Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Pictures Of Lily As A Zombie



Then one day things weren’t quite so fine
I fell in love with Lily
I asked my dad where Lily I could find
He said, “Son, now don't be silly
She's been dead since 1929”

Oh how I cried that night


Pictures of Lily, Pete Townshend






Over the last few years the two video stores near my old house—the corporate store and the locally owned store—went out of business and I’ve done a lot of posts about them going away.

All the links are at “Organic Chemistry Is So Hard!”

The corporately owned chain totally went out of business. The locally owned store closed up and some of their movies and staff were re-located to the ‘flagship’ store of the locally owned chain a few miles away on the other side of the suburb.

That flagship store is now closing. I think that is the last video store in the suburb. I think they are all gone now, the locally owned stores and the corporate stores. There might be one Blockbuster over on the borderline trying to live through bankruptcy, but I think even they have given up and closed down.

So I drove over to the last locally owned store to say goodbye to the clerks and see if they had any DVDs I might want to buy.

I’ve got all the monster snake movies I want so I didn’t buy any of those—and there are quite a few monster snake movies I don’t own. It’s a popular theme.

But I did buy a zombie movie. Now I proudly [?] have my very own copy of this:



Yep. It’s not a good movie, but it has a couple of fun parts. Mainly I bought it because I like the cover graphic so much. Too bad the cover art is completely unrelated to the content of the movie. In the movie itself there is no scantily-clad redhead kneeling on a Trioxin container.

I also like the plot, the notion that stupid kids—You Damn Punk Kids—would take Trioxin on purpose to enjoy the high, and the zombie plague would start not as a result of government shenanigans but rather as a result of ill-conceived designer drugs and the quest for a higher high.



The series came about as a dispute between John Russo and George A. Romero over how to handle sequels to their 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead. The two reached a settlement wherein Romero's sequels would be referred to as the Dead movies, and Russo's sequels would bear the suffix Living Dead. Thus, each man was able to do what he pleased with the series, while still having one another's work distinct and be considered canon.


“Return of the Living Dead” at Wikipedia




The zombie movie industry now is basically divided between Romero making pretty bad social commentary horror zombie films where zombies shamble around aimlessly kind of doing what they used to do when they were alive and biting people who are stupid enough to get too close to them, and everyone else making pretty bad action horror zombie films where zombies hunt around fast for brains or living flesh to eat.


Not too long ago I watched in real life as a Photorealist artist created a hand-drawn copy of a black and white photograph.

The whole process seemed to consist of two basic procedures. First the artist would lean way back from the paper and assume something that looked like a painfully bored expression and, holding the pencil high up the shaft, sweep the pencil in wide arcs again and again across a shape, slowly bringing the shade of the shape down to an appropriate value. Intermittently, then, the artist would lean way forward, almost nose-to-paper and assume something that looked like a painfully tense expression and, holding the pencil by the very tip, adjust an edge of a shape very carefully to a particular kind of hard line or a particular gradient of a soft line. Then the artist would lean back again and return to making wide sweeping marks.

At no point—to my eyes—did the artist look happy or interested or excited or engaged in the process in front of him.



I think if a person were feeling ornery they could make the case that the zombie movie industry itself is a more interesting metaphor for the modern world than are any of the particular metaphors presented in the actual movies the zombie movie industry cranks out.






















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We’re Going To Need A Bigger Boat


The Margins Of Water In The Wild


















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