Steady Diet of Nothing.

When I lived in Jamaica Plain, I was fortunate enough to live spitting distance from the Hi Lo Food Mart. With a short walk, I had easy access to fresh produce, milk, ramen, and all other college student food essentials (except beer - but Centre Liquors was right down the street). I always preferred getting my food at a cheap, no-nonsense place like Hi Lo as opposed to the much closer but much snootier and more expensive City Feed. City Feed was literally right next door to me - I could see it from my window. But, while I often stopped there for coffee in the mornings, the extra five minutes or so to Hi Lo were invariably worth it when it came to actual food.

I don't live in JP anymore. After a year or so of bouncing around, I'm back to commuting to school (in Dorchester) and work (in Cambridge) from my hometown of Franklin, Massachusetts (don't worry, nobody else has heard of it either). My food options have gone from preparing my own relatively healthy meals (I put together a bomb recipe for Chicken a la King when I was living in JP, all with ingredients I could get from Hi Lo), I'm stuck with eating out more often than I'd like to. Bread, peanut butter, and canned soup have become good friends of mine once again.

In about four days, I'm moving into Ball Square in Somerville. I've been told by many that Ball Square and the nearby Davis Square are great places to eat on the cheap for broke college students such as myself. I'm also told that the nearest grocery store is the Shaws in Porter Square - just one stop away on the Red Line, but a bit of a haul compared to my former Hi Lo commute. So we'll just have to see: can I make this work, or will I starve to death before the year is out?

Keep reading to find out, and wish me luck.

(Hi Lo Foods is located at 450 Centre Street in Jamaica Plain. It keeps odd hours which I couldn't find online. Try calling them at 617-524-6622)

(Hi Lo image obtained via http://hilobrow.com.)

Fangs, but no Fangs.

As both a lifelong Unitarian and an avid horror and Halloween enthusiast, I think I'd be remiss if I failed to direct people to this article in today's Boston Globe.

Now, what you may or may not know about Unitarianism is that it's very big in Romania. And, in fact, particularly big in Transylvania. Which leads me to this wonderful passage:

Three years ago, First Parish decided it would step out on a spiritual limb to create a Halloween celebration to benefit the Bedford Food Pantry, but with a few important exceptions. There will be no Count Dracula - nor his vampire kin from the popular “Twilight’’ and “True Blood’’ books and shows - during this monster-mash-themed tour, organizers said.

The Bedford congregation enjoys a warm, 15-year-old relationship with a sister Unitarian church in Abasfalva, in Romania’s Transylvania region, said First Parish’s senior minister, the Rev. John Gibbons, and doesn’t wish to play into outdated stereotypes about it being the birthplace of vampires, fueled by 19th-century novelist Bram Stoker’s famous work, “Dracula.’’

“They really weary of Dracula being the only things Americans know about their country,’’ said Gibbons. “They have such an incredible and rich history and culture, and so few people know that it’s not all about a story invented by a Westerner. So we just don’t do vampires.’’

The church also doesn’t do old-fashioned stereotypes of Halloween witches as green-faced and pointy-nosed. There are modern-day pagans and wiccans who worship at First Parish, and the congregation is sensitive to their feelings, said Lisa Rubin, First Parish’s director of religious education.

The omissions may sound a bit politically correct to some, but organizers say their Halloween celebration is meant to be great secular fun and still in line with Unitarian Universalist values of liberalism and acceptance.

Man. That shit is so Unitarian it hurts.

(image: "The Vampire" by Philip Burne Jones. Obtained via http://www.artmagick.com)

Filmed In Spookyvision: Paranormal Activity

Oren Peli's Paranormal Activity, which has sat on the shelf awaiting release since 2007, is a movie that really tries its damnedest to scare the shit out of you. Every trick in the haunted-house genre is thrown at the screen with reckless abandon, from creepy footsteps to doors opening and closing on their own. There's even a paranormal investigator on hand to tell young couple Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat) just how much trouble they're in (who ya gonna call?). Now, the problem is, none of this is very scary. But it tries so damn hard that it at least becomes endearing.

Katie has been, for lack of a better word, haunted by some sort of unknown presence since she was eight years old. She talks about it with a cool rationality for the most part, but from the beginning it's apparent that things are getting worse. Micah, ever the alpha-male, brings home a fancy video camera to try and capture some sort of evidence of the titular activity. And that right there is basically all the plot the movie needs to string together a series of creepy haunting scenes.

The device for these scenes is pretty clever. Micah sets up the camera across from their bed, and we're given labeled footage of roughly 21 nights. All of the 'action,' what little there is, takes place almost entirely in that one static shot, and the film gets a lot of mileage out of it. We always know something is going to happen, but it's different every time, leading to a lot of looking around the frame to see what the spirit will do this time.

The use of repetition in these scenes becomes both an asset and a liability. The sheer tension every time the camera shifts to that shot was palpable in the theater. The problem is, as I said before, these scenes are very rarely scary. A few of them are very, very creepy (including one that makes a brilliant use of time-lapse footage), and about two have a noticeable jolt to them (although jump scares really don't affect me as they once might've). After the second or third unexplained breeze, though, it starts to lose its impact. Furthermore, this movie is at least a good 15-20 minutes longer than it should be. Dropping a few of the milder stuff in the middle may have helped to make the transition from 'innocent poltergeist' to 'terrifying haunting' more jarring and, thus, more scary.

This movie has been, is, and will continue to be compared to The Blair Witch Project, and it's not unwarranted at all. From the creepy soundscape to the gimmicky opening and closing screens to the use of the actors real names - not to mention the first-person camera work - this one takes more than its share of cues from that film. The whole first-person gimmick has really taken off in the horror genre lately, and the results range from the fantastic (Blair Witch and the Spanish import [REC]) to the abysmal (George Romero's laughable Diary of the Dead and the painfully bad Cloverfield).

Even the best of these movies have issues to overcome, though, the most obvious being: Why the fuck don't these people ever put the camera down? Each film has tried to offer its own explanation (I'd say [REC] pulled it off best), from revealing a social injustice to an almost metafictional dedication to filmmaking. Paranormal Activity's solution to the problem is simultaneously very credible and pretty disappointing: Micah never puts down the camera because he's a bit of a stubborn, immature douchebag. The kind of guy who, after being told about seven times that the worst thing he could do is bring a Ouija board into the house, does exactly that. The kind of guy who thinks the haunting is "cool" even as his girlfriend is being driven to the brink of insanity. The kind of guy who, in a particularly nasty moment, tells Katie to "go upstairs and play with your little friend." I suppose it does play in nicely with the film's theme of negative emotions making the haunting worse, but it's also an example of one of my least favorite horror tropes: people doing stupid shit just to move the story forward. Still, Sloat gives a very believable performance in the role, and Featherstone is seriously impressive in what becomes a far more complex role than you might suspect by the end of the film.

Paranormal Activity may not live up to the inescapable hype, but despite its flaws, it's still a nifty little low-budget chiller. I have a real soft-spot for horror films that can do what they need to by relying on ideas, acting and camerawork instead of a big effects budget or big name stars. If he can move past the gimmick, I think Peli shows real promise as a horror director. It may not be out-and-out scary, but as I said, it is often very creepy, and most horror movies have trouble even accomplishing that.

Coming Soon in Movies: Friends of Eddie Coyle gets a second look.

(Poster image obtained via http://www.wikipedia.org)

Things to Do in Boston When You’re Dead: “Boston Noir” hits Cambridge, Copley.

When one thinks of Halloween, it might call to mind costumes, parties, and seeing scary movies in the theater. This October, though, Cambridge’s famous Brattle Theater (located at 40 Brattle Street in Harvard Square) is putting together a different kind of film revival. “Boston Noir” kicked off this past Friday night, starting up two weeks of pulpy crime flicks set in and around Boston.

As to what sparked the idea of holding a repertory series like “Boston Noir”, it was brought on by the upcoming publication of the literary anthology of the same name, published by Akashic books, an imprint that specializes in like-minded collections in American cities ranging from Brooklyn to Phoenix. The newest entry in their Noir series is edited (and features a short story) by famed Boston crime writer Dennis Lehane (Gone Baby Gone, Shutter Island), and sports the neat gimmick of having each story focus on a different Boston neighborhood, from Dorchester to Cambridge. Lehane himself will be attending the Brattle at five pm on Sunday the 25th to sign copies of the book along with fellow contributors Jim Fusilli, Dana Cameron, Russ Aborn, and Lynne Heitman.

If you live in the greater Boston area and have somehow never been to the Brattle Theater before, you just have to go, and the Boston Noir series should serve as a fantastic, one-of-a-kind introduction. Any Bostonian who saw The Departed in its first theatrical run can attest to the sheer fun of going to a Boston theater to see the city on the big screen in all its dirty, gritty glory (hell, even the brief shout-out to Ted Williams in Tarantino’s recent Inglorious Basterds drew cheers when I saw it on the big screen). Plus, the Brattle just happens to be possibly the best theater in the area when it comes to showcasing vintage prints of really choice movies.

I attended day one of the Boston Noir festivities with a new archival 35 millimeter print of the 1973 classic Friends of Eddie Coyle on Friday. Peter Yates (of Bullit fame) directs fantastic tough-guy actors Robert Mitchum (Out of the Past, Night of the Hunter) and Peter Boyle (Taxi Driver, Hardcore) in a twisted tale of Beantown bank robbers and arms dealers. This once-forgotten film is a noir-lover’s dream, replete with all the standards: shifty crooks, themes of trust and betrayal, and plenty of moral shades of grey. Plus, it’s a veritable filmic treasure trove of familiar locations, with clandestine meetings taking place on the Common or Government Center while the down-and-dirty stuff happens out in Quincy, Dedham, and Weymouth. So pervasive is the film’s use of setting that I was almost surprised to step out of the theater and find myself back in 2009. If you missed the screening, this long out-of-print film was finally released on a typically high-quality DVD by the Criterion Collection.

I hadn’t been to the Brattle in at least a year or so (I forget what I last saw there – either the remastered print of Blade Runner or a Polanski double feature), but it’s nice to see it hasn’t changed much, and where it has is for the better. They continue to unveil new designs for posters and t-shirts that will have film geeks’ mouths watering (I noticed a particularly awesome day-glo poster for John Carpenter’s Halloween). And speaking of mouth-watering, they’re now serving select beers from the Cambridge Brewing Company at all shows after five pm. At $5.50 a pint, it’s a bit pricey, but the Porter is delicious.

“Boston Noir” at the Brattle will continue right up through Halloween (when they’ll make time for their annual screening of Evil Dead II), coinciding with the November 1st publication date of the anthology. Lehane and crew, in addition to their appearance at the Brattle, will also be making a stop at the Copley Square library for the Boston Book Festival on Saturday, October 24th to promote the new book. Upcoming films to be screened in the Boston Noir series include The Departed, Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, The Brinks Job, and The Thomas Crown Affair.

(The Brattle Theater is located at 40 Brattle Street in Cambridge, MA. Ticket prices are $9.75 General Admission and $7.75 for students or at matinee showings. You can get more info at www.brattlefilm.org or by calling at 617-876-6837.)

Coming Soon in Books: Reviews of My Dead Body, The Shotgun Rule, and The Rebel

Coming Soon in Film: A more detailed review of Friends of Eddie Coyle. Plus, tune in next time to find out if I shit my pants watching Paranormal Activity! The answer may surprise you!

(image "Boston Noir" by Francisco Marty obtained via http://www.boston24.com/article-1544-boston-noir.html. Brattle Theater image obtained via boston.com)

Zombies Ate My Neighbors! (But I didn't like them anyway): Zombieland

“What do you think?” asks zombie killer Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) after blowing away the one remaining zombie in an abandoned storefront, “Zombie kill of the week?” This moment pretty perfectly encapsulates director Ruben Fleischer and Zombieland’s mission statement, and gives us the litmus test for whether or not you’ll enjoy the rest of the movie: If the idea of watching Woody Harrelson kill zombies in increasingly creative ways for roughly 90 minutes appeals to you at all, you’ll enjoy this film. It's such a simple concept that its hard to believe it hasn't been done before, and for fans of the genre, it's basically critic proof. Zombie movies have always been, to some extent, about seeing how creative the filmmakers can get with their kill scenes. Tom Savini and George Romero have gone so far to admit that some of the most memorable moments in Dawn of the Dead came about just because they were bored and had extra food at the craft services table. This is the first time, though, that I’ve seen a movie that made killing zombies its explicit purpose – and believe me, I’ve seen a shitload of zombie flicks.

What little plot the film has is of the basic road-movie/zombie film variety: a few random survivors of a zombie apocalypse try to make their way across the country to some kind of safe haven. We’ve got Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), a nerdy college student who manages to survive not through skill or even luck, but through an obsessive compulsive attention to detail. There’s Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), sister con artists who get by on their wiles alone. And, stealing the movie from all of them, there’s Woody Harrelson’s Tallahassee, a southern-drawling ultimate badass who seems to derive real joy from killing the undead. Harrelson plays the part as a variation on his role in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, except here we can root for him since he’s killing zombies and not people. The plot takes all sorts of winding detours, including a 15 minute middle section that contains no zombies at all, but makes up for it with one of the funniest celebrity cameos I’ve ever seen (which I won’t give away here, and shame on anyone who does - fuck you, Boston Phoenix/Roger Ebert). It’s not flawless – like a lot of zombie movies, this one relies on a third act where smart characters do very dumb things solely to keep the plot moving forward. Really though, this is just a movie that everyone clearly had a blast making, and for dumb, hilarious Halloween entertainment, it’ll be hard to top.

Coming Soon in Movies: Arguably the greatest movie ever to be filmed in Boston, Friends of Eddie Coyle, which I'll be rewatching at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge on Friday. If you live in Boston and you haven't seen it, GO! When's the last time you saw Robert Mitchum hanging around Boston and not just some homeless guy that looks kind of like Robert Mitchum?

(Poster image obtained via http://www.wikipedia.org)

Blood, Booze, Bullets and Baseball - Caught Stealing by Charlie Huston

Any time a book can make me feel physically ill from the first few pages, I know it must be doing something right. Charlie Huston’s 2004 debut novel, Caught Stealing, opens with protagonist Hank Thompson pissing blood following a savage beating leading to catastrophic kidney failure. I’d say that qualifies.

“This is how life changes,” explains Hank, as he breathlessly launches into the second-person story about how his promising high school baseball career was ruined when he broke a leg trying to steal third base. “The bone sticks straight out from your calf, and you just stare at it.” Along with the traumatic car-crash death of his childhood friend, this leads to Hank moving from California to New York where, apart from the alcoholism and the sore feet from tending bar, he seems pretty content. “You’re a good guy, you’re tough and you have a reputation in your neighborhood for helping people out. It’s nice. It’s not the life you expected, but it’s nice enough for you.”

And that’s when this new pulp-crime classic really gets going with a deceptively simple Mcguffin of a plot: Hank is asked to watch his friend Russ’ cat while he’s away. There’s something else in the cat carrier, though: A key. And some very scary people are out to get it. The kind of people that will threaten to “Kill your ass an’ your family an’ your ancestors, kill your fucking house plants an’ all that shit.” People like Detective Lieutenant Roman, the corrupt Robbery/Homicide cop, Red, the fashionable Chinese kid with a real knack for inflicting pain, and bank-robbing brothers Ed and Paris DuRante. “I have to hand it to these guys,” Hank muses in a moment of self-reflexivity, “They all have great names.” Huston’s sharp, screenplay-style dialogue and profanely poetic prose put us right there with Hank as he runs all over Manhattan looking for safe haven, stopping periodically to check up on how the Mets are doing and trying to resist having the drink that could push his one remaining kidney over the edge.

Hank quips, “As alcoholics go, I’m really more of a dedicated amateur than a true professional. I tend to be more of a bingeing, life-of-my-own-party kind of drinker rather than a steady, dying-an-inch-at-a-time kind of drinker.” Huston pays special attention to Hank’s alcoholism, with his protagonist unable to stop thinking about all the drinks he can’t have even as he’s being pursued across the city by police and thieves. “Let’s face it,” he says, “everyone has to figure out a way to get through the day and booze is a very popular strategy.” His friends are no help either. He can’t even tell his former boss Edwin about the armed thugs gathered outside his bar without being forced to drink a shot of Wild Turkey with him first.

Huston also crafts Hank into such a likeable, genuinely nice character – a stark departure from your average ‘noir’ tough guy – that the things that happen to him seem all the more horrible. And believe me, things do get very horrible. The book pulls absolutely no punches with the violence, but it doesn’t try to be glib about it either. As Hank points out, “I have fought very little in my life, but what I have noticed is that even when you win, you get hurt.” Violence has real consequences in this book. That being said, if you’re faint of heart or weak of stomach, this book is absolutely not for you. You should know whether you’re planning on sticking with it by the time you get to the almost unbearable scene about 50 pages in where Hank is tortured to the soothing sounds of the Beach Boys. “I have a secret. The secret is, I don’t know where the key is. So these guys can do whatever they want and I just won’t talk. […] Lucky me.” Watching Hank slip from his decent, normal life into a life of violence and crime is pretty disturbing as well. Even as he keeps his mordant sense of humor about him, it’s clear from early on in the book that there’s no going back.

Huston makes New York a real character too, with his transplanted-from-California protagonist offering all sorts of nifty cultural insights, such as Hank Thompson on the East Village: “Condos, boutiques, and bistros are popping up like fungus. But murders, muggings, and rapes are way down, so when people bitch about gentrification I usually tell them to fuck off.” Baseball, Hank’s favorite pastime, has a definite presence as well, and Huston gets a lot of humor out of Hank trying to take time out of being pursued by killers to see how his beloved San Francisco Giants are doing. “Now the Mets and the Giants are all tied up for the wild card with one game each left. Tonight. And I’m gonna miss those too. Because I’m gonna be at a fucking showdown.”

With his deft ear for dialogue and his breathlessly page-turning sense of pacing, Charlie Huston has firmly placed himself as one of the best new crime writers of the decade. Not only is Caught Stealing one of the best crime novels of the past ten years, it’s one of the best debut novels I’ve ever read. The misadventures of Hank Thompson would continue into the sequels Six Bad Things and A Dangerous Man, both of which are also great reads, and several of the pet themes that pop up in this book would come up again in some of his later novels. Hank’s childhood hobby of breaking-and-entering would become the focus of The Shotgun Rule, and another protagonist with fear of motor vehicles going back to a prior tragedy would appear in his latest novel, The Mystic Art of Erasing All Signs of Death. But for the sheer exuberance that only comes from a first-time novelist with a lot to say, Caught Stealing is where it’s at. Huston’s new novel My Dead Body, the fifth and final book in his horror-noir Joe Pitt series, came out Tuesday, October 13th, and should be available at cool bookstores everywhere.

Coming Soon in Books: More Charlie Huston, with a review of his first third-person novel, The Shotgun Rule. And, if I can make my way to one of those cool bookstores, My Dead Body. I also just read The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt by Albert Camus, which I'll try to review if I can find all the pieces of my brain that fell out.

(Cover image obtained via http://pulpnoir.com)

Hardcore on the Dance Floor

Finally, for all to see, here's my long overdue review of hardcore fest:

The weekend of September 20th in Boston marked the first annual Great American Hardcore Fest, sponsored by Mass Live Events. The event, a three day festival featuring hardcore punk bands from Boston and across the nation, culminated on Sunday at Revere’s Club Lido, located just next to the Wonderland T-stop on the Blue line. After waiting in line for close to two hours, the young crowd of patrons was treated to a thorough search for weapons, as well as having wallet chains and water bottles confiscated. The Club Lido staff, it would seem, was on edge.

If Club Lido doesn’t exactly seem like a hardcore venue, I suspect that it isn’t. It’s more of a nightclub style venue (according to their website, they specialize in “international music concerts and mixed martial arts events”), but dance floors can easily be converted into mosh pits; and the dual stages served the event very well, cutting out the between-band setup time completely. Once one band was finished, the next would start right up, resulting in either an orderly migration or a full-speed mass exodus, depending on the band. The bar area was an elevated platform next to the main stage, and the under-21 crowd was strictly forbidden from even ascending the stairs. Some of them, the ‘straight-edge’ anti-drug and alcohol set, wore the Xs on their hands as a badge of honor, while to others they were a nuisance preventing them from enjoying the four dollar Pabst Blue Ribbons.

The dual headliners for the night were the influential Boston quartet Converge and Cleveland metal-infused hardcore pioneers Integrity. A nasty chest cold and a need to be up early in the morning prevented me from catching Integrity’s set (although, against my better judgement, it didn't prevent me from indulging in some of those 4 dollar PBRs), but I was determined not to miss Converge, whose furiously intense live shows have become the stuff of legend.

Converge opened up with ‘Concubine,’ the blindingly fast lead track off their seminal 2001 release Jane Doe. At the outset, this looked to be another standout live performance. The next song was ‘Dark Horse,’ the recently released debut track off their forthcoming album Axe to Fall, due out October 20th on Epitaph Records. It was about here that things started to go awry. Halfway through the song, the band appeared to lose power in one or more of their amplifiers, resulting in an awkward pause and leaving the song unfinished before its bombastically loud outro. Converge’s live performances rely heavily on audience participation and interaction, but after this snafu, the audience seemed to lose their enthusiasm. Apart from two or three animated audience members (one of whom was my friend Dan, who got a tooth broken in half during Guns Up!'s set - at least he snagged a pack of cigarettes off the floor), the mosh pit area was a ghost town. It didn’t help that security at Club Lido seemed unusually strict (I was pulled aside and reprimanded twice by security simply for holding my arms out to block people from charging into me - okay, I might've shoved back a few times, but come on).

Converge went on to play another new song, the hyperspeed title track ‘Axe to Fall.’ This one got the crowd going a bit more, but it was still a bit lackluster compared to previous shows. A trio of songs from their 2006 effort No Heroes followed (the three short blasts of noise ‘Vengeance,’ ‘Heartache,’ and ‘Hellbound’), as well as another new song that I didn’t catch the title of, a slow, crunchy number similar to past songs such as ‘You Fail Me’ and ‘Hell To Pay.’ After this, frontman Jacob Bannon began to inquire as to how much time was left in their set, and finding that it wasn’t a lot, they closed out with ‘Eagles Become Vultures’ off their 2004 Epitaph Records debut You Fail Me. This last song was the most energetic of the night, inspiring audience members to jump at the mic screaming the chorus of "Cashed in, crashed and burned," but it was too little, too late. Live favorites such as ‘The Saddest Day,’ ‘Conduit,’ and ‘Locust Reign’ were all conspicuously absent, and the set was hamstrung by the lackadaisical crowd, technical difficulties, and lack of any of the band’s pre-2000 material. It wasn’t a terrible set, but from previous shows I’ve attended, I know that Converge is capable of so much more.

The good news in all of this is that the sets leading up to Converge were, by and large, fantastic. Texas natives Powertrip were an early highlight, playing a high energy blend of 1980s-style thrash and punk rock that would’ve felt at home on a Suicidal Tendencies record. The Mongoloids from New Jersey took the stage at four p.m. with a wonderfully sloppy set that inspired the biggest mosh pit of the day thus far, and their singer was the first in the lineup to jump off the stage and take to the audience, and the California collective Trash Talk reinforced their reputation for out of control audience melees with their seven p.m. set of spastic hardcore.

The two biggest highlights of the night, however, were a couple of Massachusetts locals. Colin of Arabia from Brockton put on a vastly entertaining show, wherein burly, bearded singer Colin Campbell climbed atop amplifiers and P.A. monitors, dragged audience members to the stage, and declared the show “by far the best festival we’ve played this year.” Colin really knows how to get a crowd going, asking between songs if anyone in the audience had anything they wanted to say, and, during the song ‘Science of Violence,’ screaming the wonderful non-sequitur, “Ted Kennedy is fucking dead!”

Shortly thereafter, The Carrier took the stage with their brutally loud, emotionally intense, and entirely unique brand of hardcore. The crowd surged back and forth as if possessed, a windmilling fury of arms and legs, but vocalist Anthony Traniello appeared entirely in control throughout the set. When they launched into the fan favorite ‘Alcatraz,’ it was the most exhilarating moment in a day filled with exhilarating moments.

Overall then, despite whatever mild issues I opened with, I’d consider the Great American Hardcore Fest a resounding success. I’m still not sure Club Lido is the ideal venue for such an event, but venues of its size willing to host hardcore festivals are few and far between. I for one hope that this event becomes an annual tradition from here on out.

Coming Soon in Music: Reviews of new albums by DOOM, Doomriders, and Mission of Burma - a whole lot of Doomin' goin' on.

(Colin of Arabia image obtained via http://www.returntothepit.com)