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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   good parasitic horror
Saturday, October 22 2011

The other day I while listening to a segment on the Madeline Brand Show about overlooked scary movies, I was reminded of the Hidden, a classic alien parasite horror movie from 1987. Back when it came out in VHS, my brother would rent any movie whose cover art depicted horrible things, and that must have been how I came to see the Hidden. So I downloaded the Hidden and watched it again for the first time in 20 years. It's great not just for the fun it plays with a fairly standard plot arc, but also for the details, most of which are more funny than scary. Our evil parasitic alien, for example, has a love of fast cars and heavy metal music (which plays to satanic archetypes) while the good alien (and yes, there is also a good alien) keeps reminding us of angels.
Gretchen had helped arrange another Woodstock poetry event this evening, this time at the Colony Café. Two of the poets she'd gotten for the Woodstock Writers Festival would be reading, and one of them (Tim S.) would be spending the night in our master guestroom (which I've recently put back together after the spate of recent work). In addition to the Woodstock poetry scene's regulars, everybody who is anybody in Gretchen's Hudson Valley life showed up, filling the downstairs and forcing a good number of us up to the balcony. Tim's reading was excellent, partly because he has such a deep, venue-friendly reading voice. Jean, the other reader, is much older and I kept missing important information-bearing sounds in her soft, quivery delivery, which rendered her lean redundancy-free poems completely unparseable.
After the event, I chatted a little with Michæl from KMOCA about his interest in a television program called Ghost Hunters. At the very mention of the show, I had an immediate negative reaction, accusing it of dumbing down America. Michæl pointed out that I watch shows like Sister Wives and The Bachelorette, which are equally stupid. I agreed, but my problem with a show like Ghost Hunters is that it pushes aside real science content and sews confusion in the marginal grey matter of the nation about what exactly science is. "But it's on the SyFy channel," Michæl pointed out. "Yeah, but it's not science fiction either." But none of this was the point; Michæl wanted to build an installation featuring various classic pieces of "evidence" for haunting, including movable cold spots and voices hidden in recordable static. So, there in front of the dying embers in the Colony Café's fireplace, we brainstormed about how best to build a remotely-controllable cold spot. One could use radiation: parabolic heaters could heat all the spots in the room except the spot that was to remain cool. Or one could use convection: have a container of cool air with a system designed to pour it down onto an addressable point on the floor. And, finally, one could use conduction: with a million dollar budget, one could install a fine-grained multi-zone hydronic system under a floor and change the temperature of any particular square foot at the flip of a switch.
The post-reading banter went on for awhile, and gradually those in our contingent grew hungry. The nearby Yum Yum noodle place was our first choice for a dinner venue, but it proved too full (there was outdoor seating, but the night was chilly and there weren't enough heat lamps). So we ended up at the Little Bear. By this point our contingent had been whittled down to just six of us: Tim S., Deborah, Ray, Nancy, Gretchen, and me. The food at the Little Bear was uncommonly good, and the service seemed a lot better (though sassier) than usual as well.
Back at our house, Gretchen wanted to go down to Ray and Nancy's place briefly to hang out with Bruce, a pit bull belonging to Ray's brother Kim. Bruce would be returning to the city tomorrow, so if we wanted to see him, it would have to be tonight. So we went down there for something like 20 minutes. Tim came along too, though he seemed kind of sleepy. As for Bruce, his head is still the size and shape of a blacksmith's anvil, but he's about the sweetest dog you could ever hope to meet.


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