i put a spell on you: august 1, 1999.

August 1, 1999.

Must get on a regular sleeping/eating schedule. The last 2 days have been utter chaos compared to camp life, although not very chaotic by any other of my lifestyle metresticks, and I'm still exhausted from accumulated July fatigue. Especially when someone insists on waking me up after only 5 hours of sleep because he's lonely.

But I'm not mentioning any names.

tiny blair witch spoilers ahead......
We went to see the Blair Witch Project last night, just like everyone else. Spooky stuff, kids. Unlike other good horror flicks that work their magic by exploiting dream imagery (see: Dark City and Fire Walk with Me), Blair Witch worked on a very undramatic primal level of fear. And it seems to have awakened my latent fear of the dark, which was pretty much subdued during my year in Hippie Hell and my month downstreet from the mental hospital. I've heard that the realism comes from the fact that they underfed, disoriented and scared the fuck out of the actors during the completely improvisational shoot. As Dav pointed out, that brings the viewing experience unpleasantly close to that of a snuff film.
Funny how the myth incorporates elements of the supernatural right along with elements of the hermit serial killer...funny because (as my anthropology professor pointed out), we treat serial killers in exactly the same way as our ancestors treated witches. In our estimation, they are a mysterious, uncontrollable, malignant force that must be removed from the community. By death, if possible. You can quote Andrea fucking Dworkin all day; the truth is that people believed in witches 500 years ago and they do today. No covert control of old women need apply to the situation.
And who else was utterly terrified that Mike would turn around in the last scene?

"ready for some mind-fucking?"

A less scary movie we consumed this afternoon was The Wizard of Oz. Funny...it must be the 20th time I've seen that movie, and it's still possible to see new things in it. For instance, the whole female power subtext. Women have the trump cards in Oz; specifically the Witches. Glinda herself is an incredibly ambiguous figure. Consider:

she knows everything about Oz, and thus knows that the Wizard is a humbug and Dorothy's quest will involve much pain and likely end in failure
she put Dorothy into the Wicked Witch of the West's wrath with the ruby slippers

These things are somewhat balanced in the book by Glinda's Kiss - she leaves a silver mark on Dorothy's forehead to ward off evil, just like Cain. But still, she never descends into a fairy godmother mode...she's always remote and powerful. And she always plays her own game.

Consider also that although there aren't too many subtleties to be found in the Wicked Witches' role, isn't it interesting that they're sisters to the Good Witches? Just like the Greek gods, they squabble among themselves, gather followers and use proxies to fight an eternal immortal struggle. At the very least, the Witches are powerful priestesses to 'good' and 'evil,' but I prefer to think of them as deities in their own right.

In Neil Gaiman's The Kindly Ones, Rose Walker tries to write a book about the Triple Goddess in popular media. She would do well to seek the multiple faces of a Pagan Mother Goddess in the Wizard of Oz.

And that's your crackpot artistic theory of the day. Goodnight, folks.

pic of glinda linked from wendy's wizard of oz page. she used width attributes to mis-size it as well as myself.