Picos Gemeos

It's been now 6 weeks since olamina came to visit Brazil. We had many interesting conversations during those days we spent together, mostly about our families and lives. Two of them have stayed with me.

The first one was about creativity, the energy we place into what we create and how we must be careful of what we bring into the world. I was in the midst of writing a first draft of a novel (for NaNoWriMo) - a horror novel - and it made me stop and think about my story, especially as it had demonic elements. In fact, a strange coincidence happened at the time. Just before Olamina and I went off to São Paulo for a long weekend, I wrote a passage in the novel that referenced a snake. When I got back, I discovered that one of my beloved pets had been killed by one.

At first I was really upset about this - even thinking I had somehow brought this about by "invoking" demonic elements. Took me about a month to get over his death and I've come to realise that part of grieving involves a little guilt. What if I had stayed behind with him? What if I had written something different?

I'm still going ahead with the novel and have started to delve more deeply into the symbolism around snakes. Grief as well: how can I add to my writing what I felt, since death goes hand in hand with horror? I guess I'm trying to make the best of it and learn from the experience, assimilating his loss and ultimately bringing some meaning into my novel - for the reader and myself.

The second chat we had was about the platform Substack. I was telling her about wanting to post more often on LJ, maybe even rebrand my account, and she suggested I try Substack instead. "You have so many stories to tell," she told me.

I already knew of Substack thanks to two writers, Hattie Crisell and George Saunders, who publish newsletters on creative writing. But I'd never stopped to consider creating one for myself. I started researching Substack, signing up to more accounts, and finally created a newsletter for myself.

I've been thinking since then about what I would write, how often I would publish, and if I should monetize. I've researched other writers, read articles in favour and against Substack. I've behaved like a typical Libra, weighing the pros and the cons. Finally, I decided I would launch it at the start of January, giving me this holiday break to tinker with it and get it ready.

Then news broke yesterday about Substack's decision not to remove or demonitize nazi content from its site. Damn... the nazis were one of the main reasons I left Twitter. This has thrown a clog in my plans and made me stop and rethink what I'm doing. Do I really want to send out a newsletter regularly? Do I want to commit to Substack and support a platform that encourages hate groups to proliferate? Do I care to play the monetization game? Should I maybe just log off and read a book?

Should I just post more regularly on Livejournal and leave it at that?

Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I first heard of this novel when it won Goodreads' Popular vote for Best Horror of 2022. Curiosity piqued, I downloaded a sample to my Kindle. I was immediately sucked in by the narrative's voice: a young woman called Mallory who used to be a star athlete but, due to some personal losses, became a drug addict, cut off from family and friends. Also, Mallory somehow has the strange ability to sense when someone is observing her (discovered when she attends a university research experiment on parapsychology).

The novel opens with Mallory, a few months sober and living in a halfway house, ready to embark on her first job back in the real world, thanks to her sponsor’s help. She lands a babysitting job for a wealthy family who have just moved into an affluent neighbourhood in New Jersey.

Caroline and Ted Maxwell epitomise success. They are conscientious well-to-do liberals, who are aware of Mallory’s background but want to help her (Caroline works with drug addicts in a local hospital). They entrust their 5-year-old son Teddy into Mallory’s care, which I thought worked really well in establishing tension in the novel. You want Mallory to succeed in this job but you are also afraid she’s going to fuck it up, that something awful will happen to Teddy. And very soon the reader discovers there’s something strange going on in the Maxwell’s house.

There are a few big twists to the novel. The first one, which came as part of the design of the book, made me laugh out loud. I’m glad I went into the book not knowing anything about it – I think there’s a danger of guessing this first twist beforehand, and I feel particularly sorry for Brazilian readers as the publishers in Brazil put the first twist right on the book cover!

The next big twists come towards the end, which I didn’t see coming. They were a bit silly, to be honest, and didn’t work quite so well for me, though Rekulak does a good job of tying everything up by the final line.

All in all, it was a silly but entertaining read, though more of a paranormal thriller than a horror story.

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From thefridayfive:

1) If you think your house is haunted, what should you do?
Pull out the Ouija Board, obv. Get some mates around, light up some candles and call the spirit(s) for a chat. What do they want? How long are they staying? And do they know any juicy secrets?

2) When should you investigate a strange noise in your basement?
When it's daylight and you are well armed as well as backed up by mates (can be the same people who participated in the Ouija Board session with you.) Do not, under any circumstances, go down there by yourself - especially just in your underwear calling out "who's there? Anybody there?"

3) How do you know if an abandoned building is safe to visit?
If there is a visible sign at its entrace saying it has passed a recent Health and Safety inspection.

4) How do you decide whether to solve a problem as a team, or split up and go it alone?
It boils down to who's in your team. If there's one member who is always looking out for themselves, always moaning and complaining, works for an evil corporation and would push you in front of a monster/killer at the drop of a hat to save their ass then you are better off on your own.

5) Where do you store your knives and where would you look if one was missing?
We store them in the guesthouse's dining room, the inside kitchen (used just for the family's breakfast) and the external kitchen (where the main meals are prepared.) We also have a gardener's shed, with axes, saws, etc. It's like the brazilian version of Camp Crystal Lake over here.

Happy Halloween! 

Standing in one of the chalets’ verandas, the mountains all around, cats at my feet: “I should film this and post it online.”

Sweeping leaves down the path that leads to the guesthouse’s main house, poems and prose crop up: “I should weave this into something online.”

Book club meetings over video, it’s inevitable I will conclude: “everyone online must find out what I think about his novel!”

Dream fragments, quotes, cooking recipes, London memories, ghost tales or even complete fantasies: everything is grist for the online mill.

The idea for this written piece, though, was fashioned – you guessed – offline.

I told my boyfriend: "I'm thinking of starting a new blog but I have no idea what to call it." It would be a blog dedicated to my new life in Brasil, living with my family in a small town in the state of Minas Gerais and helping run a guesthouse.

"How do you say Twin Peaks in Portuguese?" he asked. When he'd visited the town in 2000, he had joked how it reminded him of a "Brasilian Twin Peaks". Perhaps because of its eccentric characters. Perhaps because of its sleepy, remote nature. Perhaps because it had a colourful history (my great-grandmother, for example, is rumoured to have killed her first two husbands with glass powder mixed into their food.) Then there are the stories of werewolves, ghosts and other strange going ons in these mountains that surround the town - including, more recently, UFOs.

So that's the reason for this journal's name. I'm hoping this blog will be a place to share tales of this small town, life in our family's guesthouse and thoughts on Brasil and its culture. But I reserve the right to keep this journal as random as possible, with videos, songs and other bits and pieces added occasionally. A little bit like my real life.

Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho by Stephen Rebello

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On one level, this book is about the making of "Psycho" - from the story based on Ed Gein's killings that germinated the novel of the same name to the massive cultural phenomenon it became upon release, almost turning into a success Hitchcock could never escape from. On another level, this book was to me a great example of how storytelling should work; how to craft a narrative, how to create characters, setting, plot and suspense - all through observing how Hitchcock handled his material.

Film buffs will love the way Rebello shows what happened behind the scenes: the shooting of the famous shower scene, Hitchcock's relationships with the studio execs and stars, and the techniques he used to achieve certain camera shots.

I thought the marketing campaign around Psycho was particularly interesting. Hitchcock filmed a featurette at the house and Bates Motel, giving the viewer a tour of a place "now for sale" after the "terrible events that took place there." It's nicely macabre and tongue-in-cheek. He also did something unheard of at the time: he asked/insisted that film goers watch the film from the beginning, instead of just wandering in halfway through (as was bizarrely the custom at the time.) People were outraged that they had to wait in line until the start of the film, instead of popping in whenever they wanted, but their curiosity won over as the word-of-mouth grew stronger, and a new filmgoing habit was born.

I'd recommend watching Psycho before reading this book, even if you've seen it before.

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City of the Dead is a little known horror classic from 1960 that is worth checking out, especially if you like Hitchcock's Psycho. Although it was filmed before Psycho, it was only released afterwards. Similarities in plot twists branded it a plagiarism, but it's now obvious that both films were tapping into some zeitgeist that was just round the corner: the 60s' counterculture explosion.

I'd never even heard of City of the Dead before this last Saturday, when I saw it alongside other horror films at naturalbornkaos and moveslikegiallo's awesome Hemel Hellfire Weekender (a back to back horror films marathon plus a quiz, pizza and a raffle of lousy straight-to-DVDs that left everyone a "winner".)

The film revolves around a small village where a witch was burnt in the 1600s - a place now cursed with dry fog and creepy inhabitants. A young university student (a Hitchcock blonde) is encouraged by her university professor to visit the village for two weeks and write her dissertation on the witch persecutions. She arrives and stays at a creepy inn, where all sorts of warnings to run away fail to register in her radar. When she disappears, her uni beau plus her brother decide to investigate.

The film was known in the U.S. as 'Horror Hotel', which lent fire to the critics accusations of plagiarism. Like Hitchcock's Psycho, it has a profusion of stuffed animals hanging on walls, a ballsy blonde that walks straight into danger and a revelation surrounding an old woman's corpse.

I attended a talk at the BFI a week ago on Hitchcock's Women and their magic, delivered by Camille Paglia. It was an amusing talk, in particular because Camille sounded like she'd drunk three cups of coffee beforehand - she was so enthusiastic about her subject. The main thing that stayed with me was her theory that Hitchcock's women were quite independent and unlike the stereotype of the 50s dutiful suburban wife. Impulsive and determined (Rear Window), sexually aggressive (North by Northwest), daredevils (To Catch a Thief), an enigma to men (Vertigo). There were some elements of that in the women of The City of the Dead.

I then started wondering why these two films are so alike. Could it be their writers and directors were somewhat channeling the counterculture movement's birth (on the back of the 50s beat movement?) Psycho with its transsexual killer (upside-down sexual mores) and The City of the Dead with its satanism (overturning of Christianity, the hippies experimentations that led to new cults.) The chills and fears played upon by these films were the anxieties of their audiences? (Including women who are too independent and don't need men.)

Anyway... City of the Dead is worth checking out - perhaps even as a double bill with Psycho.



Oh look... it's available in its entirety on YouTube!

My family bought its first VCR in 1985, when I was ten years old. Our building had an inhouse cable TV channel (very modern for the time) which showed two films at night (picked by the building manager); but we lived right by a large film rental shop and had wanted for a while the option to choose our own films. The weekend routine was for me to pick five films (this would allow us to keep them until Monday morning) - one comedy, one drama, one action/thriller and two horrors.

The first two films we rented were Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and a B-movie horror from 1983 called The Lift. Indiana was my brother's choice while The Lift was mine. Afterwards, I invented a game with my friends in the building where everyone was trapped in a space (say, a part of the playground that was made up of three walls) while one person played the killer lift (arms for wires that snuck through the door, latched onto legs and dragged them out to their death.)

This memory came back to me today as I was waiting for my tower block's elevator. There's a sign by it that says: "don't throw any garbage in the elevator. CCTV is in full operation." Pointless: you can find all sorts of things in the elevator, from chewed chicken legs to napkins and candy wrappers, and as far as I know nobody has ever been penalised for this. The elevators are new too, installed just last year at great expense to all property owners, but they are already keyed, scratched, spat and battered.

I toyed with this private fantasy as the elevator rose, of it coming to life as someone was defacing it, the walls slowly starting to close in on them as the light flickered and they desperately tried to get out (to no avail). Squish.

The version of The Lift I watched back in 1985 was dubbed in Portuguese - I somehow always thought it was an Italian film. Just discovered that it's actually Dutch and you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

Here's the trailer with a Marc Almond lookalike for the hero:

It's 17.32pm Greenwich time and I'm drinking tea from a mug that says "Sex" while listening to indie music on iTunes shuffle. I've been alone most of the day - my boyfriend left in the morning to meet his sister across town and take a £13 yoga class. Like yesterday, he woke me with a cup of coffee before banging the front door in his wake.

I watched videos on my laptop for a while then took a bath (still can't take showers.) The plan was to take a bus to Stratford and walk to the communal garden - do a bit of digging in the dirt before heading downtown to meet loveinsuburbia for a drink. But the minute I stepped outdoors I knew the day was wrong: ominous drops hitting my head, heavy clouds over London, a sluggishness that couldn't leave me even with the help of soap box screamers outside Westfield. Bought some things in Sainsbury's (why were all the chocolate Easter eggs gone?!) and took the bus back home.

Did a creative writing exercise where I imagined myself to be a half-naked woman about to perform on a cabaret stage with two other lasses. Read a poem by T.S. Eliot. This made me think again of my story - of how the two cabaret dancers and I were performing to soldiers from the 1st World War.

Moved on to A Clash of Kings (the sequel to A Game of Thrones) while Radio 3 played Late Junction from a few days ago. Then I played Xenoblade Chronicles for a few hours (oh god it's going to take me years to complete this bloody soap opera JRPG).

When Sissy A was visiting, she let me copy dozens of films from her hard drive onto my laptop - we watched one of them last night (the new version of The Thing). A friend built a blanket fort in her living room two days ago and held a horror marathon underneath it - I'm tempted to do the same.