MARK YOU CALENDAR AND GET YOUR TICKETS:
John Carpenter: Live Retrospective, 8 p.m. Saturday at the , Keswick Theatre, 291 N. Keswick Ave., Glenside. Tickets: $29.50-$65. Information: 215-572-7650, keswicktheatre.com.
He is spending time this summer driving around, playing hits from his past films and new music from his two recently released albums:
Lost Themes and Lost Themes II
UK GUARDIAN SPLASHES: Is it time for a horror movie about the evils of Donald Trump?:
Chuck Bowen writes this for the world to read:
A much larger proportion of the electorate is terrified of a Donald Trumppresidency, of course. This alarm has led to protests of all kinds. One image circulated on Facebook depicts the “Make America great again” huckster as one of the mossy-colored, skull-exposed aliens from John Carpenter’s They Live. Below this monstrous caricature is a caption that will be familiar to fans of the horror film: OBEY.
This caricature, like Hillary Clinton’s address in San Diego, offers a small catharsis for those of us who find Trump’s running for office to be a prolonged and baffling ordeal – a serrated cornucopia of unchecked authoritarian aggression, most obviously embodied by his obsession with dictatorial regimes and attending hatred for non-white, non-male citizens as well as the press and judicial systems. (Imagine what the hypocritical Republican hate machine would say about a Democrat who praised Russian president Vladimir Putin.)
Debate away.. the political spectrum is filled with vibrant colors on both sides.
But one thing Bowen writes struck me:
They Live was released in 1988, following a couple of likeably macho salt of the earth types (played by Roddy Piper and Keith David) as they discover that the upper class of society are alien monsters lulling us into a stupor with pop culture, exploiting us and polluting our planet while living the high life. Change the size of the TV sets, gingerly sprinkle the phrase “1%” into the dialogue, digitally insert cell phones into the characters’ hands, have a few extras snapping selfies in the background and They Live could pass as a story of the present day.
They live was one of the best movies ever made..
There have been a lot of candidates for ‘they live’ cred long before Donald Trump emerged from the stairway in the same style the SIMPSONS predicted he would ..
Bowen goes on to name other films in recent horror memory, like THE PURGE..
Horror and pop culture.. they go together so well.
I have often written that horror movies encapsulate the moment in time they were created..
Perhaps a Trump movie is in order. To be fair, maybe Hillary should be in it too. And the victor in the end? Gary Johnson! Ok that can only happen in the movies.
You read that right.
If you were in Washington DC last night (or many other East Coast cities) you hardly saw the July 4th fireworks shows. It was cloudy, murky, ugly, and rainy as a storm zipped by the major metros just in time for dusk fire shows..
If you watched PBS’ version, you saw something very different: Other fireworks shows from curiously clear skies.
Perhaps it’s only in D.C. where a PBS show can become a scandal.. But it did just that. Even forcing PBS so say sorry..
Here is what went down:
In the old days before the Internet people may not have questioned this. In the new era where information runs wild, it become an instant obsession of Twitter and social media.
PBS defended itself first, Tweeting:
We showed a combination of the best fireworks from this year and previous years. It was the patriotic thing to do.
When they realized they sounded like Twits they apologized over the social media airwaves for “for any confusion this may have caused”..
From time to time over the coming weeks, I want to start taking some time off from the madness of daily headlines to focus on some other aspects of the planet earth worth mentioning..
Creepy.. strange.. and bizarre things. The planet is a collection of that. From the people gazing at a don’t walk sign at a stop light all the way to the people who run our open and shadow governments.
And in that vein, here is something awfully creepy. Or perhaps just sad..
Have you ever heard of the valley of the dolls in Japan?
The photographs taken from the village are strange.. dolls emulating people in various walks of life.. Like construction workers on highways..
….like mischievous children..
…like classrooms of people..
The entire thing is unique .. and uniquely sad. Perhaps sad more than anything else..
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