NPR fired one of their news analysts, Panama-born (just like John McCain!) Juan Williams, author of Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary, for comments earlier this week on Fox News. He said that he gets “nervous” when he gets on a plane and sees “people who are in Muslim garb” and he thinks “they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims.” The second part of this statement is what we imagine constituted the firing, because that’s stupid. And dumb. And strangely French! That land of nationalism through conformity! In America? We don’t do that. The first part, though… well? Heck. Juan just doesn’t fly enough. Here are some things that make me nervous when I get on planes.

Whenever I get on a plane and see that it’s full of Orthodox Jews, I get nervous — because I know there’s going to be a ton of annoying standing and davening and refusing to sit by women.

Whenever I get on a plane and see that it’s full of white men in business suits, I get super-nervous, because I know that no one is going to snuggle with me during a bumpy landing. (At least Muslims will hold your hand!)

Whenever I get on a plane and see that I’m surrounded by midwestern women in pantsuits, I get totally nervous, because I know that they’re going to yack my ear off about their kids and pets.

Whenever I get on a plane (Virgin Atlantic or Jet Blue) and see that it’s full of people in skinny jeans with Apple laptops, I get nervous, because I know I’m going to have to hear the tinny tones of MGMT and Girls leaking out of everyone’s oversized DJ-style headphones.

Whenever I get on a plane and it’s full of people with goats and chickens, I get totally nervous. Because you just know there’s going to be a ton of crapping in the aisles.

Also, Tibetans? Oh man, I basically just book another flight. Those damn bells keep me awake.

Arianna Forster, who started the punk band The Slits at the age of 14, has passed away after “a serious illness.” Lead singer Foster, better known as Ari Up, was 48.

A six-year-old Australian girl has been banned from her school bus for five days, after facing bullying over her hijab. In response to being teased by a boy on the bus, she pulled down his pants. Her school is 40 miles from her house, so she’ll have a nice week to sit at home and think about how life isn’t fair while her bully goes to school. In other news, Australia has a word for pulling down people’s pants in retribution: it is “dacking.” Now you know.

It’s a sad day for sleazy Italians and lovers of beaver shots everywhere: Penthouse founder Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini Guccione has passed away at the age of 79. Guccione, who forever changed the way we look at nude women — I mean, he really got up in there — is the first in the triumvirate our nation’s naked lady picture pushers to die. Despite a glamorous, incredibly tacky life that featured forays into film, science (“He once hired 82 scientists to develop a small nuclear reactor as a low-cost energy source, but it came to nothing and cost $17 million.”) and gambling, Guccione lived long enough to see his fortune melt away, and finally suffered the ultimate indignity that any person can, dying in Plano, Texas. It is a tragic American tale.

“It took me a little while to understand how much nastiness people generally intended when they used the word hipster. It just sounds sort of attractive to me, a hipster. I thought yeah, I guess that is sort of my culture. Those are my people and I was just about able to go on thinking that it was a perfectly nice thing to be until someone pointed out to me or it finally sank in that it was meant contemptuously and I really I’m not sure I accept the premise that I think it’s a self-loathing term and I’ve come to be very alert to this self-loathing propensity that surrounds certain kinds of cultures of what are essentially connoisseurship, generational affiliation.”
 — Jonathan Lethem, in answer to the question “Are hipsters ruining Brooklyn?”

The things that hipsters such as Jonathan Lethem value and embody are worthy things — surprisingly so, in view of all the mockery the hipsters come in for. I agree with him that a hipster is “a perfectly nice thing to be.” It is a pity that anyone should be made to suffer so much, and so needlessly.

If it were really such a contemptible thing to be a hipster, you’d think that nobody would want to live in Echo Park or Williamsburg or Shoreditch or the Haut Marais; you’d think nobody would want to be caught dead wearing skinny trousers or the colored Ray-Bans or listening to WHY?. And yet people in search of the like-minded flock to those places, to those things. So why this “self-loathing propensity,” the doubtless real and widespread thing of which Lethem speaks?

It isn’t really self-loathing at all. People don’t hate hipsters, and hipsters don’t hate themselves. What people hate so much is the faux-hipsters: they hate poseurs. And because it’s such an irritating thing to be having to tell the real from the fake (exactly as in the matter of overpriced European handbags), the easiest way out is simply to deny any involvement in the whole business. That is why nobody, not even someone who fervently embraces hipster culture, wants to call himself a hipster.

But there are good reasons to validate the legitimate aspect of hipster culture, the aspect that is fun and has real charm and elegance to it; that tries, the way every social group tries, to form bonds between the like-minded using all these signals like haircuts and cardigans and bicycles and magazines.

It’s easy to tell the difference between a hipster and a poseur, because while the former are mainly enjoying, the latter are mainly judging. The poseur is an aesthetic snob without aesthetic discernment; he sneers but has no understanding of standards. So instead of having fun sharing their arcane things together, the poseurs are having zero fun pretending to not like anything. As Nietzsche put it most memorably: The man who despises himself nevertheless esteems himself as one who despises. These two kinds of people really are just worlds apart, even though they may find themselves living in the same neighborhood and going to the same rock show.

The tastes and habits of the world’s bohemias are real symbols of a certain way of life and way of thinking; there’s fidelity to a certain truth in the underlying reality, and that is how a Tokyo hipster can quickly recognize what might prove to be a kindred spirit in Buenos Aires or Austin. This kind of symbolism has been around since at least the time of Oscar Wilde, when the greenery-yallery aesthetes drifted about carrying “a poppy or a lily” (q.v. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience.) In the age of the Internet, though, that symbolic force has become just hugely magnified, because new symbols can penetrate the hive mind so quickly, and so deeply.

So today’s bohemians get in a big gang and live together, as they have for over a century at least; almost every city of any size in the Western world has at least one such neighborhood, and the big cities have many, each with its own flavor. In effect, though, all these places are the same place, like Solzhenitsyn’s “archipelago” (except not a prison camp for political dissidents): a series of far-flung islands but really one place, invisibly linked. In this case, residents of the archipelago value inventiveness, intelligence and taste over wealth and conformity; what Lethem is calling “connoisseurship.” There is lots of artwork and music and clothing being made in these places, experiments of all sorts, an atmosphere of discovery. There is generally “more dash than cash.” It is fun to have lunch or buy records there, more fun than having lunch in the rich neighborhood; people from “outside” come along to see the foreign movie, to have coffee. The hipsters live there, and the poseurs who follow them do, too.

The widespread vilification of hipsters has entirely failed to distinguish between the hipster and the poseur. Maybe that is the very reason why people never seem to tire of the constant ragging, even though it’s all been done to death; the irresistible “Being a Dickhead’s Cool” had millions of YouTube views only a matter of weeks ago. But please note that what is being mocked in every case, from “Dickhead” to “Hipster Olympics,” is not really hipsters! It is poseurs. Nobody is ever mocking anyone who is having fun. The mockery is reserved for those scowling, affected types who are in such a hurry to be the first to know the New New Thing before anyone else does, not out of real curiosity or scholarship, but just out of anxiety and a cold, sterile competitiveness, a kind of pushing other people out of the way. It’s the ignorance and fakery that are being mocked, not the actual hipster culture: “We’re puttin’ on this rave, and there’s a band in the mosque? And all the proceeds are going to that thing that happened in the Middle East or Africa or whatever?”

So what are these alleged good reasons for praising the hipsters? There are two. One is to decrease suffering among the youngs, because there should be no shame ever surrounding the love of or identification with a place, a way of life, a band or a pair of glasses. There could be so much more happiness (and inventiveness, and liberty) if people were just free to just love what they love without having to worry about whether or not they are going to be crucified for being a hipster.

When you are around young people who have ambition and taste, and who long to enter an imagined world full of gloriously attractive and brilliant cognoscenti, it can break your heart to see their fear and insecurity — which is very natural and really, almost inescapable for the young — manifested in distrust and an assumed arrogance, in a pretense at more knowledge than they really have. The way they pretend to know about this or that band, or the way they suddenly up and say that Pitchfork itself is “too mainstream,” or they pretend to read a book that they haven’t read. They literally twitch with grief and fear. They are suffering! And this suffering stifles their natural curiosity and pleasure, imprisons them in an airless chamber of embarrassment and insecurity. How many lofty, jaded teenagers are out there right now, too bored and cynical to enjoy anything freely? When they should be having fun instead. So that is why it is a good idea to say, go ahead and be a hipster, if you want to! That is very charming and delightful, and please tell us when you find another band as good as WHY?.

An aside: I am one of the ancients, myself, but I can still remember something of that fear; wanting to prove I was smart, fit to participate, things like this. Nervous that I might not really be as worthy as I hoped, no matter how hard I worked. A common paradox, I think: it’s a strange thing, but as an ancient I feel far less informed, less well-read than I did at eighteen, when I thought it was such a big deal to have read (a tiny bit of) Dostoevsky (in English.) Maybe this is partly a question of making friends with your own inescapable ignorance? So that you go in the library and can fully, absolutely realize that you’re only ever going to absorb the tiniest particle of what there is. I can remember, too, how liberating it was to be able to admit freely and even with pleasure, “I don’t know!” and to view saying so as an opportunity to learn something, rather than as an admission of inferiority. Ignorance is Liberty! Haha, God, now I sound like Orwell, whatever.

The other and equally good reason for encouraging the hipsters is that bohemian values of inventiveness and not-so-much-materialism are particularly helpful to have just now in the U.S. Because there has been way too much materialism over the last fifty years, new ways of looking at “success” and so on are badly needed. It would be great if, instead of excoriating the hipsters, people took a serious look at how they like to live, and maybe tried some of the things they like, for example riding a bicycle instead of driving a fancy car, or trying a vegan diet, or learning to play music. If we could broaden the idea of excellence to include more than wealth and power-to include cultural fluency, invention and new experiences — it could be such a good thing.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

Photo from Flickr by Fred Benenson.

Why won’t President Obama quote the part of the Declaration of Independence that mentions our “Creator”? Maybe he DOESN’T BELIEVE IN HIM! I’ve got to say, for a secret Muslim who worshiped at a racist Christian church, this guy is the worst elitist atheist ever.

by “David Shapiro”

right now i am inside the restaurant Cipriani on 42nd St. in Manhattan for a gala celebrating the Norman Mailer Writers Colony and honoring some literary figures and young writers and i am standing 20 feet away from Jann Wenner, the founder and publisher of Rolling Stone Magazine, and i want to ask him some questions about the music website Pitchfork but he is talking to some other people and i don’t want to interrupt him. i am standing with my friend mike who is a reporter, who brought me to this gala and who is also keeping an eye on Jann Wenner to swoop in and ask him some questions when he extricates himself from his current conversation. me and mike are watching him as he dips his middle finger into his glass of water, swishes the ice around in his glass with his finger, puts his finger into his mouth and sucks the water off the finger. even from twenty feet away we can hear the slurping sound he makes when his finger comes out of his mouth. i don’t know why he did that, i’ve never seen someone do that before

the reason i am here is that three hours ago mike asked me if i wanted to go to a literary gala tonight, he is reporting on it for his magazine, and i said “yeah totally” and then half an hour ago i met him outside and he said “you’re underdressed” because there were men in tuxedos and women in ball gowns streaming past us into the restaurant, and he looked me over and i was wearing skinny jeans and a ratty flannel and a fitted cap, and he thought for a second and took his own coat off and handed it to me and i put it on and it is a little small but at least they didn’t turn me away at the door. i said “should i take the hat off?” and he said “yeah, i think that would be a good idea” and then we went inside and the coat check people who were waiting by the door wanted to take my coat and put it in coat check but i couldn’t let them because i am just wearing a flannel under it

we walk inside and mike checks in at the press table and the writer Gay Talese is getting his picture taken in front of a banner that says Norman Mailer Writers Colony. he is old and has white hair and looks frail but he still looks elegant and moves gracefully, like he’s an actor playing an old literary giant in a movie, and it makes me think that if charles bukowski was here he would say “that guy has STYLE!” because he wrote a poem about things that have style, and after Gay Talese finishes getting his picture taken he dashes off to escape the press but mike catches up to him and i see Gay put his arm around mike as mike asks him some questions and i stand among a group of reporters and photographers. the only other person i know here is nate and i find him and tell him that i am trying to come up with ways to accurately describe Cipriani, the restaurant we are in, but not go overboard about it, and nate says “don’t overwrite it — just use four or five descriptive words”

okay so this restaurant has ceilings that are maybe 100 feet high, from the entrance to the back wall it is about as long as a football field, it’s probably about as wide as a football field too, and there is gold light streaming from everywhere and huge marble columns lining the room. in the center 80% of the room there are banquet tables set up with white tablecloths and all around this center area there are people shmoozing as my mom would say. i am not trying to be hyperbolic but it is the most opulent room i have ever been inside

okay so as i said, i just watched Jann Wenner do that weird thing with his water. a cocktail waitress comes by and offers me and mike goat cheese on an endive leaf and we decline but then another cocktail waitress walks by and offers us little rectangles of beef tartare, i’ve never had beef tartare before, and we both try it and agree that it is okay but a little dry. also the cocktail waitresses give you a weird look if you don’t take a napkin with your hors d’oeuvre, they think you’re uncivilized, so i have three balled up napkins in my pocket. finally Jann Wenner gets up and goes over to the bar to greet some people, including a tall woman with garish makeup

jann wenner is about 5’5″ or 5’6″ and has a close-cropped and very neat gray beard that he strokes when he speaks sometimes. when he is done talking to the tall woman in garish makeup i go over to him and say “hi i write a blog about music — can i ask you a few questions please?”

he seems impatient and says “okay fine” and peers around my shoulder and looks at the table that he was heading back towards before i got to him

i say, “do you read the music website Pitchfork?” and he says “no” and i say “why not” and he says “i don’t have time”

i go, “does pitchfork impact what you do?”

and he says “yeah, it impacts everyone” and i say “how?”

Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone Magazine and current media titan, is maybe making a mental list of things he would rather be doing than talking to me right now. in response to my inquiry as to how Pitchfork impacts what Jann Wenner does, he just replies “i don’t know” and looks at me like i should get out of his way. if you are reading this right now Jann Wenner i want to say i understand your frustration, you are a media titan and i am a squirt, you are here to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award and i am here for the complimentary meal and to talk to you for 25 seconds

i say, “okay one more question: what current bands or records are you listening to?”

he tells me he is listening to Tom Morello (former Rage Against The Machine guitarist) and Bruno Mars, and then i thank him and he walks back to his table and i walk around the restaurant and find mike, who is interviewing media titan Tina Brown, and i stand a few feet away from him and wait for him to finish. a photographer walks up near me and takes a picture of Tina Brown’s feet and sees me looking at him as he takes the picture and i guess he felt embarrassed that he had been caught photographing Tina Brown’s feet because he leans over to me and whispers half-jokingly, “i just don’t have anything better to do at the moment”

then someone on the loudspeaker announces that cocktail hour is over and we should proceed to our assigned seats. me and mike and nate are assigned to Table 31 and we walk around looking for it for a while, and we see molly and she is sitting at the Daily Beast table and i tell her i am nervous about being underdressed and she tells me not to worry about it because people will think i am super rich/powerful if i look like i don’t care about getting dressed for this. then we find our table and i sit down next to a man who is at least 80 years old and he is rhythmically chewing on a breadstick and making the blank expression that old people make sometimes, like they have been configuring their face in a socially appropriate way for however many decades but now they are checked out

3 tables down from me, Tom Wolfe is actually making the same face. the man next to me doesn’t greet me when i sit down but the woman who is sitting next to mike, who is on the other side of me, greets me and mike and nate. her name is veronica and she is maybe 55 and she reminds me of my mom because i think people might describe her as a practical woman. mike texts me that we are sitting at the Rejects Table because there is no cohesion in literary affiliation among the guests at our table, it’s just like the leftovers. Veronica says she works for Viking Press and i try to envision what she would look like if she was wearing a viking helmet with the horns sticking out. she asks us what we all do and then says “i don’t mean to seem anthropological” and then indicates that she has an innocent curiosity about what young people are up to these days. we tell her we write on the internet and she tells us that people her age in her industry are sometimes resistant to the internet, they are “occultists of the book”, and also she tells us that she edited 6 Norman Mailer books and ghost-wrote 3 books by somebody else whose name i pretend to recognize. and then she names an online publication that she writes for and after she names it she puts her index finger to her lips and says “shhhhh!!” because i guess her writing for that publication is a secret

then the emcee comes on and starts talking about the gala and the virtues of the Norman Mailer Writers Colony but it looks like most of the people are pretty focused on their appetizers, which are fried pears and some cheese and slices of meat and some small green leaves that i think are baby spinach. so far all the food here has been very small. the speech is boring and i feel restless and it reminds me of the other day when beau told me about “church giggles” which is when you are in church and you start laughing and you can’t stop and your mom has to take you out. i am envisioning what would happen if i stood up on the table and started pounding my chest like tarzan and screaming “FOOD! FOOD! FOOD! FOOD!” then the emcee says “this is a remarkable night — where else can you find three UN ambassadors that were brought together by writers from their countries?” the ambassadors are from bulgaria, israel, and one other country that i didn’t write down. later i am introduced to a kid who says that the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations has been keeping him abreast of the score of the Yankees game

as the emcee is finishing and they have given out some awards to some young writers, i see Tom Wolfe eat something off his fork and then put something into his mouth with his other hand and chew them together, then he wipes stuff off the corners of his mouth, takes a bite of a roll, and stares blankly towards the entrance of the building, wipes his mouth off again, and finishes his roll. a few tables away i watch Tina Brown as she waves at Tom Wolfe and smiles. she does that dainty wave where you hold your hand up and wag your fingers around, not the wave where you move your forearm back and forth. she is radiant

Gay Talese gets on stage and says some stuff that i don’t write down except that he makes a factually inaccurate baseball joke when he says “AJ Burnett (Yankees pitcher) will be showing up later, he’ll be knocked out in the third inning by the Tigers and then he’ll be here” but the Yankees are playing the Rangers, not the Tigers. i look at nate and he is smiling and i whisper “do you think anybody noticed?” and nate whispers “oh yeah definitely”

then Gay Talese finishes talking and the first part of the gala is over and dinner is served, it’s seabass, and the reporters and photographers get up and start walking around and interviewing the people they couldn’t get to during cocktail hour. we go to the bar to get drinks and mike and nate see a guy who they both interned for named Jesse, who mentions that his tuxedo pants don’t have pockets so he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. then nate points out that a kid who looks like he is about my age and is sitting at Jann Wenner’s table is Jann Wenner’s son, named Theo, and he suggests i ask Theo some questions about pitchfork and also tells me that Theo was dating Liv Tyler even though he is like my age and she is much older and has a son. he must have definitely gotten some big high-fives for that

i go up to Jann Wenner’s son who has one knee on his chair and one foot on the ground and both hands on the back of the chair, you know, one of those chair-assisted standing positions, i don’t know if there’s a better way to describe it, and i say, “hi i write a blog about music, can i ask you some questions for my blog?” and he looks hesitant but he says “okay”

i say, “do you read pitchfork?” and he says “yes” and i say “how often?” and he looks puzzled for a second, he is trying to discern my motives for asking him this question, and then he goes, “wait! who do you write for?” and i say “it’s a tumblr blog, it’s called Pitchfork Reviews Reviews” and he looks like he is thinking for a second and then he says “oh… i know about that… okay i don’t want to answer any more questions” and then i say “okay i understand”, i guess he thought i was gonna try to make him look dumb or something, but that’s not what i want to do and i should take this opportunity to mention that he was very amiable as he told me he didn’t want to answer my questions and he seemed reserved but not cold. and as i am writing down what he said he goes, “but, like, what questions were you gonna ask me?”

and i say, “beside the questions i already asked i was gonna ask what bands you listened to and if you talk to your dad via Gchat or Gmail”

and then he says, “do you know the band Salem?” and i say “yes” and he says “well i’m going to see them after this”, i guess he was answering my question about what bands he listens to, and then i say “that’s cool, i like their record, it got a 7.5” and then he says “they deserved higher actually” and i ask why and he says “it’s an amazing album” and then i thank him and go to the bathroom and in the bathroom there are no paper towels to dry your hands with, but there is a really old hand dryer. i have never seen one of these before, the only hand dryers i’ve ever seen are the ones at the movie theater that look futuristic and the other ones in bathrooms that are like as loud as lawnmowers and have stickers of evergreen trees on them. this old hand dryer is a big wooden box that sits on the ground, maybe 4′ long by 2′ wide by 3′ tall, it has some vents on the side and a thick tube coming out of the back of it that leads out to a window and then two smaller tubes sticking out of the front that you put your hands in front of and it blows the water off your hands. there is a man next to it who is operating it. i didn’t even know they made hand dryers like this

then dinner is over and everyone goes back to their seats and the emcee comes on and says some stuff and then Jann Wenner wins his Lifetime Achievement award and gives a nice speech, including a vague mention of introducing Tom Wolfe to acid. then some other people win awards, and then dessert is served and everyone gets up again and starts shmoozing again and me and mike go over to Tom Wolfe, who is wearing a white suit and a black bowtie and has wispy white hair and is talking to a blonde woman. mike waits until he is done talking to the woman and then introduces himself, asks Tom Wolfe some questions, and then finishes his questions and introduces me to Tom Wolfe and i ask him if he listens to any pop music

Tom Wolfe says that right now he is quite fond of this song called You Are The Only Exception and i guess i make a quizzical face to indicate that i’m not familiar with the song so he starts singing it to me, he sings “you are the only exception, you aaaare the only exceptionnnnnn, youuuuu are the ooonly exceptionnn” and he snaps his fingers to the beat and i giggle and he smiles and keeps singing, and then he stops singing and says “i also like country music. i like the song That Ain’t My Truck In The Driveway” and i say “i don’t know that one either…” because i want him to start singing again, but he continues, “i like that one because it presupposes that there are no other kinds of vehicles beside the truck: no sportscars, no sedans, no minivans…” and he thinks for a second, “…no motorcycles…”

i ask if he uses an iPod and he says he doesn’t and i say “a CD player?” and he says “oh yeah, a CD player — that doesn’t really get me into the 21st century right?” and i go “no, it sort of does, my dad uses a CD player and he’s in the 21st century” and then Tom Wolfe says that he really likes this composer named Astor Piazzolla who he went to Argentina to see, twice, and then i thank him and smile and he smiles

mike is talking to Gay Talese again. the night is almost over and people are leaving. i come over to them just as their conversation is ending and Gay Talese turns to mike and says “i hope they’re paying you for this!” to indicate he is impressed by mike’s reportorial vigor, and then he turns to me and says “are they paying you?” and i say “nope!” and he goes “well then good thing you’re rich!” and i say “yeah thank god for that.”

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

“David Shapiro” is 22 and lives in New York City and has a Tumblr.

Photo by David Shankbone from Flickr.

Why didn’t Morgan Stanley make any money this last quarter? “One major culprit was trading of both stocks and debt…. Revenue dropped 42% at Morgan Stanley’s sales and trading division.”

by Sean McTiernan

The sad thing is, From Beyond could only ever have been a disappointment. Re-Animator was such a perfect schlock horror movie, with its mix of creeping dread, savage gore and an incredible hammy villain. And when Jeffrey Combs gets up in that mix, giving one of the greatest displays of anti-heroics ever committed to celluloid, you’ve got yourself a fake-blood barn burner. Director Stuart Gordon’s sophomore horror movie was never going to be able to match up.

Precedent and an impossibly high standard weren’t the only things working against the film. On the face of it, it seems too similar to its predecessor. It is also based on a Lovecraft story about the dangers of science pushing the limits of natural order. It also has Jeffry Combs playing a mad scientist pitted against another mad scientist, both of whom have been intoxicated by their research. Both movies feature weird rubber monsters and complete repulsion for sexual deviancy. But that’s not why it is now mostly forgotten. From Beyond is probably ignored because, even for a horror movie, it’s too creepy and too insane.

The movie opens with two scientists working on a machine that lets humans tap into another dimension using their pineal gland. This is a dimension exists in tandem with ours but the two can only meet when said scientists turn on their “resonator”. Of course, the monsters attack the head scientist, leaving his assistant, Crawford, under suspicion of murder, protesting his innocence to the four walls of his padded cell. A psychiatrist and a cop accompany Crawford to the scene of the crime promising that if he can re-create the experiment they’ll declare him mentally sound. Unfortunately, the experiment works and while Crawford has been suffering from insanity, Doctor Pretorious has been bathing in it… in another dimension.

The film is, above all things, ludicrously pervy. Horror movies usually prey on the anxieties bought on by sex but few are baldly explicit as this one. While everything in Re-Animator was tinged with an appropriately toxic green, scenes in From Beyond are regularly bathed in garish, purplish-pink light. The evil scientist, Dr. Pretorious, is a sadist and heavily into bondage. It’s also implied heavily in the movie that his evil is due to importence. The enlargement of the pineal glad seems to highly increase propensity for sexual deviancy: Crawford is a nervous mess at the start of the movie but once his pineal gland gets severely enlarged he quickly reaches “Jersey Shore” levels of blunt sexual aggression, subtly underlined by his shaved, bluging head, which resembles a giant dick.

Dr. Katherine Michaels, a reserved psychiatrist, gets forcibly stripped and mauled by a horribly mutated Pretorious, whose phallic tendrils significantly increase the already high potential for rapeiness he had in human form. Then later on, the influence of the resonator leads her to don bondage gear and dry hump the sleeping mutated body of Crawford, who by that stage is half way to becoming his final form: a brain-eating, living-dick, zombie-monster.

It is unsettling to see a horror movie so committed to portraying the most disgusted, terrifying view of sex it can possibly manage. Those looking for the fun romp of the Re-Animator will certainly be disappointed with the tense, slimy feeling that prevails throughout From Beyond. But that precise feeling is what makes this film so interesting today. Now that movies like A Serbian Film have clearly shown that truly shocking horror now seems to exist solely in the realm of sexual violence, now that Saw has rendered plain, explicit gore cartoonish, it is great to find a film that attacks sexual anxiety so relentlessly from a more fantastical and strange angle.

As I’ve said, no one plays a maniac like Jeffrey Combs. The grim determination, disregard for humanity and matter-of-fact bad-assery he bought to Herbert West in Re-Animator is most of what makes that movie so iconic. Combs doesn’t just play the role of Creep With Own Agenda well, he carves the perfect method into stone and distributes it from mountain tops. And part of what makes From Beyond so odd is that Combs doesn’t reprise the role he perfected. Sure, he still plays a mad scientist, meddling in things unimaginable and abhorrent to normal people. But this time, it is not ambition and dedication that drives him on, it is fear.

What Combs does with From Beyond is an act of pure bravado. Far from taking a role as far away from Herbert West as possible or giving an identical performance in every other movie, Combs takes an seemingly identical role and plays it so differently it’s almost jarring. And he manages to do this while still retaining his mastery of creeping everyone the fuck out, whether it be subtly stroking the machine or visibly relishing the bizarre twist near the end of the movie. Usually when schlock horror movies are being discussed, cheesy or inexplicable acting choices are relished most by fans. But what Combs does her is prove himself a powerhouse. It takes a special kind of skill to make overblown insanity disquieting believable, especially in a movie as loopy as this one. His character name is Crawford Tillinghast for god’s sake. Any other movie and you’d devote 500 words to unpacking what sort of person would even try to name a character that. Yet every time Jeffrey Combs bellows “I…am…Crawford…Tillinghast !” as his pineal gland bulges out of his head, you just feel like saluting.

There is a nonsensical charge of cloaked white supremicsy that occasionally get leveled at the film in some obscure corners of the internet. It’s completely ridiculous but worth mentioning as an insight to what horror fans get up to when left to their own devices. Ken Foree, who plays the investigating detective, meets a messy end. The catch here is that Ken Foree made history as the first African-American to survive a horror movie in 1972’s Dawn of The Dead (if that’s a spoiler for you, we’re probably not going to be friends). So some have posited, seriously…you’d be surprised what people feel they can posit, that his death here is some sort of act of balance bought about evil white filmmakers. Isn’t that amazing? Sure, white people have done some horrific things (like River Dance or Nu-Metal) but it’s hardly fair to imagine Stuart Gordon was contacted by the Grand Wizard and told exactly who needed their brains eaten and what message this was going to convey. Still, people have said this and been serious about it. Never change, Internet.

From Beyond is flawed. The pacing is erratic, the plot comes and goes as it chooses and the supposedly euphoric experience of seeing through the third eye of the pineal gland is a poor facsimile of a similar effect in Brain Damage. But it has such fine performances, such an atypical concept (although much has been written throughout history on the power of the pineal gland) and is just so damned strange any horror fan would be missing out if they were to dismiss it as a poor cousin to Re-Animator. It’s also, rare for a movie with this style of effects, a complete downer from beginning to end. But still, Jeffrey Combs is in this movie, screaming like a zombie and eating brains. What more do you need?

Sean Mc Tiernan has a blog and a twitter. So does everyone, though. He also has a podcast on which he has a nervous breakdown once an episode, minimum. You should totally email him with your questions / insults/ offers of tax-free monetary gifts.

Royce Mullins and The Case of Virtue’s Burn, A Novel: Chapter 7

by Jeff Hart

Let me tell you a little story about your client. I know by looking at you, not to mention by the way you throw a punch, that you’ve never served. You city boys never have to. Too many opportunities for you, too much life to live. Even a guy living like you are, like a real dirtbag by the look of this place, even you probably think you got it too good to hump around the dunes and light up some Arabs, am I right?

I don’t resent that. I sure don’t want it to come off that way. It’s a volunteer army, after all. Me and Pilgrim, we wanted to be out there. We got reasons. We work on a different wavelength of thought than a pink piece of cosmopolitan pussy such as yourself. What I’m telling you, Mr. Detective, is that you don’t have the frame of reference necessary to really understand this story. All I expect from you is to nod politely when I speak and, when I’m finished, to agree in no uncertain terms to turn that son of a bitch Paul Fennel over to us at your earliest convenience.

Regardless of what you might think, cozily napping in your ignorance, the war effort is on. Not your fault. You could watch the news morning and night and still not comprehend the vast amount of bone dry, sun-bleached, one camel desert shitholes that we currently occupy. Don’t let the suits fool you, we are still very much out there. Guys like Pilgrim and I are still putting hoods over the heads of villagers and dragging them off into the night to have our way with them.

I’m just kidding. We would never.

I’d tell you where we were stationed, but I doubt you’d know the city, maybe not even the country. The place was a particularly bad one and our unit a uniquely bloody one. A very high concentration of purple hearts. I’ve got a couple myself. Pilgrim over there, he don’t talk so much anymore on account of the things he’s seen and done. We’ve had fingers and toes spill down from the sky like confetti. It’s why when we come to New York and find it raining Chinese garbage, I just turn to my buddy Pilgrim and say hey, this is an improvement.

You know what an IED is, Mr. Detective? It’s a thing that explodes. These Arabs been living in the desert for a billion years, drinking each other’s piss to stay hydrated. They’re resourceful. Villages just full up with al-MacGuyvers, turning Beta-Maxes into bombs. Our company leader, he used to love quoting us statistics about how we were like a magnet for the things. How there were five booby-traps out there for every man. Guess what happened to him.

Then one day the brass sends us a new kid. By the look of him, I don’t see how he made it through basic. He’s a skinny thing, weak, and they don’t make sun screen strong enough for him. It’s hot as balls out in those deserts, my friend, but this new kid is shuddering all the time, like he’s got the chills. He don’t belong out there in the shit with guys like me and Pilgrim, but they say he’s some kind of genius. You know what they tell us to call him? A safety consultant! Isn’t that funny?

This is your pal Paul Fennel I’m talking about.

I’ll be damned if things don’t get better. Casualties start dropping. Fennel, he can barely speak above a whisper while in our presence, but we learn to listen in a hurry because he’s like a bomb sniffing dog. He tells us what rocks to drive around, what doors not to kick down, what stereos not to unplug. We listen. And shit just stops exploding.

He can’t explain how he knows what he knows, of course, but then again we ain’t asking. It’s like not talking to your pitcher during a no-hitter, you know? Fennel, he creeps everybody out, but we like him. We feel safe when he’s around. We feel like we got a chance, like it’s not just a dismemberment lottery.

One time there’s this teenage rag-head that Fennel points out. Teenage might be doing this kid a favor. He’s young, anyway. Fennel points him out and says, him. That one. Now you might think we’re all monsters out there, like we relish the bloodshed, but that’s not true. There’s some debate about this. The kid, he’s getting closer, sort of like he’s working up the nerve. Somebody’s got to make a decision. A buddy of ours, Derek May, he shoots this kid and we approach and sure enough he’s loaded up with enough homemade plastic to take out a city block.
Everybody pats Fennel on the back after that one.

A couple days later, we’re stopped to refuel. Derek takes a couple steps away from the group to piss, he steps in something, and he explodes. Everybody’s screaming. It’s like they forgot what it was like. Fennel though, he’s not screaming. He’s just staring off at where Derek used to be.

I catch up with Fennel later. He looks sick about the whole thing. He’s crying into his hands. We never talked much, him and I, but he’s one of us. My heart goes out. I give him the usual hey man, it’s not your fault. You can’t see them all coming. Focus on all the lives you have saved and get back on the horse. I guess because of my gentle demeanor, Fennel thinks he can confide in me. You know what he says?

Derek was bad. He was going to be worse. I let that happen to him, he says.

The next day, Fennel is gone without explanation from command. We go back to getting shredded, worse than in the bad days, because we’ve grown complacent. That’s about when Pilgrim and I decided to take our leave.

Now, Mr. Detective, I can see the rusty gears in your rational mind turning. How could Fennel know where the bombs were? Seems impossible, don’t it? But he did know. He knew where every last one was and he let Derek die all the same. He was supposed to be one of us, but instead he decided to play God. That don’t sit well with me. It don’t sit well with Pilgrim. Paul Fennel needs to be held to account for what he did.

You’ll help us now, won’t you? You’ll help the good guys.

Jeff Hart lives in Brooklyn. His other writing can be found over at Culture Blues.

Photo by Fabio, from Flickr.