SURREALPOLITIK: I have a review in the current Commonweal of the Philadelphia Art Museum’s Lee Miller retrospective. The review is subscribers-only now; I’ll let you all know if that changes. Miller–possibly my favorite visual artist, ever–went from fashion model to war correspondent, but despite her immense range and talent has never had a major retrospective until this one. Lots of photos here. An old post of mine on Miller here. Read more

Further communication with her husband seemed hopeless. Between them yawned the chasm that divides those who have consumed champagne before breakfast from those who have not.–Helen Cresswell, Bagthorpes Haunted Read more

MORE FLIES ON GRAY VELVET: I should just give up and blogroll the Horror Roundtable, you know? This week’s entry, on favorite horror locales, gets several terrific responses. (Someone else likes The Bat Whispers!!) I’m adding those Venice movies to my Netflix queue, pronto. I also keep thinking about my if-only horror anthology. I’m going to talk more about it, which I hope will spark more comment or something rather than diminishing the concept. These are some thoughts on why... Read more

THE REAGAN HORROR PICTURE SHOW: Shock Treatment. This is “the other Richard O’Brien movie,” basically: a quasi-sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And if you’re thinking there’s a reason lightning didn’t strike twice, you’re right–but Shock Treatment is still immensely, totally fun, and you guys should see it! I loved it. It opens with a fairly tame satire of feel-good television and local boosterism, at the Denton (Home of Happiness) TV station. Even at the start, three of the... Read more

PROBLEM W/LINKS: For a while now, using the “copy shortcut” function to create links to a specific blog post here has produced something with a tail that looks like this: …#7726700524016777480#7726700524016777480 when it should look like this: …#7726700524016777480 Does anyone know how to fix? People have been linking to me, and the links take you to the top of the month’s archives, rather than anchoring to the specific post they want to cite. (Also, of course, if you’re linking to... Read more

“SHE TREATS POEMS LIKE PICTURES”: Unqualified Offerings gives a more charitable, and quite interesting, reading of one of the problems I had with Sexual Personae. Comments also interesting. Read more

“APHRODITE TRIED AND FAILED”: Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss. I would have loved this book in junior high. Partly, that’s because I could recognize good prose! Generation Loss is a lit-suspense novel about a washed-up junkie photographer (the awful title is a photo-jargon term, not that that’s an excuse) who travels to darkest Maine to interview a reclusive artist, and stumbles into a decades-long, “the ’70s were evil”-style mystery surrounding an abandoned artists’ colony. The descriptions of Maine’s harsh beauty are... Read more

THE BEST FORTUNE COOKIE EVER. Via About Last Night. Read more

LATE-NIGHT DOUBLE FEATURE PICTURE SHOW. I watched One, Two, Three and You Can Count on Me last night. Very scattered thoughts follow. One, Two, Three (Billy Wilder satire on Coca-Cola exec in divided Berlin) wasn’t really my thing–lots of rapid-fire yelling to make the script seem wittier than it is. Hanns Lothar, as the exec’s assistant of dubious wartime background, was terrific, stealing scenes from James Cagney left and right. (So to speak.) But the opening scenes really worked for... Read more

“THUS WE KNOW THE SQUID’S SECRET GENDER.”: Sexual Personae. I’m developing a theory that you can tell more about a work of literary criticism by what doesn’t appear in its index than by what does. One tendril of this theory posits that any lit-crit work is fundamentally unsound if it devotes more than two sentences to de Sade and not a one to Pauline Reage (our true nouvelle Heloise). I find both the theory and its subtheory (…so to speak)... Read more