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Posts tagged “James Whale”

Day 74: In the Margins

Posted on February 7, 2014

My dad had a box of fishing tackle he kept in the garage, a great silver box that accordioned into eight levels when you opened the lid.  That’s how I remember it anyway.  The glints on little hooks.  The feathers.  The spools of iridescent fishing line.  Later he’d carve his own out of bass wood and hang them on handmade racks to paint and epoxy them to a high shine, writing names on the tails he’d picked out of an English to Spanish dictionary: Pescado, Nadar, Niño Malo.  But these in the box were store bought, some still in their clear plastic containers that snapped shut.  Lying stretched straight in a tray — a rubber worm twice the length of my finger and the purple color of an old bruise.  I was six or seven, living in Arkansas.  One month before my breast cancer diagnosis, D. R. (Duke) Haney and I were working on a piece about Frankenstein and Duke told me that growing up in Virginia he was able to tune into a D. C. station to watch Detroit-based Sir Graves Ghastly present films like Whale’s Frankenstein in the middle of the night.

sir grave ghastly

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Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: breast cancer, Cynthia Hawkins, D. R. Haney, Frankenstein, James Whale, Philip Seymour Hoffman, TNBC

Day 43: Electricity

Posted on January 3, 2014

When I spoke to Jody on the phone she encouraged my confidence in her acupuncture services because she used the word “evil” when I mentioned “cancer” and “chemo.”  Last week, I had … a vision?  I don’t want to say the word “vision” because it makes me think of Dirty Steve in Young Guns warbling out at half-speed, “Did you see the size of that chicken?”  I was dozing off at any rate, and I imagined without trying (okay, call it a vision if you want) that chemo was a lanky woman in a cheap feather boa leaning on an elbow, flicking the nails on one raised hand together, looking back at me with her brows aslant in mock pity.  I’ve worried that my animosity toward the chemo might manifest itself more deeply, might make my body resist the work of the chemo every two weeks.  So I’ve been trying not to see chemo as evil at all, but when Jody made the connection I thought, this is the acupuncturist for me.

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Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: acupuncture, Annie, breast cancer, Carol Burnett, chi, Dirty Steve, Frankenstein, James Whale, Miss Hannigan, monsters, qi, Sean Young, Young Guns

Monster Bisque: Hawkins and Haney Talk Frankenstein

Posted on October 26, 2013

Last Halloween, I’d asked a few Nervous Breakdown contributors to share their favorite terrifying movie scenes, and D. R. Haney was among them with his contribution from Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I, on the other hand, had picked the tunnel scene from Willy Wonka, which I explain so you understand why I like collaborating with Duke. My brain grows three sizes bigger by association. He’s like a cinematic moral compass for which true north is James Dean. And this year for Halloween, Duke and I decided to discuss the classic tale that produced another old-school Hollywood icon.

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Categories: On Movies

Tagged: Boris Karloff, D. R. Haney, film, Frankenstein, James Whale, Kenneth Branagh, Mary Shelley, Young Frankenstein

  

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