Personal

A Trip to the Banya and Everything’s All Right

by horrorfeminista1 Comment on A Trip to the Banya and Everything’s All Right

I had some bad energy going on in October. Everything just kept going wrong and anxiety plagued me, keeping me from sleeping or ever relaxing completely. I knew in my head that this too shall soon pass, but it sure seemed to be taking its sweet time. Somebody told me once that stress hormones are released from the body in two ways—through crying or sweating. Now, I’ve never been much of a crier. The studies that say women cry an average of once a week never took me into account. I’m more like three or four times a year, if that. It’s a good thing I’m a world-class sweat machine; otherwise, I’m sure I’d have a nervous breakdown annually. From about May through September, I’m usually in a constant state of ooze. With the arrival of fall, though, it’s been chilly, and I haven’t had much time to exercise or work up a sweat. Maybe that’s why I was feeling so off. Luckily, I live near a Russian bathhouse, the Banya, on Coney Island Avenue, where I can pay to go sweat. This might seem like a weird idea, but it really does work. Really.

I was first introduced to Russian bathhouses when my friend had part of her bridal shower at one. We went to the Russian & Turkish Baths on Tenth Street in Manhattan, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d never been fond of the locker room experience in high school and wasn’t looking forward to it again in my adult life, but I stomached it and got dressed in what I could put together as a swimsuit. All I can remember from that experience is that two hours later, I was more relaxed than I had been in years, maybe even in a decade. I fully intended on getting a ten-punch card so I could return again at a discounted rate, but then I learned that there was an ongoing feud between the two owners, Russian émigrés Boris Tuberman and David Shapiro. Their feud was so bitter that once a card was purchased you could only go on days that Boris staffed the baths or David, depending on whom you had bought your card from.

My first visit to a Russian bathhouse.

 

A year later I watched the movie Eastern Promises with the famous naked knife-fight scene that takes place in a Russian bathhouse, and the one on Tenth Street didn’t seem like the safest place in the world. Plus, it was far from home. I didn’t want to have to trek all the way into Manhattan to get relaxed and then just waste it by getting tensed up in the subway because of angry commuters or what have you.

 

When I moved to Ditmas Park, a friend told me that there was a Russian bathhouse within walking distance of my house. I hadn’t visited, though, until my stressful time last month, but now that I have, I hope to return at least a couple times a month—especially during the winter. I had forgotten how much stress relief sweating it out in a sauna can provide.

We went on a Monday, and there were hardly any customers, just a few seasoned Russian pros. The man running the counter spoke minimal English, but he made it clear what he wanted: we were to hand over our wallets. He locked them into security boxes and gave us keys for the women’s locker room and one large towel each. The general admission for the Banya is $30, and if any food or drink is ordered in the cafeteria area or a massage, robe, any of the extras, that is charged to your safety deposit box number, and you settle up at the end of the visit.

At the Banya, there are two saunas and one steam room, a cooling pool, and a Jacuzzi. There not as many saunas as the Russian & Turkish Baths in Manhattan and the Banya doesn’t have the ice-cold pool that is cold enough to stop your heart, but I liked it better because there was less traffic and the masseuses weren’t as aggressive about getting customers. (At the Banya, there was one masseuse on duty, and she spent the majority of her time watching Russian soaps on TV.)

The Brooklyn Banya.

 

This is a DIY spa, and the goal is to go through five or six cycles of sitting in the sauna and then spending an equal amount of time or longer outside of the sauna. In the sauna, your job is to have a full sweat from your head to your feet, which I had no problem doing. I left a huge wet print on the wooden benches each time I went into the sauna, and after my first cycle, I could feel the tension rolling off me as I relaxed in the Jacuzzi. I lay my head back, and I think I would have been able to take a nap if Russian music videos hadn’t been playing on the overhead TV. There are large orange jugs full of ice water so patrons can replenish their fluids between cycles, and next to the jugs is an endless supply of clean towels to keep you dry. After leaving the sauna, you are expected to rinse your sweat off in showers provided before dipping yourself into the pool or Jacuzzi. With all of this water in and out, you are really clean and feel like a new person by the time you’ve finished your visit.

When I left the Banya three hours later, I was in a completely different head space than when I had entered. My body felt loose and relaxed, all the tension was gone from my shoulders and neck, and my sinuses were clear. In the locker room, we ran into a neighborhood woman who asked if it was our first time there. She laughed and said, “It’s better than sex, isn’t it?”

Books, Horror, Uncategorized

Damien Echols’ Life After Death Is a Heartbreaker

by horrorfeminista9 Comments on Damien Echols’ Life After Death Is a Heartbreaker

I had never heard about Damien Echols and the West Memphis Three before reading the memoir Life After Death. Somehow I completely missed this case in the 1990s when three teenagers were sentenced to life—and in the case of Damien Echols, to death—based on no real evidence to speak of except for a coerced confession. This is the case that started a slew of reactionary stories in the media about cults and satanic worship among teens. This was just not true, though, in the case of the West Memphis Three—Jessie Misskelley, Jason Baldwin, and Damien Echols—and these guys lost almost twenty years of their lives behind bars, not to mention suffering the unspeakable torture that occurs in jails.

Echols starts his memoir with two definitions of magick, which appear to have been the guiding principles for much of his life. He says, “The first is knowing that I can effect change through my own will; and the other meaning is more experiential—seeing beauty for a moment in the midst of the mundane.” Echols’s view of life was probably his saving grace in jail, and he describes how much of the population there was batshit crazy—if not before they went in, they came to that point after a few years behind bars.

Echols had simple memories of the eighteen years of free life he experienced before he was sentenced to death. He grew up mean poor—not a little poor with family meals of Ramen noodles, but really poor with no running water at times or heat. Despite that, he carried treasured memories—the feel of the different seasons and an appreciation for nature, the meaning of music in his life and what it felt like, and real affection for his friends and family. In jail, he had to ration his memories and only take them out every once in a while so they wouldn’t get used up. Often, he talks about having to deny himself things while in prison, because otherwise there was nothing to break up the monotony. He had to keep experiences from himself so they would remain special.

I’ve never had a clear picture of what jail is like, I don’t think, until reading Life After Death. The idea I had probably came from Stephen King’s novel and novella The Green Mile and Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, and in those stories, there are saving graces—a mouse that becomes a pet, decent guards who look out for their prisoners no matter what they’ve done, and adequate access to books. Echols’s experiences in jail have destroyed whatever notions I might have held, and I believe he could school Stephen King (who Echols learned the art of writing from) in giving a more realistic portrayal of what life is like behind bars.

Echols is taken off his antidepressant cold turkey once he’s on death row because there’s no point in fixing a guy who’s going to die anyway. When he’s beaten by guards and his teeth sustain nerve damage, he’s given the option of having them pulled out and replaced by dentures because fixing them is too much trouble for a guy who’s supposed to die anyway. Echols is never allowed outside to see the sky. He’s in his cell most of the time, and when he’s allowed to walk, he must be shackled and can then pace back and forth in something akin to a grain silo.

The list goes on and on, but what seems most cruel is when the author is suddenly slapped with something he did not realize he had lost. With startling comparisons, Echols writes, “God, I miss the sound of cicadas singing. I used to sit on my front porch and listen to those invisible hordes all screaming in the trees like green lunacy. The only place I hear them now is on television. I’ve seen live newscasts where I could hear them screeching in the background. When I realized what it was I was hearing I nearly fell to my knees, sobbing and screaming a denial to everything I’ve lost, everything that’s been stolen from me. It’s a powerful sound—the sound home would make if it weren’t a silent eternity from me.”

Damien Echols.

 

What scares me the most about this story is that it ever happened at all. After reading Life After Death, I became obsessed with the case and watched the documentaries that brought the West Memphis Three to the public eye—Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, Paradise Lost: Revelations, and Paradise Lost: Purgatory. The footage taken of West Memphis during 1993 makes the town look like a doppelgänger to the one where I attended high school; it’s eerie how similar the landscapes are. The teenagers put on trial for a supposed satanic ritual murder of three children could have been the friends I hung out with in high school with their long hair, Metallica T-shirts, and taste for horror movies and literature. And it just seems crazy and impossible how these trappings of youthful rebellion, heavy metal/goth style, could be twisted into a case about cult ritualistic murder.

 

All three were convicted of the crime based on the flimsiest of evidence and served seventeen years before somebody finally overruled the original trial judge, David Burnett, who shut down all of their appeals, and the Arkansas Supreme Court agreed to allow new evidence that could set them free. Thank God, those materials still existed. With the amount of bungling that happened in this case, I would have expected for the evidence to have been destroyed or “accidentally” thrown away. But it didn’t, and during those seventeen years in jail, Echols taught himself how to write so he could give us this dark jewel. I’ve gobbled up everything I can read and watch about the case and now just have to wait for the Peter Jackson-produced documentary West of Memphis to come out at Christmas to put a cap on this. Echols is a powerful writer, and I’m curious to see what he puts out next now that the West Memphis case is over. I’m hoping for a horror story—a fictional horror story.

Uncategorized

I’ve Been Robbed!, Part II

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I went to bed shortly after the police left and didn’t sleep all night. Every creak in the house, ding of a nut on the fire escape—those sounds made me sure the thief was returning. As I tossed and turned, I thought about the last time I was robbed when living in Austin, Texas. We lived in a house at the end of a dead-end street (prime territory for a thief to hit, the police later told us), and it was about the same time of year, I think. The first time the thieves robbed us there, they took my computer and a few CDs. A week later, they came back and cleaned out everything valuable. To add insult to injury, they piled all of our possessions in our roll-away trash can and used that as their get-away vehicle. We were scared after two robberies in a row and got an alarm system for the house that the cats were particularly adept at setting off. That didn’t stop the thieves, though. Periodically we would return to that house and find that the front porch light had been unscrewed and that they had tried to jimmy open a window. They never got back in after the second robbery, but they sure as hell tried. With so many tries, the terror level dialed down, and the robbery attempts just became a nuisance, like gnats. Now, with the new robbery in New York, I’m beginning to believe there’s something in my star chart about this. Something with my Saturn?

The next morning I was up early, early, early, having given up on sleep at about seven, and a good thing, too, since the NYPD’s Evidence Collection Team showed up at eight. These were two young ladies with tightly braided hair. I showed them my desk where everything had been taken out of my computer, but they said these were poor surfaces for fingerprinting. They finally decided to check the front door for prints, and I tried to do some editing while they worked. I couldn’t concentrate. I kept drifting to their conversation, where they gossiped about people at work. After they finished with that, I had to be fingerprinted so they could eliminate my prints. We did this at my now-empty desk, and my cat Ellie (who usually hates women and hisses at them uncontrollably) came right up to this lady with a gun and head butted her, wanting pets. She probably did this to the thief, too.

My door after the NYPD Evidence Collection Team lifted prints off it.

Kristi was up by now, and we took a short walk up to Cortelyou Road, a block from our house, meaning to get coffee, and I noticed the sad-face looks we were getting from our neighbors that we happened to run into. Word spreads quickly when you’ve been visited by the police during the night (or during the day, for that matter). I waited for the detective impatiently (I had to pick up a friend at the airport that day), and when he finally came, he gave the lock on my door an appraising glance, then told me how easy it was to pop open with a piece of paper or credit card. He recommended that we have a deadbolt installed, as the ladies of the Evidence Collection Team had done a few hours earlier. He asked about what types of work I did and if I had been working on a particularly newsworthy piece of investigative journalism or something like that. I had to snort at that—unless Alison Bechdel’s next possible graphic memoir counts, well, no. He had me call the building super so he could talk to him about the security cameras in our building and then went through our stairwell, knocking on all apartment doors and questioning our neighbors. I was impressed. We sure didn’t get this kind of service when we lived in Austin.

Friends and family were sweet, calling, texting, and e-mailing to see if there was anything they could do, offering to lend us things that had been stolen or a safe place to stay until we felt more secure in our apartment. One person who was not sweet was our building manager or landlord. I shouldn’t have expected anything different. I have never experienced anything but corruption from the New York City landlords I’ve had to deal with in the ten years I’ve lived here; they come from a long history of this I’ve learned from lectures and tours at the Tenement Museum.

My sister called our building’s management company to report the crime and tell them that the police would be collecting the security camera footage from when the robbery happened. She was passed from person to person and said the guy she was finally patched into must have had a phone that only gets the shit calls, because he was a hard-ass from the start. She asked about the cameras, and he said that they hadn’t been working for three months because somebody had stolen the recording equipment that was in a room in our apartment building. So the security features that the building manager had been touting when we moved into the building were essentially decoys. Kristi asked about getting a deadbolt installed and reported that most of the apartments in our stairwell were equipped with one. He said that we were welcome to have one installed at our expense, but that we must use a licensed locksmith. Kristi brought up the yearly rent increase that we had just been hit with for “luxury items” in our building and said that a deadbolt surely qualified as such. He blathered on about how if she tried to find a comparable apartment in our neighborhood, she would see that our rent was really quite reasonable and even below market value. Kristi was spitting mad by then and hung up with, “So sorry to have interrupted your day.”

So I had our deadbolt installed today by a very understanding locksmith from M&D Locks and Keys, and we had to pay for it out of our pocket. He said he’d just installed another deadbolt in an apartment in our building just the other day. For free, he will come back and take out the deadbolt when we move. That makes me happy; I don’t want our landlord getting anything free off of us. My next-door neighbor told me that they had a similar robbery just last year and only his son’s laptop was taken. So I guess we’re living in a building that’s popular with thieves.

Locksmith from M&D Locks and Keys showing off my new deadbolt.

I still miss my computer, especially the collection of heavy metal videos that I had amassed. I really hope those thieves are enjoying my copy of Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law.”

Personal

I’ve Been Robbed!, Part I

by horrorfeminista1 Comment on I’ve Been Robbed!, Part I

A few years back when I started making good money from my freelance work, I decided it was time to make the move from my humble laptop to a ginormous desktop system. I figured that it was necessary since I was working on bigger graphic files and not just Microsoft Word anymore. I bought myself a 21.5-inch iMac and had the maximum amount of memory installed with my accountant’s blessing. I named my hard drive Second Brain, but as time went on, I found that it was acting more and more as First Brain.

In the morning, often before I had even made my coffee, my first stop was my computer. I logged in and checked all my e-mails and such to make sure nothing earth-shattering had happened during the night. From there I would make myself breakfast and then watch something on YouTube or just surf while I ate. Then I would get to work. Sometimes I would feel a physical pang when I was separated from my computer for too long. I could lose whole days on that computer between my work, music, online life, and movies without much to demarcate the time of day or even the week. I wasn’t a complete computer potato. I would make sure to get out of the house at least once a day unless I had a killer deadline to make. But I never noticed how much my home life had shrunk until my computer was stolen.

Second Brain hard at work on the night of the first presidential debate.

 

I’ve been going to a coworking studio pretty regularly since June because it gets me out of the house and somewhat socialized—also, I have a dual-monitor setup there that is so helpful with all of the fact-checking and shifting that I have to do between documents. I came back from the studio last week and went to my computer right off—only it was gone. My printer, my scanner, and my brand-new camera were all there on my desk. It was only my iMac, keyboard, and Magic Mouse that were gone; the thumb drive, digital voice recorder, and iPod cord that had been plugged into the iMac’s USB ports were taken out and lay lifelessly on my desk. I went through my desk drawers and live checks were still there, credit cards, and my checkbook. At first, I thought maybe my sister had borrowed the computer or something, and I waited for her to get home. Once she did, we were able to verify pretty quickly that we had been robbed. I knew I had to call the police, but what number should I call: 911? That seemed so frivolous. A robbery didn’t really rank as an emergency, did it? I dug out my netbook and did a quick google, which suggested that I call the city’s information line: 311.

I did that and the woman who picked up ended up patching me into 911 anyway, so that’s one thing I learned. If you’ve been robbed, call 911. The 911 operator took my address, phone number, and asked me what had been stolen and then said to wait and police officers would respond as soon as they could. I hung up, talked to my sister about it, wrote about it, made something to eat, and talked to my sister about it some more. It was nearing eleven at night, and we had been waiting a couple of hours. I didn’t think the police were going to come until morning and was just getting ready to take a bath when I heard the telltale sound of police radios in the entryway outside our apartment. I opened the door to a short, loudmouthed Ponch type of character and his completely silent sidekick, who was tall and gangly with the shadow of adolescent acne still on his face.

They checked my windows that led to the fire escape, asked about my work and what was stolen, and weirdly enough, complimented me on my driver’s license photo. Then they got a call on the radio about a deranged person on Ocean Parkway and said that they would be back in twenty minutes. They were back in less than that, and while they were gone, Kristi and I joked about getting them to pose for photos as they investigated the crime. When this team came back and were checking out my windows again, our doorbell rang and another cop and his partner entered our apartment. Now, it was starting to look like Law & Order, and the cops started acting like that too. The most senior officer (I assume, since the Ponch character was deferring to him) decided that point of entry was the door to our apartment, though it had been locked. Because I’m a freelance writer/editor type and only the computer was taken, he thought it sounded like “corporate espionage.” There had been tons of other valuables lying around in the open, and he said a thief would just sweep the computer and valuables into a bag and not worry about niceties like disconnecting cords and external hardware. Then he said that this was definitely somebody we knew.

My naked desk after the robbery.

 

This made me feel awful. The last thing I wanted to do was cycle through all my friends and acquaintances, mentally calculating who the guilty party might be. I was reading Damien Echols’s Life After Death, too, where the author was blamed for a crime because of his Goth tastes and sentenced to death with no evidence because of a prejudiced jury, judge, and so on, which made me really leery of thinking about anybody that way. The police finished up and said not to touch anything on the desk and that a detective would be at our house in the morning.

Uncategorized

For a Wicked Good Time, Go to Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House

by horrorfeminista2 Comments on For a Wicked Good Time, Go to Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House

I spent Sunday with nervousness in the pit of my stomach, that psychic sense of unease that comes up when I have to speak in front of an audience or I have a job interview. The reason for it on Sunday was for something completely different, though, something quite preventable, and something I paid thirty dollars for—Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House. My sister Kristi found out about this serial killer-themed haunted house in September, and as horror aficionados (knowing more than our fair share about serial killers) and after coming off of my accidental haunted house experience last year, I was ready to go. Funny how that went away the day of the experience.

The half hour Kristi, Sarah, and I spent walking to the haunted house after our last supper of hot dogs, fries, and Diet Coke was almost completely silent. I don’t know about Kristi and Sarah, but I was spending that half hour completely freaking out—would I have a panic attack while inside? Even worse, what if I peed myself? I was wearing black pants and had a relatively empty bladder, so I thought I would be okay on that count.

We had a mix-up with the tickets and had to get to the haunted house early to get everything fixed, but the staff was very gracious and accommodating toward us, even though it was my error. There was a good-sized crowd, and we were herded into a labyrinth-like line similar to what you wait in while at an airport check-in counter. The staff pushed us in tight and close, starting with the horrific, claustrophobic feeling early before we even entered the haunted house.

While in the pens, two members of the haunted house staff walked the periphery, trying to scare the audience. One wore a multicolored clown wig and plastic mask like the killer in Alice Sweet Alice and would stand silently next to members of the audience while rubbing together a thumb and forefinger that were tacky with a bloodlike substance. This character wasn’t so much scary as awkward, making me think, Go away already. The other guy wore a long blond ponytail and lab coat; he went around asking audience members, “Do you want to play?” Kristi and Sarah signed up for this right away. When the man asked me, I frowned, which I guess he took as assent and painted a line on my cheek. The fake blood felt cold and weird so I drew away and let him go paint other members of the audience.

Kristi and Sarah with their X’s at Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House.

 

As we got nearer to the door, I overheard the guard of the haunted house giving the group in front of us the rules for the tour. Number one: Don’t touch the actors. Number two: If you are painted with a red X, that means you’re allowing the actors to touch you. I started cowering. I couldn’t have anybody touch me, or I would freak out for sure. Sarah dug in her purse and found a balled-up Kleenex so I could wipe off my half-assed X. We were in position to be the next group to enter the haunted house, and the staff found a lovely, well-dressed couple to go with us so we were a nice even six. We were warned, “If you can’t go on, say, ‘I need to leave,’ and somebody will escort you out of the haunted house. If you think this is going to be a problem, do it earlier rather than later. The further you go, the scarier it gets.” The guard asked if there were any questions. I asked how long it lasted and was told twenty-five to thirty minutes. Surely I could make it that long. With that, the door opened, and I pushed my friends ahead of me while clinging to one. I sure as hell wasn’t going to go in first.

In the first room, we were subjected to a searchlight in our faces, and various members of our party were called out, told to come to the middle under the light or to face the wall. Sarah was wearing slippers and showing some skin, and her leg ended up getting snuffled by our first serial killer. (She was the one most often called out when we went into the different rooms, but she was also the lippy one in our group.)

Jeffrey Dahmer at Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House.

 

Each room of the haunted house is themed for a different serial killer. Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, Lizzie Borden, H. H. Holmes, Elizabeth Bathory, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and Jack the Ripper all make an appearance, along with others, and in each room, there is an out-of-nowhere surprise. I was menaced with sniffing, balloons, open wounds, an ax, and a chainsaw. I screamed and grabbed onto every member of our party (including those who I didn’t know), crying, “You go first,” “Don’t leave me here,” or “No touching” (this to the actors). And it was cathartic and a lot of fun. The staff of Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House are an enthusiastic bunch, and they do their very best to give you a scary good time.

H. H. Holmes and a victim at Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House.

 

Families of some of the serial killers’ victims were quite upset to hear that serial killers would be glorified in this exhibit. The architects of the haunted house were sensitive to these remarks and included an exhibit that focused on a parent’s grief and the victims of the various serial killers who are featured in this haunted house. That was the one nonscary room of Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House; for the rest—well, gird yourselves!

Art, Crafting, Personal

Pimping Out My Apartment

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I love beautifying my apartment, and in the last year, my sister and I have kicked it into overdrive. The centerpiece of our apartment has always been ammo crate bookshelves. When Kristi and I were in high school, my mom would buy these ammo crates for five dollars apiece at a local store that had hideous things like camouflage overalls and fishing lures. She loves a sale and the ammo crates were a deal, but they sat in our garage for a long time. Kristi was the one who figured out that they made fabulous bookshelves when staggered and stacked up on top of one another. And each crate had rope handles on the ends so it was easy to move them by stacking the crates and lifting them up by the rope loops. The last time we moved and the movers saw all of the ammo crate bookcases, I thought they were going to pass out. I could see them mentally calculating how many crates there were and how many flights of stairs they would have to walk down with them. Then we showed them the trick, and suddenly they were all smiley faces.

Our ammo crate bookshelves.

Last year, I spent August in Berlin and had a fine time glutting myself on German art from the Weimar Republic. I picked up a few posters of artwork by Otto Dix and George Grosz, a couple of my favorite artists, and brought them home with me. Kristi and I also had a poster of one of our favorite Caravaggio’s from a trip to Florence a few years earlier, and we had never had it properly framed. I took the art to the Frame Shop at Pearl Paint when Kristi was working there, and she helped me pick out really great frames and mats and then had the great idea of using a circular mat for our Caravaggio shield of Medusa.

Caravaggio in our kitchen.

Once we had all this fabulous artwork to hang up, we wanted the walls to look festive, so we went to the hardware store and picked up a few gallons of paint—banana yellow for our kitchen and a really saturated turquoise for my bedroom. Around the beginning of the year, Susan Godfrey had a Kickstarter campaign for the last funding she needed to start her coworking studio, the Productive, and she had a set of drawings by artist Maya Edelman as a prize for a certain level contributor. I fell in love with one particular drawing—The Sadness of Not Fitting—and had to have it. I wanted to support the Productive, but I wanted to own this particular drawing even more. When I got the drawings, I had Kristi evaluate them once again and she came up with the perfect frame treatments, which cost under twenty dollars and look great against our yellow walls.

Maya Edelman’s drawings.

The ammo crate bookcases still look wonderful, but I was getting sick of the rest of our living room. We had used the same blue futon cover and curtains for several years, and they were starting to get dingy and yellow. Our friend Sarah was coming to visit in October for Kristi’s birthday, so this became the perfect time to fix up the living room a bit. I had it in my head that I wanted skull curtains, and Kristi, the master seamstress, said okay and that we could go pick up some material and she would stitch them up. We went to the Fashion District in Manhattan, where skull fabric was all the rage a few years ago, and found nothing but a chichi silk fabric with a very subtle skull pattern after visiting a half-dozen stores. One proprietor told us to come back in a week because the stock is always changing. We just couldn’t wait that long. We went home and Kristi found some nice-looking fabric online with the bold, dramatic skulls that we craved. We decided to take a risk and order it, and the fabric really did turn out to be lovely and worth it. Again, it cost less than twenty dollars, and Kristi whipped up these babies in an evening.

Our skull curtains.

In this same week, I also decided that I had to have a leopard-print couch—probably because I’m reading all these heavy metal biographies and autobiographies right now as research and animal prints are a big part of the style. Also, my mother started buying us leopard-printed things starting in high school. I have a leopard-print cigarette case from her that I use for my laundry card, and we both have matching leopard-print comforters from Christmas one year. Now, it’s turned from Mom buying me leopard to me buying it, so maybe the fetish is just something I’ve inherited from my mother—a genetic predisposition for leopard print. The leopard-print futon cover that I ordered online looks so nice, and now we have the old grungy blue one as a spare so Kristi can rip it apart and make a pattern for new futon covers. I’m imagining zebra print and snakeskin print, a skull print. Maybe we’ll change the futon cover every time a new guest comes to visit us.

Our new and improved leopard-print couch.

 

 

 

 

Movies

Pitch Perfect Gets It Right

by horrorfeminista2 Comments on Pitch Perfect Gets It Right

Be still, my nerd-loving heart.

That’s how I felt from the first frame of Pitch Perfect to the end.

When I first saw trailers for this movie, it looked like a formulaic inspiration film—something like the Stomp the Yard or Step Up movies. I thought it would be fun, but not $13.50 worth of fun. I was content to wait until the movie came to video. This is one of the few times, though, when the trailer doesn’t take the best parts of the film and present an unrealistic view of it. There’s comic genius in Pitch Perfect that can’t be conveyed by the trailer. After seeing the stellar review of Pitch Perfect in New York magazine, I made plans to go see it with friends, and those were probably the most joyful 112 minutes of my weekend.

 

At Barden University, there are several a cappella groups, but the two main rivals are the all-female group, the Barden Bellas, and the all-male group, the Treble Makers (who also happen to be the national a cappella champions). The Bellas and Treble Makers faced off the previous year at Lincoln Center, where the current leader of the Bellas, Aubrey (Anna Camp), blew the competition by vomiting all over the audience during their performance. Sadly, that was the only interesting part of the Bellas’ routine. Now, Aubrey and co-captain Chloe (Brittany Snow), the sugar to Aubrey’s snot, are trying to recruit new talent but finding it rather difficult after their competition performance and bad behavior the previous year.

Aubrey and Chloe have no choice but to take on misfits they wouldn’t have given a second glance to the other year, and this is where it gets fun. It’s like all of the stereotypes ever given to women have infiltrated the sorority house. There’s the slut Stacie (Alexis Knapp), the androgynous man/woman and token black Cynthia Rose (Ester Dean), the silent Asian girl Lilly (Hana Mae Lee), and the fat girl who goes by the super-obvious Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson). This crew of misfits ends up bringing the razzle-dazzle that the Bellas have sorely needed. Beca (Anna Kendrick), the alternative girl, is recruited at the last minute after a rather sour start to the college year (she’s forced to go to college with a free ride rather than LA, where she wants to move and get a start on her music career—oh, the horrors). Kendrick is able as the unlikely star and motivating force behind the Bellas, but Rebel Wilson as Fat Amy is my favorite in this very enjoyable cast. Somebody needs to give this actress her own comedy show. She can even make “Um” hilarious when it comes out of her mouth. She was a bright light the few times she appeared on-screen in Bridesmaids last year, but in Pitch Perfect, she steals every scene she’s in.

These goofy protagonists are only as strong as their antagonists, and the Treble Makers are equally worthy and ridiculous as rivals to the Bellas. They’re led by Bumper (Adam DeVine), king of the nerds, who’s completely unaware of this as he throws himself into the Treble Makers’ routines and mocks his competition (“Girl power!”). Beca’s persistent love interest Jesse (Skylar Astin) joins the Treble Makers, but everybody feels bad for Jesse’s adorably nerdy roommate Benji (Ben Platt), who’s obsessed with Star Wars and magic, when he doesn’t make it into the group. The Bellas are warned that if they are ever romantically involved with one of the Treble Makers, they’ll be cut from the team. Beca’s not worried about that, though Jesse does everything in his power to change her mind.

The jokes in Pitch Perfect are fresh and funny. I hadn’t heard any of them before, and sometimes it would take a minute or two for the joke to hit me before I started snorting laughter. And I did snort often. But if the antics of the Bellas and the Treble Makers aren’t enough for you, then surely the team of judges will slay you. John (John Michael Higgins) is a misogynist so steeped in his own bullshit he doesn’t even smell it, and Gail (Elizabeth Banks) tartly meets each of his no-brainers with a zinger that flies over his head. Their show within a show brought something new to the competition faceoff that I’ve seen played out so many times before.

We left the theater with big smiles on our faces, and one friend said, “All right, I’m calling it. That’s going to win the Oscar.”

It should, really—the Oscar for fun.

Books

Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You Is Pretty Forgettable

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Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You is Joyce Carol Oates’s latest young adult offering, and I always feel like these novels are attempts by her to make sense of new technology. In Oates’s young adult novels, Internet searches, instant messaging, and texting take up great chunks of the book and are important plot points compared to her adult novels and short stories. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I often have to ask younger kids how to do something on the computer. They’ve grown up always used to one while I had to learn in my last few years of high school. I know Oates got a new iPhone a while ago and was enamored with the photo function. Lots of cat pictures followed, which is very teenage girl, and I can’t help thinking that maybe this novel coincides with her acquisition.

A recent cat portrait by Joyce Carol Oates.

 

In this novel, the story is told through two perspectives, Merissa Carmichael, a triple-A personality who’s been accepted early to Brown, and Nadia Stillinger, an insecure, curvy girl who’s been told she’s fat so many times that she now believes it (she’s five foot four and weighs 119 pounds at her heaviest). The unifying factor between these girls is that they were part of an inner circle that all received a last cryptic text from the boldest of them, Tink Traumer, before she committed suicide. The two different viewpoints didn’t really work for me. They felt uneven, but I guess the point of them is to show how Tink’s strength, ever after her death, helps these two girls when they are at their worst points and quite close to suicide to themselves.

Tink Traumer came to their school a few years earlier, a short, slight girl with an exotic past. Her mother is a television actress and very glamorous to Tink’s friends, and Tink herself was a child actress for several years on the same drama series as her mother. Now, Tink wants nothing to do with the world of acting and refuses to answer any questions about that time period. Tink’s not much to look at. She has red hair that she shaves off, is covered in freckles, and wears the same clothes day in and day out, but she makes up for that with her bravery. She’s a gifted artist and quite lippy, challenging teachers and adults when she feels it’s needed. Her friends are part of a popular clique, and all have their problems from the Perfect One, Merissa, whose home life is breaking apart and copes by cutting, to the weakest member, Nadia, who’s so eager for others to like her that she ends up sexually abused and the victim of cyberbullying.

 

Both Merissa and Nadia have strong fathers who only seem to care about their daughters as far as how much of a credit they are to them. Merissa’s father is proud of her prize-winning essay that’s posted on the Scientific American website, but he doesn’t have time to read it, and he’s thrilled that she’s won the coveted part of Elizabeth Bennet in the school theater production of Pride and Prejudice but doesn’t understand her reasons for quitting, or resigning her role, as Merissa puts it. Nadia’s father puts her in the best school possible—she’s nearly as recent as Tink to the high school—and her job is to not embarrass him. (She’s the baggage left over from his first marriage; he’s on his third now.) After a sexual experience happens that she doesn’t remember because she was drugged, Nadia is the subject of many rumors at school and is mercilessly harassed by the boys. She develops a crush on one of her teachers, Mr. Kessler, and after some bad decisions, her father is after him, accusing Mr. Kessler of something that he didn’t do. Nadia’s father doesn’t listen to his daughter; he just wants to punish what he perceives as a slight against him.

This isn’t a terrible book; I finished it. But I like Oates’s other young adult titles better. This just felt like a list of teen problems to me: suicide, check; cutting, check; and oh yeah, body image. I’m puzzled about what the novel’s big message is. The girl who is apparently the strongest in the clique commits suicide and then her spirit helps others who are having problems? Or is the message as simple as appearances are deceiving? I have no takeaway from the book. I reflected for a moment on cutting and body image, but the teens of today are coming up with their own solutions like the Butterfly Project and petitions to teen magazines to stop photoshopping models, making unrealistic images. I’m not sure that they would have much use for the girls presented in Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You.

Joyce Carol Oates and cat.
Movies

The Possession: Don’t Open the Box!

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I was so happy when I saw The Possession take the number one spot at the box office two weeks in a row. It was the little horror movie that could, yet people seemed completely shocked when that happened. They shouldn’t be. When a screenplay agent visited the last coworking studio I was at, Paragraph, he did not recommend doing a screenplay on spec unless it was a low-budget horror movie script because those were always sellable. He also said writers shouldn’t slum and try to do a horror script to break into the business. You really have to believe in your material and bring something new to the table to impress today’s jaded horror fans.

Though I was impressed with The Possession’s success, I ended up being tardy to see the movie. It’s on its way out of the theaters now, and I think part of my problem was finding someone to see it with. Everybody had already gone when I wanted to see it, and it’s no fun seeing a horror movie if you don’t have somebody to scream with. This ended up being the second feature in me and Valerie’s horror movie weekend. While watching, Valerie said she always learns something in horror movies, and within the very first few minutes of seeing this one, the number one lesson was apparent: Don’t open the box.

The Possession has an original premise that reminds me of Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box (where the protagonist goes to great lengths to secure a haunted object advertised on the Internet). The movie opens with a scary scene where an older woman confronts an antique wooden box on her mantel. It emits spooky sounds like a Goblin song from a Dario Argento movie, and it’s pretty obvious who or what is going to win in this matchup.

Next, the audience is introduced to a fractured family—mom (Kyra Sedgwick) and dad (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) have divorced and their two daughters, Hannah (Madison Davenport) and Em (Natasha Calis), are shuffled between two separate residences. Dad has just moved into a new prefab house, and on the way there, the family car passes a yard sale. The girls convince their father to stop—after all, what can be more pleasurable on a fall day than a yard sale? The girls play dress up and frolic, but then the younger daughter, Em, finds the antique box containing the dybbuk and falls under its spell immediately. She convinces her father to buy it, and with that and a whole load of other items, the family makes out like bandits, paying only fifty dollars for everything.

Once the family gets everything home, Em asks for help opening the box, which seems to be impossible as it has no seams. Eventually she’s able to do it by herself in her room, and the box opens to show off all manner of ugly things, like desiccated moth bodies, a huge yellowed tooth, and an antique ring that Em immediately slams on her finger. It’s such an old-lady ring, and Valerie and I were both surprised that her parents didn’t see and comment on such a thing, especially when it starts discoloring her hand like a spreading bruise.

Em begins exhibiting unpleasant personality traits that are not very becoming to a little ten-year-old girl, such as stabbing her father with a fork between bites of pancake, tackling a kid who takes off with her box and beating him senseless, and presenting her mother’s boyfriend with a disgusting gift. Strangely enough, it’s her part-time father who is troubled by this behavior when it was his absenteeism that brought about the divorce in the first place. Her mother blames all the misbehaving on the divorce.

As the undesirable behavior escalates in Em, her father is denied access to her after what looks like an incident of child abuse. But he knows something is seriously wrong with his little girl and goes to find help first at his university, where he coaches basketball, and then with a group of Hasidic Jews in Borough Park, Brooklyn. (Another lesson we learned: Help is near our neighborhood. If a dybbuk ever threatens us, we now know where to go.) He’s turned down by the shul, but one rebel Jew, Tzadok (Matisyahu), agrees to help him. By this time, Em’s mother realizes something is up and has taken her daughter to the hospital, where there’s further confirmation that something’s not quite right. This ended up being one of several scenes that seemed liked paler versions of The Exorcist.

The only difference in the exorcism scene at the end was the religion used, but this wasn’t enough to make it new or scary. Also, I felt there was some cheating. The religious authority said the dybbuk was attracted to innocence so some of the possession choices the spirit made were quite puzzling if that’s the case. Because of this, the movie ended on a rather blah note for me, which was disappointing after it had been going along so well. Endings—they’re so hard to get right.

Movies

Jennifer Lawrence Rocks House at the End of the Street

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My friend’s daughter was staying the weekend with me, and since there are a few horror movies in the theater right now (with more to come in preparation for Halloween—whee, I love this time of year!), we decided to do a horror movie weekend. First up was House at the End of the Street, and my fifteen-year-old charge met me at the Park Slope Pavilion, our favorite shabby-chic theater, with her friend. We fed a friend’s cat that I’m cat sitting (the Halloween-colored Bellatrix), and then went to have a little Thai food, where we told each other ghost stories before the movie. Valerie’s friend lives in a house in Brooklyn that’s been in her family for generations and a few family members have actually died there, so there have been some sightings of great-grandma and others.

Once we were properly in the mood and with twelve minutes to spare, we ran to the theater and got our seats just in time for the movie. It took me a little while to get into House at the End of the Street. There’s a murder where a husband and wife are taken out by their daughter, which frees up the glorious house next door for Elissa (Jennifer Lawrence) and her mother (Elisabeth Shue) to move into. I really liked the casting for the mother-daughter pair—I don’t think I’ve been this happy about a casting decision since Teri Garr was cast as Phoebe’s mother on Friends—but I wish there had been more depth to their characters.

Mother and daughter have been led to believe that the house where the murders happened is abandoned, but they soon learn otherwise at a neighborhood barbecue where everybody bitches about the long-lost son, who has returned to fix up the house and resell it, because he’s driving down the value of their homes. Of course, this is the reason that Elissa and her mother are able to live in their house in the first place, so they can’t complain.

Elissa’s introduced to the perfect neighborhood boy, but later at school when he invites her to a social gathering, she finds out he’s a brat and flees. Elissa is picked up by the next-door neighbor, the son of the murdered parents who everybody else hates, and after that meeting the two form a friendship.

The best thing about House at the End of the Street is Jennifer Lawrence as Elissa. It was satisfying to sit in the movie theater next to two teenage girls and see a worthy role model on-screen for them. Elissa plays guitar and sings, and when slimy kids come on to her or tease her, she doesn’t cave into peer pressure and sometimes even fights back with her fists. Stranded on a dark road with a menacing car passing by, she pulls out her cell phone and dials, being a smart girl. Later in the story, horror movie clichés dumb down her character, but Lawrence still comes off as steely. And at this point in her career, I wouldn’t expect anything less. After playing Ree in Winter’s Bone, Mystique in X-Men, and Katniss in The Hunger Games, Jennifer Lawrence is always going to be the epitome of tough girl for me.

There’s a good twist in the movie that I didn’t see coming, but the ending turns into one of those long, drawn-out climaxes that I’ve seen repeated quite a few times. I’m confident the main character won’t be killed, so I’m just sitting there, feeling ho-hum, until everybody calms down and the enemy is vanquished. The best part of these average horror movies is when the audience’s reactions are out of proportion to what’s on-screen. I think the screaming, the comments of “No, don’t do that; don’t go down there,” and being in a dark movie theater while this is going on makes viewing the movie a richer experience. The audience is always a crucial factor for me when going to see a horror movie.

After the movie, the two girls talked about how they liked it but weren’t really scared, and we climbed on the bus to go home. We sent Valerie’s friend home with instructions to call when she got there so we would know that she hadn’t been chloroformed and kidnapped, and then Valerie and I walked home, talking about important things, like how would you react in a life-or-death situation? Would you be able to do what needs to be done or would you shut down, whimper and curl into a ball, waiting for the murderer to get you? We made fun of the girl going down into the dark, creepy basement, but Valerie said she realized that it had to be done to advance the plot. Maybe this next generation of horror writers will be able to find a more creative way to get the protagonist into the basement or change the location of where the horror is hidden altogether.