the desert wind was a man like us

[ashlyme]

Hello! I'm not long back from a hot Bank Holiday spent in Bristol with cybermule . A pretty social weekend, this. H took us to a friend's wedding up at Arnos Vale cemetery. There is something cool about paper lanterns nestling in the crook of graveyard trees. Something cooler when the groom takes his wife's name as his own: I know I punched the air at that. Later there was a lot of good conversation (blurred a little by very good rhubarb cider and cans of Brewdog IPA) and some dancing. Or at least I flailed around The Cure and the Pixies for a bit. A garden party the next night where I fell over and dented my knees and head trying to sit on a wall (don't ask). But at a do where there are microbiology jokes going round it doesn't hurt to say you come from the village whose isolation hospital hosted the last recorded death from smallpox. Crappy knees aside H and I went up to Bristol to get some more dancing in at a Goth night. Sunday was less frenetic - we drove to Stroud for a little music festival there, Godspeed on the stereo. The haybails looked as if they were about to roll over the land in a slow conquest: it reminded me of Robert Westall's YA ghost story The Scarecrows. The festival wasn't the chin-stroking muso gathering we expected. Lots of kids and dogs in a marquee and slightly-bemused West Country guys doing spoken-word over backing tracks. When we left there was a band doing half decent blues/two-tone music, but the singer murdered everything. We also watched Richard Stanley's Dust Devil (1992) which still has me scratching my head. It could have been a really great numinous movie if the serial-killer elements had been handled subtly. Picked up Marcel Ayme's The Man Who Walked Through Walls and a book on British plant-lore from a charity shop for a couple of quid. Currently reading H's copy of Cloud Atlas.

Comments

[sovay]

I'm not long back from a hot Bank Holiday spent in Bristol with cybermule.

It sounds like a great weekend. I'm so glad.

But at a do where there are microbiology jokes going round it doesn't hurt to say you come from the village whose isolation hospital hosted the last recorded death from smallpox.

That's excellent. Also, I don't think I knew that.)

We also watched Richard Stanley's Dust Devil (1992) which still has me scratching my head. It could have been a really great numinous movie if the serial-killer elements had been handled subtly.

May I ask? It played at NecronomiCon—Stanley was the Filmmaker Guest of Honor—but I did not manage to see it.

[ashlyme]

*It sounds like a great weekend.*

It was, thank you!

*Also, I don't think I knew that.*

It was also a maternity hospital in its time; my middle brother was born there! There's a slightly upmarket housing estate on the site now. I'd try and work that history into a tale if I could only find the shape.

*May I ask?*

Of course! It's set in early nineties Namibia, where a demon, a naghtloper, in human form as a white man in a dustcoat and bush-hat is hitchhiking across the desert, seducing then murdering those who pick him up. There are a few hints that he only takes those who have nothing to live for. He's described in narration - " "back in the first times, in the time of the red light, Desert Wind was a man like us. Until by mischance, he grew wings and flew like a bird. He became a hunter, and like a hawk, he flew to seek his prey. Taking refuge in those far corners of the world where magic still lingers. But having once been a man, so does he still suffer the passions of a man, flying in the rages sometimes, and throwing himself down like a child, to vent his wrath upon the earth. The people of the great Namib have another name for those violent winds that blow from nowhere. They call them Dust Devils." This Dust Devil is using the fingers of those he killed to gain power over the material world, to bring chaos. He works far better as a figure who flits out of a moving car or a storm-calling magus with human bones stitched to the back of his coat than as a prosthetic-faced slasher: you want him almost to be the figure Nick Cave sang about in "Red Right Hand". The film doesn't need to show you mutilated body parts to keep its atmosphere. Which it has in spades. There's a stunning sequence right near the end where the Devil's tracked to a sand-shrouded ghost town. You could almost be in Tarkovsky's Zone here. There's a cinema where only dunes occupy the seats but the screen *still works*. Most of the white characters are depicted as thugs or at best idiots; the two black central characters are much more sympathically drawn, and for a change one of them is the cop who's sceptical of the local folklore (and he has his own hauntings to deal with). I wonder if there was pressure from the studio to make the film more like conventional horror? Nevertheless, I was still talking it over with H a couple of hours later.

[cybermule]

keeping you busy one weekend at a time...

[ashlyme]

You're the best co-adventurer. I miss you. <3