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May Updates

Published by Michael Arnzen in Arnzen News on May 10th, 2006

Lots of little news bytes to pass along.


  • WHC: I’m heading to World Horror Convention in San Francisco on May 11-15th. Details on the no good business I’ll be up to are here.
  • News: I’ll be sending out the next e-mail edition of The Goreletter shortly after I return. New contests await! Sign up now if you want to win something.
  • Vanderworld: Look for the fun interview, “Michael Arnzen Walks the Plank,” scheduled to appear on fantasist Jeff Vandermeer’s weblog in the weeks to come. (And if you’re looking for a great summer read, I really recommend his books!)
  • Not Dead Yet: A neat review of my funky “household tips for serial killers” chapbook, Michael Arnzen Dying, just went up at Bookloons.
  • Pod: The Goreletter is proudly sponsoring Pod of Horror for the month. If you haven’t listened to this wacky horrorshow, check them out at HorrorReader.com
  • Film: The production of Exquisite Corpse — a compilation of short films by different artists responding to my poetry — is coming along swiftly. The website isn’t up yet, but it is likely to appear at www.exquisitecorpsemovie.com. I’ve seen an advanced look at the DVD cover sleeve…this is going to be VERY COOL!
  • Web: Raw Dog Screaming — publisher of my books, Play Dead and 100 Jolts — has overhauled their website. It looks fantastic and they’ve got some great new titles recently announced. Check ‘em out.
  • Blog: My NEW weblog at amazon.com is now up and running. The dismembered hand is taking questions.


The Alpottoir

Published by Michael Arnzen in Blather on May 10th, 2006

Take a walk down the pet food aisle, the next time you’re at the supermarket. Marvel at the rows of canned meat and bags of hearty pellets — all those wasted by-products scraped from the slaughterhouse floor and the oily sludge trellises of the fishery, all that scrapple repackaged for consumption by animals who really have no choice in the matter. This is what we’ve ordained to feed our domesticated beasts. It’s a wonder they don’t come after us with…well, tiny little torches and pitchforks.

Take a pensive moment under the fluorescent glare of the pet food aisle to contemplate the fact that you’re surrounded by more dead meat than you’d find in some morgues. Try not to imagine all the chopping, carving, slicing, cubing, mashing, and grinding that went into each and every one of those perfectly stacked cans. The chow packets are as bulky as body bags. Don’t be fooled: there’s nothing “tender” about a “cut.” There’s no gourmet Navy chef at work behind the “Sea Captain’s Stew” of salmon guts commingling with cow testicles in a broth of poultry gizzards. Take a whiff — smell all that yumminess? That’s the fine odor of dismemberment, dried and fortified with “more great taste!”

If cats had taste they wouldn’t lick themselves clean. If dogs had taste, they wouldn’t drool all over my fine carpet.

But I digress. Sometimes it’s the dried foods that are the worst of all. They come in all shapes and sizes — little formed fishies, tiny X’s, teensy squares. More than “nine lives” are in them, their bodies stewed together in some giant vat to produce a brown muck that is subsequently formed and baked and bagged. All traces of life are removed and transformed into a magic “formula” that animals would never find in nature, but which pet nutritionists are more than happy to endorse. Imagine pouring milk over your breakfast cereal and spooning up a brown pellet of soggy meat. That’s what you’re doing to Fido every day, when you’re not otherwise teasing him with a dog biscuit that’s shaped an awful lot like a skinned human leg bone.

The more you think about these things, the more repulsive they become. But we don’t want to think. We want to feel good about spending less on our pets than we do on our own meals, and we want to feel loved for selecting them the fanciest of feasts. But what really creeps me out is the happy little packaging that leads us to believe we’re somehow making the right choices. I’m talking about all those picture perfect cats and canines, from the snarky fatcat models like Morris to those dopey-but-lovable Alpo dogs. Like famous athletes on cereal boxes, these are celebrities in the animal kingdom, right? Wrong: Morris would be dead meat in an alley fight and Lassie would get so mauled by the pack she’d single-handedly redefine the meaning of dog biscuits. Even when the animal sponsors are cutely drawn, they’re kind of creepy to me. The “Meow Mix” brand logo is, essentially, a dismembered cat, it’s alphabet soup of body parts formed into letters that spell the brand name. The happy-go-lucky names and slogans don’t help. Like, do I really want my animal to be “Friskie”? Couldn’t that get me arrested in some states?

No, there’s nothing cute and cuddly about the pet food aisle — all those perfect pet faces on the packages are utterly unnerving. Look at them, lined up in rows and columns like some animal cloned pet army — gazing up at us, head cocked to one side with unknowable intention, licking the Pavlovian drool from their lips and baring their sharpened, pearly white teeth! It’s a bad veterinarian’s living nightmare.

And did you ever notice that in every pet package, the animal is smiling? Smiling! Animals do NOT smile! They don’t waive hello and say “howdy-do” or “it’s grrrreat!” or “hmmm…snuggle!” They snarl and champ and would bite the hand that feeds them if they weren’t so preoccupied by the puzzling sound of food pouring into a ceramic dish. Seriously — the “photoshop tricks” on the pet food packages don’t fool me. I can still see that look in their little kitten and puppy dog eyes. And I recognize it. It’s the same look you see on Wild Kingdom or Animal Planet, when they show lions tugging a string of bloody muscle from fresh kill. The glint of primal satisfaction from gnawing on all that gamy goodness.

Now, I know there are a lot of “alternative” pet foods that are out there — from scientifically formulated dietary mixes to “vegetarian” snacks to chocolate covered dog biscuits. But the more that pet food becomes like human food, the more human food becomes like pet food. Most of the prefab stuff you buy at the grocer’s is close enough already, thank you very much. And until Fido can pick up the tongs properly, he isn’t getting any of my salad.

So I guess we have little choice but to slop it all out in a pretty little dish and leave the stinking dead meat in the open air. It sits there in a puddle in the corner like a torn carcass in the Serengeti, drawing flies. Fluffy comes and goes as she pleases, lapping at the corpse cuttings, happy that her owners have provided her with every morbid morsel.

Mange! And I mean that both ways, carnivores.

And don’t even get me started on the TV commercials. Where you see puppies hopping on laps like happy little children, licking their owner’s faces, I see wild animals getting a little taste of their prey before the bestial mauling and fanged carnage begins. Dogs love bones. And we are pet food. Don’t forget that.


Funny Brain Transplants

Published by Michael Arnzen in Our Odd Triple Feature on May 10th, 2006

For your next movie night, rent:

The Man with Two Brains (1983)
MST2K: The Atomic Brain (1997/ aka Monstrocity, 1964)
Man with the Screaming Brain (2005)


People Repellent: A Flash Fiction

Published by Michael Arnzen in Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems on May 10th, 2006

He found the bottle of People Repellent at a health food store. The package was right next to the all-natural bug sprays and fly papers and anti-mosquito incense. It cost $24, emblazoned with a stick figure logo that raised a scrawny arm in a “talk to the hand” gesture. He thought it would make a funny gift for his girlfriend, who always complained about the people in her office, so he blew what was left in his wallet for the novelty spray, along with his usual assortment of herbal extract supplements and offbeat teas.

At home, he started wrapping the gift. He chuckled at the logo on the bottle again, but then found himself questioning his choice. Maybe she would read between the lines and accuse him of calling her anti-social. Or maybe she’d assume that all the gifts in their relationship from that point forward would be juvenile pranks. She might conjure an image of fake doggie doo in her Christmas stocking or a squirt ring surprise during their marriage ceremony, and then quickly remove him from her speed dial.

He didn’t want to “repel” his own girlfriend, after all. So he grabbed the bottle and opened the lid of the trashcan. Something liquid sloshed inside. He shook it. Wondered what it really was. Took a whiff of the sprayer.

It smelled fantastic. Like flowers fountaining inside of other flowers. But it was still musky enough to be called cologne. He decided to try it out. He sprayed People Repellent on his neck, then his arms, then his chest, and then inside the waistband of his jeans…spritzing copiously until he was sure he could keep inhaling it like a floral cloud descended from heaven, floating around his body.

Immediately a number of houseflies stirred inside his trashcan and zoomed up from the refuse to glom onto his flesh. More flying gnits zipped across his house and landed on his skin, fizzling in the still-wet sheen of People Repellent on the back of his neck and on his arms. Mosquitoes followed, whining around his ears before dipping their beaks into their newfound nirvana.

They itched, and he was surprised by just how many flying insects were living in his house, but he also understood what was happening with perfect clarity. He went outside and walked slowly down the sidewalk, heading towards his girlfriend’s house just a few blocks away. A thousand thousand more insects joined their brethren on his flesh. His body became a living block party for the local gnats. Moths landed on his eyelids. Honeybees buzzed and nuzzled into his belt line. And people quickly got out of his way.

He was a living coat of writhing wrigglers when he rang her doorbell, waiting to see what kind of person she’d turn out to be. Beneath a mitten of mites, he still clutched the spray bottle in a free hand, which he held behind his back like a lover’s bouquet.

***
If you like stories like this, you’d like my collection, 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories

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Bob the Angry Flower: Dog Killer

Published by Michael Arnzen in Not Dead Yet: Print Reviews on May 10th, 2006

from Bob the Angry Flower

Meet “Bob the Angry Flower,” Stephen Notley’s outrageous main character in his comic strip by the same name. Bob is a pissed off sunflower — that icon of happiness and sunshine. But Bob’s disposition isn’t sunny, sappy, or sugary — he’s angry as hell. This embodies Notley’s approach to the form: he turns what we assume about popular culture icons inside-out and upside-down, in the process challenging our worldview. And it makes for a very entertaining, thought-provoking read.

Dog Killer — his latest collection of comics — is rife with wry political commentary and subversive play, but it’s also an appealing work of dark surrealism. In Bob’s world, the sky hails eyeballs and the local furniture store sells chairs made of human skulls. Bob follows his shadow underground, only to discover a Starbucks at the end of the cavernous journey. Bob slays ghosts with a samurai sword, and begs to know why they are haunting him (“Stop…killing…us!” is their answer!). Notley’s sly approach has got a knock-out underground power to it: Notley plays freely with form, experiments with structure, and just takes no prisoners in his attack on conventional truth and habitual ways of seeing. In this book’s introduction, Ted Rall describes “Notley’s rageful ranting” as revealing a “tragic honesty” about the American universe through some “pretty scary allegory” that’s “grim” even when it’s optimistic. “This brutal appraisal of the human condition,” Rall writes, is “never crueler than when it’s turned inward, [and this] bugs the hell out of people.” It’s courageous alternative art. Sounds a lot like what I enjoy about horror fiction.

So who is Bob? Why is he angry? Why floral? Hard to say, but he’s one of the more original characters you’ll find in the genre. Bob is, well, a sunflower embodying the morphed personality of Sam Kinison and Denis Leary, hopped up on some strange mixture of Starbucks, psychedelics, and anabolic steroids. He reminds me of a poster I once saw, called “Defiance,” which featured a tiny mouse snarling and flipping a middle finger at the eagle descending upon it from above with its dangerous talons. That’s Bob: defiance, personified. Which might explain why you haven’t met him before — Notley’s character goes against the grain of most cartoons on the comix page. So thank goodness for books like Dog Killer, the fifth collection of BTAF in print.

Bob often has a message, but I can imagine that he often puzzles readers who don’t quite understand just how deep this defiance goes. Take the title strip, for example, Dog Killer.” [viewable online] All that happens here is that Bob shows up at the doorstep of a white man in a suit, collar opened, head heavy, eyes evasive, saying “Thanks for coming.” Bob shoulders his shotgun and says, “I understand. You need your dog put down and your not man enough to do it.” Bob goes in the back yard, pets the sick dog for four panels, soothing it with “good boys” … and then blows its head open (the extreme closeup on the furry skull bursting is so excessive, you can only make out the fanged upper palate in the carnage). Then Bob blows on his finger in the end panel: “Ooh, I burnt my finger!”

Most people, I imagine, might call this gratuitous violence. A juvenile thrill, akin to pulling the wings off a fly. But as most savvy readers realize, there’s more to such a spectacle of guts than first meets the eye. For one thing, there’s drama in the suspenseful soothing of the dog. This one page is worth a thousand Old Yellers. Then there’s the ugly truth exposed by the blast. It’s everything Old Yeller never had the guts to do. This is accented by Bob’s exposure of the pettiness of human pain (“I burnt my finger!”). And an attack on the lack of backbone in much of the middle class, refusing to both soothe those who are failing and to get their hands dirty when there’s an uncomfortable problem that needs to be solved.

In the back of the book, Notley gives excellent annotations which read like an insightful and witty “director’s commentary” track on a DVD. Notley’s discussion of “Dog Killer” reveals that it’s based on a true story from childhood. He also manages to unveil his general approach to the comic as a whole: “Just as [Bob]‘s holding the dog’s head down and coaxing it, I’m holding the reader’s head down until that moment I make them look at a dog’s head getting pulped. Sometimes you have to take cherished notions into the back yard and blow their heads off, and you can’t look away when you do it.” I couldn’t agree more.

Such thematic depth can be found in even the most silly or bizarre entries in the book — all of them force you to look at something in a new light, from a skewed angle. There’s a lot of meat and grizzle to chew on here, in 158 pages of high energy drawing. I think this book will appeal to horror fans very much. But Bob the Angry Flower eludes genre, ranging from direct political commentary (a number of the pieces in Dog Killer refer explicitly to the 2004 Presidential Election) to surrealism (in one entry, Bob awakens as a bug and cursing Kafka and then transplanting his floral head onto a clone in a gory, pitiless act of decapitation) to science-fiction (Bob makes killer robots) and the gross-out (Bob sticks his fingers in the squirming maggots of a dead bird over and over again in one strip — and that’s the whole bit). I am hardly an expert on the graphic fiction genre, but I think it’s safe to say that Notley’s approach to sequential art is incomparable. The manic and raw drawing style, the play with titles and captions, and the sheer audacity of the premises all reminded me a little bit of the expressionist flourishes of Jhonen Vasquez’s brilliantly sick comic, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, but without the Goth sensibility. Skewed, dark, twisted, smart, sick, scary, witty…even these words don’t do it justice. That’s why it’s art. And why it’s angry.

You gotta see it for yourself. Dog Killer is Stephen Notley’s fifth compilation of BTAF cartoons, but the first American collection (his work originates in Canada). It’s bound to be a hit. The trade paperback is hitting stores this June from Tachyon Publications, for $12.95. Get it while it’s hot-headed.

Visit the publisher: http://www.tachyonpublications.com
Preorder on: amazon.com
Bob also has his very own website, chock full of sample strips, at: http://www.angryflower.com


serpiginous

Published by Michael Arnzen in Dictionscary on May 10th, 2006

Today’s word is “serpiginous” (pronounced “sir-pijin-us”). This pretentiously bizarre adjective actually means “creeping from one part to another” or “having a wavy border” and is often applied by medical doctors to refer to visual skin disorders, like ringworm, snaking lesions, or drunken tattoos. Example: “Her serpiginous freckles run in an S-shape down her back like shizophrenic bird droppings down the sidewalk.” Note that “serpiginous” is not to be confused with “serpentine”– for the former clearly involves a snake-eating pigeon while the latter refers to a snake with a strange affinity for turpentine. Nevertheless, both terms work equally well in limericks and are especially funny when slurred by the mouths of tippling drunks. Some Satanists debate about whether or not the Great Dark One is “serpentine” or “serpiginous” — but the answer is obviously neither, and they really ought to look these words up in the Satanic Collegiate Dictionary before uttering them so carelessly. After all, I’ve heard the Great Dark One is notoriously litiginous.