STAY STUPID!
BATHOS of course is a fanzine, not a prozine, which it would be, if the editor were to write about literature, being a professional writer himself (in Danish, that is, not in a leetle broken Inglis). As far as the movies are concerned, he is merely a fan, having seen a lot of this stuff.
If ever a professional movie-maker should read this rag, he would know how to take my criticisms, with a large dose of salt. There are a lot of us around, consequently there are a lot of these rags.
I usually enjoy reading them, there’s always the odd movie you haven’t seen, or maybe you have a long time ago, and reading about it is almost like seeing it again. There’s also quite a few of them in my own country – unfortunately I don’t enjoy reading them quite as much.
They are simply too – well, Danish. Now, as everybody knows, Danes are stupid.
They are probably the most stupid people in the world. They also have the most beautiful language of all, which is rather like, to quote Solomon, “a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout”.
We produce prophets like Kierkegaard (pronounced –gore, not -guard) and a lot of bacon – you can smell it, as you walk the streets. Of course, being stupid is nothing to be ashamed of – codfish can’t fly, and Danes are peasant stock.
But you see, they’re proud of it – they even teach it at the University. At the moment Denmark is ruled by a conservative and quasi-fascist party, so maybe you should see the Little Mermaid at a later date.
Still, you mustn’t think that the Danes are Fascist, Racist, or anything of the sort. They’re just stupid – it’s their religion.
In Denmark we have freedom of religion, just as long as it’s stupid – we don’t like Moslems, who can usually read and write. We’re also a democracy, meaning you can say anything you want, as long as – yeah, you guessed it.
As I’m sure you know, nobody likes a wise guy. Well, we’ve sort of made it part of our constitution.
Fanzines of course are sort of underground, they may even be considered kind of subversive, and since in a Stupid Commonwealth being intelligent is considered treasonable, you might hope that these rags would be – well, less than idiotic. I’m sorry to disappoint you.
You see, these fanzines have a mission too, which seems to be to cement the prejudice that horror movies and the like can only be enjoyed by the mentally deficient. Consequently, they seem to be written by eight-year-olds with no inkling of grammar or syntax and a vocabulary of two hundred words.
Movies are “fede” (“bad” - that’s good) or “ufede” (they “suck” – nothing to do with vampirism or fellatio, I’m afraid). They’re bad, when they contain mutilations of females (“kællinger” = “bitches” – you didn’t know Danish was that easy to learn, did you?) and they suck, when they have a script.
At the same time, these morons hail themselves and each other as experts and pioneers – which is very Danish. Just don’t let them know that you ever read a book, because they’re not going to like that one bit.
Of course, there are exceptions. There’s Frank Brahe, who knows his limits quite well.
He makes no excuses for his shortcomings (and why should he – he’s having a great time making these rags just like yours truly) but he isn’t particularly proud of them either, and so you are spared the rage. Then there’s Henrik Larsen, who even brings in semi-professional people to write his half-English OBSKURIØST.
If it weren’t for the aggressive stance of these school-children, one might merely smile. After all, this has got nothing to do with reviews, being just clumsy synopses, with a lot of irrelevant nonsense.
These people write the way the talk - and they talk a lot – but if you think you’ll get any real information (except for their spoiling your fun by reiterating the whole plot) you’re very much mistaken. Usually, there aren’t even any illustrations, expect for the odd DVD cover – I guess it would be too much trouble to download a few of the stills, the Internet is teeming with.
Of course, the editors are mostly and endless commenting on each other’s deplorable products. They may be of interest to those, who were present at that particular grill party, but they are of no interest whatsoever to film-buffs.
Accordingly, when I published BATHOS, I didn’t send it to any of my Danish “colleagues”. It seems that one of them got hold of a copy anyway, reviewing it in his own magazine.
It obviously made him very angry, not just the fact that I write an “academic English” (more than 200 words) and try to interest people who didn’t come to that grill-party, but because of my “denunciation” of the genre on the cover, promising bad taste and women as sex-objects, and going on to say that “in articles and reviews we have endeavoured to expose the terrible menace to society that popular art represents. For this reason alone we have filled our magazine with disgusting pictures of sex and violence, of monsters and killers, and of naked women being tied up and whipped, from the sexual innuendo of Tex Avery to the explicit sadism of Laurel & Hardy.”
And if you think that’s funny, listen to the comment of the – understandably anonymous – editor of STAY SICK, as, unable to fathom an irony that would be easily grasped by any four-year-old, he states: “So popular art is a terrible menace to society! And this from someone who professes to be fond of horror movies!” Okay – sometimes stupidity can be entertaining …
: man 29. sep 2008 16:25
- men hva sir' du?
