Nazgûl

Check out this creepy Nazgûl-esque sculpture via ThemThangs:


Speaking of LoTR, I had a nightmare I was trapped in Moria last night. The dark side of being a geek.

Dark Shadows

Just started watching Dark Shadows streaming on Netflix.

Filled with Gothic mystery and supernatural intrigue, the daytime series "Dark Shadows" became wildly popular after its 1966 premiere on ABC and has earned a reputation as one of the most unusual and enduring programs in TV history. The show revolves around Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid), a guilt-ridden 175-year-old vampire who longs to be human again and returns to his estate after being chained inside a coffin for nearly 200 years.

I read a long time ago that Johnny Depp's production company had bought the rights to it and I believe he and Tim Burton have already begun work on it. I was reminded to check it out after reading that Lukas Haas' character's outfits in the film Brick (also good and streaming) were based on those of Barnabas Collins. I also saw that it was on TV Guide's (my favorite magazine!) list of top cult TV shows.

All that aside how can you not watch a show with these titles:

NASA for Lovecraft

This image is begging to be used as a cover for a Lovecraft book. Via NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Lovecraft / Doré / Ernst Mashup Illustrations

I just wandered across these illustrations for H.P. Lovecraft's literally awesome story At the Mountains of Madness from what I believe was a 1936 issue of Astounding Stories. Besides looking a little like Matt Diffee's New Yorker cartoons, they also reminded me of Gustave Doré's illustrations for Dante's Inferno. If no one does it soon I'm going to add making a collaged together Doré illustrated Lovecraft à la Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonté to my list of neverending art-projects!







Doré's illustrations of Dante and Virgil at the Gates of Hell:

Don't Eat a Fudgesicle While Viewing This...

...because I did and now I'm sick. Jake & Dinos Chapman's recreation of their 2000 work (ironically destroyed by an accidental warehouse fire) Hell is entitled Fucking Hell. It looks amazing, some critics are already calling it the first major artwork of the 21st century. Comparisons to Bruegel the Younger and Bosch are inevitable and maybe deserved. Here are some photos but this video gives you a much more horrific picture.





Update: Nick pointed out the similarities to this Halo video proving once again that popular culture has already gone ahead and produced something (almost as) equally arresting for the masses while the obscenely rich and cloistered art world continues to sit around and jerk each others largely half-baked and bullshit ideas off. That being said I am still really impressed with the Chapman's piece although not with the current art market as a whole...

Happy Friday the 13th!

I really recommend subscribing to Mad Decent's podcast (or as they call it "NPR for the streets") to balance out all that This American Life you've been listening to.

Kids Cook/Befriend/Torture the Strangest Cookies/Vampires/Zombies

I made the mistake of passing this video on to Alex before posting it here and got stabbed in the fucking back when he posted it first. Lesson learned. Anyway, here is the cutest thing since the Amelie girl:


He has two previous episodes as well but this one is his best and in addition is his first original recipe.

Proof that not all kids are adorable, I also just returned from Let the Right One In which was as good as HBO's True Blood is bad. The trailer of course doesn't really do it justice:



(I also think it kindofsortof resembles the plot of my previously posted children's book.)

Lastly, Neil passed this great short film along to me about a bunch of sadistic teenage boys in a post-apocalyptic Australia (why is Australia (and sometimes New Zealand) so prone to apocalypse? Zombie Movie / The Quiet Earth / Mad Max / On the Beach to name a few). Here it is, if you're my mum don't watch it:

Abysmal Depths Populated by Monsters

I like to think that this is what our first encounter with alien life will look like (although in reality it will probably end up being some single-celled boring-ass thing), the first video beamed back from a Europan ocean probe (as previously reported here). It's actually an "elbowed" Magnapinna squid that presumably snags prey as they brush past its arms at pitch-black ocean depths (full story here).






Thanks Paddy for pointing this video out to me and for letting me rip-off your blog.

Awesomeness

Here's an idea, why not make a movie that's a cross of Freaks and Geeks (actually Undeclared but whatever) and the Apocalypse? Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel made their own trailer a year ago but apparently the rights to making it a feature length movie have been bought!


In a similar vein, here's a short New Zealand film from 1986 about 3 metal heads stuck in a car during the apocalypse (and strangely preminiscent of Shawn of the Dead):

The Diver

I found a book called She Woke Me Up So I Killed Her on a book merchant's sidewalk table on Astor Place. If the title (or the scribbled dedication to the former owner: "praise the lord and pass the double donged dildo") wasn't enough to make me buy it, the second story was:

The Diver
by Ramón Gómez de la Serna

He was moving from cabin to cabin in the sunken ship, remembering the ships on which he had traveled himself, thinking of them too as wrecks, all ships, those that arrived and those that did not.

He came to closed staterooms, where, once he had opened the doors he had the impression that their women occupants had been in the act of putting on tropical dance-costumes: much decoration and little covering.

It seemed to him that he had come there to collect the passports at the final arrival, and that the passengers would soon be hurrying to present them to him, after looking about for them in the drawers full of photographs.

With his lantern he stumbled into the galley with its rows of hanging cups; it was like the ultimate heaven of all cups and pots.

In the writing room he found envelopes with wills inside them, and saw for himself the fact that wicker rises in water.

He came across dead coins, tips lying in the passageways, stewards who had drawn the bath only too well, waiters fallen onto their piles of dishes, and the dishes looked like giant chips used in the game with death. He saw the ardors of intertwined legs, rows of marks on the walls showing how many days were left before the boat was due to arrive, cancers no longer hidden by the pale and exhausted passengers who carried them.

All this he withstood, but when the poor divers with the huge eye—the watchmaker's glass for sunken ships—opened the door to the second-class dining room with its green chairs and its assemblage of exiles, the dead people there, whether because of the sudden current set up in the water, or out of delight at the sight of the diver, rose from their seats and began to sway slowly, a sarabande of human fish, moving like dolls to absent music.

The diver, terrified to see so many people rise from their seats at once, turned, rushed back along the corridors, and rang the emergency bell to be taken to the surface

When they removed the fishlike helmet from his head, he burst into laughter and sneezes.

—Translated from the Spanish by Paul Bowles

Besides the intense claustrophobia I felt reading this story, it ultimately reminded me of the one—and only—time I scuba dived (dove?). I had somehow wound up all by myself (against all first-time-diver rules) standing maybe fifty feet down on the bottom of the ocean. The thought struck me, "I do not belong here. If nature had her way I would be dead." While it's true I've had the same reaction being in airplanes or in Albuquerque or maybe even some day outer space, never was it as strong as that day I was standing on the ocean floor. "Standing on the ocean floor." Even writing it freaks me out a little bit...

See also:
Jacques Cousteau
Ghost Ship (2002)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
Below (2002)
Hatchet (1988)

Key West

Theme Music: King Horror - Loch Ness Monster [download]

I got back from Key West a while back and think I got skin cancer as a result (no joke!). Mostly all I did was read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, swim, eat and drink too much.

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I read that the dead outnumber the living in Key West due to the large cemetery in the center of it. There's a tomb rumored to house a vampire and one man's inscription reads "I told you I was sick." Which is not nearly as funny as this.

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I also caught this on video, an osprey eating a fish...brain first! I shoot what National Geographic is afraid to:

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Oh, and I saw this:


Dilettante cryptozoologists would probably presume it to be a variant on the Loch Ness monster or Champ but it's clearly related to the Mokèlé-mbèmbé. Please ignore the asshole blocking the shot...

Darkplace

I probably shouldn't drink and blog but my friend Noga just tipped me off to the BBC's Darkplace, an "unearthed" horror TV series about a hospital situated above the Gates of Hell (and is perhaps the best show of its kind since Red Dwarf or The Young Ones!) I think they're going to start (or have already started) showing it on Adult Swim. Just check out the opening credits to get a sense of what's to come:



It's also continuing in the same brilliantly demented vein as H.P. Lovecraft's Reanimator: