Lovecraft on Fiendish Deliciousness
McSweeney’s brings us these brilliant Selections from H.P. Lovecraft’s Brief Tenure as a Whitman’s Sampler Copywriter. Included are these Lovecraftian descriptions:
White Chocolate Truffle: What black arts could have stripped this chocolate of its natural hue? The horror of the unearthly, corpselike pallor of this truffle’s complexion is only offset by its fiendish deliciousness.
Nut Cluster Crunch: This eerie candy will test the sanity of all but those who possess the strongest of constitutions. Strange congeries of almonds, walnuts, and pistachios dance hypnotically within, promising to reveal their eldritch secrets to anyone foolish enough to take a bite of these ancient nut clusters!
Dark Chocolate Fudge: Dark! All-encompassing, eternal darkness! Human eyes cannot penetrate the stygian blackness of this unholy confection!
Chocolate Cherry Cordial: What deranged architect could have engineered this non-Euclidean aberration? I dare not speculate.
More at McSweeney’s.
via Serious Eats
The Masque of The Red Death
This wonderfully done animation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Masque of The Red Death captures the baroque Gothicism of Poe’s ode to the lost art of the Masque without losing the essential morality of Poe’s work. Earthly pleasures are fleeting and cannot long keep at bay the harsh reality of the inevitable death and decay of all things:
The Return of Sir Richard Grenville
Robert E. Howard’s stirring yet maudlin poem about friendship and loyalty features the ghost of a long lost comrade of Puritan adventurer Solomon Kane returning from the dead to fight alongside his former friend. A touching tribute to the enduring power of those bonds of brotherhood we forge in our youth, and mourn as we age, the poem’s strength is enhanced by the moody noir atmosphere of this short film by artist Mike Kane.
I found this movie on an old post at Pulp Reader.
If the film has you yearning for derring-do check out this collection of Howard’s Solomon Kane stories.
Blogging the Zombie Apocalypse
The world as we know it has ended and survivors are few and far between. They’re suffering from exposure to the elements and some are running low on food, water, and first aid supplies. The ones who have stuck it out the longest have survivor’s guilt.
But they all have two things in common: they’re trying to survive in a world infested with zombies, and they’re blogging about every detail at LastDaysJournal.com.
Finally, a social networking project I can get behind. It’s sci-fi alternate reality meets survival blog meets MySpace meets RPG in a post-apocalyptic multimedia zombie extravaganza. Here’s the premise:
imagine that the world had been afflicted by a terrible pandemic that killed millions and millions of people in just a few short weeks. now also imagine that those millions of people that were killed by this disease had also gotten back up and started attacking and infecting others as deadly man-eating zombies. now finally imagine that somebody on a tiny, remote island had created a web site for the lucky few who might still have electricity and internet access, and that this site was the sole means for survivors of this terrible tragedy to communicate with and get advice from other human beings in similar situations all around the world.
Survivors who register at the site use text, audio, video, and images to describe their circumstances as they fight off the undead and attempt to maintain some semblance of normalcy.
The warning sign at the top of this post was contributed by Agatha, a survivor in Wisconsin who has found herself fostering several orphaned children who have no one else to protect them. Bruce in New York finally made it out of the subway tunnels and has taken up position in the 42nd Street Library. Check out the stories as they unfold at LastDaysJournal.com.
Via The Zombie Notes Newsgroup, of course.
Fightin’ Words From Clive Barker to Roth and Zombie
Eli Roth and Rob Zombie are probably curled up in little balls weeping right now (maybe separately, maybe together, I’m not sure), and Clive Barker, the renaissance man of horror, is the reason why. Check out this quote from Barker:
I don’t want horror to become what Eli Roth does and what Rob Zombie does because that would be highly detrimental to the genre.
Read all of this new interview with Clive Barker at Bloody Disgusting.
Celery and Fallen Panties: The Pin-up Art of Art Frahm
While writing my post about Brenda’s Babes, I was reminded of Art Frahm’s cartoonish fallen panty pin-ups.
While Frahm’s pin-ups get points for being campy and kitschy, they’re more the stuff of perverted fantasy than cause for fiendish delight. But somehow James Lileks
… the falling-panty theme is a staple of his work. These pictures aren’t taken from a calendar he did when hungry and desperate, chafing against the dictates of some gnomish pervert who wanted a year’s worth of falling-panty pictures. These date from throughout the 50s. It’s a theme to which he returned again and again - and you have to wonder why.
Lileks’ observations include the recurring celery motif in Frahm’s paintings, the frequent presence of a silently leering pervert, and of course, the improbability of losing one’s panties. His criticism of each painting makes for a good read. Check out more at Art Frahm: a study of the effects of celery on loose elastic.