Every year I'm on the lookout for the first signs of Halloween. And every year, Halloween makes its initial appearance earlier and earlier. In recent years, Halloween was already here in early August.
But yesterday, on July 31, 2024, at the Pavilions in Santa Monica, Pumpkin Spice products were already on display.
Okay, you might say Pumpkin Spice means Autumn (September), not necessarily Halloween. But I think Halloween and Pumpkin Spice marketing go together.
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Several horror icons whom I admire have died these past several months. I just now learned that David J. Skal (1952 - 2024) died after being hit by a drunk driver in Los Angeles.
I first encountered Skal through his book, The Monster Show. A self-described "cultural history of horror," his book is informative, filled with original insights, and well written; a breezy, entertaining read, mercifully free of academic jargon. The prose is literate yet accessible to lay readers, the way film criticism should be always.
I later read his Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween, as part of my research for a class I taught at The Learning Annex about Halloween haunted houses. It was great preparation for my lecture.
I only met Skal once, in the fall of 2001, at Burbank's Dark Delicacies horror bookstore. Several writers were there for a book-signing, including me and Skal. I had brought The Monster Show for him to sign, which he did. I still prize that book with his inscription.
To my surprise, he bought a copy of my book, Halloween Candy and asked me to sign it. I took it as his way of encouraging a fellow writer and fan who was hardly in his league.
Overall, Skal was a fine historian, a skilled writer, and a gracious man.
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British actress Lysette Anthony has announced that she
too was raped by producer Harvey Weinstein.British actress Lysette Anthony has told police that Harvey Weinstein raped her, the Sunday Times reported, becoming the fifth woman to level such accusations against the disgraced Hollywood mogul.The 54-year-old actress, who currently appears in British soap Hollyoaks, told Metropolitan Police last week that she had originally met Weinstein in New York, and agreed to meet him later at his rented house in London, according to the paper."The next thing I knew he was half undressed and he grabbed me. It was the last thing I expected and I fled," she told the Times.Anthony, who appeared in Woody Allen's 1992 film "Husbands and Wives", said that Weinstein then began stalking her, turning up unannounced at her house."He pushed me inside and rammed me against the coat rack," she said of the attack in the 1980s. "He was trying to kiss me and shove inside me. Finally I just gave up."Weinstein has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex.
It has become an embarrassing memory, like a mawkish, self-pitying teenage entry in a diary. We cringe to think of it. It is our collective moment of madness, a week when somehow we lost our grip. A decade on, we look back and wonder what came over us.
There were some who felt that way at the time, but they were the minority. Indeed, they complained they were a marginalised, even oppressed, group - gagged dissidents in a new totalitarian state of the emotions. Some looked at the mountain of Cellophane-wrapped bouquets that piled up outside Buckingham Palace - a million of them, it was said - and sniffed "floral fascism" in the air. Later, Christopher Hitchens wrote that in the week after Princess Diana was killed in a Paris car crash, Britain became a "one-party state", such was the coercive nature of the public reaction. He sought out the Britons who had been forced to close their shops or cancel sporting events on the day of the funeral, lest they feel the rage of the tear-stained hordes outside. The writer Carmen Callil was more specific: "It was like the Nuremberg rallies."
