Ken Grumbles, Dave Pierce & Joe Hill — image by kenne

Whether in a pub, a concert hall or someone’s living-room, poetry put to a chant, rap or song has a way of stirring the inter feelings of all of us and will generally create a memorable experience. Such was the case the Friday before Thanksgiving. Dave Pierce invited some of his friends over to connect with the word as music with two of his fellow American cantautori, Ken Grumble and Joe Hill. What an enjoyable evening of singing, story-telling and pickin’! The following video represents only a fraction of the evening, and like so many snapshots will mean much more two those, who by the presents, will add so much more to this 4 1/2 minute video.

kenne

so busy that I just didn’t have the time to post about my experience at the Cobra Starship show. Which is a shame because the OP Tour was…eh it was okay. Meeting Cobra was awesome and seeing them perform was even better but the other bands weren’t my type. Cobra is embarking on a new tour today to do a short leg around the country ranging from New York to Florida, California in between. Should be awesome, thennn next year they’re off to Europe. I’d really go more in depth but I feel so guilty about not updating that I just want to get this out of the way.

Saw my family last week for thanksgiving that was great, it was a little weird coming home to my FL home without Chloe, but…you know – that’s that.

I feel like I’m gipping my readers (should I have any at this point seeing that I was absent for like…uh two weeks. HOW DISGRACEFUL) with this post but I really don’t have much to report on! Hm.

I’ll distract you with a picture of me and Cobra Starship: Fun right? Tomorrow actually I’m posting about the wellbeing of my fish because I haven’t posted about them in months! I might actually write about ‘20th Century Ghosts’ too by Joe Hill. Hmm the possibilities.

Let’s just say Miss Harley has been a busyyy busyyyyy girl.

xoxo

Arriving late to Ken & Mary’s Blues Project last Saturday, we were only able to get a few photos and no video before Ray Bonneville’s gig. However, we should be able to capture more at Dave C&W jam tonight. Joe Hill and Ken Grumbles are expected to be part of the jam. Look for a future posting on the jam.

kenne

Per farla breve, la ghost story occupa molti dei miei pensieri. Anche dei miei interrogativi. Il più inquietante è quello dei famigerati stereotipi, che secondo me sono più forti in questo tipo di romanzo gotico-horror che in altri casi.
Del vampiro si è detto tanto: ma il fantasma? La scatola a forma di cuore di Joe Hill è un ottimo esempio di come si possa parlare di spettri fuggendo da: porta che cigola, occhi ciechi che ti guardano dietro il vetro di una finestra, ciondoli o collane o libri che appaiono là dove non devono essere.
Oppure: è possibile, naturalmente, utilizzare tutto questo in un altro contesto. Usare lo stereotipo e renderlo di nuovo potente. Si può fare. La voglia è quella di rivolgersi, ancora una volta, ai miti. Ma vediamo.

Today marks the 94th anniversary of labor hero Joe Hill’s death by firing squad. (Photo: david_axe / flickr)

www.truthout.org

Thursday 19 November 2009

by: Dick Meister, t r u t h o u t | Report
It’s November 19, 1915, in a courtyard of the Utah State Penitentiary in Salt Lake City. Five riflemen take careful aim at a condemned organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Joe Hill, who stands before them straight and stiff and proud.

“Fire!” he shouts defiantly.

The firing squad didn’t miss. But Joe Hill, as the folk ballad says, “ain’t never died.” On this 94th anniversary, he lives on as one of the most enduring and influential of American symbols.

Joe Hill’s story is that of a labor martyr framed for murder by viciously anti-labor employer and government forces, a man who never faltered in fighting for the rights of the oppressed, who never faltered in his attempts to bring them together for the collective action essential if they were to overcome their wealthy and powerful oppressors.

His is the story of a man and an organization destroyed by government opposition, yet immensely successful. As historian Joyce Kornbluh noted, the IWW made “an indelible mark on the American labor movement and American society,” laying the groundwork for mass unionization, inspiring the formation of groups to protect the civil liberties of dissidents, prompting prison and farm labor reforms, and leaving behind “a genuine heritage … industrial democracy.”

Joe Hill’s story is the story of, perhaps, the greatest of all folk poets, whose simple, satirical rhymes set to simple, familiar melodies did so much to focus working people on the common body of ideals needed to forge them into a collective force.

Remember? “You will eat, bye and bye/In that glorious land above the sky/Work and Pray, live on hay/You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”

Ralph Chaplain, the IWW bard who wrote “Solidarity Forever,” found Hill’s songs “as coarse as homespun and as fine as silk; full of laughter and keen-edged satire; full of fine rage and finer tenderness; songs of and for the worker, written in the only language he can understand.”

Joe Hill’s story is the story of a man who saw with unusual clarity the unjust effects of the political, social and economic system on working people and whose own widely publicized trial and execution alerted people worldwide to the injustices and spurred them into corrective action.

It’s the story of a man who told his IWW comrades, just before stepping in front of the firing squad: “Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize!”

Hill’s comrades aimed at nothing less than organizing all workers into One Big Union regardless of their race, nationality, craft or work skills, calling a general strike and wresting control of the economy from its capitalist masters. The revolutionary message was presented in the simple language of the workplace, in the songs of Hill, Chaplain, and others, in the street corner oratory and in a tremendous outpouring of publications, including a dozen foreign-language newspapers, which were distributed among the many unskilled immigrants from European nations where unions had similar goals.

Workers were told again and again that they all had the same problems, the same needs and faced the same enemy. It was they who did the work, while others got the profit; they were members, all of them, of the working class. To aspire to middle-class status, as the established labor movement advocated, would mean competing against their fellow workers and chaining themselves to a system that enslaved them.

Organized religion also was a tool of enslavement, to keep the worker’s eye on that “pie in the sky” while he was being exploited in this world. Patriotism was a ruse to set the workers of one nation against those of another for the profit of capitalist manipulators.

IWW organizers carried the message to factories, mines, mills and lumber camps throughout the country, and to farms in the Midwest and California.

The cause of radical unionism to which Joe Hill devoted his life was lost a long time ago. The call to revolution is scarcely heard in today’s clamorously capitalist society. Labor organizations seek not to seize control of the means of production, but rather to share in the fruits of an economic system controlled by others. Yet, Joe Hill’s fiery words and fiery deeds, his courage and his sacrifices continue to inspire political, labor, civil rights and civil liberties activists.

They still sing his songs, striking workers, dissident students, and others, on picket lines, in demonstrations, at rallies, on the streets and in auditoriums. They echo his spirit of protest and militancy, his demand for true equality, share his fervent belief in solidarity, even use tactics first employed by Hill and his comrades.

Hill emigrated to the United States from his native Sweden in 1902, changing his name from Joel Haaglund, working as a seaman and as an itinerant wheat harvester, pipe layer, copper miner, and at other jobs as he made his way across the country to San Diego, translating into compelling lyrics the hopes and desires, the frustrations and discontents of his fellow workers.

In San Diego, Hill joined in one of the first of the many “free speech fights” waged by the Industrial Workers of the World against attempts by municipal authorities around the country to silence the street corner oratory that was a key part of the IWW’s organizing strategy.

Not long afterward, Hill hopped a freight for Salt Lake City where he helped lead a successful construction workers’ strike and began helping organize another free speech fight. But within a month, he was arrested on charges of shooting to death a grocer and his son and was immediately branded guilty by the local newspapers and authorities alike. Ultimately, Hill was convicted on only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.

Hill had staggered into a doctor’s office within an hour after the shootings, bleeding from a chest wound that he said had stemmed from a quarrel over a woman. The prosecutor argued that the wound was inflicted by the grocer in response to an attack by Hill, although he did not introduce into evidence either the grocer’s gun or the bullet that allegedly was fired from it. He did not introduce the gun that Hill allegedly used and did not call a single witness who could positively identify Hill as the killer. But he easily convinced the jury that the murders were an example of IWW terrorism and that since Hill was an IWW leader and had been arrested and charged with the crime, he was guilty.

As Hill’s futile appeals made their way through the courts, Gov. William Spry of Utah was swamped with thousands of petitions and letters from all over the world asking for a pardon or commutation. But he would not even be swayed by the pleas for mercy from the Swedish ambassador. Not even by the pleas of US President Woodrow Wilson.

The governor paid much greater attention to the views of Utah’s powerful Mormon Church leaders and powerful employer interests, particularly those who controlled the state’s dominant copper mining industry. They insisted that the man they considered one of the most dangerous radicals in the country be put to death.

Joe Hill’s body was shipped to Chicago, where it was cremated after a hero’s funeral, the ashes divided up and sent to IWW locals for scattering on the winds in every state except Utah. Hill, with typical grim humor, had declared, “I don’t want to be caught dead in Utah.”

Even in death, Hill was not safe from the government. One packet of his ashes, sent belatedly to an IWW organizer in 1917 for scattering in Chicago, was seized by postal inspectors. They acted under the Espionage Act, passed after the United States entered World War I that year, which made it illegal to mail any material that advocated “treason, insurrection. or forcible resistance to any law of the United States.”

The envelope, containing about a tablespoon of Hill’s ashes, was sent to the National Archives in Washington, DC. It remained hidden there until 1988, when it was discovered and turned over in Chicago to the men who presided over what little remained of the Industrial Workers of the World, shrunken to only a few hundred members.

The post office apparently had objected to the caption beneath a photo of Hill on the front of the envelope. “Joe Hill,” it said – “murdered by the capitalist class, November 19, 1915.”

On November 19th, 1915 Joel Hagglund, known as Joe Hill, was executed in Utah. Was he framed for a murder he didn’t commit? One thing is for certain, his activities as a labour activist made him a host of enemies in the establishment.

This is our open thread. Please feel free to offer your own comments on any topic.

I met Joanna Ruocco at her release gathering for The Mothering Coven. After her reading, she gave me a copy of the latest issue of Birkensnake. She’s one of the editors there and she told me that she had bound the book herself. It’s a lovely object that was both blowtorch-singed, and sprayed, I think, with some kind of toxic (is there any other kind?) fixative.

Birkensnake 2 opens with Michael Stewart’s “The Children’s Factory,” a beguiling short short with no shortage of underlying menace. The factory’s machines here are “run by tiny hands. In the bowels. In the guts. In the very intestinal tract of it…” and the “Devil only knows what their great machine does—other than wheeze and breathe.” Though it easily works as a standalone piece, it also felt like it could be a fragment of a much larger narrative.

An excerpt from Danielle Dutton’s novel A World Called the Blazing World follows. It’s about Margaret Cavendish, a polymath who lived in England in the 17th century. Besides being Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne she was a prolific writer who wrote poetry, philosophy, prose romances, essays, plays, and she also wrote a proto-science fiction novel, The Blazing World. Dutton is a wonderful stylist who writes sentences to luxuriate in:

The trip to Oxford was made in the dead of night. Kisses on the lawn at St. John’s Green. A perfect summer gloom of vegetal bravado: peonies, bugloss, native beetles singing.

[…]

Then someone cleared his throat—and Margaret saw she was in an alternate universe whirring far into space: African servants, poets, dogs in silken caps, platonic ideals, sparkling conversation, aristocratic ladies “half-dressed, like angels,” and ivy-coated quadrangles with womanizing captains, dueling earls, actors.

Blake Butler offers another one of his slipstream journeys in “From now on all I’ll talk about is light”. In a place where “children’s eyes made prisms,” the narrator relates:

The second year I shot a beam out of my eyes: radiance earned purely from my fury over Sister—her whole eyes not quite what whatever—and perhaps concerned slightly for my hymen, undulating, which in the night would keep me up, ragged, counting my inhale, waiting on the rheum. At my emission the children moaned a little, rattling their hands, their own eyes lit as if in midst of replication, one thing I’d taught at last, at least—though in their eyes the light would quickly rupture or make paisley and I would sit us down to practice wishing.

With its strange, internal (or is it infernal?) logic, its assonantal phrases, and bobbing rhythms, it almost doesn’t matter where this story goes. It’s all about the journey, taking in the lay of the land, the mind’s ebb and flow.

Fighting off the inclination to parse out what the five forms are in Rhoads Stevens’s “Five Simple Sentence Forms” is easy when you encounter a paragraph like this one:

I lost. I woodshedded my boat design for three weeks before I decided it was time to try it on a man-made lake. The lake was murky and designed by a man named Murphy. Murphy once cooked my father a meal—one that consisted of manioc and rooster heads. My father considered the coxcombs toothsome.

You know that story “Pop Art” by Joe Hill? It’s about an inflatable boy. (See a beautiful adaptation of it HERE. ) When I read the first sentence of “Matt Briggs’s “Knot” (“I was made out of string”) and the immediate sentences following it I thought I was going to get a similar kind of story with more refractive, language-y elements. The story unravels, but not in the way that I thought it wanted to. Anyway, while it seems undeveloped, reads more like a vignette, Matt Briggs’s “Knot,” is still an imaginative piece that has some gorgeous passages like this one about starfish

wrapped in weeds and kelp. They had more than just five arms. Some of them had six or eight or twelve arms. The arms were long and curled around the starfishes’ bodies in elaborate sweeps. They were orange and brown and russet. The gulls let out piercing cries as they hunted the helpless starfish. Each gull emitted a sound at a regular interval, and their cries overlapped and multiplied creating a jarring, pulsing agitation that spread over the entire beach.

There’s a lot of strangeness in Christopher Boucher’s “Strange Animal: Three Stories.” The narrator in “Cage” dates a woman who “kept her brother in a cage.” A man is foiled by a burrito wrapper in “Strange Animal.” Things get hairy in “Hairy,” a story about a hirsute woman and her suitor.

Caren Gussoff offers a fine cyberpunk junket in her story “Correspondence.”

Matthew Pendleton’s “Someday on Planar Surface” is the longest story in this issue. A world is created in which “the outside,” “the ahead,” and “the behind” are palpable things that encroach, enclose, poke, and threaten. It’s a bizarre world with its own logic:

He continually valued the goods in the tray. All together he had been expecting six pounds. There’s six pounds here and there’s six pounds there. Now even if he got six pounds with no lip it wouldn’t account for the distance of his delivery, the way back. Not the real costs maybe, but time, that meant something, made him feel tired. He found a seat and thought of resting there, maybe for several days, letting a morning catch him up, maybe slowly coming across a morning he could participate in. Everyone so half-collapsed all the time with the goods on them, it takes a different mind to think there are things around him saying: it is OK, what happens happens, then it manages into a sort of multi-dimensional puzzle, and solves itself too quickly to see; some voices could describe this sort of thing, when he was most optimistic, or in need of it, optimism, which required a clear view of the ahead, with only the known and surmountable obstacles.

That was when he was sleeping, most optimistic – removed from the world – but when awake he had the idea, it went like this: if I can create of my time a physical artefact, might it be sold and act as leverage for a perpetual sales walk ahead, and the tray and contents, its mass of profit increase boundlessly, grow heavy, bend the web of the world, and then he would see the edges of things wiped out (the certainty of profit causing the certainty of the ahead)?

Miles Klee’s “Dogfight” is a clever story that will make an excellent companion to Sean Lovelace’s “Charlie Brown’s Diaries: Excerpts.” I especially enjoyed this section:

Borrowed Dreams

Visions of engaging the Beagle. Stacks his oddly human teeth in towers, shakes into life the invisible gun. We set the sky ablaze, weave black zigzags across golden dusk. He climbs to a stall and plummets past, black ears trilling, face blank canvas, lifts goggles to reveal all-pupil eyes. Awake in pre-dawn, remember Mannie Red is his own worst foe. A yellow bird alights on the windowsill, speaking spells. Outside, Red stares at toy plane—jammed just out of reach in skeletal tree.

Evelyn Hampton’s “Sag: A Saga” is full of recursive sentences that eddy along in wonderful rhythms and internal rhymes, assonance, and alliterative flair:

We were married in a garden of stone, a few flowers, fewer hours each day after, until darkness was our only and every hour, and every light in our home had to be brightly on. There was something the matter with his vision—he saw far, but only into himself, where he found himself looking back and laughing.

There’s the flight of f’s in “few flowers, fewer,” the rhyming of “flowers” and “hours,” of “our” and “hour,” the assonance of “with his vision,” and the lolling quality of connecting in “himself looking back and laughing,” its assonance and alliteration the perfect ending to a serpentine sentence.

“Tumor Flats,” by Joyelle McSweeney,” is also filled with great sentences:

I wore a standup collar, fake hair, I had a velvet repel, I was shooting up life by the spoonful, but then my grind grew a rind that grew bitter and bitterer till my gears just went rust. Now I’m practically incarcerated in my recliner, glimming the smear world through a rip in my sack. But through this nick in my glass I spy the bright world, the little kids heavy with knowledge, their necks stalked, they need a constant tumor tutor to hold their throats open, check the lines that change their fluids, run the chemical baths.

From her expressive usage of the comma that helps these sentences to tumble along to the various repetitions and rhymes, McSweeney is, as always, an engaging stylist.

Birkensnake 2 is available for free HERE.

I always find white text on a black background difficult to read so it’s all the more reason to get the fuzzy fine-looking object in your hands. You may purchase it HERE.

I was reading one of my new zombie books yesterday and there was a story in it by Joe Hill. The books that I’ve read by Joe Hill, I’ve enjoyed immensely. It’s like reading Blu-Ray.

I started reading his bio on the page preceding the story and within two sentences I actually had to stop and think before moving on to confirm my suspicions.

Joe Hill is one of Stephen King’s kids. Which is cool.

Joe Hill is coming out with a new book, or has come out with a new book. I need to write a note to remind myself to get it or ask for it.

WE’RE BACK! And to raise the bar from part II, we are reviewing the psychologically disturbing Locke and Key by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez. You won’t want to miss our spine-tingling critique of this mental cage of mystery and horror! Plus, we go back in time and discuss LAST WEEK’s incoming trades as well as THIS WEEK’s thanks to the powers of Chronokinesis!! (AKA the Internet).  We also have a big talk of what Iron Man has been going through in the Marvel Universe as well as where he is going! LISTEN IF YOU DARE!!!

Continuing Monsterpiece Comic Book Theatre, we give you a short yet frighteningly witty scene from Dan Slott’s Arkham Asylum : Living Hell!!!

Locke and Key Vol. 1

Locke and Key Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft
Words by Joe Hill
Art by Gabriel Rodriguez
IDW, 2008

As we move into the last week of October I’m be spending the remainder of my time exploring some Lovecraft and Lovecraft influenced fiction.  While not quite Lovecraftian in tone and theme Hill & Rodriguez’s series Locke and Key, the first arc of which is collected in this trade, name their island setting Lovecraft in honor of the New England author.  The novel begins with an almost idyllic summer afternoon spent with typical teenage griping but veers sharply into darker territory as the father of Bodie, Ty, and Kinsey Locke is murdered by a deranged student.  What appears at first to be a simple act by a deranged entity is slowly revealed to be something of dark portent and more supernatural bent.

Following the death of their father the remaining Locke family, the children and their mother, move in with their Uncle to the ominously named Keyhouse.  There the graphic novel takes a rather poignant look at how each of the children is coping not only with the grief of their father’s death, but with the lingering fear left by the harrowing events that saw him dead.  Each deals with it in a different way Ty’s quiet and somewhat dangerous stoicism and Kinsey’s desire to fade into part of the crowd but perhaps the most poignant and disturbing is that the youngest child Bodie.

Bodie is the first to discover some of the supernatural elements of the Keyhouse literally stumbling through a door way that unlimber his spirit from his body.  It is during Bodie’s frequent sojourns as a ghost that Hill and Rodriquez are able to reveal each of the characters in their most intimate settings.  In Bodie the reader gets a strong perspective to latch onto and an insider’s viewpoint on how each of the family members is handling their grief.  In these section Bodie’s narration provides a frequently razor truth that is all the more powerful thanks to the unfiltered and unburdened mind of a child.

Of course Bodie is the first to discover the thing in the well house and that same childhood innocence becomes something less touching and more dangerous.  I’m not going to spoil how things go from there but when things come to a head for the Locke family there are quite a number of unsettling consequences.  Perhaps the most interesting part is that all the way though the novel only we the reader and Bodie remain certain and sure about the supernatural events that occurring.  Even the older characters, when confronted face to face by the supernatural, eventually find a way to explain away what happens.  There is a method to the madness here, relating to the as-yet unexplained powers of the Keyhouse, but is never completely explained.

My slip in using the word novel above wasn’t completely unintentional.  Unlike many comic series, particularly by what I stand to be an ongoing series, manage to convey as sense of unity of development in terms of both plot and character development.  I’m curious as to how the series actually reads in serial form as I am uncertain how each individual issue holds up one its own.  Regardless, Welcome to Lovecraft feels like a complete volume and comes across as a tightly woven piece of fiction by two men with a plan.  Hill’s writing is as superb as ever, more in line with his work in 20th Century Ghosts then with the still-excellent Heart-Shaped Box.  Gabriel Rodriguez is a man with an impressively broad pallet of talent and skill.  He is as adept at crafting a tense action scene as he as poignant character work.  I admit the the latter, especially as it pertains facial expressions, is perhaps my favorite aspect here.  There is one particular panel toward the end of graphic novel that, despite the character involved, is heartbreaking.   As the final promo pages of the graphic novel show it looks like there is a lot more planned for the world of Locke and Key.  I for one an both excited and terrified to delve deeper into halls and doors of mysterious Keyhouse.

I’ve been trying to read more lately, I figure every author should be reading others’ work and it’d be nonsense for me to deny myself that knowledge.

I just finished Tucker Max’s book ‘I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell’, funny story behind that actually. I bought the book last year because I love that kind of humor but I never read it – instead, I passed it around to my roommate last year and one of my best friends. See, they loved it. So I read it this past weekend and I was just killing myself laughing. Tucker Max, although he’s an asshole, he’s also a genius and his sense of humor is outrageous!

But now I’m starting another Jodi Picoult novel ‘Salem Falls’, I’m only on like page 11, but I have high hopes seeing as I’ve read ‘Nineteen Minutes’ ‘The Tenth Circle’ ‘Perfect Match’ and my favorite I think ‘Second Glance’. I guess you could say I’m a big fan!

I would like to read, however, Joe Hill’s ‘20th Century Ghosts’ because I loved Heart-Shaped Box and the latest installment of Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter series, ‘Dexter by Design’. Funny, I started reading the Dexter series before I got into the television show.

Also, this semester I’d LOVE to finish Aravind Adiga’s ‘The White Tiger’ I just couldn’t finish it but they want to turn it into a movie so it must be worth it! I’d like to read David Benioff’s ‘City of Thieves’ too.

But for those who know me, my favorite author is CLEARLY Chuck Palahniuk. I went to a book reading of his for ‘Pygmy’ in the city this spring and it blew my mind. I was sitting so close to the stage and he was hilarious!  I can’t wait for his next book, and my favorite was ‘Invisible Monsters’.

So I guess I’ve got a lot of reading ahead of me – see, I’m trying to cut down my online time because the internet is fantastic yes, but I need to get my Lit on too!

More later <3

xoxo,

Harlequinn

A entrega do Scream Awards 2009, teve algumas surpresas, e reconhecimentos, True Blood, Watchmen  e Star Trek merecidamente.

Para quem não sabe o Scream Awars, é a premiação mais famosa voltada a SCI-Fi, filmes de terror, Quadrinhos e Fantasia.

THE ULTIMATE SCREAM (Melhor Filme)

Arraste-me para o Inferno
Deixe Ela Entrar
Star Trek
Transformers: A Vingança dos Derrotados
Crepúsculo
Up

melhor filme de fantasia
“Coraline”
“Harry Potter e o Enigma do Príncipe”
“Crepúsculo”
“Up”
“Watchmen”
“X-Men Origens: Wolverine”

melhor filme de horror
“Dead Snow”
“Arraste-me para o Inferno”
“Sexta-Feira 13″
“Deixe ela entrar”
“Dia dos Namorados Macabro 3D”
“Splinter”

melhor série
Battlestar Gallactica
Dexter
Fringe
Lost
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
True Blood

melhor atriz em filme ou série de ficção científica
Moon Bloodgood; “Exterminador do Futuro 4: A Salvação”
Eliza Dushku; “Dollhouse”
Megan Fox; “Transformers: A Vingança dos Derrotados”
Lena Headey; “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”
Katee Sackhoff; “Battlestar Galactica”
Zoe Saldana; “Star Trek”

Melhor ator em filme ou série de terror
Bruce Campbell; “My Name is Bruce”
Michael C. Hall; “Dexter”
Kre Hedebrant; “Deixe ela Entrar”
Justin Long; “Arraste-me para o Inferno”
Ryan Kwanten; “True Blood”
Stephen Moyer; “True Blood”

 melhor atriz em filme ou série de terror
Jennifer Carpenter; “Quarentena”
Jaime King; “Dia dos Namorados Macabro 3D”
Lina Leandersson; “Deixe ela Entrar”
Alison Lohman; “Arraste-me para o Inferno”
Anna Paquin; “True Blood”
Monica Potter; “The Last House on the Left”

melhor ator revelação
Taylor Kitsch (X-Men Origins: Wolverine)
Taylor Lautner (Twilight)
Robert Pattinson (Twilight)
Chris Pine (Star Trek)
Will.I.Am (X-Men Origins: Wolverine)
Sam Worthington (Terminator Salvation)

melhor atriz
revelação
Anna Torv (Fringe)
Zoe Saldana (Star Trek)
Lorna Raver (Drag Me to Hell)
Isabel Lucas (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen)
Lina Leandersson (Let the Right One In) 
 Malin Akerman (Watchmen)

melhor roteirista de quadrinhos
Brian Michael Bendis (Dark Avengers, Ultimate Spider-Man)
Joe Hill (Locke & Key)
Grant Morrison (All-Star Superman, Batman and Final Crisis)
Geoff Johns (Green Lantern, Justice Society of America)
Mark Millar (Wolverine: Old Man Logan,  Kick-Ass)
Brian K. Vaughan (Ex Machina)

melhor filme baseado em quadrinhos
“Dragonball Evolution”
“Punisher: War Zone”
“The Spirit”
“Watchmen”
“X-Men Origins: Wolverine”

melhor diretor
J.J. Abrams; “Star Trek”
Tomas Alfredson; “Deixe ela Entrar”
Michael Bay; “Transformers: A Vingança dos Derrotados”
Pete Doctor & Bob Peterson; “Up”
Duncan Jones; “Moon”
Sam Raimi; “Arraste-me para o Inferno”

melhor vilão
Eric Bana as Nero; “Star Trek”
Cam Gigandet as James; “Crepúsculo”
Lorna Raver as Mrs. Ganush; “Arraste-me para o Inferno”
Liev Schrieber as Victor Creed/Sabretooth; “X-Men Origens: Wolverine”
Alexander Skarsgrd como Eric Northman; “True Blood”

So after keeping my emotions about books in check all through this year’s Landmark Sale, I decided to make a visit on the last day of the sale, hoping that the available selection would have been reduced, and I wouldn’t end up bankrupt as I usually do. I did just fine. Went over-budget by only 50%, which is good because my usual is around 200-300%. This continues my couple-of-months-long streak of not splurging on books till I read enough of the ones I have.

So, as usual, here’s a short, mostly uninformed set of opinions on some of the books I bought. It’s essentially an annotated list, but I’ve linked to stuff this time so you can take a look for yourself.

***

I decided to get myself some comedy, for one thing. So it was extremely fortunate that there was a Robert Rankin book on sale (The Toyminator, sequel to the rather awesome The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse), and one by Jasper Fforde – The Fourth Bear. This one isn’t part of the matching hardback set I talked about some time ago – it’s a paperback, but I haven’t read this book, and I can always give this copy away when I get the matching set.

I also saw Eoin Colfer’s Hitchhiker’s book, And Another Thing …, but I decided not to buy it just yet because looking at it just made me sad.

I found a lovely hardback of Good Omens for Rs. 149, with this sort of flippable dust cover, so you can choose the white angel cover saying ‘Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman’ or the black devil cover saying ‘Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett’. It was a pity I couldn’t find more copies to give to other people.

I bought a couple of books for a friend – a second copy of Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World (I haven’t yet finished reading the copy I own, because a friend ‘borrowed’ it fairly quickly), and Death by Chick-Lit by Lynn Harris, which, of course, I’m going to read before I give to my friend.

Which reminds me, I got one ladlit book (for myself) – Love and Other Near-Death Experiences by Mil Millington – and chose not to get one by Mike Gayle because that dude sucks at endings.

I missed out on buying Best New Horror 15, because I thought I already had a copy. Turned out I had Best New Horror 12. But anyway, I’ve got way too many anthologies at home which I still have to read, and also, Landmark had something like five copies. It’ll stay. Speaking of horror, I got Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box, which I’d been craving for a while. I also got Transgressions 2, which has a story by Joe Hill’s dad.

The find of the day originally seemed to have been Eagle Annual: Best of the 50s (featuring Dan Dare, apparently ‘the Greatest Comic Strip of All Time’), but it turned out to be more of an interesting artefact than something of actual reading value. Still, cheap!

I tried to renew my old allegiance to sci-fi by buying Black Man by Richard Morgan and Spook Country by William Gibson. (Proof I’m a bad sci-fi fan? I’ve only read the first 30 pages of Neuromancer – I got bored and stopped.)

Assorted weird books that stood out from the (rather large) pack – Lost Souls by Michael Collins, Time Was Soft There by Jeremy Mercer (a memoir centred on a bookstore), The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen (a holistic memoir, it seems), The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson, The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes (New Victoriana), Rain Dogs and Love Cats by Andrew Holmes (bought due to the Tom Waits connection, and currently reading) and The Insatiable Spider Man by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (nothing to do with Peter Parker).

Also bought my first Jeanette Winterson (Tanglewreck) and Simon Spurrier’s first (Contract).

Finally (did you notice how I reserved it for the end, didja, didja?), I got Electric Feather, mainly because I wanted to finish reading the Samit Basu story excerpted here. I finished this book last night, by the way, and it was quite interesting. I’ll be writing a review soon. All in all, I’m glad I got it. You can read Ruchir Joshi’s introduction here on Nilanjana Roy’s blog.

And that’s all for this shopping spree. I don’t have the usual feeling of shame and huilt at overspending, which makes me happy. And these’ll last me for a while, don’t you think? Yeah, right!

I have to confess that I did a little happy dance when my new personalized and signed copy of Joe Hill’s Locke & Key: Head Games arrived.  Joe Hill has created a dark fantasy world that is unforgettable, and the art work by Gabriel Rodriguez is thoroughly captivating.  Head Games is the second volume in the Locke & Key series.

If you enjoy horror fantasy, I highly recommend the Locke & Key graphic novels.  The main characters are three siblings who move to a mansion in the haunting New England coastal town of Lovecraft after the murder of their father.  The house itself holds many dark secrets.  While dealing with the transition to a new town and the loss of their father, the two brothers and sister find that they must also fight for their own safety.  In the midst of this struggle, the youngest brother, Bode, discovers magical antique skeleton keys that unlock supernatural doors.

I can’t wait to submerge myself in this newest addition to my quickly growing graphic novel collection.

While the anticipation grows for Stephen King’s Under the Dome, buzz is also building for the latest project from his son, who writes as Joe Hill. Hill’s debut, Heart-Shaped Box, was an uber-creepy tale of a haunted rock star that demonstrated that a talent for tapping into the dark side of human nature just might be genetic.

In February, Morrow will publish Hill’s second novel, Horns, a book the author describes as “another heart-warmer.” It’s already been optioned for film by Mandalay entertainment. The premise: a man wakes up after a wild night to find horns growing out of his head—and like Pinocchio’s nose, they keep growing every day. Turns out his girlfriend’s murder might have something to do with his strange condition.

Like King’s Under the Dome, Horns will also be released (in the UK, at least) in a limited edition by PS Publishing. The limited edition of 500 will include art by Vincent Chong and be signed by the author. Full details on the special edition can be found here.

What do you think of this special edition trend? Are there any books you’d like to have a $300 deluxe version of?

Mandalay Pictures has picked up film rights to Horns, the upcoming novel by Joe Hill (Heart Shaped Box), son of Stephen King, according to Variety.

The novel is described as a love story driven by horror and vengeance that revolves around a 26-year-old man who wakes up one morning from a blackout hangover and finds horns sprouting out of his head. As the horns grow bigger by the day, the reason why seems to lie in the unsolved murder of his girlfriend.

Joe Hill also wrote the brilliant Locke and Key graphic novel which I thoroughly enjoyed and can highly recommend. Very spooky, lots of twists and great characters in that one. All about some kids who move into an old house full of magic doors, strange keys and lurkers in the well.

The book will be published by William Morrow in February 2010 and this is the full synopsis.

“Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke the next morning with a headache, put his hands to his temples and felt something unfamiliar, a pair of knobby, pointed protuberances. He was so ill-wet-eyed and weak-he didn’t think anything of it at first, was too hung-over for thinking or worry. But when he was swaying over the toilet, he glanced at himself in the mirror above the sink and saw he had grown horns while he slept.

The second son of a renowned musician and doting mother, Ig Perrish has a privileged life and expectations of a bright future with his childhood sweetheart, Merrin Williams. But life takes an unexpected dark turn when Merrin is brutally killed and suspicion falls hard on Ig.

A year passes, but Ig is nowhere near over his grief or his rage . . . feelings that come to a head in a lost evening of alcohol and hate. When he wakes the next morning he discovers that he has undergone a surreal transformation, and is in possession of an incredible power. It isn’t long before he turns his terrible new abilities towards vengeance. Unfortunately Ig is about to learn that when it comes to revenge, the devil is in the details” .

This week’s edition features moments from Pittsburgh’s G20 Protests, an analysis of what the Bank Bailout could have bought us, bits of audio surrounding the Health Care Reform debate and remembrances of the musical giants, Joe Hill and John Lennon.

Ashley Smith from the International Socialist Organization in Pittsburgh.

“Don’t Pay for a Failed System” by Tony Iltis, from the book, “Meltdown: A Socialist View of the Financial Crisis”
Recession’s Over from Colbert Report
Obama’s Done Nothing from SNL
John Lennon Speech



Music:
Politicians in my Eyes – Death
Joe Hill – Billy Bragg
Working Class Terror – God Leighton
Gimme Some Truth – John Lennon
There’s Power in the Union – Utah Philips
Casey Jones – Pete Seeger
Concrete Jungle – Bob Marley & the Wailers
The Internationale

Download this episode (right click and save)

Original version broadcast on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 8 PM EST on WXOJ-LP 103.3 FM Valley Free Radio Northampton, MA

Program Length – 1:06:53

As a huge admirer of both Heart Shaped Box and Twentieth Century Ghosts, I can’t wait to get my hands on Joe Hill’s next novel, Horns.

The bad news is we have to wait until February ‘10 to get our hands on it. It’s going to be published by Orion in the UK and apparently PS Publishing are going to do a signed, limited edition print run with Vincent Chong artwork.

Little else is currently known about this one at the moment.

Idag är det 130 år sedan folksångaren Joe Hill föddes i Gävle.

Phil Ochs, en annan favorit, har gjort den här fina hyllningslåten. (Från ett SVT-program från 1968.)

Mer om Joe Hill hittar du här.

Hazel Dickens (who also has a song called Will Jesus wash the bloodstains from your hands? Cool!) singing a song written by Joe Hill – song starts at about 1 min 8 sec.

Vicente Feliú • La Habana / Foto: Iván Soca /tomado de LA JIRIBILLA