Dawsferatu's House of Horrors

  1. "Because it's so much fun, Jan, get it!" Watch enough interviews with Quentin Tarantino on YouTube and you will inevitably wind up with this clip from his 2003 appearance on KRON 4 in your recommended tab. For the three of you reading this who haven't seen it and don't particularly care to, it's a publicity piece gone bad. Jan Wahl, critic for KRON-TV and various San Francisco based newspapers, antagonizes Tarantino until he snaps, dredging up every talking point about preserving children's innocence along the way. After some quibbling back and forth between the two about whether or not the film empowers women, Wahl asks, "Why the need for so much gruesome, graphic violence?" To which an exasperated Tarantino responds, "Because it's so much fun, Jan, get it!" What follows is a conversation that has been had and had and had again since Moe first slapped Curly. "I'd like to see you get attacked by some kids who had just...

I. "I am big," she said. "It's the pictures that got small." Here comes your close-up.   II. The leading man's face Appears shrouded, black and white-- Chiaroscuro.   III. Sanjuro went to Italy, where he soon became The Man With No Name. IV. She was a star, once. Now they say she's just another Sad back lot lizard.

Coined in the late 1880s to deride the works it describes, “pointillism” refers to a style of Impressionistic painting that employs discrete points of color that, when viewed from a distance, cohere into a single image. Notable pointillist artworks include Georges Seurat’s 1886 A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and Roy Lichtenstein’s 1964 Ohhh… Alright (pictured below), both of which--despite the nearly eighty years between them--serve as near perfect examples of the style. They are images created in composite; every individual dot relies on its neighbor for meaning.   The literary works of James Ellroy and Frank Stanford operate based on a similar principle. In Ellroy’s later novels and throughout Stanford’s poetry, each sentence (or line, as the case may be) typically contains a single image, emotion, or action. As one sentence/line builds on the one before it and segues into the next, the scene or scenario takes shape in the reader’s mind.   Obviously, th...

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.        Revelation 6:8   “Mein Führer, I can walk!”      Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Published seven years after the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, William Dean Howells’ short story “Editha” concerns the process whereby the titular character convinces her fiance, one George Gearson, to enlist. After some cajoling on Editha’s part, George does finally volunteer to fight. George goes to war. George fights. And George dies. So it goes. Editha’s role in the story turns the Spanish-American War into a bizarre psychosexual drama. George’s willingness to fight for his country becomes confused with his willingness to fight for Edi...