blog rec

As the paucity of my posts here may suggest, I enjoy reading blogs much more than I enjoy writing one. On that note, I'd like to recommend a great blog that I stumbled across recently: the Faculty Blog at the University of Chicago's Law School. There are some seriously heavy hitters in the legal profession linked, if only tangentially, to U of C's law school, and they rotate in and out on the blog with a wide variety of posts. Recent topics include genetic testing, the authority of the special prosecutor in the Plame case, Hussein's trial, and the rise of Google, to name just a few. For the political science-minded out there, there's an ongoing series of posts from Martha Nussbaum on Hindu-Muslim clashes and their ramifications for democracy in India (which might be especially interesting for you UNC folks given the work of our own Jeff Spinner-Halev). At any rate, check this one out; it's a very interesting read.

Oh, and I especially recommend Strahilevitz's review of Loewen's new book on sundown towns and his related paper "Exclusionary Amenities in Residential Communities".

University of Chicago Law School's Faculty Blog

the search for a truly scary movie

(es+u+cs+t) squared + s + (tl+f)/2 + (a+dr+fs)/n + sin x - 1

Where:
es = escalating music
u = the unknown
cs = chase scenes
t = sense of being trapped
s = shock
tl = true life
f = fantasy
a = character is alone
dr = in the dark
fs = film setting
n = number of people
sin = blood and guts
1 = stereotypes

That, according to a team of British researchers, is the formula to mathematically calculate the scariness of a particular film.

The formula combines elements of suspense, realism and gore, plus shock value, to measure how scary a film is. Researchers spent two weeks watching horror films like The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs in pursuit of the formula. The model focuses on three major areas: suspense, realism and gore.

Factors considered include the use of escalating music, the balance between true life and fantasy, and how much blood and guts are involved.

As suspense plays such a pivotal role in the success of a scary film, its elements - escalating music, the unknown, chase scenes and a sense of being trapped - are brought together and then squared. Shock value is then added.

In addition, the experts say a film needs to be realistic to be truly frightening. Accordingly, they tried to balance out the parts which made a film either too unrealistic or too close to life.

They then looked at how many characters were in the movie, assuming audiences empathise with a smaller number of people.

The team at King's College, London also took into account the darkness of the film's setting.

Now, I don’t disagree with the elements that this team of researchers included in their formula. On their own, they all seem to make sense. But there must be something amiss in the way that they combine those elements because, after viewing and coding a large selection of films and then plugging the numbers into that formula, they come up with The Shining as the most frightening film ever.

I’ve seen The Shining, and I don’t find it scary. At all. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a pretty good movie – it’s just not scary. The best I can give it is a “kinda creepy.” The empty rooms, Nicholson’s performance, the stillness and quiet, and those two little girls all make it vaguely unsettling in a way, but it’s not anything that I would give a second thought to when turning out the lights and climbing into bed at night. For that kind of effect, you need a legitimately scary film, and in my book, The Shining ain’t it.

So what is?

I’ve been giving some serious thought to that in the last week or so as the Halloween season gets into full swing. I’d like to go out and rent a few genuinely frightening films, brew up some apple cider and bake a couple of pumpkin pies, and settle in for a night of getting scared witless. Problem is, I don’t know of any actually scary movies.

The problem with formulas like the one above is that what is truly horrifying or frightening varies from person to person. No two people are scared in the same way by the same thing. What might cause one person to jump out of their seat (my wife, for instance) may cause another person to yawn and glance at their watch. I must have a decidedly different than average take on what constitutes horror, because when I scan the various lists out there of the top ten scary movies, I don’t find anything that I really consider to be scary. Some of them I don’t even consider to belong in the genre of scary movies at all.

With that in mind, let me try to give some idea of the things that raise the hairs on the back of my neck. In doing so, I’ll of necessity be highlighting some of the things and movies that I don’t find scary at all.

I’ll begin with the latter. First off, let me say that haunted house movies are simply not scary. I’ve seen The Haunting on many of the top ten lists, often in the top five, and I just don’t get it. I can say from experience that this is a film more likely to bring laughter than chills. The same goes for most other movies I’ve seen where a house or the spirits that haunt it is the primary antagonist. I don’t care if it creaks, groans, mysteriously closes doors, generates cryptic writing, features bleeding walls, or folds in upon itself, a house just ain’t scary. Well, let me qualify that: a house can be scary if you’re actually the one in it, but no filmmaker has yet succeeded in making a house a frightening thing on screen. Put me in a supposedly haunted house in the middle of nowhere by myself at night, and I’ll most likely run screaming into the wilderness or hang myself from the rafters before five minutes have passed. But put on a movie where people wander around a house hearing things, getting trapped, and reciting cheesy dialogue, and I’ll want to hang myself for a different reason. This is where the realism factor comes into play for me; there just isn’t enough of a chance that the events that play out in “scary house” movies might actually happen for me to find them frightening.

Then there are the movies that I don’t consider to be scary movies at all. Chief among these would be The Exorcist and The Silence of the Lambs. I think these are both terrific films, well-acted and well-written and generally very competently directed. But they’re not scary. I don’t even think they’re intended to be scary. I tend to think of them more as psychological dramas with a few somewhat frightening moments. Whatever scares they provide are simply icing on the cake, pleasant surprises that, while great in and of themselves, don’t constitute the purpose of the films. I think a truly frightening film needs to have scaring the viewer as its primary goal, and these films don’t fall into that category.

Also, slasher flicks aren’t scary. Watching some mindless drone (Jason, Michael Myers) wander around with a large knife and inexplicable powers of immortality and teleportation isn’t scary. It’s annoying. And it gets old really quick.

Perhaps it would be easier if I list what I actually find frightening. When I was a kid, the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series scared the bejeebus out of me. Particularly those stories that fall into the “urban legend” camp. The most frightening of these for me is the story of the babysitter who receives phone calls from a creepy voice that says things like “I’ll be there soon” and “won’t be long now”. Everybody knows this one: the calls are coming from inside the house! The kids are hacked to pieces and, depending on the version, the babysitter may or may not make it out. There’s a variation on this featuring a kid who comes home early from school to an empty house except for the family dog, who seems to be having trouble breathing. Turns out he’s choking on the fingers of an escaped lunatic that’s hiding in the attic. “High Beams” scared me; to this day I check my back seat when getting in the car alone at night. I also got freaked out by the story in which the girl gives a stranded grandmother a ride only to find out that the old woman is actually an escaped serial killer in drag with a purse full of instruments of torture.

What frightened me (and in some cases still frightens me) about these stories was the feeling that they could actually happen. Every time I came home from school to an empty house or was home alone while my folks were out the babysitter story would run through my head. I’d get a baseball bat and walk around checking all the dark corners and under the beds, then sit huddled in the living room trying to think about something else. Unfortunately they don’t translate well to film. They’re short stories, and they derive most of their scare from the creation and maintenance of tension and suspense that a feature-length film can’t really deliver. The film Urban Legend is a great example of the absolute wretchedness that results when a filmmaker tries to take a series of unconnected frightening events and weave them into a coherent story. Things that were frightening by themselves in short story form became laughable in the hands of a second-rate director and a cast of teen actors.

So what are some movies that I’ve seen that have really scared me? Off the top of my head, I can’t really think of any. There were parts of The Blair Witch Project that I found scary, mostly because of the realism involved. Event Horizon was scary, and I remember being scared during parts of The Ring. I’ve seen the first twenty minutes or so of Night of the Living Dead, and I remember that being creepy and seeming to have the potential to be scary. That scene on the moors in An American Werewolf in London freaked me out. But for the most part I haven’t seen many movies that I would say really scared me at the time and stuck with me afterward. My only hope is that I haven’t made much of an effort to really find and watch scary movies, so I figure there’s got to be some good ones out there that I just haven’t seen/heard of yet.

I realize that there’s not much a connecting theme here in terms of what I find scary and what I find laughable. I guess it’s better to say that it’s not the premise of a movie that makes it frightening or not in my book. I’m willing to believe that there could be an actually scary movie about a scary house. It’s just that it hasn’t been done well yet. What really makes a scary movie succeed, in my mind, is good filmmaking, good dialogue, and good acting. You can take the most horrific premise imaginable and turn it into an inadvertent comedy by hiring a poor director, throwing in a few cheesy lines, and casting a group of wooden actors. Conversely, you can take a concept that on its face doesn’t seem scary and turn it into a truly frightening film with the right combination of music, good directing, and solid writing and acting.

During the past few days (in my off-work hours, of course), I’ve been searching for some movies that do just that. Here’s the few I’ve found so far that, based on reviews I’ve read, hold some promise for being actually scary:

A Nightmare on Elm Street (the original)
Night of the Living Dead
Carnival of Souls
When a Stranger Calls
28 Days Later

What's missing from this list? What are some movies that have kept you up at night or made you look over your shoulder or under your bed? What are the really good scary movies out there?

from the front lines

Her eyes well with tears as she tells me about another of her organization’s members, a man who had been suffering intense and chronic pain from a tooth that had nearly rotted away. This man had no insurance and could not afford a dentist bill, and was on the verge of pulling the tooth out himself when this organization, a local nonprofit, was able to offer him some part-time work that supplied enough money to have the tooth extracted. It is another in a string of similar stories that I have heard already this day, and it is beginning to be too much. She can barely speak at this point, her voice choked with emotion, and so I suggest a break. We could both use one.

Later, after our meetings have concluded, she drives me around the area to help me get a sense of the living conditions there. We drive past a series of trailers, which she refers to as the “nicer homes” in the community. “Most people live in more dilapidated trailers or in very old houses,” she notes. “There’s one of our members’ houses over there. There’s no floor on the inside and he can’t afford to get it fixed. He lost his arm in a machinery accident several years ago, and then his wife died. He lives there with three kids and tries to keep things together on about $8,000 a year. It isn’t easy.” No, I don’t imagine it is.

It isn’t all bad news, though. We stop by a crafters cooperative that has organized local craftspeople and helps them get their products to market. “This place has kept several families afloat already this year. People around here are just trying to pay their bills and keep the lights on. They have to work several jobs in order to do that, but this cooperative is helping to ease that burden somewhat.” Amazingly, she seems hopeful. I ask a few questions, but mostly I just listen. “Come on,” she says, “I’ll show you the business area.”

Blink and you’ll miss it. Literally. She points to our left. “There’s the only grocery store in the county. Over here these businesses have closed. Shops come and go here, mostly because people can’t cope with being in the red for the first couple of years. They get through a year, maybe 18 months, and then have to close their doors. Then someone else comes in and the same thing happens again. Entrepreneurship isn’t easy when the labor market for your customer base is so uncertain.” We drive past a couple of shops, a restaurant, and then we’re out of the downtown area. We pass an old building with a few cars in the parking lot. “That’s the satellite of the county community college,” she says. “Some of their training classes have been a lifesaver for folks here. If we didn’t have that, even more people would need to leave to look for work and education. With land prices going up and people tempted to sell of old family plots, and nothing to keep them here…we’re losing a culture, a history. We’re losing our way of life.”

We drive on in silence for a time, then turn sharply up a steep hill. The engine groans and she shifts into a lower gear. I worry that we won’t make it up the slope, but the car gives a mighty effort and we finally crest the hill in front of a cordoned-off memorial, in the midst of which sits a large cut stone surrounded by flowers and native plants. “That’s where Junaluska’s buried,” she whispers. We get out and walk over to the memorial. The air is cold and long shadows have begun to fall. It’s getting late. “Junaluska was a Cherokee who lived with his people in these mountains. He fought with Andrew Jackson for a time and even saved his life in battle. They had a bond, or so Junaluska thought. When Jackson became president he ordered the removal of the Cherokee, the beginning of the Trail of Tears. Junaluska and his people were forced out to Oklahoma. That’s really the history of our area right there. Betrayal. The county government has abandoned us, the old jobs are gone. We get something going and then it’s taken away. People lose their houses, houses that have been in the family for generations, so that a road can be widened. The jobs where people have worked for most of their lives leave, and there’s nothing to take their place. There’s a real sense of…I don’t want to say hopelessness…but our people have been betrayed so often it’s tough for them to feel optimistic about life here. We work hard, bust our tails, and then it crumbles out from under us. The county abandons the local school, or a program that was helping us on our feet gets cut. I’ll be blunt, ‘cause I’m too tired not to be: under the previous administration, we were just getting back on our feet. Now I have to choose between buying groceries or gas every month. Maybe I’m talking out of school, but…” I assure her that she’s not.

As we drive down into town the conversation winds it way back to the work of her organization and other groups, of the grassroots efforts that are keeping these communities going. We talk about development strategies, exchange ideas of where to go next. The car pulls into the parking lot of my hotel, and the discussion falters. I suggest what’s gone unspoken through much of our visit, the idea that lurks beneath the surface: that we are fighting a losing battle. We consider that for a moment, then dismiss it. We don’t want to believe it. We can’t believe it. The engine idles softly. We sit in silence, staring out the window, as the sun sinks behind the slopes.

working, running, drinking...

That pretty much sums up my life here lately. Work, both remunerated and domestic, has been intense. We've got a rather important and large-scale annual event coming up at the ole daily grind that is demanding most of my time, and the home improvement activities continue apace. The grass in the back yard is coming up nicely, thank you very much.

More enjoyable has been the continued running in preparation for the upcoming half marathon in Wilmington. My running group ran a 10K in Carrboro a couple of weekends ago and, while I'm still experiencing some suffering from that event in the form of shin splints and general all-around soreness, we were all pretty happy with the results. My finishing time was 55:21, which is just below a 9-minute-mile pace. Given that I was shooting to finish in just under 60 minutes, I was pleasantly surprised to shave nearly 5 minutes off that projection. I paid for that quickened pace later, though, and my training runs are just now getting back up to speed. It was good to get a race under my belt so that I can more accurately guage how competition and the race-day atmosphere affects my running. Now I know that the excitement causes me to run faster than my target pace, which is good, because I was completely out of steam by the end of the 10K, which is just shy of half the distance I'll have to run in November. Getting out of the gate too quickly for the half marathon will likely mean that I won't be able to finish the race.











Afterward we hit Weaver Street for that classic post-race meal: beer and eggs. I'd like to recommend Young's Oatmeal Stout for that post-run drink; it's a meal in itself. We sat on the lawn for a while, enjoying the first genuinely cool day of the season, and then got burgers and fish over at the Spotted Dog. Then it was on to the Ale House to catch the Yankees-Red Sox end-of-season series and to have a few more beers. Running and drinking, as I said.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the visit of an old college friend a couple of days later. Jennifer from DC stopped by for a brief stay on her way to conduct some interviews at a prestigious private school down the road. We had some great food, including BBQ at the Q-Shack and country cooking at Mama Dips, hit a local pub, and went shopping down on Franklin Street. All in all a good, if too short, visit.

Drinking continued Wednesday night down at the Southend Brewery in Raleigh. We went down partly for drinks but primarily for the open mic night, at which our good friends' band, The Gravy Boys, was performing. You'll recognize most of the band members from the shot of my running group above. The Gravy Boys are mostly a cover band, drawing heavily from bluegrass, folk, country, and classic rock, but they also have a very good (and growing) repertoire of original songs. So good was their performance at this particular open mic night that they were approached by the manager for a series of regular shows. We had some beers and enjoyed their take on The Weight, Don't Think Twice, It's Alright, and a few other standards.



Saturday saw more of running and drinking, though fortunately very little work. Saturday morning's 8-mile run was one of the worst of my life, both due to the distance, lingering soreness from the 10K, and one of the most sickeningly humid days in recent memory. All that was forgotten, however, as we watched the Dawgs handily dispose of Tennessee at Rocky Top. During my sophomore year of college I, along with several of my dormmates, bleached my hair, dyed it red, and painstakingly painted my face with red and black for that year's much-anticipated matchup with the Volunteers between the hedges. I'll never forget being heckled by Tennessee fans, on our home turf, as we trudged back to the dorm after being soundly beaten that day. As we watched the Dogs hand it to them on Saturday (despite a couple of junk touchdowns by the Vols), I wished I could be there in Knoxville to give an earful to those sorry, misguided scrubs. Watching on TV, though, was pretty satisfying as well.

phoning it in

I feel the need to update the site, but I lack the motivation and the requisite caffeination to write a real post, so I'll leave you with what amounts to the blog equivalent of "phoning it in": a list of the three items recommended to me to purchase by the computer models over at amazon.com:

Recommended for you: The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation, by Alexander Roadie
Because you purchased: Ferguson: An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought), by Adam Ferguson.

Recommended for you: Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards, by Henry Brady
Because you purchased: Subversive Institutions: The Design and Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics), by Valerie Bunce.

Recommended for you: Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, by Sidney Mintz
Because you purchased: High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work, and Pink Collar Identities in the Caribbean, by Carla Freeman.

Once again, Amazon isn't even close to the books I actually have my eye on right now. That's not to say that I don't find the items recommended intriguing, it's just that they're not on my list to get to anytime soon.

What would be great is if Amazon could more accurately predict what I'll want to read in the next few months by utilizing a more complex formula for making recommendations. It needs to more heavily weight items I've recently purchased versus more dated purchases and to incorporate into the mix items that I've placed on my wishlist (again weighting the most recent items more heavily). An even better model might incorporate blogs I read, magazines I subscribe to, or media that I most frequently consume. If Amazon got a little more sophisticated, it could tell me what I want to read before I even know it.

Which, while admittedly ultimately undesirable, would be kinda cool.

oh gosh, dontcha know

In about an hour I’m heading to the airport to catch a flight to St. Paul, Minnesota, where I’ll be attending a training session at the Northwest Area Foundation for a pilot community development and poverty reduction program. While there I’ll also be meeting with a representative of Minnesota’s Community Capital Fund to discuss the possibilities for establishing access to resource pools and gap financing for rural development projects. This trip kind of fell into my lap at the last minute, so I’ll be spending most of my time prepping for meetings. However, this will be my first visit to the Twin Cities area (and quite likely my only one), so I’d like to get out and see a bit of the city, maybe visit a jazz club, and at the very least find some good food (is there any food that Minnesota or the northern mid-west is known for? Didn’t think so…). I’m scheduled to fly back Friday night, so if you don’t hear from me over the weekend, I’m most likely lost in the Twin Cities, probably futilely attempting to find my way through the skyways, or I’ve accidentally driven to Canada and can’t get back into the country. Given my navigational skills, that’s not as unlikely as it might seem.

November 1st

As I’ve noted before, I’ve been in a bit of musical limbo lately regarding the kinds of music and the artists that I listen to. Whereas I used to buy new records with great gusto, I rarely make any new album purchases these days. It’s a combination of fiscal restraint, a quarter-life musical crisis, unintended detachment from the music scene, and who knows what else. While that situation looks to continue for the foreseeable future, it will be pleasantly disturbed by a couple of new releases on November 1st.

First up: Wilco’s live album. Having seen them in concert five times now and twice with the new lineup, I’m not expecting any surprises here: just some rollicking rock-n-roll songs slightly stripped down and reworked from the studio releases. The track listing is what would be expected, although it’s notably light on material from Being There and Summerteeth. Still, this should be a good one.

And then, more interestingly, there’s the new album from Sun Kil Moon, Mark Kozelek’s follow-up to Red House Painters and a band I’ve mentioned here before. The new album, Tiny Cities, features Kozelek reworking 11 songs by Modest Mouse. Yeah, Modest Mouse. If you’ve heard his album of AC/DC covers, you’re already aware that the songs will sound radically different than their original incarnations. Should be interesting.

If these are the only albums that I get this Fall, it’ll be a damn good season for music. Hopefully there’ll be some other fine releases as well.