Brian Keene: Back in the Day (Part 1)

Recommended Viewing: Earlier today, novelist Brian Keene interviewed four living legends in the horror field: David J. Schow, John Skipp, Chet Williamson, and Douglas E. Winter.

Back in the Day (Part 1) hosted by Brian Keene

Quote of the Day

“The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War.

"Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear.

"Ho ho ho. Let's not get carried away here. Freedom was yesterday in this country. Its value has been discounted. The only freedom we truly crave today is freedom from Dumbness. Nothing else matters."

--Hunter S. Thompson, KINGDOM OF FEAR, 2003 

Cormac McCarthy's Noir Masterpieces

From Nick Kolakowski's 6-23-23 CRIMEREADS article entitled "How Cormac McCarthy Used Crime Fiction's Tropes to Make Masterpieces":

Attempting to analyze McCarthy’s work through the lens of ‘crime fiction’ is an interesting exercise. His books were saturated with ‘crime’ in the most primal sense: murder, theft, baby-eating, massacre and genocide. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy told The New York Times in 1992. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”

Crime fiction also revolves on the axis of crime and punishment, law and outlaw—but even in his most grounded novels, McCarthy wasn’t interested in the niceties of societal justice. The marauders of “Blood Meridian” pillage with impunity until more savage forces tear them apart; the police in “Child of God” are little more than a cleanup crew once the full scope of the protagonist’s horror is revealed; the cops who scurry through “No Country for Old Men” are powerless before the ruthlessness of Anton Chigurh, a professional hitman and fixer who pontificates about fate before murdering people; and in “The Road,” set in a post-apocalyptic America coated with ash, the laws and tenets of the old world are a fading dream.

Much of crime fiction is obsessed with balance: the forces of law and order win, or at least the guilty get what’s coming to them. The arc of McCarthy’s literary universe bends not toward justice but something far darker. In “Blood Meridian,” man is described as the “ultimate practitioner” of war, the “ultimate trade.” War, in the book’s context, isn’t the orderly movement of troops around a field—it’s slaughter and pillage, much of it conducted on territory where burning down a village and killing its inhabitants for their scalps is considered just another Tuesday. Humanity perfected violence, and violence pushed humanity onto a merciless evolutionary path: Sheriff Bell, the old-fashioned lawman in “No Country for Old Men,” laments that a man he sent the death row “wasn’t nothin compared to what was comin down the pike.”

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency

Earlier today, the House of Representatives held a congressional hearing regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena (i.e., UFOs). You can see the entire hearing directly below....

Subcommittee Hearing: Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency

CHAMELEO ANNIVERSARY

Twenty years ago this month, my friend Dion Fuller was arrested by the San Diego Police Department (under the ostensible auspices of The Patriot Act) for conspiring with international terrorists to smuggle Top Secret military equipment out of Camp Pendleton. The fact that Dion had absolutely nothing to do with international terrorists, smuggling, Top Secret military equipment, or Camp Pendleton didn’t seem to bother the NCIS. Dion was released from jail after a six-day-long Abu-Ghraib-style interrogation during which he was never allowed to make a single phone call or speak to a lawyer. This led to a domino effect of High Strangeness that continues to this very day. If you want to know the full story, read my 2015 book CHAMELEO (available from OR Books right HERE).

 

KING KONG: THE STAGE PLAY!

If you find yourself anywhere near Southern California within the next three weeks, I recommend checking out the Maverick Theater's wildly fun and inventive stage adaptation of KING KONG (1933), which I had the pleasure of seeing this past Sunday night. The Maverick Theater is located in Fullerton where Brian Newell has spent almost the last twenty years producing such eccentric stage adaptations as PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE and SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS. (Obscure & Useless Factoid: Oddly enough, the theater is located within walking distance of the Santa Ana apartment building where Philip K. Dick wrote VALIS.) What better way to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's most legendary film? The next performance is Friday, July 21st. To order tickets for the show, click HERE!

In other KONG news, I recommend buying a copy of PS Publishing's recent hardcover release, Edgar Wallace's KONG: AN ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY (edited by Stephen Jones). Here's the publisher's description of this historically important book:

90 YEARS AGO, the classic Hollywood monster movie King Kong was released. What most people do not realise is that much of the film was the brainchild of best-selling British mystery writer Edgar Wallace (1875–1932). Known as the “King of Thrillers”, Wallace was an incredibly prolific and influential writer who moved to California in the early 1930s, where he was employed at RKO Radio Pictures. He was working on the initial drafts of Kong when he died unexpectedly, at the age of fifty-six, just two months into pre-production.

For decades, Wallace’s contribution to the film has been consistently down-played. Now, with the publication of Kong: An Original Screenplay, we can finally see how Wallace’s substantial draft script prefigures much of the narrative structure and more important themes found in the final film. It also depicts many of the production’s key scenes, while also including several epic sequences that were never used.

With an historical Introduction by multiple award-winning editor Stephen Jones, Wallace’s personal copy of his original draft script with his own corrections and interpolations, a boys’ story-paper adaptation of the film, preliminary production stills and art-work, and a colour portfolio of King Kong posters from around the world, Kong: An Original Screenplay finally gives Edgar Wallace the credit he deserves as the “Man Who Created Kong”!

“Corporate Awareness Monitoring”

From Gabriel Grill and Christian Sandvig's 6-22-23 WIRED article entitled "Military AI’s Next Frontier: Your Work Computer":

IT’S PROBABLY HARD to imagine that you are the target of spycraft, but spying on employees is the next frontier of military AI. Surveillance techniques familiar to authoritarian dictatorships have now been repurposed to target American workers.

Over the past decade, a few dozen companies have emerged to sell your employer subscriptions for services like “open source intelligence,” “reputation management,” and “insider threat assessment”—tools often originally developed by defense contractors for intelligence uses. As deep learning and new data sources have become available over the past few years, these tools have become dramatically more sophisticated. With them, your boss may be able to use advanced data analytics to identify labor organizing, internal leakers, and the company’s critics.

It’s no secret that unionization is already monitored by big companies like Amazon. But the expansion and normalization of tools to track workers has attracted little comment, despite their ominous origins. If they are as powerful as they claim to be—or even heading in that direction—we need a public conversation about the wisdom of transferring these informational munitions into private hands. Military-grade AI was intended to target our national enemies, nominally under the control of elected democratic governments, with safeguards in place to prevent its use against citizens. We should all be concerned by the idea that the same systems can now be widely deployable by anyone able to pay.

FiveCast, for example, began as an anti-terrorism startup selling to the military, but it has turned its tools over to corporations and law enforcement, which can use them to collect and analyze all kinds of publicly available data, including your social media posts. Rather than just counting keywords, FiveCast brags that its “commercial security” and other offerings can identify networks of people, read text inside images, and even detect objects, images, logos, emotions, and concepts inside multimedia content. Its “supply chain risk management” tool aims to forecast future disruptions, like strikes, for corporations.

Network analysis tools developed to identify terrorist cells can thus be used to identify key labor organizers so employers can illegally fire them before a union is formed. The standard use of these tools during recruitment may prompt employers to avoid hiring such organizers in the first place. And quantitative risk assessment strategies conceived to warn the nation against impending attacks can now inform investment decisions, like whether to divest from areas and suppliers who are estimated to have a high capacity for labor organizing [...].

The corporations purveying these services are thriving in a context of obscurity and regulatory neglect. Defenses of workplace surveillance are made of the thinnest tissue. Industry apologists proclaim that their software, sold to help employers “understand the labor union environment,” isn’t anti-union. Instead, they brand themselves as selling “corporate awareness monitoring” and prominently mention that “every American is protected by federal, state, and local laws to work in safe conditions.” It’s apparently not the manufacturer’s fault if a buyer uses this software to infringe on a legally protected right to organize or protest.

To read the entire article, click HERE.