The Death Of Guy Fawkes

Guy Fawkes, 1605, plotted to blow up
Parliament -
his reasons were religious or something -
he was Catholic – or Protestant -
malcontent – psychopath –
anti-what-we’re-trying-to-do-here
(in truth, his grievances are lost to history
or even if they’re not, they’re quite irrelevant to this case) -
and he was guilty found.

How in hell did Fawkes haul two tonnes of gunpowder
into the basement of Parliament without anyone knowing??
I suspect a conspiracy.

King James I, who gave us The Bible,
forbade torture,
but had the power to bend the rule ad hoc in extremis
and so did.
James recommended the “gentler tortours” be applied first,
and then, well, you know, after that do what you have to do.
Fawkes signed his confession dutifully
with a line like a child’s drawing of waves.

The trial dragged on for a couple days.
Fawkes’ co-conspirators – a bunch of
stupid fucks with no names -
cried out their innocence,
even up to the commencement of hanging, drawing, and quartering.

A mighty throng – throng so mighty! -
assailed Parliament to behold the swelling scene!
So many young men and women of England,
so strong in body, so wise in their simplicity,
so generous with their goods,
so fearful of god,
so devoted to their king,
grown men wept to behold the assembled
pure stock vouchsafing England’s future. Amen.

They cheered as each conspirator was hoisted,
and, kicking, opened up like a hog,
their sausages removed in bulk,
the craftsman-torturer heaving on the guts
like a man trying to pull a boy out of a well,
clipping a strip of white connective veil,
here and there, to make the whole thing
come out neat.
Sure, some stayed living for quite some minutes
and all that jazz you know.

Later they would cut the cocks off and toy
with them, stick them in each others faces
and say, “Oh, you make me so horny, give sucky sucky please?”
Obviously, they daren’t do such a thing
in front of Parliament. Or ladies.
But back at barracks, they could unwind a bit.

The arms and legs were separated publicly.
This was part of the ritual.
People expected it,
and they cheered like hell as each limb came loose.
When one executioner clowned with the right leg
of Robert Keyes conspirator,
the groundlings laughed.
But a conservative MP fumed
and said a mockery was being made of justice,
and he would make the saucy fellow pay for it
and maybe he would think twice next time.

Fawkes was left till last.
They wanted him first to watch it,
then after he watched it, he would mount
the scaffold it was going to be so great!
He ascended slowly,
like a grandmother afeared of a fall, hips
and shoulders barely holding true after weeks on the rack.

The rope -
limp, sleeping, and really thick too -
was looped over his neck,
and the crowd giggling glee,
stood tiptoe
to see it all
(Some ladies later reported to their maids
that their nipples stiffened at this particular moment:
“A queer feeling, as like I would nurse a babe or – or – ”),
and Guy Fawkes, finally at the top, was heard to say,
“Fuck this.”

And he jumped a big jump, a big jump forward, out -
the hangman slapping his ass as he went,
saying “You go, girl!!” -
a jump enough to snap Fawkes’ neck and kill him.

The crowd had been robbed of the pleasure
of seeing the live body writhe
under the torturer-craftsman’s tools.
But they cheered anyway.
And then cheered when Fawkes steaming dead man’s guts
were exhumed.
And then cheered as each limb
came clear.
And the head too,
gray-faced and gray-bearded,
looking like the face of a man in prayer or on the verge of orgasm,
they cheered at that, when the head came off.
And when it was displayed to all
like the next item up for auction,
they cheered.

Eyewitnesses wrote the crowd felt “joy”.

And we watched the whole thing on tv, didn’t we?

We were there. And there.
And there too.
And we were in there,
and in there.
Every part of that meat was ours.
And we cheered too to know it was accomplished.
We squeezed each other so tightly round the neck,
we came in our pants.

 

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(article originally appeared on Mark Deniz’s
“Vampire Appreciation Month” site
as “George Romero’s Martin: Portrait Of An Honest Vampire”)

My first exposure to George A. Romero’s Martin (1977) came via an event at the Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences. George had been selected to give a George Pal Lecture, the Academy’s special night in which a cinematic luminary is invited to give an address on the state of fantasy/sci-fi/horror. I don’t remember a lot about that evening. I do remember being introduced to George Romero – and Adrienne Barbeau – by Bill Moseley (Bill’s intro to George was when he played brother Johnnie in Tom Savini’s 1990 Night Of The Living Dead remake). I also remember George Romero saying, in his address, how much he was influenced by Powell & Pressburger’s The Tales Of Hoffmann (1951) and repeatedly rented out a 16mm print of the film when he was a kid in NYC – except sometimes the print wasn’t available because it was being rented by another local kid named Martin Scorsese.

The one thing I most vividly recall from the evening was the clip George showed from a movie of his called Martin, a movie completely unknown to me at the time. It was the scene in which the title character – the vampire Martin – stalks a married female victim in her home and must deal with her and the unexpected arrival of her lover.

My mind was blown.

We see the traditional vampiric poses so often, they barely have any symbolic impact anymore, much less emotional or visceral impact. Onscreen, feeding on human blood has the same impact as a death by gunshot – a storytelling trope which ticks an intellectual “shocking” box in our minds without communicating any real impact or real human experience.

Martin feeds by first injecting his victims with a hypodermic, then once the victim is unconscious, opens them up with a razor blade to feed on the blood. The procedure is performed with the skill and adrenaline agitation of a hunting forest predator – with nothing romantic or sublime about it. It is at once both mechanical and savage, idiotic and fiendish.

The chaos, the madness, of the clip Romero showed us was breathtaking. The maniac bloodsucker darting around the house, wielding a hypo, alternately evading and wrestling the woman’s half-naked lover in a farce from Hell – it was absurd, and very, very real – and very frightening.

There are few movies I can think to compare Martin with. It’s as if Harmony Korine had made a vampire movie produced by David Cronenberg. Romero goes to every conceivable length to make his extraordinary vampire creation as banal and mundane as possible. He’s an unromantic 84 years old. He dresses like someone with Asperger’s. He is an unappealing, creepy person, setting aside his vampire characteristics. He lives in a miserably ordinary house with a miserably ordinary family. His vampirism seems quite normal, while the hocus pocus of religion or concepts of Good and Evil seem like the outlandish superstitions.

Martin has that riveting knife-edge freshness and immediacy that has been virtually absent from filmmaking for 20 years. Watching it, you have the unnerving sense that the storyteller is not playing by your rules, that you’ve ventured into an arena entirely unpredictable and your safety may not be the storyteller’s highest priority. The 70′s cinema – hands down the best decade for horror – completely embraced these twists and turns and breathtaking shocks, the things that can burn a film into your mind for a lifetime. Martin, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Exorcist (1973), Halloween (1978) – on and on – aren’t masterpieces because of their “spooky” subject matter. The very way they are told, their rhythms, structures, and turning points are calculated to give the audience a transformative experience. They are not about giving the audience what it wants, but giving it what it needs.

In today’s motion picture vampires we see beautiful merchandise, beautifully packaged and factory sealed for freshness. But there is little that is truly shocking and transcendent. Rather than the bloodsucker being a pernicious monstrosity with a story that, if studied, might make us wise, we prefer evil with a candy face, easily digestible horrors, monsters as harmless as we fantasise we are.

Martin, though a killer and a monster, is the one character who consistently tells the truth in Romero’s film. Give us back our truth-telling vampires.

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I’ve been interviewed at the fine, H.P. Lovecraft-inspired horror site, “Innsmouth Free Press” (www.innsmouthfreepress.com).

I yawp about writing & sci-fi & The Cyclopedia Of Worlds & the new novel.

Read it now.

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2. “After Hell” & The Paradise of Audio Drama
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Having just launched my horror site, “All The Hells”, how I could I not listen to an audio drama called “After Hell”?

“After Hell” a supernatural drama, a mix of police procedural and “28 Days Later”-style Armageddon story. It’s enthusiastically presented and – the key to any good audio drama – uses an intelligent sound design to create spaces, describe scenes, illustrate scenes in detail.

I was sent one of the new CD copies from SciFind Ltd., UK based aggregator of all things scientifically fictional. I was sold on the concept, sight unseen – or sound unheard.

I love audio drama – as anyone who has heard my delightfully self-indulgent (yes, delightfully!) “Wretched Goo Of The Imagination” podcasts will tell you. One of my first forays into media production was the recording of a thrilling audio space adventure with my older brother. It was entitled “Face To Face With The Planet Scanodon!” and recorded in the living room of our Ohio apartment on glorious reel-to-reel tape. I wonder if my parents still have that tape in storage somewhere.

And I have not grown up – have not “changed my principles”, let’s say – that sounds better – one iota since then. Here is the planet Scanodon at The Cyclopedia Of Worlds:

And, heck, here’s a movie of the planet Scanodon at The Cyclopedia Of World’s video channel, that you can watch till your eyes cross:

The quality of writing and production design may have improved since I was seven years old, but the subject matter…remarkably the same.

Writer-director Joe Medina at Ollin Productions has put together something he should be proud of with “After Hell”. I think Orson Welles would agree with me, if he were animated and rotting next to me in some kind of horrific horror story way, that audio drama – radio drama, we used to call it – is it’s own, self-contained media form. Audio drama, like music, engages the mind and imagination directly – and can – in partnership with our brains – describe atmospheres, textures, spaces, and all manner of impossible absurdities (see again, The Wretched Goo Of The Imagination) with ease. I love it. And will do more of it myself some day, when I finish these several dozen other projects.

Well done, to Ollin Productions and the entire “After Hell” crew. Keep up the good work. We want more. We need more.

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I invite you to read rabbit + crow’s new meta-horror fiction site, “All The Hells”:

http://allthehells.nealromanek.com

Read also the accompanying Twitter:

http://twitter.com/allthehells

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In his intro to George Romero’s zombie masterpiece Night Of The Living Dead, Max Brooks explained: “Yes, there were zombie movies before Night of the Living Dead, just like there were space movies before Star Wars …”

Likewise, there were technical manuals describing how to survive hideous, unnatural apocalyptic threats to human survival before Max Brooks’ “The Zombie Survival Guide”, but…

In 2003 Max Brooks (son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft – a legacy which I’m sure must haunt Max constantly, like some relentless zombie that just won’t stay down) published “The Zombie Survival Guide”, a meticulous textbook on how to survive in a world plagued by the shambling hungry dead.

I love “The Guide” (as those of us on the front lines call it) very, very much. I bought it for my girlfriend – now wife – hoping it would make her get serious and face the genuine threat closing in on us from all sides. She read it, and she laughed and laughed and laughed. I was ready to go machete-shopping. But I’ll take what I can get.

Max’s follow-up book, “World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War” is now available for study. Last September, even before the book was on the shelves, the film rights to “World War Z” were the object of a massive bidding war between the production companies of Leonardo Di Caprio and Brad Pitt. Brad won – by shooting Leo’s agent through the head with a speargun. That’s the only way you can kill them.

On a gloomy Tuesday night a couple weeks ago, Max began the Barbican Centre’s “Max Brooks’ Festival of The (Living) Dead” with his brief introduction to the first film of the series, Night of the Living Dead. The film was followed by a Q&A moderated by horror film scholar and Time Out writer, Nigel Floyd. Copies of the new zombie book were available for purchase and Max was ready for autographing.

In a quiet half-hour before the evening kicked off, I interviewed Max Brooks about “The Zombie Survival Guide”, about “World War Z”, and about the horror, the horror of it all.

I asked him about the genesis of the first book. It thought it must have had its origins in American post-9/11 trauma. But Max had originally written it in response to the hysteria over Y2K.

Remember Y2K?

To refresh your memory: In the days before The Terrorists, and the bird flu – but after the Soviet evil empire – we lived day and night with the imminent threat that computer clocks would automatically reset themselves to the Year Zero at the stroke of midnight Jan. 1, 2000 A.D. If we failed in this task, banks would implode, planes would fall out the sky, and Tetris would fail to work properly. The next millenium would begin in a Age Of Darkness. Oh, our hubris! We had dared make machines in the likeness of our own mind, and one absurd oversight would lay low man and machine alike, for a long, long time. Or is that lie low? It’s lay low, I think. Anyway, you know what I’m getting at. To avert the disaster, billions of dollars were exchanged among big companies and many computer experts were interviewed on television.

And “Y2K” stands for “Year 2000″. Catchy, eh?

Max had been a writer of spec motion picture photoplays and believed that was where his future career lay. But year after thrilling year of sitting on executive couches hearing bulemic business majors say “We loved it. But it’s not for us. What else do you have?” was losing its luster. Amid the Y2K ruckus, he wondered what the threat of a national zombie disaster might look like. With Vulcan-proof logic, he created a flawless handbook for survival in that emergency.

The book was a labor of love and, as labors of love will, went into a drawer and bided its time. In the meantime, Max was a staff writer on Saturday Night Live for a couple seasons, but still wasn’t having great success with his original longer-form material.

The zombie myth rises from the fear that nothing in earth or heaven can stop an evil whose time has come. On the flip-side, nothing can stop a zombie book whose time has come. So one day, in a year when the ghosts of September 11 were still very angry, and a new Golden Age of Zombie Movies was beginning, and Iraq was making good on its promise of becoming a real slaughterhouse, a friend said to Max: “Hey! What about that zombie book? I really liked that zombie book.”

Phone calls were made, manuscripts mailed to and fro, and “The Zombie Survival Guide” rose from its drawery slumber and was published in 2003.

Max had been training for years to write “The Zombie Survival Guide”. He was a history major in college and an Army ROTC student. “Most of ROTC was basically survival skills,” he said. It might as well have been zombie apocalypse survival school. He wasn’t just making it up when he said that the M-16 was a crummy gun that was destined to be a liability when the zombies arrived. He had fired M-16′s and learned first-hand why they were undesirable and what was the better alternative was. M-16 fans on the net are miffed at his appraisal of the gun. But who’ll be laughing when the zombies come? Max also dipped back into his ROTC survival manual when writing the chapters on the zombie threat in various terrains.

Ah, the ROTC survival manual.

When my father retired from the Air Force, he taught Junior ROTC and we had several of those survival manuals around the home. It’s a must-have for writers, by the way – particularly writers of adventure or action. Or comedy. In fact, I actually quoted directly from the “Mountain Terrain” chapter of the ROTC manual in the Mountain of the Imagination podcast. I finally sold my copy of the book a couple months back, before the move here to London. Was that wise? There are factoids I learned from that book that are still indelibly etched upon my mind. For example, in most Middle Eastern countries, though belching after a meal is good form, “breaking wind in public is considered a serious breach of manners”. Also when you are climbing a mountainside, your body should be aligned with the force of gravity (standing straight up and down), not parallel with the surface of the slope (on your belly, in position for a fatal slide). And also, snow is a much better insulator against radioactive fallout than you’d think.

The ROTC manual is extensively illustrated with line drawings of military personal serenely coping with a variety of dangers. It is probably one of the best basic survival manuals in the world. Next to Max’s book.

Knowing the ROTC book as well as I do, “The Zombie Survival Guide” is all the more enjoyable. You think, “He’s got all this survival stuff absolutely correct! The zombie info must be accurate too.”

But my favorite part of the book is the concluding section of “Recorded Attacks”, starting with 50,000 year old rock paintings in central Africa depicting the walking dead with arms ravenously outstretched, to a 2002 zombie appearance in the Virgin Islands (where, coincidentally, Brooks spent a college year abroad). Most of the major historical periods and world cultures get their chance to do battle with the undead.

I love zombies. But greater than my love for zombies is my love for Roman history – particularly British Roman history. So, when you’ve got zombies vs. legionaries in Roman-occupied Britannia … the only thing that could make it more sublime is if the legionaries had light sabers. And there are lots of Roman-era accounts of zombies in the book. In fact, I wondered when I first read them “Why so many? Hmm. Maybe this Brooks fellow just likes Romans. Well, good for him. Or … wait a… could it be … is it just because the Romans kept better records?!” So I asked Max, why so many Roman accounts? And he replied that it was because, yes, the Romans kept better records. Of course, the important lesson to learn form the Roman stories is that the discipline and training is the best defense against the zombie horde.

The new book “World War Z” in some respects begins where the “Zombie Survival Guide” accounts left off. It assumes a world-wide zombie outbreak and is a collection of first-person accounts of encounters with zombies during this period. The book was much more difficult, Max said, than the first, primarily because of the massive amount of research necessary. Not research about zombies – he already knows about them – but research about modern places, professions, technology, society in many different parts of the world. As with “The Zombie Survival Guide”, the stories in “World War Z” will only be as effective as their factual, mundane details are. Most horror is based on the supposition that the audience will suspend disbelief. The goal of Brooks’ kind of horror verite is to leave no room at all for disbelief. The wonderful result is either fascination, dread, or belly laughter.

He was inspired by Studs Terkel’s “The Good War”, a collection of personal narratives of WWII veterans and by the work of Ed Victor, whose 2002 book coldly examines the causes and conditions of a Third World War from the point of view of some far-future historian. Wonderful. Max Brooks is the Peter Watkins of the zombie world.

As if all these great zombie doings weren’t wonderful enough for the fans, Max’s next project is the adaptation of the accounts at the end of the “The Zombie Survival Guide” into graphic novels. People have said that writers seeking the best home for their stories work toward becoming tv writer/producers. But the best avenue, we are learning, particularly for those of us who like to write spectacle is the graphic novel. Later, during the Q&A with Nigel Floyd, when Max announced this plan to the pre-movie audience, a collective gasp of excitement filled the theater.

I asked Max if he was planning then on promoting “World War Z” at Comic-Con next year. He said he didn’t know and confessed that he had never been to Comic-Con. I was shocked. There is, literally, no other event in the world with a more zombie-receptive audience.

To whom do I address my complaint? To Max’s representation? To the publishers? To Comic-Con itself?

Guys, why hasn’t Max been down to Comic-Con yet? Why is this? It’s only the most important yearly event for horror, fantasy, and sci-fi entertainment in the world. Do you not want Max to do well? What do you have against Max that you are holding him back like that? I believe you’re jealous. Yes, I do. I do believe you are. That is why you won’t let him go to Comic-Con. I’ll say it once: get Max’s ass down to Comic-Con in 2007. And get him on his own full-on panel. Not one of those little panels. One of those massive Hall H panels. If you don’t, then … well, I can’t be held responsible for the consequences.

It was a great night really. Great to meet Max and talk with him. Great to see one of the best horror movies ever made – maybe one of the best movies ever made. But best of all, I learned the most important fact I am likely to learn about my new life in here in London:

During Nigel Floyd’s Q&A, an audience member asked: “Max, what is the best place in London to hide during a zombie outbreak?”

Max said without a second’s hesitation: “HMS Belfast.”

Thank you, Max, in advance, for saving my family.

Damn, I forgot to ask …

… can we bring the cats with us?

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Today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. There are more hours of daylight today than on any other day. This phenomenon is caused by the sun’s swelling to more than seven times its normal circumference. The resulting increase in electromagnetic output naturally increases the number of hours and minutes that it is daylight we have at this particular time of our lives.

So you see it is very simple.

If you are a vampire, you may want to take extra-good care of yourself by observing some of these simple guidelines:

- Take a flask of blood to bed with you and if you feel peckish prior to sunset take sips in moderation to get you through to nightfall.
- Feed thoroughly on multiple full-hearted fresh victims the night before, this also can help to keep you from waking hungry. A shocking number of injuries occur from evening falls caused by – quite unnecessary – low blood blood sugar.
- Capture and chain up your victim near your resting place so that when you wake you can immediately “tuck in”.
- If you must leave your lair before it is fully dark, wear a hat – sombreros are surprisingly effective.
- Accept that this is a stressful time; talk with your fellows about it and don’t be afraid of admitting your own anxiety. You will find that you’re not the only one who feels that way.
- If you find the summer solstice too upsetting, consider seasonal migration. Many have found it beneficial to spend June and July in the Southern Hemisphere and the December holiday season in the far North, thus taking full advantage of the dark hours each hemisphere has to offer. One enterprising fellow we know spent a long dark winter in Antarctica posing as an ornithology student observing penguins.
- Don’t become depressed; use this time for reflection on your own immortality and when you find yourself resenting bikini-clad hotties and muscle-bound volleyball jocks bound for the beach, imagine the looks on their faces as you unsheathe your pearly fangs and descend like a vengeful wraith to suck the life from their bodies as, paralyzed, they shriek for mercy.
- Drink plenty of water.

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There are many good beheadings in Peter Jackson’s first-rate interpretation of “The Lord of The Rings” (2001 – 2003). But the one most worth study – because it is the most iconic, as well as one of the most significant in the history of Middle Earth’s Third Age – is the beheading of the Witch-king’s Fell Beast by the young warrior-maiden Éowyn (AKA Lady of the Shield-arm, AKA White Lady of Rohan; later titled Lady of Ithilien, AKA Lady of Emyn Arnen).

Since first reading Tolkien’s books as a child, this has been one of my favorite moments in the story, and I’m sure that the heroic lone figure of Éowyn on the battlefield helped inspire me to write the stories of my own beloved Battle-Maidens – Boudicca, Penny Morehouse, et al. It’s an archetype which inspires to this day.

Also I’m married to one, so that’s good.

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Because losing your head is one of the coolest things you can do nowadays, we bring you #2 in our series, “Great Movie Beheadings”.

Today’s beheading takes place in the final moments of Fred Zinnemann’s adaptation of Robert Bolt’s “A Man For All Seasons” (1966). The actual beheading occurs off-screen, at the moment we CUT TO black, thus ending the movie, and Sir Thomas More’s life, with a single stroke.

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