Nanette Fabray, the legendary American television actress, singer, comedienne, and advocate for the hearing impaired, has died at the age of 97. Fifty years ago last month, she (and The Carol Burnett Show) provided just over two minutes of the most amazingly quiet and mesmerizing programming in the history of American broadcast television. These two…
Tag: television
David Lynch: “A wild pain and decay accompanies everything”
Film critic A. S. Hamrah on the life, mind, and work of David Lynch, including his pursuit of a fearsome disease and darkness lurking in the heart of everything, including America: A nicotine fiend and a coffee addict who mixes existential dread with sadomasochism in all-American settings, Lynch is that rare director who makes subversive…
Matthew McConaughey and the Lincoln MKZ: Existential Crisis
A bizarre, surreal, hilarious, and strangely hypnotic remix parody of Matthew McConaughey’s commercial for the Lincoln MKZ.
If Thomas Ligotti, David Lynch, and Philip K. Dick made a sitcom: “Too Many Cooks”
In case you missed this when it basically took over the Internet for a couple of weeks last fall (late October to early November 2014), I give you Too Many Cooks, which I think has been described most ably by Simon Pegg: “Too Many Cooks is so deftly engineered to unnerve stoned people in their…
Bobcat Goldthwaite: Why have a civilization if we’re no longer interested in being civilized?
A couple of years ago when I watched the movie God Bless America, written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwaite (whom I once had the pleasure of seeing live when he was doing standup comedy), it didn’t turn out to be as good in its entirety as I had hoped. The trailer (see below) had been…
Rebranding Giordano Bruno: How the new ‘Cosmos’ spins the history of religion and science
The updated/remade version of the classic Carl Sagan series Cosmos has been drawing lots of attention in the past few weeks, both positive and negative, and one of the areas that has come under the most scrutiny is the show’s inaccurate portrayal of Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century philosopher, occultist, mystic, and proto-scientist whose life and…
Validating Ray Bradbury: Climate change and high temps linked to violent behavior
Remember Ray Bradbury’s famous fascination with the idea that hot weather spurs an increase in assaults and other violent behavior? This was the basic premise behind his widely reprinted 1954 short story “Touched with Fire,” in which two retired insurance salesmen try to prevent a murder. In a key passage, one of them shares his…
Vampies, zombies, and sacred horror
Here’s a fairly awesome audio feast spiritual about the deep connection between religion and supernatural horror: Sacred Horror: Zombie Resurrections and Vampire Souls It’s an hour-long episode of the radio program Encounter that was broadcast just three days ago by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Encounter “invites listeners to explore the connections between religion and…
It’s reading vs. screen culture — and screens are winning
Yesterday I posted some excerpts from and commentary on last weekend’s interview with Stephen King in Parade magazine, in which King says he’s uneasy about the future of reading in an increasingly screen-oriented culture. The main data point he cites in this regard is his experience of teaching a couple of writing seminars to Canadian…
George Clayton Johnson describes the reality of the ‘Twilight Zone’
Fans of both The Twilight Zone and the realm of philosophical, spiritual, religious, and psychological inquiry represented by the likes of books such as Daimonic Reality and Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness — the latter featuring contributions from Teeming Brain teem members David Metcalfe and Ryan Hurd — will find much of interest in…