Some links of interest

-I've started a new photo blog where I'll be posting pictures, images, books covers, and photographs that I like. Basically whatever interests me. It's called The Cold Blooded Sausage Maker, please follow it if such a thing interests you.

-From 'Trance' to 'Spring Breakers,' Is This the Golden Age of Film Noir?

Disorientation is the key ingredient of contemporary neo-noir. It also manifests in Harmony Korine's neon-caked explosion of excess, "Spring Breakers," which --  depending on your perspective -- celebrates or indicts the hedonistic tendencies of modern youth. Korine certainly doesn't make it easy to determine whether the criminal antics of gangster-pimp-arms-dealer Alien (James Franco) and his entourage of giddy college girls have gone off the path of righteousness or discovered a spectacular new freedom. Atmospherically, "Spring Breakers" is an elegant evocation of noir storytelling, littered with misdeeds with girls and guns at every turn. As with "Trance," it's nearly impossible to figure out whether any given character should elicit viewer's sympathies, but Korine relishes the confusion. 

 -Great review (from one of my favorite blogs) of First Blood by David Morrell which also dips into some of the differences between the book and the film: 

"First Blood comes off like an action-adventure take on Moby-Dick, with Rambo and Teasle acting as both Ahab and the whale for one another."

-Courtesy of Jake Hinkson I've got a new (to me) writer to try: The Godmother of Noir: Elisabeth Sanxay Holding 

If you trace the roots of literary noir back far enough, eventually you’ll run into the unlikely figure of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. Though in recent years she has been overlooked in the rush to canonize folks such as James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich, Holding was just as pivotal in the development of noir as a distinct literary genre. Like Cain and Woolrich, she didn’t write about hardnosed good guys very much. Before the term “roman noir” had even been coined, her specialty was isolated and desperate characters with profoundly poor decision-making skills.

 -Craig Clevenger offers up "High Priest of the Godless: A Jim Thompson Primer"

Before there was film noir, there was the roman noir, the dark novel. What Americans of the mid-twentieth century called pulp fiction was simply the contemporary incarnation of the dime novel or penny dreadful of the previous century. The lurid stories behind the lurid covers were considered lowbrow trash and indeed, many of them aspired to be nothing but the same. But one man’s trash is another man’s dark worldview, as evinced by the French embrace of these tales from the godless gutter of the New World.

-The Word You’re Looking For Is Genius—Not Crazy, Genius: The Top 5 Craziest Crime Writers

-Low Winter Sun is coming this summer on AMC. A show about a group of dirty cops.


-Viva Riva!, a Congolese crime movie looks worth checking out.