Posts by David Jón Fuller

Werewolf Wednesday: Anathema and other news

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Looks like a busy fall for those keen on werewolves, whether you’re a creator like Rachel Deering, who just launched the second issue of Anathema but is now looking for a new artist to draw the remaining four issues, or a keen fan looking forward to HowlCon 2012 or the new DVD rerelease of An American Werewolf In London. While you’re at it, you can get kitted out in style with the new werewolf tee available at Werewolf News.

Anathema returns

Readers of As You Were should be familiar with the work of Rachel Deering, whose lycanthropic tale of revenge, Anathema, has garnered rave reviews.

The success of the first issue enabled Rachel, who is publishing the series independently, to fund issues 2 – 6 in part thanks to a second successful Kickstarter campaign that concluded this spring.

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Metal Monday: Opeth’s Damnation

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Maybe there’s somthing in the Northern character that grasps the grandeur in metal (no longer “heavy,” thereby losing some of its sense of humour) — an example being Finland’s Apocalyptica surprising listeners with cello renditions of Metallica and Faith No More. Remarkably, Sweden’s Opeth have followed up last year’s fairly (sonically) dense Deliverance with an album that can be legitimately called “sublime.”

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Feature Friday: Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

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Despite the vampire fiction genre taking its place in the mainstream — and the movies that have followed — in the 21st century, one vamp still reigns as the granddaddy of them all: Dracula.  But is that just because he’s become a classic monster? Is he still relevant?  Can he still be compelling? Offbeat, acclaimed filmmaker Guy Maddin — Icelandic by descent and from Winnipeg, to boot — tackles those questions in his adaptation, with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, in Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.

Once bitten, twice Guy

Maddin, RWB reinvent classic vampire

Cover of "Dracula - Pages from a Virgin's...
Cover of Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

A character like Dracula comes with a lot of baggage. Despite the relatively recent explosion of vampire fiction (and keep in mind this review was written in 2003, before the explosion of Twilight — DJF), Bram Stoker’s incarnation of the blood-sucking count, followed hard by Bela Lugosi’s screen portrayal, looms large in the popular conception of the ultimate creature of the night.

That hasn’t stopped filmmakers from sallying forth to capture Dracula — but given the heavyweights who have left their mark on the mythos (F.W. Murnau, Terence Fisher, even Francis Ford Coppola), you might think all has been said and done.

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Thunder God Thursday: Chadwick Ginther’s Thunder Road

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Full disclosure: I’ve not only read Chadwick Ginther’s Norse-mythology-infused novel set in Manitoba, Thunder Road, I got to do so in my capacity as freelance copy editor.  So I felt, having had a part in its production, I shouldn’t interview Chadwick about his book.

But, I figured, there was nothing wrong with hosting him as part of a blog tour. (Info on the book launch can be found at the end of this post; he’ll also be appearing at Thin Air: the Winnipeg International Writers’ Festival this autumn.)

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Metal Monday: Metallica’s St. Anger

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Cover of "St. Anger"

One of the few eighties metal acts to enjoy success without resorting to a reunion tour, Metallica became the top cover band in the world, whether covering others (as on Garage Inc.) or themselves, with orchestral backup (as on S&M).

Battles with Napster notwithstanding, it almost sounded as if James Hetfield et. al. were starting to have fun with their music. Whence, then, St. Anger?

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Feature Friday: Plaster Caster

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For those of you who wondered what the KISS song “Plaster Caster” was really about, the kicker is they were never immortalized by Cynthia Plaster Caster. But the rock stars who were her subjects — such as Jello Biafra, Eric Burdon, and others — really bring to life another side of the fan/rock star relationship in this hilarious, offbeat rock film. She’s still hard at work, as you can see at her website www.cynthiaplastercaster.com/. This movie review originally appeared in 2003.

 

She wants their love to last her

Groupie sculptor immortalizes rock stars’ organs

Plaster Caster
Plaster Caster (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

KISS had a penchant for euphemism. It took some deciphering to figure out what Gene Simmons meant by “love” (could be an emotion, sex, genitalia, or some combination). So in high school, when I first heard the song “Plaster Caster” on Love Gun, I wondered. Was it about a groupie who casts plaster, or a porno reference? Is she really taking casts of people’s penises, or are my hormones seriously clouding my interpretation? And if she isn’t, what the heck is this song about?

Well, there really is a Cynthia Plaster Caster, and she really did get access to some of the most notorious rock stars. As the documentary Plaster Caster explains, she never stopped, and has amassed a large collection of famous white penises. (Incidentally, Simmons’s is not among them; she never approached KISS to cast them. Simmons declined to take part in the film.)

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