My cousin and J. are going to throw an AUNTIE MAME-THEMED party for me a month or so after I arrive on Maui! He said, “You’ll be the fresh new meat on the island,” meaning most of his crowd is older, and I’ll be a whipper-snapper at the tender age of 33. I’ve been researching Hawaiian centipedes and cane spiders so I know what I’m up against. Hawaii is generally pest-free, so if I don’t have trouble with these two fearsome insectoids, I should be fine. My cousin said cane spiders aren’t venomous, “just gross and scary, and they jump AT you,” and he said centipedes are what you really need to watch out for, “I’ve been bitten three times.” Supposedly they can get up to a foot long, and I saw a video of one eating a mouse (!) People occasionally end up in the hospital with baseball-sized swellings from centipede bites. The pain has been described as similar to a lighter flame being held to your skin. But I don’t think they’re poisonous either, or if they are, their poison only works on the insects and small vertebrates they prey on, not humans, so you’re not going to die.
This reminds me of hearing a woman on the bus a few months back talking about camel spiders and how soldiers in Iraq have to deal with them. She went on and on to her friend about how horrifying they are, how they have crazy jumping ability and can run 30 mph and they’ll inject a sleeping person with anesthesia so they can’t feel anything and then devour their flesh while they sleep. Then I went to the Wikipedia page for camel spiders and found that this is all either greatly exaggerated (they CAN run up to 10 mph, which IS crazy fast for an insect, though), or completely untrue (they don’t produce anesthesia, and according to almost all studies, they aren’t venomous, though their bites are certainly very painful).
People have a need to believe certain things that eclipses any intrusion by facts or reality. When faced with such facts they deny them, or more likely simply tune them out, because they’ve decided that their own constructed pseudo-reality must be defended at all costs. You can still find plenty of vestiges of the old-world, pre-Galileo belief that the earth was flat and if you sail too far you’ll sail over the edge of the world and be eaten by giant monsters. It’s like how James, poor James who I met last summer in Glacier, absolutely INSISTED that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a true story. He’s from Texas, and he KNOWS it. But it’s not a true story. It sets itself up as a true story, but so have plenty of other films from Citizen Kane to The Blair Witch Project. Chain Saw is loosely based on the exploits of Wisconsin ghoul Ed Gein, who was a graverobber and artist working in the medium of human skin (but didn’t use a chainsaw). Then you throw in some Charles Manson, a bunch of social unrest and governmental deceit, the no-gas crisis of the early 70s, and the basic structure of Hansel and Gretel, and you’ve got this eerie film that is a weird mixture of modern horror and Grimm’s Fairy Tale.
How do I know this? By reading the words of Tobe Hooper, who wrote and directed the film.
Another good example: COURTNEY KILLED KURT! Or, along the same lines, KURT WROTE COURTNEY’S MUSIC! There is absolutely no compelling evidence of either of these claims, yet many people persist in believing them. A friend who visited me last week put an entertaining new spin on this by insisting that BILLY CORGAN wrote Hole’s second album, Live Through This! Now, that one I’d never even heard before, so you get points for ingenuity! But I’m afraid you’re confused. Corgan had nothing to do (and has never claimed he had anything to do) with Live Through This (except insomuch as the opening song, “Violet,” was apparently written for Corgan by Love, inspired by their on-again, off-again relationship). He DID co-write several songs on Hole’s LAST album, Celebrity Skin. Check the liner notes and you’ll see he was credited as such. And yet when I confronted my friend with this information, she sternly refused to let it impinge on her preferred version of events.
What can you do? You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it think.
I just watched a gay French movie called Like A Brother (Comme un frere, en francais). It was only 55 minutes long and felt more like a first draft than a finished film, and it ended very inconclusively, yet I enjoyed it, and it had many sweet and sexy moments. I think I like movies that challenge the pre-molded conception that films have to be between 90 and 120 minutes long. Why is that, anyway? Did some sort of scientific research determine that was the greatest length of time that most peoples’ attention spans will tolerate? And if that’s so, NOW, is that because of some innate threshold of the human brain, or because we’ve gotten so used to movies being that long?
One of the things I intend to work on while on Maui is a screenplay for a new film, longer than any I’ve done so far - I’m guessing 30 to 45 minutes. That’s a good next step. I’m not ready for a feature yet, though.
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