Daisy

I have turned into someone overly concerned with lists. Here are some:

1. The Rolling Stone 200: A list of 200 essential rock and roll records. I've discovered a few amazing albums via this list, and I've picked up some very mediocre CDs as well, but for the most part (specially the 50s part) the list has been a revelation. CD burners rock.
2. Anthony Burgess' 99 Novels of the 20^th Century: A terrific list with some great and sometimes forgotten books. Surely Burgess included more than a few in there simply because they'd be overlooked otherwise (Nabokov is in there twice, but not for the obvious)
3. El Diablo Songs: Songs whose name is "El Diablo." Must find them all.
4. Ebert's Great Movies: Yes, Ebert. Matt Groening said that the nicest thing about movie critics on TV is that they wear nice sweaters. The other nice thing is that they seem to have a good grounding in film history. I'm about halfway through the films, thanks to the university's terrific library.
5. Movies mentioned in A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American MoviesI'm also halfway through these. I've been looking for one that features an army of women running into a mirrored hall in slow-motion while an unbelievably melancholy voice runs through a voice-over. I forget which movie Scorsese pulled the scene from. But the other movies he's picked (and that I've seen) are pretty damn cool.
6. Compact Deuce: I've discovered some terrific bits here, many available for next to nothing on Half.com. And some I knew already and was pleased to see that they were well liked elsewhere.
7. William Shakespeare, in Chronological Order: I'm up to Richard II.

Lists offer the illusion of completion. These items are all you need. These books are all the books you need to read. These movies are all the movies you need to see. This is all you need to know. It isn't. There's far more out there than one can absorb. But I think that as long as the illusion is acknowledged as such, it's fine, and other than betraying an obssessive-compulsive streak, it's mostly harmless, or about as harmless as setting up an elaborate train-set in your garage, or building a replica of monuments with toothpicks in your living room, or writing and illustrating beautiful, bloody epic stories about little girls in danger while working as a janitor, or preparing for the inevitable coming of the lord with tinfoil and a high degree of intuitive art.

I also love lists posing as anti-lists. They too have a point.

Work

Emeril Naranjo died of cirrhosis on the eve of his forty-fifth birthday. He weighed three hundred pounds, was five foot flat, and owed enough rent to include this datum into his checklist of writerly dolors. He died broke. He died drunk. He died owing money. He did not die in obscurity: his stories had been much admired by fans of genre fiction, specially by fans of evil ventriloquist dummy stories.

Genre efforts suffer from doggedness -- the worst of it, no matter if it's crime fiction, horror, fantasy,or science fiction, reads like a checklist of expectations. The best plays with those conventions. Naranjo wrote 103 short stories about animated dummies. The best of these subtly played with the expectations of the reader. Several raised the possibility that the dummy might not be alive and demonic at all, and some deconstructed the story even as it unfolded. (The least succesful of these featured titles for individual bits of the story. (Ie, "4. IN WHICH THE CHARACTERS BEGIN TO SUSPECT THAT THE DUMMY MIGHT BE COMMITTING THE KILLINGS," "7. IN WHICH THE DUMMY HIDES IN A WOODEN ORANGE CRATE AND WAITS FOR HIS NEXT VICTIM," "8. HIS NEXT VICTIM.") Given his massive output, some repetition was to be expected. He wrote quick, and he hardly revised, and his kind of writing could only find a home in magazines that accomodated quick, patchy prose.

For all his flaws his stuff bristled with life. He could be very funny and very creepy. He had Sam Fuller's taste for lowlifes, and his same distaste for hipocrisy. Fuller admired Naranjo, and before he teamed up with Hanson for the fantastic but ill-fated White Dog had considered an evil dummy story about white supremacy in Peoria. Naranjo jotted down a couple of scenes but the project never materialized.

He wrote a few screenplays and teleplays. Not one was filmed -- odd given how his influence can be felt in movies like Devil Doll, Attenborough's Magic, The Unholy Three, and can be seen (albeit diluted) in the Chucky and Puppet Master movies. In television, Naranjo partly inspired "The Glass Eye" in Hitchcock's TV series, episode 6X20 of Hooperman, the Bobcat Goldwaith episode from Tales from the Crypt, several episodes of Hammer House of Horror, and Joss Whedon's Talent Show from Buffy, which includes a very clever nod to Naranjo, as well as the kind of twist that the master of the evil dummy story excelled at.

The dummy, blank and sinister, lends itself to many interpretations. It's an uncontrolled ID, a savage Other, an Inner Child gone wrong. The dummy's everywhere, and has been associated with hack television and low-budget movies for so long, and so effectively parodied, that it's easy to forget that when the concept works, it really packs a punch.

Naranjo devoted his life to it. He never owned a dummy. Like Spielberg, who distrusted the ocean and its great predators after completing Jaws, Naranjo believed that he would incur some kind of karmic, all-too fitting retribution if he were to ever bring a dummy into his shabby apartment. He did learn to throw his voice around, but his friends said that you could see his lips move.

You Won't Let Those Robots Defeat Me

Nothing right now but half-thought thoughts on the infinite variations of stories about evil ventriloquist's dummies in television and movies. One particular writer crafted a hundred-odd stories, teleplays, and film-scripts -- all centered on dummies. More on him Wednesday.

But why not listen to the new Flaming Lips album right now instead? Online? Yes!