I had a successful first visit with my new PCP! There was a slight last-minute snafu over whether it was virtual or in person! She agrees that I am dealing with a lot! Have some links.
1. By an elsenet friend: on Gen X music, Clear Channel, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
2. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks: "How the Moomins became an anti-fascist symbol."
3. Josh O'Connor interviews well and is correct that I had never heard of the cheese-rolling at Cooper's Hill.
4. I tend to like the song no matter what, but this is an especially nice chamber-darkwave take: Emilie Autumn, "The Passenger."
5. I am not an audiobook person, but I might have to listen to Bill Nighy reading the footnotes.
I came home last night and told Autolycus that I had just seen a movie with a heroic black cat. In other news, Hocus Pocus (1993) has been some kind of stone classic New England horror-comedy for the last twenty-eight years and I just found out now. Rush-That-Speaks showed it to me; I am even a hard sell on fiction of real witches at Salem and I loved it. I can see why it confused audiences on release. Its mix of slapstick comedy and gloves-off horror is the sort of thing I would have expected in the early '90's from Joe Dante or Sam Raimi, not live-action Disney, even without the fact that it is also kind of a musical. It really doesn't behave like the coming-of-age teen comedy its modern-day plot initially resembles, when its hero's virgin status is more folklorically than socially significant and his most important relationship is with his younger sister, which does not prevent him from figuring out how to get past a shallow crush to a somewhat battle-forged friendship with a girl his own age. Its witch lore is not only good—this film must have taught an entire generation how to ward with salt—it's nasty in ways where I have to start pointing to Gemma Files or Jeanette Winterson or Warlock (1987) for comparable examples of casual, reliable, historically-reputed malice. I was floored that its exteriors were actually filmed in Salem and Marblehead, but the slant of the roofs was unmistakably New England. I am moderately surprised that I never ran into it at a party in middle school, but I would have remembered the experience: the plot is pretty much a dead heat between things I would have enjoyed recognizing and things I wouldn't have wanted in my head for years. (No one, not even our protagonists wondering what's keeping their parents as dawn approaches, seems to realize how close the entire adult population of Salem came to going the way of The Red Shoes. This movie wouldn't have introduced me to the concept of immortality as a curse, but the thought of being mourned and driven away unrecognized by the parents whom you must outlive is the sort of thing that bothers me even now.) The untestable litmus is not the precise ratio of folklore studies to nightmare fuel, however, but whether I would have imprinted as strongly as all other signs indicate on Doug Jones' Billy Butcherson. The last person I saw with that body language was Ray Bolger's Scarecrow. I had seen little of Sarah Jessica Parker and zero of Kathy Najimy prior to this movie and they should have been genre stalwarts in addition to their other talents; especially the former achieves a remarkable otherworldliness while still being a spider-eating airhead. Between Winifred Sanderson and Rose Hovick, 1993 was some banner year for Bette Midler and those characters should never meet. I can't figure out if this film missed its zeitgeist by ten years in either direction or should just never have been released in summer, but I am delighted it has been celebrated and rediscovered to the point of an upcoming sequel, which neither of us was expecting when we took to IMDb to look up the young actors who weren't Thora Birch. I spent my entire life scrupulously avoiding Salem during the month of October and just had no idea.
1. By an elsenet friend: on Gen X music, Clear Channel, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
2. Courtesy of
rushthatspeaks: "How the Moomins became an anti-fascist symbol."3. Josh O'Connor interviews well and is correct that I had never heard of the cheese-rolling at Cooper's Hill.
4. I tend to like the song no matter what, but this is an especially nice chamber-darkwave take: Emilie Autumn, "The Passenger."
5. I am not an audiobook person, but I might have to listen to Bill Nighy reading the footnotes.
I came home last night and told Autolycus that I had just seen a movie with a heroic black cat. In other news, Hocus Pocus (1993) has been some kind of stone classic New England horror-comedy for the last twenty-eight years and I just found out now. Rush-That-Speaks showed it to me; I am even a hard sell on fiction of real witches at Salem and I loved it. I can see why it confused audiences on release. Its mix of slapstick comedy and gloves-off horror is the sort of thing I would have expected in the early '90's from Joe Dante or Sam Raimi, not live-action Disney, even without the fact that it is also kind of a musical. It really doesn't behave like the coming-of-age teen comedy its modern-day plot initially resembles, when its hero's virgin status is more folklorically than socially significant and his most important relationship is with his younger sister, which does not prevent him from figuring out how to get past a shallow crush to a somewhat battle-forged friendship with a girl his own age. Its witch lore is not only good—this film must have taught an entire generation how to ward with salt—it's nasty in ways where I have to start pointing to Gemma Files or Jeanette Winterson or Warlock (1987) for comparable examples of casual, reliable, historically-reputed malice. I was floored that its exteriors were actually filmed in Salem and Marblehead, but the slant of the roofs was unmistakably New England. I am moderately surprised that I never ran into it at a party in middle school, but I would have remembered the experience: the plot is pretty much a dead heat between things I would have enjoyed recognizing and things I wouldn't have wanted in my head for years. (No one, not even our protagonists wondering what's keeping their parents as dawn approaches, seems to realize how close the entire adult population of Salem came to going the way of The Red Shoes. This movie wouldn't have introduced me to the concept of immortality as a curse, but the thought of being mourned and driven away unrecognized by the parents whom you must outlive is the sort of thing that bothers me even now.) The untestable litmus is not the precise ratio of folklore studies to nightmare fuel, however, but whether I would have imprinted as strongly as all other signs indicate on Doug Jones' Billy Butcherson. The last person I saw with that body language was Ray Bolger's Scarecrow. I had seen little of Sarah Jessica Parker and zero of Kathy Najimy prior to this movie and they should have been genre stalwarts in addition to their other talents; especially the former achieves a remarkable otherworldliness while still being a spider-eating airhead. Between Winifred Sanderson and Rose Hovick, 1993 was some banner year for Bette Midler and those characters should never meet. I can't figure out if this film missed its zeitgeist by ten years in either direction or should just never have been released in summer, but I am delighted it has been celebrated and rediscovered to the point of an upcoming sequel, which neither of us was expecting when we took to IMDb to look up the young actors who weren't Thora Birch. I spent my entire life scrupulously avoiding Salem during the month of October and just had no idea.
