architectural digest
I used to haphazardly collect these, finding them used or occasionally buying copies. I'd flip through them as if they were porn: pale-skinned walls laid bare; floorboards stripped naked and polished; a spiral staircase posing with an elegant twist of spine; bedrooms lit rosily with lilies sticking up all over. I loved all the minimalist rooms, that had no clothes strewn around the floor, no personal items, no cats or children or grocery bags--all of the cupboard doors closed, the beds made, all the furniture aligned with the area rugs, and the rugs aligned with the unframed canvases on the walls.
When the magazines accumulated, I'd sit and scissor out my favorite images and paste them in a journal, carefully blocking out compositions of similar interiors, page by page. And sometimes I'd scribble things in the margins that suggest I should invest even more in therapy. Like, I want to live in Ghent in quietude and die slowly year by year in air conditioning with public radio and the television talking to itself in the background. And the drone of vacuuming. And, I want to be rich and I want snow in winter on the bricks with the lamplights calling to mind the 1890s evenings and parties and carriages winter winter winter.
depression
From the DSM-IV: "Major Depressive Disorder is associated with high mortality. Up to 15% of individuals with severe [MDD] die by suicide. Epidemiological evidence also suggests... a fourfold increase in death rates in individuals... over age 55 years. Individuals... admitted to nursing homes may have a markedly increased likelihood of death in the first year. [I]n general medical settings, those with [MDD] have more pain and physical illness and decreased physical, social, and role functioning."
Well, enough of that.
horror movies
I made a page a long time ago about serial-killer movies, which I don't really think of as horror movies. Maybe it's a subgenre though. It's one of those web pages where people, me, write things such as, "Serial killer movies have become an increasingly stylized mirror of our cultural fears..." Yeah, I can be pseudo-knowledgeable with the best of them. Basically I just like movies about self-aware sociopaths and homoerotic buddy killers, and also killer bugs and rat infestations and zombies and attractive students possessed by multi-tentacled aliens. Et cetera. They riff on and rip off the same set of conventions. They cannibalize their ancestors. I find them relaxing to watch most of the time. Sometimes one gives a fresh jolt to the genre, which sets a trend, which Hollywood beats into the ground until it's a zombie, tired and falling to pieces. Some trendsetters: Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, Jaws, Halloween, Alien, Poltergeist, Silence of the Lambs, Scream, and probably The Ring, which seems to be spawning a lot of arty imitators, and yay I've just killed an hour and a half with this post.
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