Nothing is scary when you understand it: American Horror Story Wraps It Up

I am a bit fascinated by the concept of Numbers Stations.  Not enough to buy a copy of The Conet Project, but I have lost full evenings online listening to clips.

If you're not familiar with Numbers Stations, you may remember the first season of ABC's Lost, where our heroes were picking up a seemingly random sequence of numbers coming over their radio.  It was spooky stuff, because you're hearing a human voice, and they seem to think they're making sense, but there's something else clearly going on, something organized, and not knowing what is happening puts you at a disadvantage.

These things are very real, and they make no sense.  Hearing someone repeating "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" over and over, or a series of chimes, or a series of numbers  appearing mysteriously over shortwave (where the broadcasts got their name) sets you back a pace.  Disembodied voices, garbled by the inconsistencies of the aether, making no sense...  its utterly discomfiting.



No, it does not steady the nerves to think: oh, its spies broadcasting via shortwave from behind enemy lines. But it is an explanation.  But what if its not spies...?  What if we don't know...?

We know that people will generally come up with some sort of animistic explanation for the world around them when they don't have facts.  Its the source for stories of goblins, faeries, leprechauns, and, of course, ghosts.

American Horror Story was a ghost story.  A 13-episode ghost story, which breaks from the usual mold of ghost-story movies, which give you 90-120 minutes to get a deep immersion, get spooked, and get out.  It doesn't give you an opportunity over several months to let you question too much about the situation, or, indeed, become familiar with the ghost or learn the "rules" of the ghosts or show.

What made my two favorite ghost-story movies, The Shining and The Haunting, work so well was the slow boil to meltdown.  We may have seen pieces of what was happening, and most certainly the creators of both films (Kubrick and Wise, respectively), knew not to just create a separate magical world with traffic laws and a tax code, if they wanted to keep their movies frightening.

You can ride American Horror Story as a ghost story right through the Halloween 2-parter, but after that, the show was trying to explain too much.  In fact, 13 episodes may have been too much.  I can't help but think that we never needed more than 8 episodes.

There are still plenty of avenues to explore in American Horror Story, but much like the undoing of Lost (a show that it seems we all agreed to quit talking about simultaneously), it seems that explaining things will only reduce the show in the end, make it a shadow of the early promise, where nothing is ever scary because we now understand what's happening, and when we understand, how scary can something really be?*  Even ghosts.  The show's ghosts, after all, seem to be on a continual character growth curve, which is sort of the opposite of what I'd always found frightening about the concept of ghosts, that they were caught in a loop of a moment of despair, an idea the show plays with, but seems to apply with terrible inconsistency.

Nonetheless, I think from a "fantasy TV show" aspect, American Horror Story still came out fairly well.  And I'll be very curious to see how they handle it if they're given another season.


*obviously there are exceptions to this rule, but when your show is based on the ethereal, I think that's a whole other set of challenges.  I think its more often in real life, when we uncover the truth about the past, that things become distressing, but that's different from "scary", as in "fight or flight"

SW Advent Calendar December 25

Santor hath finished his Merry Duties

and so a very, Merry Santor-mas to you and yours!

Superman (and I) wish you a Merry Christmas Eve!

Merry Christmas, Signal Corps!

I can think of no finer sentiment to share on this Christmas Eve than the words of the Man of Steel.

Tonight, let's be grateful for those with whom we spend the holiday, loved ones or otherwise.  And I hope you were able to help out your neighbors and fellow humans here on Planet Earth.

Here at Signal Watch, we're raising a glass to you!  May your  Christmas Day be merry and bright!

If you're out and about, come home safely.  Tell your family I said "howdy", and let's look forward to 2012 as the year where we figure it all out.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!  God bless us, every one.

SW Advent Calendar Day 24

Merry Christmas Eve, Signal Corps!

I hope you've had a chance to get out and enjoy the sights and sounds of the Holidays, however you celebrate them and however they look in your town.

Like Superman, here, I get to spend Christmas Eve with the lady for whom I'd make the world spin backward.  That's all I need for Christmas this year.

Have a lovely silent night.

Santor, he deliverith

SW Advent Calendar: December 23

Sometimes Christmas is all about having it out with the extended family.

I have very warm memories of watching this movie as a child. Donald's coat is still one of my favorite visuals in cartoons or live action comedy. This may inform much of what I find funny.

For Christmas, I look like a villain

So, I've been off work since Wednesday at 5:00.  Thus, the last time I shaved was early Wednesday morning.

Before heading out to the gym today, I decided to do some shaving.  If I don't shave, and I sweat, my face can really start to break out.

I use an electric razor.  Something about real razors that close to my jugular has always freaked me out, so I spend money every couple of years on a Norelco or Braun electric razor.  Of late, I've used a foil razor.  It sort of does the trick.  But with a foil razor, if you wait too long between shaves, it can actually hurt a bit as you scrape your face.  But, of course aside from redness which immediately goes away, no big deal.

Today while I was shaving, I noticed the usual slight discomfort was a bit amplified and of a different, sharper character.  I looked at the razor and noticed nothing out of the ordinary, so I went back to shaving, and it seemed to get worse.  And then I noticed I was actually bleeding a little.

This is what I did to myself:

the red in my eye if just from an overabundance of Yuletide Spirit

So I scratched the living hell out of myself, and now - I look like a villain in a 90's movie.  Just in time for Christmas.

The scratches should be part of a cautionary tale, like: oh, you can tell he fought a bear.  But in my case, it looks like I lost a fight to a cat.  Which isn't as cool.

Apparently Jamie noticed my razor fell over and put it back.  What neither or us noticed was that the foil was damaged.  Because my razor was sitting where it always sits, I couldn't figure out what changed between Wednesday morning and today, and just assumed I was a bigger wimp today than in every other preceding day.  Until the blood.

See, this is how I know I'm going to die in a completely preventable manner.  "Oh, you mean you shouldn't just wake up with your pillow soaked in your own blood every morning?  I just thought that was part of getting older."

I am an idiot.

Blog Spotlight - Down and Out: An Austin Love Story

So, some time this summer PaulT and I headed down to the Alamo Ritz to see Babyface because I was promised lots of Barbara Stanwyck (which it delivered in spades).  Prior to the movie, a lovely young woman sat down a couple seats down from PaulT, and because it turns out PaulT, myself and this person are all the sort of person who will talk to just random people, we talked a bit before the show began, and then afterward all wound up at a bar next door for a few drinks.

That lovely young woman was LT.  She's fairly new to town, a world traveler, highly educated, and now unemployed and trying to make a go of it here in Waterloo.  Turns out she can also turn a phrase, so I encourage you to check out her blog Down and Out: An Austin Love Story.

I think you'll find it an interesting read.  I know I do.  I'm personally totally rooting for LT, and it wasn't so long ago I was also unemployed in this town under very different circumstances.  So if you have a chance, give it a read.

SW Advent Calendar December 22

and now, in what's becoming a Christmas tradition, I think, here's my annual posting of The Pogues and Kirsty McColl's "Fairytale of New York"