October 2008

The house looked like any other neighborly dwelling except for the fact that it was huge, ancient, had a large iron gate at the foot of the driveway, and I think I saw a talking rat scurry past me as I walked up to knock on its formidable front door.

I was there to sign up voters on my little growing election list, and when I knocked on the door, I heard a series of loud thumps, a deep, resounding echo inside, and footsteps, before a very friendly face peeked out to see who had dared knock on his door. The man who answered the door was an aging hippie wearing a tie-dyed shirt. He asked if I’d like to come in as he filled out my forms, and I obliged because a) he didn’t appear to pose a threat, b) he was an aging hippie wearing a tie-dyed shirt, and c) in the room on the right, I could see Phantasm playing on a television screen, and thought I’d check out a few minutes of this underground 1979 horror hoot. Alas, this would turn into one of several Halloween Hidden Flicks to be devoured, but I did not know that at the time.

Phantasm is a goofy thriller in which a very strange, tall man uses a flying silver ball to attack strangers. The ball has a drill, that when attached to the head can perform routine amateur lobotomies, or eliminate, on a permanent basis, nagging headaches. I watched a few minutes while the hippie horror film fan went to get us something to drink (I assumed a soda while doubting it would be acid, or cyanide-laced Kool-Aid).

READ ON for more of this week’s Hidden Flick…

It used to be tradition that each Monday following Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit concerts at Shoreline would bring fluffy reviews extolling the virtues of that weekend’s concerts and of

My, oh my, is anyone else as sick of the political bullshit as I am? It isn’t bad enough that gas is hovering around $3 a gallon (I can’t believe I am actually celebrating the fact that I can fill up for less than $50) or that the economy is in the toilet, or that pretty much every business in the world is losing money faster than a rookie poker player trying to impress a new girlfriend.

By the sheer luck of the calendar, Americans are inundated by dumbed-down, personal attacks and dirty trick political ads as the date we choose the next leader of the free world draws near. Ballot measures with questionable wording and suspicious origins generate divisive diatribes between the pros and the cons, tossing around words like boondoggle and accusing the other side of various nefarious goings on. What the hell IS a boondoggle anyway? (For the record, I know what a boondoggle really is, but I use the phrase for effect. Don’t obsess on the details)

So it’s Friday and the day job has been really busy, and the radio and television won’t shut up about whom I ought to vote for and who approves this ad or that and I checked my 401K and found out that I’ll probably have to work an extra twenty years before I retire and the furnace only blows cold air and probably needs a few hundred dollars to make it hot again and all I can think of is I need to get away NOW. I need to escape, hide, hole up, hunker down in my own little Camp David and regroup. I know. There’s a great show at the Aladdin tonight. I’ll saunter in to the sold out former porn theater and lose myself in the musical atmosphere emitted by Ryan Montbleau and Martin Sexton.

READ ON for more of A.J.’s review of Montbleau and Sexton in Portland…

With Halloween just a few days away, we thought we’d start getting in the mood over here at HT. While there may be any number of appropriate songs for All