This movie is about 3 college students who wants to have fun in other places and spend their vacation when suddenly encouraged by a European lady to go with her as their tour guide and companion. Not knowing that the place they’re in to is a place where people bid for someone to be their toy, sex slave and obviously victims. Some are raped, tortured and killed. When they found out that their lady companion was one of them they tried to escape but at the end only one of them survives. She survived the man who wants to play her as she also bids for her life. The movie ends when she unexpectedly joined the group of bidders who wants to play people and kill. A flick of suspense and breath-taking experience.

Eli Roth has brought us some very chilling horror movies. Thus life after the “Hostel” horror franchise is keeping producer-director Eli Roth busy these days as he juggles between a handful of projects. Roth said at the Morelia International Film Festival on Monday that he expects to finish a script this month for the sci-fi project “Endangered Species,” which would mark his return to the director’s chair after several years of focusing on acting and producing. Roth was visiting Morelia with Quentin Tarantino to promote “Inglourious Basterds,” the festival’s opening film.Roth added that he is penning a script for the horror flick “Thanksgiving,” which originally appeared as a faux trailer for Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s “Grindhouse.” He is directing, producing and possibly acting in the film.As a producer, Roth and production partner Strike Entertainment will be showing director Daniel Stamm’s exorcism movie “Cotton” to Sundance officials in two weeks.  What new chilling horror movies will he bring this time.

Du brauchst ein Dach über dem Kopf? Hast einen leichten Hang zum Masochismus? Dann check ein!

Den ersten Teil von Hostel fand ich,…ziemlich gut. Die Story fand ich nun nicht gerade wooow, aber ansonsten war das käufliche Abschlachten iwo in Osteuropa nicht übel. Hostel II bildet das weibliche Pendant zu Hostel I. Statt, das Männerköpfe rollen, müssen die Frauen dieses Mal eine gehörige Portion Schmerz einstecken.

Drei Studentinnen machen sich mit dem Zug auf den Weg zu einer heißen Quelle iwo im Nirgendwo (Mein Langzeitgedächtnis sag: Slowakei, Wiki auch.). Dabei sind diese in dieses Rollenschema eingeteilt:

Die sexhungrige Flippige: (“Whitney”: Bijou Phillips): Immer eine große Klappe, durch sie stolpert die Gruppe immer in die nächsten Eskapaden. Man weiß iwie immer im Unterbewusstsein, dass sie zwangsläufig sterben muss, wer hält auch so ne Person ca. zwei Stunden aus?

Die nicht ganz so hübsche Streberin: (“Lorna”: Heather Matarazzo)): Stille Wasser sind tief. Sie lädt sich mehr oder weniger selbst auf die Reise mit ein und macht zunächst auch den Eindruck, als wäre sie Daddy’s Liebling. Bei einer Party bekommt sie dann durch Whitney (ich sag ja, die baut immer nur Mist) richtigen Alkohol und es ist um sie geschehen. Sie wird zum Tanzen aufgefordert und landet wenig später nackt/kopfüber über eine Art Badewanne, wo sie von einer Frau ziemlich unschön mit einer Sense bearbeitet wird.Sie kam mir btw. gleich bekannt vor, da sie schon die Tollpatschige in anderen Filmen (“Strike! – Mädchen an die Macht!” …hach ja, toller Film!) gespielt hat, sie ist deshalb perfekt für diese Rolle eingesetzt worden.

Die Besonnene: (“Beth”: Lauren German): Sie muss eigentlich immer alles ausbaden, was ihre Freundeninnen anstellen. Ihre Intuition sagt ihr, dass Lorna nicht diese doofe Bootsfahrt mit dem riesigen und verdammt gruseligen Typen machen soll, dennoch macht diese es. Sie kann’s nur hinnehmen und Whitney aus dem Schlepptau eines anderen Einheimischen retten. Bei ihr merkt man gleich, dass sie mehr auf dem Kasten hat und sie auch das größte Potenzial hat diese Folter zu überleben. Am Ende bestätigt sich dies auch, da sie sich aus dem “Spiel” freikaufen kann und sie ihrem Peiniger das “Beste am Manne” abschneidet.

Vom Schmerzgehalt würde ich sagen, dass Hostel II seinem Vorgänger alle Ehre macht. Am Besten finde ich die Charakterwandlung von “Stuart”. Er machte bis zum Ende des Filmes den Eindruck er möchte gar nicht an der “Jagd” teilnehmen, wurde nur von seinem Freund überredet dies mitzumachen. Er legt Gewissensbisse an den Tag, stellt sich offen die Frage ob das richtig ist. Als er dann auf Beth trifft, dachte ich echt die beiden flüchten nun zusammen und alles ist Butterblume aber nix da. Stuart hat wohl tiefgreifende Komplexe, vor allem mit seiner Ehefrau und rastet völllig aus.  …das hat mich dann doch überrascht und verlieh dem Film eine Pointe.

Jeder der Hostel gesehen hat, wird also auch seinen Nachfolger schätzen!

* Upon opening my e-mail this morning, I was inundated with 30,000 chili recipes for some contest the station is running.  This is annoying.  STOP SENDING YOUR CHILI RECIPES.  If you would like to bring your chili and give me a bowl, that’s fine.  But I cannot eat your e-mails, so they are useless to me.

* I made the mistake of watching the first hour of “Hostel II” over the weekend.  Truly awful.  Girls, if you ever have a date with anyone who owns the DVD, do not allow yourself to be alone with him.  He will try to use a can opener on your face.  (Read the stomach-turning plot at Wikipedia.)

Karen's day started much better than it ended.

What’s the deal with the “torture porn” genre?  I just envision a theater full of pasty, overweight, unshaven dweebs, cheering every methodical death.  In this movie, a guy shoots a kid in the face for no reason.  Why?  A different little kid spits in a woman’s face, then runs past her, turns around and throws the B-word at her.  Again, why?

Here is a movie totally devoid of joy.  It has nothing to say.  It hates women.  It’s like watching surveillance video of an execution.  I couldn’t watch the whole thing.  I felt myself becoming more sad and morose with every death.  I’m told the “Saw” movies are worse.  I can’t imagine.  I vow to de-friend anyone who’s seen those movies and liked them.

And how are these things rated “R”?  The MPAA really thinks this would be appropriate for someone under 17 to see as long as they were with a guardian?  It’s like an Al Qaeda training film without all the festive flag burning.

* Speaking of needless gore, Mexico now features near-daily beheadings.  Remind me to cancel the trip to Cancun.  (This, after buying a truckload of 10-gallon drums of sunscreen…)

* “I didn’t feel anything, I could even have cut off all my fingers. It was an act of despair.”  Gulp.

* I hate Microsoft Windows because whenever there’s an update, I get an annoying box that pops up every half hour telling me I need to restart my computer or it will restart on its own in 3, 2, 1… NO!  No, computer!  I am in charge.  Stop making my life miserable.  I will restart you on my own timetable.  I’m in the middle of writing a news show.  Why don’t you just chill out?

* 3% of Americans believe George W. Bush is one of our greatest presidents.  Halliburton shareholders are a vocal bunch.

* On Friday, Zoraida bragged that she never gets sick.  Today she’s fighting off a cold.  “I jinxed myself,” she said.

Hmmmm.  I never go out on dates.  (Waiting for karmic irony.) 

Ahem.  (Let’s try this again.) 

I never go out with stunning, intelligent, warm and funny girls.   (Still waiting.) 

Hello?

Maybe it only works for on-air people.

* Need a souvenir for tomorrow’s inauguration?  How about a rock with Barack Obama’s face on it?  Only $10.  A handy paperweight for Democrats, a trusty projectile for Republicans.

* Staying with the inauguration, could you avoid calling your friends or taking pictures with your phone while you’re standing at that once-in-a-lifetime historic moment?  Thanks.

* For all you gambling addicts, the odds Obama will say “banana” during his inaugural address are 1,000 to 1.

* My home state offers a deal: Marry your baby momma or pay for the kid’s birth.  If I were that guy, I’d pay for the birth.  Weddings are way more expensive.

* Congratulations, chlamydia!  You’re at an all-time high!  Stocks down, chlamydia up.  2009 is a great time to be alive.

* Lesson learned the hard way: the Google image search for “chlamydia” is pretty disturbing.  Eli Roth must stare at it all day.

* You’re more likely to buy something if you touch it.  See?  This is why I only eat at Old Country Buffet.  I see food, I get all grabby.  Expensive habit at most places.

* Tom Cruise grew up wanting to kill Hitler.  Since that dream was taken, he went to his fallback ambitions: jumping on Oprah’s couch and telling Matt Lauer he’s glib.

* Look at this clown’s mugshot.  What crime do you think he could have committed?  If you said “threw a taco at his mother’s face,” you’d be correct.  (Am I wrong for hoping a giant horse tramples his man-parts, forever ending his ability to have children?)

* We did a story about a Kenyan brewery that sells a beer dedicated to Barack Obama.  Zoraida wants me to get a sample.  Let me just flip open the phone book to “Kenyan breweries who have no problem shipping free samples to a journalist on the other side of the world.”

* A cat is not a weapon, sir.  But nice try.

* I really enjoyed yesterday’s football games.  I’m sick of Donovan McNabb and Andy Reid, so I’m glad the Cardinals won.  How can you root against Kurt Warner?  That guy is more Cinderella than Cinderella was.  And Larry Fitzgerald is a beast.  Props to Philly for roaring back in the second half, but the outcome is better this way.  It’s great to have a major underdog in the Super Bowl.  The game is always closer than we expect.

Remember back in the 80s when every Super Bowl was a blowout?  I remember watching the 49ers dismantle the Broncos while my dad and I were in a Washington, D.C. hotel room.  The announcer said, dejectedly, “This is unfortunate.”

On the AFC side, the Steelers/Ravens game was everything you would hope.  There were wicked, wicked hits, big passes and turnovers.  The Ravens are a great team, but I think they just ran out of bodies.  It’s hard to avoid injury when you play that hard.  The Steelers are my favorite team outside of Detroit, so I will be wearing my Roethlisberger jersey and waving the Terrible Towel come Super Sunday.

by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Castration has received much attention from feminist film critics in specific relation to the horror film, particularly from the always dominant psychoanalytic school: Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine and Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women and Chain Saws are not only two of the most influential works on gender and horror film, but both launch their critiques with Freud-goggles placed firmly affixed. The strong link between feminism, horror film and psychoanalysis is not particularly surprising, horror playing out in its merry visceral way the literal result of what happens when Freud’s central premise that women, as Gaylyn Studlar so deftly captures, are defined through “difference, nonphallus, lack”(1).

So pervasive are psychoanalytic feminist critiques of horror–particularly in relation to its central area of concern, gendered bodies–that it is far to easy to forget that other critical configurations may be possible. This is certainly not an absolute–Patricia McCormack’s writing on Italian horror in particular is unflinching in its determination to consistently keep the bar raised outside what is now the traditional rubric of psychoanalysis in relation to screen depictions of horror bodies.

Theory aside, however, it may be possible to negotiate an understanding of one of horror’s most privileged actions–castration–to something altogether a little more potboiled. Writing my Masters thesis on rape and the horror film in 2007 (I share MacCormack’s fascination with Italian horror, my thesis focusing on Argento’s The Stendhal Syndrome and Lado’s Night Train Murders), I was too damned busy to really express the pure outrage I felt toward the vitriolic review The Age newspaper’s film writer Jim Schembri chose to fling at Eli Roth’s Hostel II.

Says Schembri:

Now in the throes of my PhD — which happens to be on snuff film — Schembri’s review seems designed with the primary intent of irking me senseless. Engaging with this sort of hysteria, we know, is not worth the price of admission when it is displayed in a publication that so clearly panders to this mode of PC thuggery. However, that Schembri opens his review by listing “bloodbath” films that he feels are worthwhile by including Meir Zarchi’s controversial and deeply confrontational 1978 film I Spit on Your Grave (which only received an uncut release in Australia in 2004) displays a mind-boggling degree of hypocrisy. For surely anyone with even an undergraduate grasp of elementary horror knows Roger Ebert’s famous, scathing review that effectively single-handedly ruined not only Zarchi’s career (undeservingly), but also made it a very difficult movie to even view until recently?

Says Ebert:

“A vile bag of garbage named “I Spit on Your Grave” is playing in Chicago theatres this week. It is a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it’s playing in respectable theatres… This movie is an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures, because it is made artlessly, it flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering”.

This, of course, raises the question: is Schembri taking the piss? Is his review a cleverly crafted piece of meta-irony that a mere mortal as me just doesn’t have the smarts to figure out — do I need to go into wink-wink training and watch all those fucking awful Michel Gondry films you keep telling me are so fantastic even though they are as wispy, anaemic and boring as the director himself? Surely this can be the only answer: Schembri’s a genius and I totally missed it. For no one with even an iota of knowledge about the controversy surrounding Zarchi’s film could possibly mimic that very same style of hyperactive, holier-than-thou morality welded so perfectly with the unflinching acceptance of their own right to speak on what women may or may not find offensive, or what may or may not be a danger to them.

I Spit on Your Grave is, of course, a notorious example of the rape-revenge trope, and it is in her exhaustive treatment of on-screen representations of rape in her book Watching Rape (2001) that Sarah Projansky points out that not only is the emperor wearing no clothes, but that instead of rape narratives being “about” sexual violence, rape instead becomes a method of invoking a broad range of discourse “about” things other than rape: “rape narratives are so common in cinema (and elsewhere) that they seem always to be available to address other social issues” (61). Sabine Sielke agrees in her book, Reading Rape (2002), pointing out in her analysis of represented rape that, “where transposed into discourse, rape turns into a rhetorical device, an insistent figure for other social, political and economic concerns and conflicts” (2). The simplicity of this observation becomes awkwardly clear when you start to crudely list off what the most famous rape films of our time are actually “about”: Thelma and Louise and Baise Moi? Female friendship. The Accused, Anatomy of a Murder? The legal system. Birth of a Nation? Race. Straw Dogs and Hitchcock’s Frenzy? Masculinity in crisis. Irreversible is about temporality, form and (again) male relationships. Ms 45 – moral subjectivity. Lipstick–consumerism and femininity… I Spit on Your Grave gets points for being — as Carol J. Clover has pointed out (120) –brave enough to so forcefully bring home to the spectator time after relentless, unforgiving time, that it is about the cruel horror of rape and nothing else.

The question Hostel 2 – and, for that matter, Hard Candy – raise is this: if rape can be utilized as a narrative device with which to engage with broader narrative concerns, then can the same be said of castration?

Hard Candy (Slade, 2005) sets up a curious counterpoint to Roth’s Hostel sequel. Both of these films, it could be argued, contain castration sequences that are required to be placed immediately by the spectator into a moral context specifically dominated by the moral imagination (albeit through a spectacle-intensive use of sexual violence, added perversity stemming from the reversed role of adolescent girls being placed in a position of power and dominance). The first film contains a long scene where the young Hayley is seen to be castrating whom she believes is a paedophile—the audience is shown glimpses of a TV screen that is playing what is assumed to be video footage she is filming of the procedure. It becomes clear at the end of this sequence, however, that she has in fact fooled both Jeff and the spectator — she has been playing back footage from a video tape of a castration, and has attached a bulldog clip to her “patient’s” genitals to inflict extreme (but non-invasive, short term) pain that could mimic the degree of suffering a castration performed without anaesthesia could cause. This twist has purely moral motivations: Hayley cannot castrate Jeff because then her own moral status would be irreversibly tainted, she herself would become guilty of inflicting sexual violence. That she only implies this intent through her ‘fake’ castration permits the moral framework of the film to keep the binaries ultimately apart, although it hints through acts like this that they may be easily blurred.

Close, but no cigar (it’s sometimes just a cigar, you know).

In contrast, Beth in Hostel Part II does castrate—far more graphically than either I Spit on Your Grave or Hard Candy — and she does so to save her own life by fulfilling a business contract. The central genius of Roth’s project is contained in exactly this distinction: her moral choice denies the importance of gender over commerce (she is allowed to pay her captives to escape, but the terms of the agreement for all their clients is that they must take a human life). That she castrates Stuart specifically to kill him (“let him bleed to death” she says in passing as she leaves the torture chamber to organise the transfer of payment to her now-business partners), and has little moral turmoil with this price (the eye-blink speed with which she decides to snip — up until that moment it appeared to be a threat that would most likely remain unfulfilled threat due to her moral delineation as the morally correct by feisty Final Girl of the piece — is perhaps the source of much of the impact of this moment as the act itself) suggests Roth is far more interested in exploring the moral aspects of the film rather than its sexual politics.

If Roth’s intent is to show precisely that gender is secondary to commerce, this would be a radical re-working of both previous moral and gender structures active within the horror genre, and would demand a far lengthier analysis than this post would allow. Gender is well and good, but as many have suggested in their criticism of White-Girl middle-class feminism:  Race matters. Class matters.

So Mr Schembri? When you stated “that Hostel 2 suggests … that the guy (Roth) either has a fetish for brutalising women or believes that audiences who see his films do”, it reflects solely and only upon you and your Ebert-levels of self-righteousness. And I guess that’s why I have no interest in turfing psychoanalysis altogether. Both Ebert and Schembri’s reviews leave me with one overwhelming question: how do you guys feel about your respective mothers?

–

(1) Studlar, Gaylyn. “Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of Cinema”. Movies and Methods, Volume 2. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: California UP, 1985. p. 608.

Last night I watched a film known as Hostel II on DVD, provided by my sister’s boyfriend. I can safely say it was the most illogical, boring horror movie I have ever seen (which in an entire genre of mostly filler, that is saying something).

Once past the obligatory reminder/excuse to decapitate the survivor of the previous film, things start badly with an introduction to the three main characters, who are at best a gallery of stereotypes. It seems the director thought that the previous film with it’s all male cast did not appeal enough to the pre-pubescent hormonal boys i can only assume this series is designed to appeal to, as they have been replaced with a gaggle of female leads, taken straight from any teenage flick you care to mention- the geeky one, the rich one and the annoying preppy one.

All three of them are for some reason seduced into coming to Slovakia while on a trip across Europe, where they check into a normal seeming youth hostel. It turns out that the hostel is actually a macabre business which allows incredibly rich 40-somethings with nothing better to do with their lives to bid on the lives of young innocents, and continue to maim and dispatch them in whatever gruesome way pleases them most. In this way, the film draws many parallels to that most despicably pointless series of films, the Saw franchise, in that it is an excuse to see (vaguely) attractive young things get horrifically mutilated in increasingly foul ways.

The film focuses mostly on one of the girls, along with two brothers, one of which has paid for him and his sibling to come with him on a “business trip” and prove that he has the guts to kill another human being (the reasoning being that Slovakia is a lawless country where they will not get in any trouble back home). The film shows some promise of depth when one of the brothers starts to have second thoughts about the whole thing upon meeting his destined victim, but at that point the director decides, that no, he’d rather have lots of people die instead, and everything goes down the swannee. Lots of swearing, genitals being mutilated, faces being sawn off, and one unfortunate man being mauled to death by a pair of  Dobermen.

If this loss of a completely decent (if predictable) ending was not bad enough, the  single heroine left over by now (the rich one) ends up armed with a pistol, her assailant dying, and what i was expecting to at least be a half decent shootout scene. But the director decides on yet another cop out, with the lass deciding to buy her way out of the situation. I’m sure this was supposed to be some kind of commentary on the inherant corruption within the business of today, or america’s ability to buy itself out of everything, but such things do not make for good viewing no matter what the message is.

All things considered, I came away from my seat in the living room disappointed. I’m really quite glad that I didn’t have to pay for it at the cinema, in any case.

1/10

 As Springsteen wrote, it’s always “one step up and two steps back,” especially when we’re talking about the cesspool of American pop culture.  

We barely get the N-word buried when another torture-porn movie is inflicted upon the public, leaving us to wonder how even 19-year old guys who were raised on satanic death-rock can stomach this stuff.

 This time around, hot on the lacerated  heels of Hostel II, (which, happily, continues to tank at the box office),  it’s Captivity, a vein-ripper starring the alleged actress who causes endless trouble as Jack Bauer’s often-abducted daughter in the 24 series. Unfortunately, this time the captor is a gore-loving madman, and Jack’s not there to save the day or to keep  unsuspecting innocents from buying tickets and  wandering into this nightmare.

All we can do–besides deploring, of course–is hope that this nauseating concoction flops like Hostel II–which, alas, will probably bounce back once it’s released on DVD to satanic-rockers in 43 other countries.  The reviews I’ve scanned were mostly bad. Here’s a sample from TwinCities.com:

There is precious little to recommend Captivity. It is an ultimately pointless tale that throws in anything and everything that might offend — misogyny, cruelty to animals, patricide, incest, pedophilia, mutilation, cannibalism — in the hopes of being shocking. The irony is that the film is less scary as it proceeds because it becomes all about how gross it can be rather than how clever or terrifying.

 If you’d like another take, with a grueling “plot” summary, check it here.

You keep this flag in mind at the next Olympics, punks.

Island Packet – As a proud Slovak-American with a cumbersome, consonant-heavy surname, I must take issue with “Hostel Part II,” a torture-horror movie released last weekend and the sequel to the 2005 hit, “Porky’s.”

“Hostel Part II” is a wildly gruesome flick about cold-eyed businessmen who pay to inflict torture on highly nubile teens in a moldy-looking Eastern European hotel. It apparently sets new standards in cinematic bloodletting; needless to say, we rounded up the whole gang and piled into the minivan to catch “Hostel Part II” on Father’s Day.

But here’s the thing — the film is set in the country of Slovakia, which is my homeland, the land from which my great-grandfather traveled in the early 1900s to forge a livelihood in the coal mines, start his own life in America and help pave the way for his eventual descendants to write questionably valid columns and giggle like a third-grader every time they type the word “nubile.”

Some background: Slovakia is a country located in Europe, which has many countries, all of which you hear about more than Slovakia. Part of this is because Slovakia used to be Czechoslovakia before the Great European Consonant Shortage of The Mid-1990s; prior to that, it was Austria-Hungary, at least until the Great European Shortening of Overhyphenated Country Names of The Mid-1940s, which was a little hypocritical because there was a hyphen in the name, but whatever, that’s how they rolled in the ’40s. These days, Slovakia exists in a state of pleasant anonymity, much like that “Fantastic Four” movie and people who once supported George W. Bush, and is primarily known for:

1. Not being the country that Borat was from, and stop asking already.
2. Winning the gold in the 2004 Olympics in the Canoeing Slalom event (Pavol Hochschorner and Peter Hochschorner, you guys ROCK!)
3. Pierogies.

Unless you are my grandmother, you probably don’t often make pierogies, which are dumplings of unleavened dough that can be filled with traditional Slovak delicacies like cheese, sauerkraut, cabbage and meat of dog (Kidding! I’m kidding!). Like all Slovak foods, they essentially are food clumps that have been encased in other, more durable food clumps. They are available in the Ethnic Section of your local grocery store, are best when sauteed in butter and onions and make your entire house smell like the Carpathian Mountains.

In my family’s hometown of Whiting, Ind., there is an annual Pierogi Fest, which celebrates the pierogi, featured Crystal Gayle one year (she is OBSESSED with unleavened dumplings) and helps occasionally distract the citizenry from the metric tons of repulsive dust they inhale from the steel mills that have driven the town’s economy for a hundred years. The skies of Whiting are brownish-gold much of the time, except at night, when they’re basketball-orange, lit by dozens of tongues of flame that regularly erupt into the sky. We’re pretty certain the One Ring is in there somewhere.

Anyway, thanks to Google Earth, my cousin and I have discovered the very village that we Vrabels come from, which is called Carne Polo and appears to consist of about seven houses, one road and a goat; not much seems to happen there, except when the Von Trapp kids wander over. But here’s the thing: there’s not a single horror hostel to be found. We looked. Google Earth has a totally awesome horror-hostel search feature, and it turned up jack.

So, I say to the citizens of Earth: You have nothing to fear from Slovakia! Ours are a kind, forgiving people who aren’t nearly as cruel as Hollywood would have you believe, unless you meet us on the Canoeing Slalom course, where we will absolutely eat you alive.

In his preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800 ), William Wordsworth, the great Romantic poet, tried to  explain why it was that people turned to what he considered degrading, low-class forms of entertainment that offered sensationalism and oddity instead of beauty and contemplation.  

   The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse. When I think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation, I am almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble endeavour made in these volumes to counteract it. . .

For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this. . .

Can you imagine?  At the dawn of the 19th Century, Wordsworth is worried about “gross and violent” popular culture, and its damaging effect on the “beauty and dignity” of the human mind.   To us, his time seems like one long afternoon at the opera, full of curtsies and blushing maidens and delicate talk about sunsets and wood thrushes. The stuff Wordsworth considered corrupting trash would probably strike us today as High-Serious Literature, assuming we could understand it.

 Luckily for Wordsworth, he was gone long before movies like Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Hostel appeared. What would he think if he saw the promo poster for Hostel II, which will soon  be displayed in theaters all over the country? (Strong stomach required.) Not a lot of beauty and dignity in the minds of these filmmakers.

And what would the good poet think of today’s Dallas Morning News  profile of has-been/back again screamer Iggy Pop? 

  At one show, he jumped into the crowd and smeared himself with peanut butter. At another, he rolled in broken glass until his chest was covered in blood. When all else failed, he defecated, vomited and exposed himself onstage.

And people paid to see him do it again and again, and now he’s lauded as some kind of elder statesman of manic sleaze. That says so much about our time.