to be someone else. No, you’re not a disappointment to your parents or extended relatives who know nothing of the real you but have some concerns based on your facebook status updates. No, this year hasn’t been a disappointment despite all the big plans and hopes you’ve had for it. And no, you’re not a disappointment to yourself, you hope.

Just to reiterate, Halloween is nothing but: Candy, booze, spooks, thrills, sexy costumes, ghosts, goblins, ghouls, an excuse to break free and have a little fun while leaving a little bit of your dignity behind. That sounds amazing. It also sounds like your average day on the internet just IRL.

Oh well, right? October is over, and another holiday has passed. Here on Counterforce the past month has been about the words of dead writers and witches and vampires and comic books (and comics on the web) and television shows (and television shows based on comic books like The Walking Dead) and actresses and wondering where they’ve been and who they’ve been fucking and all sorts of ridiculous shit on the internet in it’s silly labyrinthine ways. So, business as usual, I guess.

And tomorrow is another day. And probably more of the same.

The Naked City.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Mad linkage:

Somewhere a dog barks.

Andrew Garfield is the new Spider-man in the Marc Webb reboot.

Is King Tut’s penis missing?

How food gets gendered.

from here.

Stop screaming during sex or you’re going to jail.

So, what do you think of the new Jim Lee-designed Wonder Woman costume?

The 20 best Superman panels.

Side by side comparison of the new trailer for Let Me In, the remake of Let The Right One In.

The male gaze: Objectification, Fetishisation and Violation.

Alison Brie and Mary McDonnell are joining Scream 4.

Tyler Perry vs. Aaron McGruder.

The downside to the recovery of the ozone layer.

The pictures in today’s post by Weegee, otherwise known as Arthur Fellig, an Austrian-born photographer/photojournalist from the mid-1900s, best known for documenting the grim beauty that was the seedy life on the streets of New York City. His nickname came from a phonetic tendering of the word “ouija,” which he got because of his eerily prescient ability to appear at the scene of a crime or a fire or emergency of another kind moments after it happened or was reported to the authorities.

To me, his pictures walk a very fine, very fascinating line between going too far and perfectly capturing the beauty of the worse sides of life, the raw and wounded aspects. Looking back at his pictures now, there’s just something unmistakably real and authentic about them, something that maybe you wouldn’t see as much now?

Fellig was married to Margaret Atwood from 1947 to 1950 before he went to Hollywood and began working in film. He became friends with Stanley Kubrick  (the two of them are pictured together above) and did the still photography for Dr. Strangelove, and it was his accent that Peter Sellers copied for the title character of the film.

You can find more of his pictures here, here, here, and here.

25 anti-music journalist songs.

Including: Guns N’Roses’ “Get In The Ring“

Harlan Ellison is having a major book sale.

Mel Gibson may be crazy and kinda racist. Shocking.

10 movies that hipsters need to get over.

The new book by the author of Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas (which is possibly going to be adapted to film by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis?).

Lady business: cleavage in the workplace.

The language of a marriage.

“The easiest kind of a job to cover was a murder. The stiff would be laying on the ground. He couldn’t get up and walk away or get temperamental.”

-Arthur Fellig

“You have no idea how dangerous you make people to themselves when you’re around.”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

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Adults are just obsolete children.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

“Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it develops a sense of humor, which si awfully important in this day and age. Humor has a tremendous place in this sordid world. It’s more than just a matter of laughing. If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack.”

-Dr. Theordore Geisel, AKA Dr. Seuss.

Today is Dr. Seuss’ birthday!

The thing that always captured me about the works of Dr. Seuss as a kid wasn’t that there was some joy of reading out there for my childlike self to discover, not yet. Sure, that would follow soon on the heels of discovering Suess’s fascinating world of characters and silliness…

And it’s funny, when my mother first started taking me to libraries, and first started showing me that books contained not just knowledge, but whole worlds inside them, whole new amazing discoveries, she would say things like, “Oh, the places you’ll go!” I knew it was cheesy back then, but didn’t know she was cribbing it from Seuss himself. It didn’t matter though. When she said it, I believed her. She was my mother, after all. And her boundless enthusiasm about the world of literature that was about to come crashing down on me was far too intoxicating.

But, no, the world of Seuss isn’t just a gateway to the joys of reading. His works and the works of someone like Shel Silverstein, whom I see many parallels, taught you more about the rhyme and reason, to pardon the pun there, of the world that awaited children. They showed you something else: silliness and nonsense.

Your parents and teachers read these stories to you or introduced them to you and they too thought they were nonsense. And as a kid, there’s so many things you don’t understand, so many things that you know you don’t understand and you look at your parents for those answers and some things are just too big to explain to the mind of a child. And there’s far too many questions that you can have to which the answer “…when you’re older” just hurts to hear. But then Seuss comes into your hands. You read it with your parents or any adult and that smile comes on both of your faces, that smile and laugh at something so ridiculous, and it’s shared. It’s a simple world, one of hilarious images and rhyming dialogue and no narrative descriptions, and it’s easy and fun. For a second there, you’re on a plateau with anyone of all ages. And then you get your footing, you grow and develop, and you continue climbing.

The wartime political cartoons of Dr. Seuss:

from here.

Some linkage, unrelated:

Two literary superstars (Ian McEwan and Rick Moody) publishing science fiction soon.

Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.

Nanotube thermocells hold promise as energy source.

Looting in Chile.

Speaking of which, the earthquake in Chile may have changed the Earth’s axis, shortened days on the planet.

The mystery of nuclear scientist’s “bizarre” disappearance.

Roger Ebert gets his voice back.

The world’s first temple?

“Jumbo shrimp.”

Doing an about-face on “overmedicated” children.

Really, Carly, it’s about David Geffen? Really?

Roger Ailes is a self-loathing liberal.

The fascinating letterheads of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison.

The universe is “hella big.”

“Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.”

-Geisel

Seuss and the frequently mentioned cat, from the Dr. Suess Memorial.

(500)(+2) Days Of Blogging.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

500  posts. Plus 2. That’s exciting. Shocking, too. Exciting and shocking. Reminds me of my last marriage.

Random notes:

1) Last night I had a dream I was watching a movie featuring Nic Cage as Benjamin Franklin and Jeff Goldblum as Albert Einstein and they were teaming up to fight vampires. It was called Science Dawn and I loved every moment of it.

When I woke up from said dream, I uttered one word: “Gangsta.”

2) Just caught up with the two latest episodes of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse via Hulu. The already canceled show will come back in January to air it’s last three remaining episodes and I’m now at the point where I can actually call it a tragedy.

I’d say that 83% of the first season was not all that great. The last two aired episodes last year were decent and the DVD only finale, “Epitaph One” was amazing, but almost like a whole other show.  The first two episodes of this season? Not that great. But then somewhere around their third episode this year, the writers must’ve realized that they were dying and they finally just started making really good TV.

The most recent episode, “The Attic” was brilliant and fun. Directed by comic book artist John Cassady (who did a gorgeous and amazing run on the X-Men with Whedon) and aping Neal Stephenson in places, it was like a whole other perfect show compared to where it was last year. I’m really looking forward to the last three episodes but there’s something heartbreaking in the idea that this show will continue to get better and better right up to the moment it dies.

3) There’s a Nick Tosches book called In The Hand Of Dante that I’ve always wanted to read and was reminded of it by glancing through the last issue of Entertainment Weekly, where it’s listed as one of “the essentials” of Johnny Depp. The fact that anyone needs to know what Johnny Depp’s essential anything is, well, it’s hilarious to me. But I’m thankful for the reminder and decided to pop online to get a copy for myself and possibly one for someone else since apparently Christmas is coming up. We still have a few weeks, right?

Anyway, they’re out of stock now on the book, and this is other suggested selections listed, the books that customers who bought that Nick Tosches book also bought:

I got a small chuckle out of that list, since those are the other “essentials” listed by Capt. Jack Sparrow in the EW article.

4) The other day this woman I work with was telling me a story about an elderly lady who was almost the victim of a home invasion. I don’t remember all the details, forgive me, but the gist of the story was that a guy kept knocking on her door, she lived out in the middle of nowhere, and the 911 operator told her to “do whatever you have to do” to protect herself, so she shot the guy with a shotgun.

Regardless of the details of whatever happened, the story terrified me. And it make ponder: If they remade Home Alone now – and that’s, what, probably just a year or two away anyway, right? – I feel like in our current crazy political climate, with all those arma ferre nutjobs out there, little Kevin McCalister would probably not use his brains or ingenuity to stop those stupid robbers but rather just go and get his parents’ gun out of the shoebox in the upstairs closet and would or kill himself and the two of them and maybe the family dog as well. And that’s just awesome.

5) Speaking of death and decay and literary aspirations and creative miasma: Counterforce actually had 500 posts. Well, 502 now. Shocking. How have the Elder Gods of the Internet not kneecapped us yet? Maybe it’s because we run so fast.

Again, sorry about disappearing on you for a few weeks there. We took a mini-vaca, I guess. There was a podcast recorded somewhere in there that probably sounded horrible, sound quality-wise, and wasn’t that thrilling, I’d imagine, content-wise. As I remember, it was a lot of talk about Dawson’s Creek, hate sex, sex with redheads, music, facebook, and… well, the rest is a blur. Rightfully so, I imagine.

Anyway, 500 posts. Here’s to 500 more! Or, at least, a few more. I feel like our posting schedule will be sporadic throughout the rest of December but there’s been some talk about a movie list from the past decade and several other interesting things. We shall see. Until then…

TOMORROW (I believe) on COUNTERFORCE: I’ll probably talk about my favorite albums from the past year, which I’m discovering was possibly even more forgetable than I realized.

And MONDAY or TUESDAY (I believe) on COUNTERFORCE: a book review.

Until then, just ask yourself this: