Sen. Barack Obama will be back in North Carolina Monday for a rally near Charlotte. This will be Obama’s eighth rally in North Carolina. No word from the campaign yet on the exact location or time of the event. Meanwhile, Sen. John McCain will hold a rally in Tampa, Fl. the same day.
Apparently, all it takes for a film to be part of the Halloween franchise is an Oct. 31 setting. Photo courtesy amazon.com
As thousands of buoyant youths don their white sheets to wait for the great pumpkin and everyone else drinks while dressed up as Tina Fey Sarah Palin, the film world turns its eyes to horror. Nary a genre of film has yielded as many duds and as much success. And while torture porn might be the reigning king of the field right now, there was a time when a great slasher was all that mattered. While many feel that the slasher debate comes down to Kevin Bacon and Johnny Depp Jason and Freddy, their is an important third entity: Michael Meyers.
And of the franchise’s nine entries (yes, Rob Zombie’s “extreme vision of terror counts“), the winningest entry is undoubtedly 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Just as Jason is absent from the first Friday the 13th film, Haddonfield, Ill.’s primary terrorist takes a break from this volume. In fact, the result is the epitome of everything worth celebrating in the genre: lifeless acting, awful writing, lazy filmmaking – it runs the gamut. But the 1982 time period results in a few choice zingers about the war on drugs and demonstrates priceless special effects and a soundtrack straight from the Atari 2600.
Hitchcock could not have delivered a better plot. A divorced doctor seeks the truth behind a series of strange deaths. Whenever a child is wearing one of the Silver Shamrock-brand Halloween masks and sees the Silver Shamrock advertisement, his innards turn into bugs a la The Wrath of Khan. And who is behind this scheme? The business-savviest class of male witches ever to grace the silver screen.
About a year ago, I was invited to a dinner party at Pop’s Restaurant, where the conversation inevitably turned to politics. Fond of good wine and better conversation, the host initiated a roundtable discussion of the presidential election, which was still 12 months away and had not yet even made it to the primaries.
The questions were simple: Who will be the nominees, and who will win?
Regardless of age, sex or party affiliation, there was an overwhelming (and perhaps unanimous) consensus. Of course, if the election had obeyed our predictions, Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain (and their running mates) would not be barnstorming North Carolina because they wouldn’t have accepted the nominations at their parties’ conventions and partly because the Tar Heel State might not even be a key battleground state.
After all, all eight students at that dinner anticipated a matchup between Sen. Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor.
McCain? Barely mentioned just months after his campaign was left for dead. Not yet identified as a maverick.
Obama? Appealing, but too inexperienced to top the Clinton machine. Not yet hailed as an inspirational tour de force.
(For the record, the brief discussion of vice presidential candidates prompted two references to Bill Richardson and Obama himself. Even the most politically-savvy Duke students hadn’t heard of a certain hockey mom from Alaska last November.)
And while none of these musings qualify for breaking news in any sense, it does underscore one lesson we’ve all learned from this grueling race: Opinions change and perspectives shift every day. Because as long as five days seem now, imagine how long these last 12 months feel.
Billy Bragg. Image courtesy of unpiano.com
Sorry this didn’t get up earlier, folks… got distracted. Anyway, here’s more of my interview with Billy Bragg, who plays at Duke Saturday. I ended up doing the interview while huddled in the one corner of my kitchen where I get cell phone reception, so there are places where I didn’t have a transcript that was quite ready to be posted, so my apologies.
How are you doing?
I’m in shock. I’ve just seen some footage [on television] of Margaret Thatcher alive and moving about. It’s terrifying.
I just wanted to say that one my sort of standard childhood memories is listening to “There Is Power In a Union” on Saturday mornings when I was about five, while my dad cooked pancakes.
Well, hopefully, I’ll be able to bash out “Power in the Union” at Duke in a few nights.
What will it be like playing this concert three days before the election?
It couldn’t come at a more crucial time for the way the world is with the economic crisis. The need for some fresh ideas and some new people is great. One of the more interesting things about [Barack] Obama’s candidacy is he represents generational change as much as anything else. People whose expectations of Obama are really high. Some of the things that will happen as a result of Obama being elected will be disappointed. People will need to balance their expectations. I think it will be sort of like what happened with Tony Blair. People are going to have to hold on to how historical it is to have a black president. It’s going to be tough, it’s not going to be easy. If Obama is elected, we will live in a world of possibilities starting November 5. Not all of them will be realized, but the fact that we live in this times is historic.
What are you going to say as part of your show?
Obviously, I would like to see a change after the last eight years. I think the candidacy of Barack Obama is important. It’s not really my place to tell people to go out and vote for him, but as a foreigner I have a view to give. There’s a lot of anti-Americanism out there, most of it knee-jerk. Electing a black person would be a great way to start [remedying] this. It would set a new precedent.
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