The unfolding events in New York and along the Eastern Seaboard of the past few days have seemed, to me at least, to be Hollywood Live. I know that there has been massive destruction, and many have died, but this is also true of Haiti and Jamaica among others. Only the news from The States has been an uber-intense uber-spectacle.
The media build-up, and rolling reporting, was like an interactive movie event. Part of this is that New York, for most people, only exists on the cinema screen – and quite often getting its arse handed to it on fat concrete plate by giant apes, earthquakes, global warming, alien invaders and giant smiling marshmallow sailors.
It is this same American Cultural Omnipresence which has changed the nature of this very evening, too. When I was a nipper, Halloween was the shittest name in the Calendar of Special Days of the year. It only really manifested itself in the crappy drawing of pumpkins and witches at school. I didn’t actually know that a pumpkin was real vegetable until my twenties, when they started to slowly appear on the supermarket shelves.
The spook creep didn’t end there. Halloween parties started to pop up all over the place, as did a plethora of sexy devil outfits and killer nurse outfits. Why killer nurses would wear fishnets and skimpy tops is beyond me. Surely they’d get blood and viscera everywhere. They would if they were doing properly anyway.
And now: it’s a Wednesday, and I’m getting ready to go to my brother’s flat for some Halloween shenanigans. Outside, packs of children trot from house to house, feeding their inevitable diabetes and burgeoning hatred of their own flabby bodies by begging cheap sugary yuck from the local community. Inside, the news is banging on about some Halloween shit I’m trying to tune out. My brother is putting on nibbles and drinks to celebrate the mythical thinning of the gateway between this world and the next.
How did this transformation come upon us? It wasn’t witchcraft, contrary to what the Christian Right would have you believe. I blame it primarily on The Simpsons, with a slice of Buffy, Michael Myers and generic American sitcoms. The children of Britain have come into being in world where Halloween is not about sticking your head in bowl of water in the fruitless pursuit of a floating apple, but a festival of the plastic macabre, of demonic prostitution, of green creme eggs.
And why might I whinge so, you may ask? Because it’s Halloween. If my words can create even an ounce of misery and doubt, I’ve done my bit for today’s evil.
Whahahahahahahhahaaaaaahahahahahaahahahahaaa etc.
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