Anything Can Happen on Halloween, Your Dog Could Turn Into a Cat

Halloween has always been my favorite because I love spookiness, the ramshackle quality of homemade costumes, candy, pumpkins, decorations, and most of all horror movies. My friend Swati and I used to watch them constantly when she lived in her studio on 2nd Avenue; we'd show each other the ones we were obsessed with as kids and look for new ones that made us get that fun-to-be-scared feeling again (with mixed results). Our top 10 favorites — and it should go without saying this means the original and never the remake:

The Evil Dead

The Last House on the Left

Motel Hell

The Stuff

The Watcher in the Woods

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Fright Night

The Gate

House of 1000 Corpses

Cabin Fever

Honorable mentions: Revenge of the Living Dead, Phantasm 1, 3, and 4

Splatter, basically. Giallo is cool but it's too arty and cold for my taste. Lurid 1980s era Tom Savini-style grossness is best. These days I never watch horror movies anymore because it's just no fun without the one girl who fully shared my obsession. When she finally visits Chicago we probably will just stay in and watch some skulls get stop-motion crushed.

My putting-on-my-costume playlist for tomorrow night:

Laura Branigan - Self Control

(I've talked about the sexy-spooky "Self Control" video before.)

Yacht - The Afterlife

Wave Machines - Keep the Lights On

Scanners - Lowlife (LA Riots rmx)

Black Moth Super Rainbow - Born on a Day the Sun Didn't Rise

(My buddy Collin gets disemboweled by a cult of scary girls in the video for this song. It's pretty badass.)

Happy Halloween!

Gigantic

Two things I am super into this week:

Videos of "The Berlin Reunion," a several days-long performance involving two GIANT puppets walking through the streets of Germany. He rises out of the water! She eats a giant popsicle! So beautiful and what mind-bending planning it must have involved. Like I always say, if there's one thing that excites me more than tiny toy food it's giant puppets (this is a thing that I am saying to everyone, all the time). Amazing pictures here too.

Part 3 from Erroll Morris's seven-part series for the New York Times, "The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock," where James Agee's descriptions of rooms in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" are compared to Walker Evans' photographs, cataloging discrepancies that suggest Evans moved items around for aesthetic purposes. For the most part I subscribe to the 'there is no What Happened' school of thought when it comes to accuracy in documentary anything, but I find this stuff endlessly fascinating.

And as for me: I turned another year older on Sunday and to quote a far better writer than me, something has me in its mouth and it's chewing. It's not an unpleasant sensation; kind of nice actually. Movement is movement and all the directions I'm being gnashed in are good ones.

Dreamy stuff I've been into lately/always:

Feist - I Feel It All (Diplo's Plastic Remix)

Kurt Vile - Don't Get Cute

[Kurt Vile]

The Association - Never My Love

Kate Bush - The Sensual World

The Magnetic Fields - The Dreaming Moon

Mariah Carey + Ghost Town DJs = Magic

Mariah Carey is a total Friend in My Head (TM Wendy Williams). It's her half teflon/half coconuts personality, sandpaper speaking voice, cougar-y marriage, and the perfection that is the first three songs on The Emancipation of Mimi. And as big a fan as I am of Beyoncè, Sasha Fierce wouldn't last one round with Mariah Cray-cray. She's the real deal.

Mariah Carey - H.A.T.E.U. remix ft. Gucci Mane, Big Boi, OJ da Juiceman

I Like Food Food Tastes Good

I was pretty bummed out when the news broke this week that Gourmet magazine had folded. Not because I've ever bought a single issue; I've pored over it at other people's houses but I generally like my food porn to resemble things I would actually make myself. Everyday Foodand the like. Its demise sucks partly because it was a beautiful magazine, but also because — like many others who make their living with words — I get a 'what the eff are we all doing here anyway' sort of feeling when I hear that a big dog like Gourmet got put down.

If you are someone who has "ever loved food and/or magazines," read this Time Out Chicago blog post on Gourmet's closing. As an editor who used to get letters from puzzle solvers who said we helped them through a hard time (sometimes actual hard time if they were incarcerated) or even taught them how to read, I'll never tire of stories about the way magazines can affect people's lives. It's cold comfort to the newly jobless staff, but I hope they read it too.

Some songs about food and drink, some more tangential than others:

Louis Jordan - Beans and Cornbread

[Louis Jordan is king]

Roots Manuva - Cornmeal Dumpling

Dead Milkmen - Filet of Sole

I'm too poor to see Dead Milkmen at Riot Fest this Saturday. Hot tears.

Ohio Express - Yummy, Yummy, Yummy

Jeff Buckley - Lilac Wine

I was just thinking the other day how it is weird that there hasn't been a Jeff Buckley biopic, when of course there is going to be a Jeff Buckley biopic. James Franco, yeah okay. Robert Pattinson, take your weirdly Eastern European sounding stilted-ass American accent elsewhere.