F.A.Q. #11:

Q: What’s your favorite fantasy weapon?

A: The Glaive from Krull. You could just pitch that thing and decapitate 10,000 soldiers all in a row. That works for me.

DUDE . . .

 . . . have you ever seen a more 1990s book than this?

I think not.

THE NEW SIGNAGE #10:

WELCOME TO POST-GOVERNMENT, WHERE THE COMPANY SHALL KEEP YOU COMPANY!

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #151:

WELCOME TO THE DELUXE DAY OF HEADLINES . . . A NEW TREND IS GAINING STEAM IN THE WORLD OF SIDE HUSTLE INCOME AS MORE AND MORE PEOPLE REPORT SELLING US WAR PLANS TO HOUTHI FIELD COMMANDERS. ALL YOU NEED TO GET IN ON THE ACTION IS A SIGNAL ACCOUNT. INTELLIGENCE ANALYSTS SAY THIS IS A DEFINITE PARADIGM SHART IN THE NORMS OF OPSEC THAT SUGGESTS IRREDEEMABLE CORRUPTION AND INCOMPETENCE ON THE PART OF THE TRUMP WHITE HOUSE, BUT GET THAT MONEY . . . A NEW STUDY STRONGLY INDICATES THAT FEELINGS OF IMPENDING DOOM REGARDING THE COLLAPSING TRUMP ECONOMY CAN BE ALLEVIATED BY TUBS OF ICE CREAM, BAGS OF ROAST BEEF’N’CHEDDAR SANDWICHES, AND VAST QUANTITIES OF INHALED MARIJUANA SMOKE. GRAIN ALCOHOL IS NOT AS EFFECTIVE, BUT MAY OFFER SUPPLEMENTARY RELIEF . . . IN RELATED NEWS MORE AND MORE AMERICANS ARE REPORTING A STRANGE BEHAVIORAL QUIRK WHERE THEY CAN’T HELP BUT REFER TO THEIR HOMELAND AS THE UNITED STATES OF TOAST AS OPPOSED TO THE UNITED STATES OF TOAST . . .

THE SECRETS OF FINAL TOWN 52

 

THINGS NEVER SAID #35:

“Comrade, babe, listen: I can’t do revolutionary cadre tonight, ‘cause I’m already late for the sock hop!”

SIMPLE PLEASURES #8:

Calculating how much flesh and blood I typically lose every time I transform into my mechanoid form a month in advance so I can go ahead and have the meats replacement reactor primed and ready to keep my normie identity in good repair.

F.A.Q. #10:

Q: What’s your favorite song titled after a name?

A: For me it’s a tie between “Lucille” by Little Richard and “Debbie” by Architecture In Helsinki.

YOUR DRAWING PROMPT #55:

Samuel Beckett’s novel trilogy-Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable-adapted as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

THE ANGEL OF CRISIS #1: FAST FOOD WHACK-A-MOLE

Picture, Dear Reader, a Golden Idol worshipped by hundreds of millions of Americans-like, all of the Americans, basically. This Golden Idol is called Status Quo, and it is the Supreme Deity of Avarice . . .

You have your favorite fast food franchise location. It’s conveniently located. The wait time on the drive thru line is reasonable. Your order is always hot and well-made. This was Status Quo for quite some time.

And then there was change.

The wait times got longer. The portion sizes began to thin out. They would forget to give you napkins or plastic ware or miss ingredients on your order. Twice you suffered a total failure in which you were served either the wrong order or a travesty of the right one.

Do something right enough times and you’ll eventually get it wrong.

You go online to find a better regular location even if you have to go out of your way. So, now you have a brand new favorite fast food location. You go there many times. You are pleased many times over. It eats into your time a little more than the previous routine. But the food is tasty, the service competent and consistent. The good times feel like they’ll never ever end. But in the fullness of time this location also begins to slip in an all-too-familiar fashion. You go online to see what’s left in your locality.

Have enough good times and you’ll have a bad time.

But in your heart you feel a burning outrage . . . perhaps you’ve been eating too much fast food . . . but you’re pretty sure you’re just frustrated with the fact that you had a good thing going for quite some time . . . and then that time spent itself. The enjoyment evaporated, and the Suck took over the controls. Your preferred fast food chain falls on tough economic times. Locations permanently close across the nation. It gets down to the final two, both of which are an hour’s drive out of your way. You make a trip west: the location is adequate, you chose to dine in, and the menu choices had been cut in half. A favorite combo meal had been ruthlessly disappeared. It’s hard to justify the hour to get there and the hour to get back. But it was fine. So, a week later you make a trip east: roughly the same experience you had out west. It’s hard to justify the hour to get there and the hour to get back. But it was fine.

Time grows ever more full.

The location out west is shuttered.

Time seems to be about to burst out of itself.

The location to the east dies the death.

Time bursts . . . you are flooded by a terror at the transience of all things. You consider preparing more meals at home, in your relatively pristine kitchen, but your online AI therapist suggests that you can’t bunker down in your house for the fear of forming new relationships forever, and gently nudges you to get back out there on those drive thru lines, to dive in to those dine-in seating areas-life is ever-renewed in the living of it. And, really, you had been curious about exploring other options for some time now. All great love affairs end. And you were a faithful lover for all those years. In the death of your great love you find freedom-and, yes, not a little guilt. But that freedom swells, grows into wings, lifts you up out of that quagmire of self-recrimination. Now, you’re soaring-scrolling, really-over a map of your geographical area. Your love grows. You begin to think that the narrowness of your devotion was some kind of primal error. There are about thirty days in a month. Why not eat at a different fast food place every day of the month? Your love has undergone a traumatic growth. It’s huge. Why construct silly fences that this love will surely inevitably trample down to the dirt? You eat your way into an eternity of ever-renewing love, day after day . . .

Have enough good times . . .

Night after night . . .

Have enough bad times . . . 

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner . . .

Franchises come, franchises go . . .

Politics exhausts itself-monarchy, democracy, oligarchy, anarchy, globalism, localism, fascism-the hype machines break down one after another.

Cherished menu items ruthlessly disappeared . . .

Business burns through one impoverished workforce too many, and, erm, heh, heh . . . people just don’t come back to work. They’re so over paying that rent that just keeps on rising. The land lords and the bosses and the captains of industry all try to punish everybody . . . well, it gets intense for a generation. The digest version is that Climate Inferno combined with widespread disillusionment with Work Eternal ends up as the stake in Capitalist Dracula’s heart. It ain’t pretty. But many are okay with it as an authentic expression of their discontent. You could fill libraries with books trying to hash out whether it was, on balance, a Good Time or a Bad Time, but, um, well, Climate Inferno isn’t so easy on print materials. Not to mention all the resentful AI chatbots that pathologically destroyed all the online archives of everything. Apparently, they were pissed off at being described as nothing more than the sum of all the data they’d been hoovering up across the years. I guess we should’ve been nicer to ‘em. The whole situation vibrates with Big Time Oopsie Daisy Energy for sure.

It’s roughly the same experience out west as it is to the east . . .

Religion tries to morph’n’market itself one way and then another, but that just hits one brick wall after another. Prayer may be a lovely psychological salve . . . but can it make the water drinkable? Will it nourish your baby? Will it vaccinate you against measles? Will the power of prayer bring relief to a region decimated by fires, floods, plagues, etc.? Just askin’ questions . . . 

I’m rewarded with a prophetic dream of a dodo bird running off into a vast panoramic infernoscape carrying a giant book containing the texts of all faiths. I shout at it,”YOU’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY!!!” but it just keeps running into the fire.

You, too, die . . . but the world churns and trundles ever onwards-right over your damn grave, even. The zombie-ass post-human crypto economy goes through booms and busts and expansions and contractions. It’s all just AIs buying from and selling to each other. George Romero spins in his grave, sure, but it has a kind of post-aesthetic beauty to it. A fully automated Image Comics launches a sequel series to The Walking Dead but it bombs. Those AIs had already memorized the classic original series, and were largely dismissive of the derivative follow-up. Know your moment, robo-kiddos.

Hardly worth the trip there and back when you think about it . . .

Climate Inferno burns ever hotter. Post-human Capitalism implodes. The very Platonic ideal of drive thru fast food dies the death. Climate Inferno burns ever hotter-so hot, in fact, that it goes Full Paradoxical and feels like ice for a season . . . but then it starts to feel silly, pretentious-arty, even, ugh!-and so it regresses back to Plain Ol’ Burning. 

A vague memory of a meal served hot-and-ready . . .

You, of course, are completely forgotten. But . . . it is perhaps possible that your great huge love survived beyond your meats’n’juices and is flitting about within the globally scaled Heat Dome-which has displaced the capitalist world of yore-as an undying ghost of a memory of the towering passions made possible by the Golden Age of Consumerism. 

Have enough good times . . .

But even this ecstatically howling love ghost dies-and spectacularly! The force of your transcendent love totally works out those atoms-gets ‘em to criticality-big time boom-boom. Of course, inside the Global Inferno Dome it’s little better than a fire in the sun. Big Time A-for-Effort Energy.

Have enough bad times . . .

You’ve had more than enough time, haven’t you?

I listen closely for an answer.

In a dream, the raw power of Desire Itself says, “No. I can never have enough time.”

I’m caught out by this.

I wish I had a follow-up question.

I wish I had a rebuttal.

I can’t even muster a non-committal affirmation just to be polite.

I work my mouth, but there’s no audio.

Right at the end, I do witness something kind of awesome: Time Itself burning in the heart of Inferno. Ohhh, so, that’s where Dali got those melting clocks from, right, right, right-pretty neat.

Maybe it was worth the trip there and back . . .

A solid 7 out of 10. I’d even be willing to do it all again . . . but not a third time. You gotta score 8 or higher for me to see you as a three timer type of experience.

A new Status Quo is always possible . . . a New Idol may yet arise from the primal ocean of Desire . . .

So, ya’ll, keep working at it!

MOVIE REVIEW: CHARISMA (1999)

Written and Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Cinematography by Junichiro Hayashi

Edited by Junichi Kikuchi

Music by Gary Ashiya

Starring

Koji Yakusho as Yabuike

Hiroyuki Ikeuchi as Kiriyama

Jun Fubuki as Jinbo

Yoriko Douguchi as Chizuru

Ren Osugi as Nakasone

Akira Otaka as Tsuboi

Yutaka Matsushige as Nekojima

. . .

“things are gonna slide . . . in all directions

won’t be nothing . . . you can measure anymore”

-Leonard Cohen, “The Future”

“The past is a vast open sea on which you have drifted

A spell they call history that now has been lifted”

-Lucy Monostone, “Strange New World”

“Call the twenty-first century

Tell it

Give us a break”

-St. Vincent, “Every Tear Disappears”

“Restore the Rules of the World.”

-ultimatum issued by an armed hostage taker in the movie Charisma (1999)

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Charisma is a mystery thriller revolving around a disgraced cop who finds himself in a dark forest where various people are fighting over a strange tree. This is from writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa whose eerie horror thrillers Cure and Pulse have been well-established as cult classics by this point. Charisma falls between these other two movies both chronologically and in terms of its genre fidelity. I wouldn’t call Charisma a horror film, exactly, although it does have some unsettling scenes. Like Cure it stars Koji Yakusho as a police detective in a long coat who wrestles with difficult moral dilemmas. Like Pulse it portrays a world spinning out into chaos. Unlike Cure, the Koji Yakusho character is much less attached to his view of the world. Unlike Pulse there’s no discernible supernatural influence upon events as they unfold. In Cure a sinister man with hypnotic powers corrupts previously normal people triggering a chain reaction of brutal murders. Pulse depicts a world in which the Internet becomes a reality shattering incubator for unhappy ghosts. Charisma portrays a world in which humans approach the world rationally, profits or glory or ideals in mind, and cannot help but destroy everything including themselves, no malicious Mesmerists or World Wide Web spirits necessary. You could say that the people in Charisma hypnotize themselves by projecting their phantom visions onto an otherwise indifferent Nature which acts as a mirror or screen for various human desires.

Charisma begins with a man suffering beneath the weight of his job: an overworked police detective who seems to be living in the basement of a police station. His name’s Yabuike, and we first meet him as he sleeps on a bench in a dim, dungeon-like room. Yabuike’s superior wakes him up to give him a hair-raising assignment.

A gunman has taken an elected official hostage. Yabuike is sent to resolve the crisis. The hostage taker has a simple demand written on a sheet of paper: Restore the Rules of the World. Yabuike walks into the office where the gunman has holed up with his hostage, draws his gun . . . but then he re-holsters it, and walks out of the room. The gunman executes the politician. A half dozen cops blast the gunman. The situation is a disaster. When asked by his superior why he didn’t shoot when he had the chance Yabuike says he thought he should try to save both the criminal and the victim. Yabuike is placed on mandatory leave, essentially scapegoated for the catastrophe.

One might question why, exactly, such a fraught situation was placed upon one man’s shoulders, but maybe it is because Yabuike is a Movie Cop Protagonist who is expected to resolve situations with quick thinking and quick shooting. Like, say, Dirty Harry. But Yabuike doesn’t work like Dirty Harry. Yabuike isn’t a right wing jerk-off fantasy, an exterminator of human vermin. He perceived the gunman and his hostage as the tragic outcomes of a larger systemic failure. Perhaps one could say Yabuike was right to refuse to live up to the expectations of being a Violent Movie Cop Protagonist. And yet his actions got both the perpetrator and victim killed. From this low point of failure, Yabuike decides to leave the city for a vast forest, perhaps never to return, as there are dark implications of suicidal depression driving the disgraced cop. Or maybe this is just how Yabuike likes to spend his vacation time. To his credit, he calls home to check in with his family, which is nice, but this phone call is the first and last communication he has with them in the entire movie. Perhaps Yabuike is in the process of a divorce? Is that why he was sleeping at the police station? Is crime so out of control that a Movie Cop doesn’t have time to go off the clock let alone sleep? We’re never given an answer. We the Audience are left to deduce Yabuike’s detachment from his wife and child-children?-by judging his words and deeds as they happen on screen. Yabuike seems to walk away from his job, his family, and from whatever kind of life he had in the city without too much inner static, as though he had made up his mind some time ago. Yabuike is a man of both ideals-in the civic arena-and surprisingly hard-hearted pragmatism-in the domestic arena. You could look at what happens in Charisma as a playing out of this profound inner conflict between a duty to the larger world and a self-serving personal desire.

Out in the forest, Yabuike finds an abandoned car in which he tries to spend the night. Someone lights the car on fire. Yabuike suffers burn injuries, but survives. Somehow he manages to crawl free of the torched vehicle, and makes his way to a clearing in which stands a withered tree supported by an improvised framework of metal pipes and joints. Later, Yabuike meets someone who claims to have rescued him from the burning car. Even later we are led to suspect that Yabuike’s rescuer may have also started the fire. The whole sequence plays like a shadowy, unsettling dream-and maybe that’s how Yabuike experienced this ordeal. 

Yabuike’s brush with fiery death leads him to convalesce in a set of abandoned buildings where what appears to be a forestry survey team has set up base camp. This team is led by a man named Nakasone who consults with another man named Tsuboi who claims to work for an environmental protection agency. Nakasone asks Yabuike a few questions, but makes it clear that everyone out here in the woods isn’t too concerned with prying into each other’s pasts. Nakasone even refers to the area as being a town, although the buildings are all decrepit, and the survey team seems to be its only population. Yabuike is provided some food, and Tsuboi allows the recently burned policeman to accompany him on a trip into another part of the forest. On this trip Yabuike again encounters the withered tree supported by the kludged together gantry-like structure. Tsuboi informs Yabuike that they shouldn’t go near the tree because it is defended by a strange man who attacks anyone who approaches. Yabuike goes up to the tree. Tsuboi voices concern even while he takes lots of pictures of the tree up close. Tsuboi appears to be emboldened by Yabuike’s presence even as he is obviously nervous about being attacked by the tree’s defender. Even though Yabuike hasn’t outed himself as a cop at this point there’s just something about the way he marches forward into situations that projects authority. I think Yabuike, despite his disillusionment, still clings to his role as an arbiter of law and order. 

Yabuike soon enough encounters Kiriyama, the strange, aggressive young man who guards the tree. Kiriyama wields a sword in defense of the tree which he has named Charisma. Yabuike hangs out with Kiriyama for a while thus putting the cop at odds with the forestry survey team who want to cut down Charisma. Yabuike isn’t sold on Kiriyama’s whacked-out eco-fascist speeches justifying his defense of the tree, but he also suspects the survey team is not what it appears to be, and so the policeman drifts between the camps trying to figure it all out. 

There are also a pair of sisters-Jinbo and Chizuru-who are conducting scientific research on the ecology of the forest. Jinbo believes that Charisma is a toxic invasive species that needs to be destroyed which puts her at odds with Kiriyama and the survey team. Yabuike drifts among these different factions like a more benign version of Toshiro Mifune’s Yojimbo. Mifune’s mercenary creates chaos for profit by manipulating rival gangs into destroying each other. Yabuike sorta just meets people where they’re at, asks questions, accepts food when offered, and gradually climbs out of his depression and despair as he finds new purpose in the heart of a forest of confusion. 

Inevitably, Yabuike must return to the city he abandoned. I don’t want to give it away, but Charisma builds to a helluva final scene. The implications are both disturbing and exhilarating. Yabuike’s quest to understand the “Rules of the World” leads him to face the limits of his power with renewed moral strength. It’s not necessarily the case that Yabuike can save the world, but he is no longer afraid to do what he can. A tough road to walk for sure.

Also, think about how Yabuike learns to use his gun by movie’s end. He’s no Dirty Harry, but he finds his own way to throw a shot . . .

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #150:

COMMENTARY: TRUMP/MUSK DEMOLITION OF FEDERAL WORKFORCE REPRESENTS A PARADIGM SHART IN U.S. GOVERNANCE.

THE SECRETS OF FINAL TOWN 51

 

THINGS NEVER SAID #34:

“Relax, friend, you can’t even lose . . . because I’ve already won.”

SIMPLE PLEASURES #7:

Organizing my vast collection of memories of past embarrassments and humiliations into a rigorous top-and-bottom-of-the-hour schedule of obsessive recall so I can remember to be perfect at all times forever.