Stuff: Because owning a silver cross you could maybe melt down into a bullet isn't really "werewolf insurance."

I don't often get the chance to throw a link to an insurance site up on ANTSS, so when it does happen I feel weirdly elated. Term Life Insurance, of all folks, has actually whipped up the following table of super serious, very real threats for you to ponder when you debate just what sort of coverage you need. Click to read the whole thing.

Via: Term Life Insurance

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House of Silent Scream: "Engineered desire."

I'm very proud to present the first guest post in our annual look at silent genre cinema. I promised to mix in aces from beyond the horror-centric blog-o-sphere, and I'm going to make good on that promise right off the bat.

Screamin' Shon has been a supporter of ANTSS and a regular presence in the comment section for, what, like a year now? But his witty comments don't fully reflect his truly prolific and twisted genius. If you want to be virtually bukkaked in Shon Genius, then you need to wait until your back in the privacy of your own home, you've put the kids to bed (or sold them Singapore - sorry baby, you work for them now), and check you his regular original erotica on Erotiterrorist.

That's right. The first guest is a master of the naught story and he's come here to talk about sexy freakin' robots. Told you this year would be different.

I'd like to thank Shon for guest starring and without further ado . . .

The 1927 Metropolis is an impressionistic film. That means it is really best viewed while sleep deprived. The internal logic doesn’t quite hold up but if you are aching for sleep and are in a highly suggestive frame of mind, it may be the best waking dream you have ever had.
The city of Metropolis is a fantastic utopia of skyscrapers, flying cars and stock markets. Pleasure gardens and bars exist for the upper class to frolic and dance. They engage in athletics for fun. They chase girls. They get chased by girls. Serious men in suits look at ticker tape and manage vast industries. Everyone is joyfully clean.
The people who actually keep the city running work in vague factories with the shambling enthusiasm of tortured zombies. These people sweat, toil and endure hardships for no reward what so ever. They gather in mass elevators very much like herded concentration camp prisoners. The elevators send them up to work in terrible factories and then take back down to their subterranean lives. Everyone is heartbreakingly filthy.

There is a plot about the workers trying to set sympathy from the ruling class but I don’t want to get into that. The moral of employee relations that Metropolis tries to teach is pretty laughable to anyone who has ever worked in a real world factory. This is compounded further by the fact that we don’t even have the complete movie now. It was chopped apart for the sensibilities of American audiences and no one made back up copies. There are still large tracts of the movie missing.

What makes a truncated Metropolis worth watching almost a hundred years later is the monster of the movie and her perverse creator.

Rowtang is the mold from which other mad scientists in film were forged from. Crazy hair? Check. Robot hand he designed himself? Check. Should really avoid being around great heights near the end of the movie? Check. Insane manner of handling the grief of his lost love by recreating her as a robot? Double Check.

Rowtang as played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, is a wonderful madman. Years ago, the love of his life, a woman by the charming name of Hel, married another man and had his rival’s child. Hel died in childbirth so Rowtang creates a metal woman in her image so that he can be with her again. It’s the first sexbot.

Rowtang’s rival comes to him and asks for his help in dealing with a meddlesome social worker type, by the name of Maria. Rowtang comes up with the brilliant plan of kidnapping the social worker and using her likeness to cover his robot. He sends the Robot-Maria out to sabotage the workers, as well as the ruling class, as a way of getting back at his rival.

Let me tell you something. Mad Scientists are the last people you come to for help when they lusted for your wife.

Which brings us to the robot herself. Robot-Maria is an amazing design that could only have been spawned in the age of Art Deco. Completely metallic curves stress both her femininity and her artificialness. She looks like something that should be on a skyscraper. She is a modern Pygmalion brought to life with strange science with a touch of evil intentions.

You can’t exaggerate her visual influence on science fiction. C-3PO from Star Wars is her grandson. The Cybermen of Dr. Who could be her clones. The sleek updated Cylons of Battlestar Galactica aspire to be her. She defined what a robot looked like and she still does to this day.

The curious thing about her influence on movies is that her wonderful robot form is only seen briefly in the movie. For most of the movie, she is disguised in flesh and takes the place of Real-Maria. Robot-Maria spends her days with the workers, inciting them to commit violence against their uncaring surface masters. At night, she is an exotic dancer who mesmerizes the jaded surface bosses with her inhuman passions and crazy costumes.

I have seen Metropolis a dozen times yet I am always baffled by her seduction of the jaded surface people. Here are the richest of the rich. They spend their days in Pleasure Gardens with willing women yet Maria somehow drives them crazy with passion. We see her perform a frantic burlesque scene while men in tuxedoes scream for her attention and almost faint from a glance. Somehow she corrupts the most corrupt.

I think the answer to this is a male conceit that lies at the heart of the Sexbot fetish. Robot-Maria is the ultimate sexual being because she was created by a man to be desired by man. No woman can be as alluring as Robot-Maria because they are human with their own free will. Robot-Maria exists only to do what Rowtang wants of her. She can be as wicked, as sexual and as utterly without conscience as Rowtang wishes. She is engineered desire. She is not a woman controlled by a man. She is a device created to be what men desire from women.

Which is why I think poor Robot-Maria really gets the short end of the stick when famous monsters are discussed. Frankenstein’s Monster usually gets the fame and glory for being the ultimate artificial man monster. Frankenstein’s creation becomes a nightmare that turns on his creator. He embodies the fear of what happens when man tampers with what we were not meant to know. Robot-Maria scares me more. She is simply a monster who does what she was made to do. Every murder she orchestrates is something she was programmed to do. The tool that obeys the evil wishes it was designed for seems much more horrible to me.

Metropolis is a grand nightmare of sweat, hedonism and wicked malice. Rowtang and his creation continue to stomp through our culture and our fetishes.

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Stuff: Choose and perish.

Slate contributor Josh Levin surveys 144 scenarios for the collapse of the United States of America. From his article intro:

If and when America expires, we probably won't agree on the cause of death. For proof that autopsies of empires are inconclusive, consider the case of Alexander Demandt, the German historian who set out in the 1980s to collect every theory ever given for why Rome fell. The final tally: 210, including attacks by nomads on horseback, blood poisoning, decline of Nordic character, homosexuality, outflow of gold, and vaingloriousness.

In tribute to Demandt, I've gone looking for every possible reason why America could fall. I've paged through the work of scholars who have studied the characteristics of declining and failed societies. I also collected theories from futurists, doomsayers, separatists, economists, political scientists, national security experts, climatologists, geologists, astronomers, and a few miscellaneous crazy people. The result: a collection of 144 potential causes of America's future death.

Levin's list of calamities includes such trendy new apocalypses as doom-by-EMP-device, rightwing-nutjob faves like a demographic death spiral caused by the legalization of gay marriage, and leftwing workhorses like a theocratic takeover.

I'm especially please that Johnny-come-lately doomsdays, such as the 2012 dealie, haven't replaced long time personal favorites such as robot uprisings or "gray goo" nanotech-driven death.

You can even select five favorite doomsday scenarios as and track progress towards midnight using Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" Tool!

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Stuff: Dress code.

I post this knowing full well that it may cause Dave – the poor guy I regularly drag to Court Street Theater to check out whatever drek might be bad enough to start a riot there – to entirely empty out his life savings.

But it seemed nifty enough to warrant the risk.

The Brit-based Hide Your Arms t-shirt blog has a spiffy list of 101 of the best robot-centric t-shirt designs with links to the online vendors who will hook you up. Here's a few of my personal faves.

We need to face it. Most of us look better dressed. Make with the click-click and suit up. As a special limited-time offer, tell the folks at the participating t-shirt stores that you're from And Now the Screaming Starts and they'll answer, "Say what now? Never heard of it."

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Link Proliferation: !

Sharks!

One of the curious things about Jaws is that for all the technical difficulties that plagued the original high-budget Hollywood blockbuster, the film's inspired slews of brilliant backyard D.I.Y. lo-fi remakes and tributes.

Here's a new one: The Bronx's video for the "Knifeman," which features the band, sub-aquatic rock action, and a vicious toy shark.



Cannibals! (And Philosophers!)

The first chapter of An Intellectual History of Cannibalism is available as a free download from Princeton Press. But, be warned, you've got to wade through this sort of jargon.

This history of cannibalism can be reconstructed as three successive stages, part historical and part conceptual. In the first, the cannibal is viewed as a creature from the perspective of natural law. In the second, the cannibal becomes the diabolical retort in which the flux of particles confounds the calculations of theologians and metaphysicians. The third stage is that at which we seem to have arrived today, when the cannibal is a creature of circumstances and education. Natural law, materialism, and anthropological relativism are the three major contexts that impose a division in the history of the cannibal’s passage through thought and which are, in their turn, clarified by his presence.

Nevertheless, the present work is not one that is primarily historical. First of all because it is in no way a history of cannibalistic practices. Of course, the instances of verifiable anthropology have sometimes left their traces in the ideal productions of the philosophers. However, whether cannibals existed or not is a fact of marginal importance. My cannibal is in the first place a scholarly creature, a personage who animates theoretical texts, and only to a lesser extent, if at all, is he a subject for the anthropology of the aberrant.

Robots!

A Swedish newspaper is reporting that "a Swedish company has been fined 25,000 kronor ($3,000) after a malfunctioning robot attacked and almost killed one of its workers at a factory north of Stockholm."

The article summarizes the whole attack:

Public prosecutor Leif Johansson mulled pressing charges against the firm but eventually opted to settle for a fine.

"I've never heard of a robot attacking somebody like this," he told news agency TT.

The incident took place in June 2007 at a factory in Bålsta, north of Stockholm, when the industrial worker was trying to carry out maintenance on a defective machine generally used to lift heavy rocks. Thinking he had cut off the power supply, the man approached the robot with no sense of trepidation.

But the robot suddenly came to life and grabbed a tight hold of the victim's head. The man succeeded in defending himself but not before suffering serious injuries.

"The man was very lucky. He broke four ribs and came close to losing his life," said Leif Johansson.

The matter was subject to an investigation by both the Swedish Work Environment Authority (Arbetsmiljöverket) and the police.

Bones!

Christine Quigley, mistress of the macabre, has an excellent post featuring shots of this unbelievable, skeleton-filled tomb in Peru.

Notice that each skeleton is topped with two skulls.

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Link Proliferation: You don't need money with a face like that, do you honey?

Let the Right Poem In?

Was the Academy of American Poets' new National Poetry Month poster inspired by the film poster for everybody's favorite vampire Lolita import?

For Serious Though

Over a the Conceptual Fiction site, Ted Gioia argues that the emphasis on realism in fiction is temporary trend and that the fantastic, from Gulliver's Travels to The Road, represents the norm of Western lit.

From the post:

Is it possible that the idea of "realism" as a guiding principle for
fiction is itself unrealistic? After all, there are no Newtonian laws
in stories—an apple can just as easily fly upward from a tree as
drop to the ground. Characters can ride a magic carpet as easily
as walk. Any restrictions are imposed by the author, not by any
external "reality," however defined.

The first storytellers understood this intuitively. That is why
myths, legends, folk tales and other traditional stories recognize
no Newtonian (or other) limitations on their narrative accounts.
These were the first examples of what I call "conceptual fiction"—
in other words stories that delight in the freedom from "reality"
that storytelling allows. Conceptual fiction plays with our
conception of reality, rather than defers to it.

In the past, conceptual fiction existed at the center of our literary
(and even pre-literary) culture. Nowadays it is dismissed by
critics and typically shuffled off into "genre" categories such as
science fiction and fantasy. Realism gained preeminence as a
supposedly rock hard foundation for fiction. From that moment
on, Newton's laws (and a million other laws) gave orders to the
imagination, with the stamp of approval of the literary
establishment.

But here is the more interesting question. Is it possible that this
trend is reversing, and that conceptual fiction is now moving back
from the periphery into the center of our literary culture?

While there's a bit too much of the tired old "I'm a genre man and I'm bein' oppressed" boo-hooing in the article, it’s a nicely wide-ranging discussion of the topic.

Collect 'Em All

Light in the Attic, the re-issue specialists responsible for the critically praised re-release of the Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson as well revived interest in the works of forgotten disco genius Betty Davis (no relation) and psych-out ghetto groove oddity Rodriguez, have put out a set of the Monks trading cards.

Now you can follow the history pf these proto-punk pioneers, from their start as the Torquays in 1964 to their chaotic collapse in 1967, in a pocket-sized and tradable format!

Portrait of the artist as a teenage cave man.

It is, perhaps, the longest running shell game in horror analysis: the idea that horror-themed art connects to the antiquity of humanity, an expression of a primal emotion that has been part of the human experience as long as our particular varietal of naked ape has been bold enough to claim the brand name.

If you've been around the horror blog-and-twit pro am circuit long enough, you've seen the claims. Critics claim that horror of one brand or another touches "primal" fears, either evoking Freud's zombie-like unkillable Poe-swipe "the Id" or his rebellious student's slovenly creation, the hero-with-a-thousand elisions: the archetype. Fans of this sloppy trope like conjuring up images of "cave men around a campfire" telling scary stories or they allude pseudo-scientifically to the deep survival functionality of the subgenre, advancing the notion that humans are specifically evolved to consume fright-industry product.

All this theorizing runs into the same problem: We really don't know anything about the inner life of our most-distant ancestors. And what little data we do have comes to us context-free, giving us very little clue as to its meaning.

Case in point, cave paintings and the problem of taphonony.

From the Culture and Cognition blog on the work of paleozoologist Dale Guthrie:

Guthrie’s no-nonsense, scientifically rigorous study shatters our most cherished and deeply entrenched beliefs about rock art, demonstrating for instance that most of it was not terribly good, that it was probably not very important to Paleolithic people and to top it off that these awesomne paintings had less to do with metaphysics than with testosterone-fuelled young men’s feverish imaginations . . .

The most important thing to keep in mind when discussing Paleolithic art is the dog that did not (and will not) bark, namely the overwhelming majority of artistic productions for which there is no trace whatsoever. A cardinal sin of cave art interpretation is to ignore taphonony, in other words to mistake the record for the fact - to think that what is central, important and interesting in the available record was the central, important and interesting part of the activity studied. Knowing that Cro-Magnons had the same brains as we do, and assuming that same causes produce similar effects, we can be confident that these people (who dwelt in ingeniously built shelters - emphatically not in caves) wore elaborate clothes, used make up and jewellery, danced, sang, played musical instruments and enjoyed well-crafted narratives. Of all these artistic achievements nothing survives, except a few drawings and paintings in the confines of a few deep caves. We know of rock art because caves preserved pigments - not because it was of any special importance to European Stone Age people.

In short, making claims regarding the mindset prehistoric humanity on the basis of what we currently know is like trying to mentally model the mindset of all of modern humanity on the basis of a collection of Frazetta paintings and a handful of vandal's tags (fun as that might be). You can try it, but you're revealing more about you than you are about the culture you're explicating.

At best, we can make some careful claims that certain social traits would be consistent with what we know about evolution. But even this gets tricky. Recently, for the first time since accurate records on the issue have been kept, infidelity rates for married women have equaled the rates for men. Why is this such an important detail? Because, for several decades now, people have been spinning elaborate theories regarding the biological basis of male infidelity. In their broad outlines, all theories went something like "men cheat more because it helps them spread their genes, while women cheat less because a stable domestic situation is the best way to ensure healthy off-spring." Only, well, women cheat just as much as men. Either all this theory spinning was assigning biological determinants to cultural factors (making these determinants useless as predictors in cross-cultural situations – including the study of past cultures) or the evolution of major social adaptations can occur over an incredibly short time span, meaning that the presumed continuity between us and ancient man is somewhat dubious.

What's the take home? It's time to put horror's just-so origin story to rest.

"Cute Beats Smart"

Skynet, you devious bastard!

Welcome your new, painfully cute robot overlords.

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Link Proliferation: Something more nefarious?

Departmentalize

The new video for Department of Eagles' "No One Does It Like You" features ghosts, desert warfare, and lots of dancing.




Aren't You a Little Short for a Stormtrooper?

In my callous youth, I used to hold the seemingly unironic enthusiasm of the cosplay/LARP/SAC set in contempt. But as I've (hopefully) become less of a judgmental prick, I've increasingly come to see these folks as kinda noble, in a quixotic and no-freakin'-way-I'd-ever-do-that way.

Miami News has a nice gallery of sundry costumed types. Be sure to read the intro of the article. Is this paranoia or an effort to tap a Superman/Clark Kent vibe?

They serve your food. They sort your mail. They man the ladder trucks. They are your accountants. Your nurses. Your personal trainers. But when they are finished cooking your food and bagging your groceries and driving your children home from school, they become something bigger: a heavily armored stormtrooper, battle rifle in tow. A demure Gothic Lolita, smiling shyly behind linen and lace. A short, sword-wielding night elf, enacting a living role-playing game. Super Mario himself.

Stilled Life

Mistress of the macabre, Christine Quigley, has a neato post about the art of Frederik Ruysch: famed for his anatomical tableaux mounts. From the post:

While a number of Ruysch's specimens survive, these dioramas did not. They are only known through the detailed engravings by Cornelius Huyberts (1669-1712). Ruysch created about a dozen of them, with themes of vanity and the brevity of life. What appear to be rocks are kidney- and gallstones; the trees are injected and hardened arteries and veins; the bushes are preserved lung and other organ tissue; the worms and snakes are intestines; and the handkerchiefs held by the fetal skeletons are abdominal membranes.

April Fools, Puny Humans!

Push the Skynet clock another five minutes towards midnight. At the NY Times "Bits Blog" – via the Digital Download - comes the impending doom that is the Conficker worm.

Ewalt's executive summary:

On April 1st, as many as 12 million computers around the world will form a massive botnet and cooperate together towards an unknown end. They're all infected with the Conficker worm, a piece of software of unknown origin described in the New York Times Bits blog.

The scariest thing about the Conficker worm is that we don't know what it's supposed to do; the infected computers will form what may be the most powerful parallel computer, but to what end? Is it a prank? A giant spam engine? Something more nefarious?

From the Times story:

An examination of the program reveals that the zombie computers are programmed to try to contact a control system for instructions on April 1. There has been a range of speculation about the nature of the threat posed by the botnet, from a wake-up call to a devastating attack.

Researchers who have been painstakingly disassembling the Conficker code have not been able to determine where the author, or authors, is located, or whether the program is being maintained by one person or a group of hackers. The growing suspicion is that Conficker will ultimately be a computing-for-hire scheme. Researchers expect it will imitate the hottest fad in the computer industry, called cloud computing, in which companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems sell computing as a service over the Internet.

Earlier botnets were devised so they could be split up and rented via black market schemes that are common in the Internet underground, according to security researchers.

The Conficker program is built so that after it takes up residence on infected computers, it can be programmed remotely by software to serve as a vast system for distributing spam or other malware.

Several people who have analyzed various versions of the program said Conficker’s authors were obviously monitoring the efforts to restrict the malicious program and had repeatedly demonstrated that their skills were at the leading edge of computer technology.

For example, the Conficker worm already had been through several versions when the alliance of computer security experts seized control of 250 Internet domain names the system was planning to use to forward instructions to millions of infected computers.

Shortly thereafter, in the first week of March, the fourth known version of the program, Conficker C, expanded the number of the sites it could use to 50,000. That step made it virtually impossible to stop the Conficker authors from communicating with their botnet.

"It’s worth noting that these are folks who are taking this seriously and not making many mistakes," said Jose Nazario, a member of the international security group and a researcher at Arbor Networks, a company in Lexington, Mass., that provides tools for monitoring the performance of networks. "They’re going for broke."

Sounds Like Another Bloodsucker Ploy

Breath easy, Boston. According to Boston Channel 5, "there are no vampires at Boston Latin School."

Here's the story:

There are no vampires at Boston Latin School, says headmaster Lynne Moone Teta.

Seriously.

Students at the school, which was founded in 1635, began e-mailing news organizations Wednesday night with the strange story of vampires roaming the halls.

"Supposedly 3 students believe that they are vampires and today when a student was bitten the police were informed," wrote one student in a message to TheBostonChannel.com. "I heard that one girl was arrested another suspended."

Police, however, denied reports that anyone at the school was bitten.

The rumors were strong enough to cause anxiety among the student body and disrupt classes on Thursday.

Guess what franchise's popularity among teenage women is mentioned tangentially. C'mon, just try.

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