Charlie Stross Runs With My Anti-Vampire Holy Water Humidifier

     . . . . That dream / nightmare I had, about fending off vampires with my humidifier filled with holy water (see here) -- remember that?

Well, via el V's twitter feeds he learns that science fiction writer Charlie Stross presented my Holy Water Anti-Vampire Humidifier to the twitverse -- go here to see the discussion:

https://twitter.com/cstross/status/958300302914007040

Reading through this twit discussion I see that though I dreamed my Holy Water Humidifier, many others have also  thought of such or related anti-vamp devices. Charlie just didn't know about them until reading the account of my nightmare, any more than I knew of them. Ha! 

SO -- is this great minds think alike or just a buncha monkey brains sloshing around in night time primeval oooze?

Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

Jim Jarmusch  wrote and directed this novel vampire film, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), starring Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston.

By describing Only Lovers Left Alive as "a novel film" is intended to convey that Jarmusch created something new with vampires.  It also implies a question about vampires I've meditated on now and again ever since a dream I had way back in the early 80's of the last vampire, his face peering at me out of a broken television set screen, on a desertified earth, on which there is no blood left at all.  Somehow, I, per se, wasn't there, I was only feeling what the vampire's face was expressing: horror, terror and despair.

Jarmusch's film goes deeper than that brief but so vivid dream.  His vampires have existed since at least the 16th century;

John Hurt as Kit Marlowe, Eve's blood supplier in Tangier

Kit Marlowe is one of the few other characters in the film.*  They are among the world's obscenely wealthy, the wealth employed for privacy, acquisition of toys and the purest, fresh blood, blood that in the 20th and 21st century they no longer needed to hunt, but can purchase in various ways.  They appropriately suffer the ennui of the dissolute idle rich who lack any purpose in existence.

Adam with his gofer, Ian, played by Anton Yelchen; he's terrific in the role.

A Detroit Punk Club, in which it has forever remained the 1970's.

Adam, Hiddleston's character, is a legendary pop musician whom no one knows or sees.  Evidently his music and musicianship has been featured in many mythic recordings since, perhaps, the late 50's into the 60's and through the 70's?  I'm guessing those three decades because of the pop music references shared by Adam and his wife Eve, played by Swinton, and the sorts of dinosaur recording equipment and technology that litter Adam's rickety, decaying mansion, **  in the area of Detroit. Adam's out-of-step with the 21st century ennui makes for very understated but effective occasional comic touches.

So here we have it -- the vampire tropes, played as an exploration of degeneration of our planet, focused through the deserted areas of Detroit and, in ever-widening circles of alarm, the ever-widening toxic contamination of the planet. By now, not only is much if not most of the global water supply been poisoned, so has most of the global blood supply.

The film takes its own time moving along its unexpectedly delicious trajectory, which may bore some viewers. Additionally, if the viewer knows nothing about guitars, recording or pop music from the 50's, 60's and 70's, or anything about Literature -- yes, Literature with a capital L -- that viewer will miss many delicious bits of meta and witty commentary.

However, my favorite line from the film is not about either music or literature. Instead, it's a subject about which I ponder much more seriously on a daily basis. While Adam and Eve are taking a drive through the ruins of Detroit, Adam respond's to Eve's lamentation as to what the zombies have done to this splendid city:

"It's blessed with water. It will come back and the southwestern zombies who did this to Detroit and have used everybody else's water will want it back."

I've been thinking that this could well happen as well. Water = the blood of our planet.

Zombies in Only Lovers Left Alive are the vampires' code word for human beings, which is a bit of meta commentary on current popular entertainment too.  The vampires are clear that human beings, the zombies, are responsible for the ruin of the world.

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* In perhaps the only misstep Jarmusch makes in this film, in all the scenes that include Marlowe it's a given he's the author of Shakespeare's works.

* *  Eat your heart out, Elizabeth Hand -- how often has she employed the tropes of impossibly wealthy recluses, decaying mansions and artists from the 60's - 70's has she lovingly attempted to create by now?  It's not impossible at all that Jarmusch has read one or two of her novels -- though it wouldn't have been necessary for the making of this film.  These are such common tropes, and Jarmusch knows personally many a dissolute wealthy pop culture icon from those decades.

Dracula - NBC

I enjoyed last week's premiere of Dracula a great deal more than I expected to.  I enjoyed it enough to look forward to the next episode. Evidently, I am not the only one to be pleasantly surprised.

It's too bad that the attraction is not in the actor, who, as Dracula, is the center of the series, Jonathan Rhys Meyers.  Being Stoker's Dracula, by definition then, evil, perhaps we don't want Dracula to be appealing?  So far, as Meyers projects him -- that slicked flat hair, the signature Meyers' hooded eyes, facial ornaments, Dracula seems more like one of those stereotypical oily latin lovers or latin villains of which the early decades of the 20th century were enamored on stage and screen.

So wherein does the appeal lie?  Perhaps in some of what captured my support in the later episodes of Ripper Street* -- a sense of a society on the move, embarked on rapid change, and excited by these changes, not intimidated by them, or jaded by them.  This is a society that does not yet even imagine WWI and is tremendously excited by electricity.  This can perhaps be described in that now convenient catch-all term, steampunk, in which bounds of European Empires, we pale folks -- and who is more pale than a vampire? -- can safely celebrate.  But like Ripper Street, the divisions of class and corruption, poverty and crime, the persistence of these matters' threats to the comfortable segments of society, are all present, if foregrounded more in the metaphor of vampirism and ancient secret societies, whose underground wars with each other are also played out in front of the eyes of the overground population -- those whose eyes are open enough to see them, anyway.

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*  Ripper Street's second season began this last week on UK television.  I loved the opening of the review for it in The Guardian, here:

According to the rules of television, there are only three characters capable of driving a plot in Victorian London: prostitutes, murderers and murdered prostitutes.

About which very thing last spring I fulminated here, and here too.

Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to Ripper Street's second season, particularly since the Guardian review stated that this time out it seems no prostitutes were murdered in the course of our entertainment.

Even Billith, Even Benlow

With all our vamps in Burrell's Vamp Camp, why can't Our Sookie now finally be safe?  But no, her father must try to kill her, taking over All Our Beloved Lafayette.

There is so much wrong with this.

Starting with they were all in Authority prison just a couple of days ago!

And that retroconning of the Warlow and Niall backstory, all the way back to 3500 BCE?  And yet I still had to use my brain, such as it is, to figure out that those silly looking people with tents were ... fairies?  Did you think they were fairies?  Why were they fairies?  What were they doing?  They weren't singing or dancing or anything, just one of them giantly preggers ... the product of which must have been Niall the Fairy Godfather, that little kid whining by the campfire, all that's left after Warlow eats all his clan -- the first fairy-vamp.  Really?  So .... why is he still existing?  And if he developed his hate for Lilith back in 3500 BCE, why hadn't he managed it all this time?  Why has it taken all these thousands of years to have a Sookie, when surely it would have been even easier to have in earlier days.  So Niall must be Warlow's own kid, which makes Warlow's plan to mate with Sookie incest, doesn't it?  Why must they fight it out here and now, in the form of poor old Bill the Vampire?  And why must poor Louisiana be so plagued by such wars?  Doesn't she have more than enough to deal with from Mother Nature and Big Oil?

And then ... AND THEN ...  HBO goes and renews this preposterousity for a season .  Holy cow!

Thank goodness for Pam.

True Blood -- Ben: I Waz Right

True Blood, the television series at least (I don't know about the books) from the start heavily borrowed from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, starting with Sookie's looks and mannerisms.  In the first season, in many scenes it was as though the actor, Anna Paquin, was literally channeling SMG's Buffy.  As the seasons continued though, that kind of channeling faded.

However, True Blood's Authority last season and this season's Gov. Burrell and his secret compound where vamps are experimented on in order to create extra special weapons borrowed heavily from Buffy The Vampire Slayer's season 4's the Initiiative. (This is one of the seasons that Buffy true fans tend to dislike.)

It's even more so for True Blood's season 6.  It has blatantly swiped one of the big reveals of Buffy The Vampire Slayer's season 5, though in True Blood tradition, it couldn't wait to tell us, whereas it took most of the season for this particular big reveal to reveal itself.

But even before the big reveal we knew it.  The moment the mysterious Ben shows up, we knew. The writers couldn't even be bothered to give Ben a name that isn't Ben.  That's how tired everybody is, evidently.  So, big reveal? no reveal at all.

Will not say more due to spoilage.

Henry VIII Plays *21st Century Dracula: London Entrepreneur*

NBC orders ‘Dracula’ drama starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers

The ten part series will go straight to series shooting -- no pilot -- produced by the same people who bring us the inexplicably praised Downton Abbey, i.e. bad writing, bad plotting, bad acting.

[ " The “cool new version,” as Greenblatt described the series, introduces Dracula as he arrives in London, posing as an American entrepreneur who maintains that he wants to bring modern science to Victorian society. In reality, he hopes to wreak revenge on the people who ruined his life centuries earlier. There’s only one circumstance that can potentially thwart his plan: Dracula falls hopelessly in love with a woman who seems to be a reincarnation of his dead wife. " ]

According to the NBC chairman, the series will bring an HBO Tudors' sensibility to Dracula, i.e. loads of nekkid women, degrading sex and violence, and blood, blood, blood. Wait -- doesn't that sound like True Blood? So when you've got True Blood already why do it again? O, wait, the poor woman's True Blood, i.e. network teevee, meaning also no copyright and license fees for the material, title, or names, unlike for that Suuucky thang.

Personally? I'd say that NBC is a day late and a dollar short with this vampire thang. OTOH, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who has been playing creepy sociopathic pervs since childhood already -- i.e. the assassin for no reason of Michael Collins in the 1996 eponymous film of Irish politics, and the 1999 Ride With the Devil pro-slavery and csa thug crew film -- which, of course includes a slave loyal unto death to his master -- set in Kansas-Missouri during the Civil War.

Trailer for *Dark Shadows*

You can see the trailer for Johnny Depp playing Jack Sparrow Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows, opening May 11. Plus the wonderful Michelle Pfeiffer. Also, though alas, the ever more weird, and not in a good way, Helena Bonham Carter.


The re-creation of Dark Shadows as a disco era vamp flick, i.e. (the television series began in 1972), now long ago history, is quite inspired, leading as naturally as it does into spoof and satire, as an 18th century vamp meets 1972 USA. This could be fun.

Or, not ....

It's Halloween -- It Must Be Vampires

Kevin Jackson, author of Bite: A Vampire Handbook: A Vampire Miscellany, lists the top 10 vampire novels.

He intelligently leaves out Rice and Meyers:  "(Anne Rice needs no plugging here; nor does Stephenie Meyer, nor Charlaine Harris ...)"

A Summer Sunday's Thoughts Drift South

I'm cutting and pasting passages from the Guttenberg Project site's Personal Memoirs, Vol. 1, by Ulysses S. Grant, to avoid the vision-bustiong drudgery of re-typing all of this text into my own document. It still needs a lot of format editing though, to conform to manuscript submission standards. It's work, particularly for somebody as visually-impaired as I am.

I switch off from Grant to a lighter interest, vampires. Meyer's 4thTwilight book published on the stroke of midnight Friday night, has been big weekend entertainment news. The forthcoming HBO series, True Blood, based on Charlaine Harris's series, also has been big news this weekend. Meyer's books are set in the Pacific Northwest, while Harris's are set in small town northern Louisiana. An interesting cultural contrast there, kind of like Dark Shadows vs. Buffy The Vampire Slayer, in terms of economic class, social acceptance and the place of violence in a society.

The radio's playing the "Tennessee Border" show. This Sunday's program is all songs about cheating on your partner or being cheated on by your partner, or your partner cheating on his / her partner, and how you feel about that. This is the South too. Do the writers of this music live in a milieu where infidelity was more common than in others? But the fans who make this music so popular are religious and concerned with doing right and care about what people think about them. Grant is easier to understand because he knew what he thought about everything and why he thought it.

I have another hero to stand with George Washington now. Grant too was a general, who became POTUS. Unlike Washington, Grant's press has been bad -- part of the historical propaganda strategy by the former Confederacy and sympathizers to discredit the Union and Reconstruction.

This article in Newsweek,"The Mind of the South," says that studying Grant this summer is about the most contemporary thing I could be working on:

[ For many of the hobbyists the delight is in the details, right down to the paper cartridges in their muzzle-loading rifles and handmade buttons on their hot woolen uniforms. "We all know slavery was wrong," says Donald Davidson, whose day job is with the water department in Nashville. "War is not a nice thing. Hopefully we can show we can live together by reliving history like this."

But the subtext of old prejudices keeps creeping in even among the very young. Walking down to The Point one morning, a 12-year-old "private" in this particular Confederate unit told me what he'd heard tell in school about the elections. Next to nothing about McCain. But Obama? "There are too many chances we would take if he became president, you know what I mean?" I said I wasn't sure I did. "I don't know if it's a myth or it's true," said the boy, "but they say that they caught him trying to sneak Iraqi soldiers into the United States."

I remember all the things I heard tell in elementary school in Atlanta during the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, when the schoolyard talk was about a Roman Catholic running for president, and the threat that he'd be putting nigras (which is what you said if you were halfway polite) in Atlanta schools. Certainly much of the similar talk you hear now comes from the obvious suspects, people like Dent Myers, a relic collector and self-caricaturing bigot in Kennesaw, Ga., north of Atlanta. (His shop, Wildman's, is full of the crazy literature of the unreconstructed South, as well as guns, swords, Ku Klux Klan hoods and scurrilous bumper stickers.) Dent argues that when Southerners criticize Obama, "They say, 'He's a Muslim, he's a mulatto Muslim, or quadroon Muslim … [only because] they don't want to use the old N word." ]

The conditions of the 19th century, from the Mexican American War and the Second Great Awakening, the Southern slave-owning determination to go to war to expand slavery, through Reconstruction, in comparison and contrast with what this nation's been experiencing since Reagan, throws a light that illuminates better both the past and the present.

I take consolation from history.