Last night I almost could not get to sleep for laughing.  The last headline I saw before turning in was “Gene Simmons, Kiss Frontman, Endorses Mitt Romney, Regrets 2008 Barack Obama Endorsement.”

Wow. The musician who bragged 10 years ago that he had slept with over 4,600 women (and kept Polaroids of all of them!) is endorsing a family-values candidate for president. Of course, that “family values” aspect is not Gene Simmons’ motivation. It’s all about business. He’s also an entrepreneur and believes that “America is a business and should be run by a businessman.” Full story »

Daniel Drezner’s visit to Graceland a few years back taught him something important about writing about zombies. Fellow tourists seemed to fall into two contingents:

The first contingent was thoroughly, utterly sincere in their devotion to all things Elvis. They were hardcore fans, and Graceland was their Mecca, their Jerusalem, and their Rome…. The second group of tourists was equally delighted to be at Graceland, but for a different reason. These people took great pleasure in the kitschy nature of all things Elvis.

Drezner’s Theories of International Politics and Zombies is a “tour of a different kind of Graceland, only with a lot more footnotes. Oh, and zombies.” Full story »

It has been observed, here and elsewhere, what a fucking embarrassment Steven Tyler has become. Once Aerosmith was among America’s greatest bands, and today they occupy the #5 spot (with a bullet) on my Oh How the Mighty Have Fallen list.

It was refreshing, then, when Joe Perry brought the hammer down on his silly-ass 64-going-on-14 Teen Beat bandmate. Reports TMZ:

Perry went off on Tyler during an interview with the Calgary Herald — saying, “It’s his business, but I don’t want Aerosmith’s name involved with [American Idol]. We have nothing to do with it.” Full story »

Earl Scruggs, the legendary master of the bluegrass banjo, is dead at 88.  It was just a few days ago that I was writing about the music that I grew up with, and rest assured, Flatt & Scruggs were welcome in the Smith household. There’s honestly not a lot I can say that I feel is worthy of the man’s genius – not on short notice, anyway – so I’ll keep it simple and let the music do the talking. Let’s start with the song that he was most famous for.

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The Internet era (and the age of PostModernism in general) has given the world a lot of garbage. But damned if the proliferation of electronic technology hasn’t produced some freakin’ awesome moments, too. Like this, which was sent my way by our buddy Frank Balsinger. One of the absolute best mashups I’ve ever seen.

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Matt Mogk knows zombies.

Not personally, of course—only theoretically. “All zombie research is theoretical,” he reminds readers in his excellent Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies.

But as director of the Zombie Research Society, no one in the world knows more about the walking dead than Mogk. If anyone could give me insights about the looming Zombie Apocalypse, I figured it’d be him. I knew I had to talk to him. Full story »

Friend: Hey, Yogi, I think we’re lost.
Yogi Berra: Yeah, but we’re making great time! 

It’s probably clear to anybody who pays attention that I’m a rock & roll guy. But I was raised by my grandparents, two country folks who were born in 1913 and 1914 respectively and grew up through the Great Depression. There were two kinds of music in my house, country and gospel, and those aesthetics – the melodies and harmonies, the minor chord dips and the aching they signify, the constant battle between ignorant hope and blunt despair – they shaped my relationship with music in ways that will accompany me to my grave.

We listened to gospel quartets on Channel 12 Sunday mornings. The rest of the time, if there was music in the house, it was the likes of Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Roy Acuff & the Smoky Mountain Boys or Cowboy Copas. Granddaddy and Grandmother liked to watch The Porter Wagoner Show (with Dolly Parton, of course) and Saturday nights meant Hee Haw, with Buck Owens, Roy Clark and some of Nashville’s greatest stars. Full story »

Like a bizillion other people, I’ve caught snippets of Night of the Living Dead on late-night AMC while channel surfing, but I’ve never stopped for more than a few seconds. There’s something so quintessentially “B-movie” about any given thee-minute segment of the movie that keeps it from being too enticing (and that coming from a guy who generally loves old B-movie monster pics, too).

But watch George Romero’s seminal zombie movie from start to finish and a creepy excellence somehow manifests itself. Night of the Living Dead rises up beyond B-movie status into something enduring and chilling—and like the zombies themselves, it just keeps coming at you. Full story »

I feel like I lived Steven Church’s The Day After the Day After: My Atomic Angst, even if I didn’t grow up in Kansas. Church manages to capture the nuclear angst that overshadowed my own Cold War-childhood. I was too old for “duck and cover,” but Reagan had the arms race in full swing, so the threat of Armageddon loomed over all. “I was afraid of the future,” Church wrote, “more comfortable with the fantastical….”

Yep.

Church grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, the town featured in the 1983 television movie, which was also filmed there. The overlap had a profound impact on Church because “[t]his synchronicity between fiction and reality was not an unusual experience” for him. “This was the sort of boundary-blurring experience that defined my childhood,” he says.

In the same way, I lived just a few miles to the east—downwind—of Three Mile Island when it nearly melted down almost simultaneously with The China Syndrome. What’s real and what’s imaginary and how do the two play off each other? What memories result, and how do we understand those memories? Full story »

If you recall, Bocephus is out at MNF, thanks to a joke that ESPN deemed over the line. But somebody has to sing an annoying, poorly customized intro before each game, right? Who, though?

I have an idea.

Lately Mitt Romney, Man of the People^® has been touring the country, connecting with the Common Man. He’s connected with Northern auto workers, with the black folk, with NASCAR fans, with hillbillies, and just yesterday, he made important inroads with America’s football fans. Full story »

Following up on yesterday’s post about how unfair it is when progressives fight fire with fire…

One of the architects of the modern conservative boycott movement back in the day was the now-deceased Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the “Moral Majority.” His strategy was simple. Identify those television and radio stations whose programming “promoted” a “liberal agenda” or “secular humanist” values, then leverage the purchasing power of the congregation to bully offenders into changing their programming. Sadly, this brand of thuggery (remember, this is generally the same crowd screeching right now about how “liberals” are “censoring” the “free speech rights” of the richest, most successful, most widely heard man in political talk radio) proved effective enough that it has now become a go-to weapon in the arsenals of interest groups across the partisan spectrum. Full story »

Wherein I tear Rush a new bunghole, explain why I feel called to do so, and expose some of his supporters for being simpletons in their own words.

I would just like to take a quick moment to thank the many, many readers that took the time to read my previous post about Carbonite’s initial lukewarm stance on supporting Rush Limbaugh with advertising dollars and CEO David Friend’s subsequent reversal (not that I caused it, but hey, it sounds good lined up like that). I’m still new to sharing my own insights to a potentially wide audience, so reaching just that many of you was, to me personally, a big deal. Thank you. To those of you who thoughtfully commented in agreement, thank you for making your voices heard. Many of you spoke more eloquently about the subject, and more pithily, than I could or did. Full story »

Davy Jones died yesterday in Florida at 66 of a heart attack. I was 6 when I discovered him–towards the tail end of the TV series. Davy spoiled me forever with his English accent. To this day, a male voice with an English accent makes me look for the source. Too bad I was so young and he was so short.

The Monkees were completely silly as a TV show and as band. Sure they had some catchy songs. “Last Train to Clarksville” was one of my first 45s and the first album I bought with my own allowance and my own trip to the record department was The Monkees (yes, I still have it). But the TV show was just the sort of late 60s insanity that would appeal to a 6-year-old: 4 cute guys in really colorful and fun clothes tripping over themselves, clowning around, and playing music. My other favorite shows from the period: H.R. Pufnstuf and The Banana Splits (whose serialized cartoon version of The Three Musketeers inspired my early love of history and my later crush on Richard Chamberlain, but I digress). Full story »

Pity, that. This one may be far more apt.

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“From a dramatic standpoint, there is no connection between the voodoo zombie and the modern zombies. From a factual anthropological, religious, or historic standpoint, there is no connection between the voodoo zombie and the modern zombie.”

So writes author Matt Mogk in Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies. As a professional zombie expert—he’s president of the Zombie Research Society—Mogk has written the bible on zombies. If my task was to trace the connection between voodoo zombies and flesh-eating movie monsters, I figured this was the book to check out. And indeed, it answered my question: There is no connection.

But as Mogk’s book warns, “The scientific study of zombies is largely an exploration of all that is strange and disturbing in our natural world and often leads to more questions than answers.” The same could be said of his zombie bible: it answered one question and posed a hundred others. Full story »

by Bryan Clark

On Jan. 27, 1991, Whitney Houston sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” before Super Bowl XXV. As news of her death spread, many people remember the performance as one of her career highlights and one of the best renditions of America’s national anthem.

Songs and sports often combine. Full story »

She was not alive…nor dead…just a
WHITE ZOMBIE
Performing his every desire!

Now picture Bela Lugosi, sketched in faint Day-Glo green pastels, intense eyes staring, one eyebrow raised as though it alone is gonna dish out an ass-whoopin’.

He’s best known for Dracula, of course, setting a stereotype for vampires that lasted for fifty years, but among Lugosi’s other achievements, he starred in the first zombie movie. Full story »

The face of Voodoo has always been painted greasepaint white. The personification, stuck with me since I was a kid, comes from the final scene of the James Bond movie Live and Let Die. Bond has vanquished his foes, throwing the last one out the window of a moving train while on the way to a well-deserved respite with the movie’s leading lady. But perched on the front of the train sits the sinister Baron Samedi, the lord of death, a dark, dangerous figure throughout the movie, still there, in the final shot, offering a tip of his ragged top hat, laughing.

Samedi was played by Geoffrey Holder, who would go on to star in 7-Up’s “Crisp and clean and no caffeine” TV commercials, where he’d get to again let loose that deep bass laughter. As a Bond villain, that laugh had much less mirth. Samedi handled snakes, presided over dark ceremonies, and promised all sorts of evil nastiness for my favorite secret agent. He was Voodoo.

But real Voodoo is something else entirely (surprise, surprise). And yes, there are real zombies. Full story »

If I’m going to study zombies, I need some context. For that, I need to read up on Haiti. The zombies that live on the small Caribbean island are different than the brain-eaters I’ll spend most of my time looking at over the next few months, but it doesn’t hurt to arm myself with knowledge.

But if I’m going to look at Haitian zombies, then really I need to start across the Atlantic, in Africa, in the small coastal country of Benin—the birthplace of voodoo. Full story »

They’re dead and they’re hungry.

And they’re coming for us. All of us.

Of course, there’s no way to really know when the dead will rise, but many experts (and fruitcakes) think the zombie apocalypse is only a matter of time. I’ve decided I need to prepare—as a matter of good conscience, if nothing else. I’ll want my kids to be safe, after all. Waiting until after the undead swarm has picked the world clean will be a little too late for me to scratch my head and realize, “Huh, the catastrophists were right after all.”

With my 30+ days of creative nonfiction books behind me, it’s time for a new literary challenge. Full story »