In the foreground a guy's fumbling with his keys . . .

 . . . trying to get into his apartment.

In the background,

approaching from far away down the hall

is a hulking figure with a baseball bat.

Our guy with the keys

well 

doesn’t look like he’s up for a fight.

I mean, if he’s fucking up with the keyring . . .

Now,

you might be thinking that a grotesquely violent beating is inevitable. 

It isn’t. 

Do you know what determines the fate of keyring fumbler and the baseball bat beast? 

Their neighbors. The other people who live in the building. 

On any given night, a majority of the neighbors feel like they enjoy living in a sinister old building where rockstars have ODed on horse or stabbed their partner to death in a drunken rage-and where organized crime figures have been disappeared-the neighbors find proximity to the Reaper so stimulating that they get up to all kinds of adult situations behind closed doors. 

Other nights, they become their parents of old, “What is the world coming to! Dear me! The breakdown of civil society and the fashions these days-and I declare well I never-!” Those are the nights when adult situations are at a minimum.

And that . . . let’s call it ‘Neighbor Energy’-that’s what determines if keyring fumbler lives or dies. 

If the Neighbor Energy is really horny for the presence of death, living on the edge and shit-boom. Keyring clatters to the floor in a shower of blood, brains, cerebrospinal fluid, and skull fragments.

If the Neighbor Energy is at a low ebb, if everybody’s just watching cable news, and fretting over their loser children burning up their scholarship money snorting adderall and funnelling booze at some dumb-dumb state university-then no action. Just stasis. You get a frozen tableau like the robo-puppets at some long-neglected theme park ride slated for demolition. 

And in the foreground our guy keeps fumbling his keys.

And our hulking bruiser keeps on coming from the deep background

and never quite arrives,

or 

the beast arrives in high style,

and creates a mess that would make a cop weep. 

Sometimes your neighbors are there for you,

sometimes not.

I made a mistake . . .

 . . . I asked to use the bathroom at a Blockbuster Video in Florida.

The employee gives me the key.

I unlock the door,

but someone has already taken a shit in the sink.

I spun right ‘round, baby,

“I’m good,”

I return the key.

I piss in a parking lot 3 blocks down,

and yet I wonder:

Was that a fake shit?

A prank to spread the rumor that the Blockbuster Bathroom is a bad place to be? Maybe just some good ol’ fashioned anti-homeless sentiment. That would be typical for the benighted Perma-Suck State of Florida. 

If I went back

and beat the truth out of the employee

throw him into the shelves,

kick him from one side of the store to the other,

unspool long lengths of VHS tape from plastic cassettes to improvise a cat o’nine tails to lash the employee into submission,

steam rising from my body,

would I have brutalized my way to a secret truth?

Would a shady operative of a nameless organization have emerged from a hidden, dilating future door, slow-clapped, and offered me a chance to battle eldritch forces as a member of an elite cabal?

Would I have been trained up to operate a mech suit with both a humanoid shape and a transformable motorcycle mode?

This is, perhaps, how the Supreme Suck of La Florida warps one’s mind.

As you piss in a parking lot upon an enchanted summer evening.

Using pulp fantasy

to erase the brain-stain of a stranger’s shitlog in a sink. 

Evil in this world . . .

 . . . letting someone starve, doing violence, a fist, a blade, an assault rifle, an aerial bombing campaign,

a line that says, “On this side is Heaven, and on the other is Hell.”

letting someone lose their mind to a hungry rage,

building a media empire on bogus psuedo-science cures,

building a media empire on getting people to fear vaccine jabs,

How ‘bout,

I make all the worst atomic decisions, okay?

And then,

you know,

won’t be any decisions left to make

or not make

or wish I did this or that

nuclear armageddon is the surest cure for the woulda-shoulda-couldas, doncha’ know!

Hey,

I got a whole bomb bunker with a self-contained oxygen supply and the most amazing stash of offline porn,

every episode of all those Skinamax shows,

paid some cable pirates in Eastern Europe to get me the complete run of every Playboy Channel movie and TV program on 4K disc, ‘cause I’m a freak for the plastic, bro!

-and there’s a New Definition of Conqueror Supreme for ya’:

THE FINAL MASTURBATOR.

ABOVE ALL THE OTHERS.

THE MAXIMUM OLI-GLAZE-ARCH.

YOU CAN’T EVEN BOW TO ME  . . .

. . . ‘cause, like, you’re ashes . . .

. . .  sorry I’m not sorry, friend . . .

. . . I just had to bust . . .

. . . not lonely ‘cause I was the Man of Destiny from Way Back, y’know?

. . . hard to relate to I suppose . . . ah, well . . .

POSTSCRIPT:

When a survey team breached the bunker they found the withered, well-preserved corpse of the Last Oli-glaze-arch. An autopsy revealed he had choked to death on a black olive pit. Further investigation revealed that the lethal pit had come from a can of allegedly pre-pitted black olives, but as any experienced shopper knows, sometimes a pit or two gets past quality control. It’s always best to chew carefully, despite what the label says. 

One of them ‘trust but verify’ type of deals. 

The more guns you have . . .

 . . . the more all-too-preventable gun murders  will occur with depressing, clockwork regularity.

More mass shootings by various hateful, white supremacist cretins. 

More impulsive, of-the-moment shootings motivated by anger and pride. 

More killer cops abusing the law and hiding behind their badges. 

More militia whackjobs playing at paramilitary politics of terror on behalf of their GOP enablers and cheerleaders. 

It's pretty simple.

The record screams for itself. 

More guns means more murder. 

Less guns, less murder. 

You can't prevent every murder-sure, okay, fine.

But you can save quite a few lives, and encourage a culture of communication and civics over force and fraud into the bargain. 

Sane, substantial gun control policy would be the first step.

Do we have that in us, here in Baldy Ol' Eagleland USA?

Maybe.

Hard to tell right now.

Life . . .

 . . . is like an endless waltz at a country buffet. 

The three beats of gorge, guilt, and apathy repeat perpetually. 

MOVIE REVIEW: ENTER THE VOID (2010)

 Written and Directed by Gaspar Noe

Director of Photography Benoit Debie

Edited by Gaspar Noe, Marc Boucrot, Jerome Pesnel

Visual Effect Director Pierre Buffin

Production Designers Kikuo Ohta and Jean Carriere

Art Supervisor Marc Caro

Sound Design Ken Yasumoto

Sound EFX Director Thomas Bangalter

Starring

Nathaniel Brown as Oscar

Paz de la Huerta as Linda

…

“Within the 38th consecutive hour of Tetris lies the bardo gate.”

-William D. Tucker, Tetris enthusiast

…

Review by William D. Tucker.

A man dies. His ghost leaves him. He’s a ghost now. Ghost zips around the city in which he died, bearing witness to the effects of his death.

You ever fantasize about that? About attending your own funeral, or being able to observe the people you would leave behind once you’re dead? That’s the fantasy that drives Enter the Void, a kind of visually audacious spiritual/faith-based porn movie I once purchased on DVD at a Best Buy 10,000 fuckin’ years ago. 

The city is Tokyo. The dead man is a white guy from America who’s set himself up as a drug dealer in a foreign country in order to avoid working a real job which he views as a form of bondage. He’s trying to cut ties to the trauma of his past, but ends up creating nothing but sorrow for himself and the people to which he is connected. 

The dead guy has an uncomfortably close relationship with his sister, who eventually joins him in Tokyo. Their closeness isn’t weird to them, not at first, but it’s definitely meant to push audience buttons, and it also ends up causing difficult feelings for the dead man. 

When the film begins, we are in first person perspective, reminiscent of a video game such as Doom or Wolfenstein 3-D. But instead of firing a gun, our POV character-the future dead man-smokes powerful hallucinogens and we see his grimy, cramped apartment invaded by spirit tentacles that inhale us all into a wild fractal organism’s gullet. Who’s smoking who, eh? 

Or something. 

After our POV guy dies, his spirit seems to be pulled this way and that by strong desires that keep him bound to the world of the living. His spirit is drawn to wherever he senses his sister is or one of the other people he’s tied to by bonds of love or hate or both. Our dead guy even jumps into vivid memories of his past. Much is made of a fanciful oath that brother and sister once swore as children that they would never be apart, and that they would never die. Our ghost begins to follow his past self around, trying to get a new perspective on all the forces and actions that led him to his death. He cannot change his fate, but he can enhance his understanding of how he ended up as a stubborn ghost.

Sometimes mundane real world things become spiritual teleport pads or expressway tunnels traversing the world of the dead. Fire, light, electricity, gunshot wounds, open urns, and inert organic matter offer secret gateways as things which are textbook physical phenomena to the living become charged with mystical power to one who is among the restless dead. 

You ever wondered what it would be like to be a ghost drifting through a strip club? Enter the Void has answers. 

Oh . . . and don’t watch it with the kids. If you do, the questions will never end. Just trying to help.

Enter the Void uses elaborate camera work and highly detailed computer generated imagery to tell a story both cosmic and intimate. It isn’t perfect. The drugs, the sex, the sleaze, the unlikeable protagonist are all gonna be deal breakers for some or maybe even most audiences.

But I find it fascinating that you could have a special effects heavy movie that isn’t about Avengers fighting an evil purple man with a plastic death glove. It also has no known ties to Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, or Harry Potter, which is nice. 

And our ghost guy wouldn’t be tied to this world if he were a saint. He would just ascend to the Great Country Buffet in the Sky if he were free of his burdens of guilt and trauma and hatred and lust. Enter the Void is a rare thing: a faith-based movie that skips empty moralizing sermons and actually takes seriously all the bizarre spiritual issues with which it wrestles. 

It’s kinda neat.

MANGA REVIEW: GREY (1988-1989)

 Story and Art by Yoshihisa Tagami

Originally published in Japan by Tokuma Shoten Publishing Company, 1985-1987.

English adaptation by Gerard Jones and Satoru Fujii.

English publication by Viz Comics, 1988-1989.

…

SERVICE GUARANTEES CITIZENSHIP.

-propaganda slogan from the movie Starship Troopers (1997)

…

Review by William D. Tucker.

Are you worried about the future, Dear Reader?

If you are not worried, if you’re the easygoing type-hey, good for you. Things probably just run down your back. Nothing gets you down. You may even think the worriers in this world are keeping you down, man! People just need more positive thinking! Stop feeling sorry for yourself! We just gotta get our act together and bootstrap ourselves into a better tomorrow! Change comes from the bottom up, you know! Elbow grease! Gumption! Optimism! It’s gonna be alright. What’s that thing Matthew McConaughey likes to say? J.K.E.- Just Keep Existing? Something like that?

If you are worried . . . then you are spoiled for choice when it comes to things to worry about in this world. White supremacist terrorism. Authoritarian governments. COVID-19. Nominally democratic governments engaging in all manner of secret surveillance of their populations. Religious fundamentalist terrorism. Gender-based oppression based on false binaries. Nominally democratic governments engaging in all manner of secret military actions with no congressional or other legislative oversight. Eroding civil liberties. Political conservatives whittling away at voting rights and ballot access- some are born to rule, and some are born to be ruled, doncha’ know? 

I could go on with the reasons to worry. I guess I could be a worrier. I prefer to think of myself as a pessimist. I take it as a given that shit is perma-fucked. So, actually, I don’t spend much time worrying. I expect the worst, and the world lives down to my expectations more often than not. But sometimes I get worried. 

Dystopian science fiction appeals to me, obviously, because it speaks to my pessimism. I don’t believe in the power of positive thinking or obsessive optimism or what have you. Actions matter. Thoughts have an influence on our actions, of course, so you could say that pessimism gives people an excuse to take no action. Perhaps it does. But, conversely, you could say that pessimism drives people to take action to prevent the worst possible outcomes, whereas optimism anesthetizes people to reality. In my experience, despite my personal lack of hope in the future, worthwhile actions grow out of both pessimistic and optimistic perspectives-it takes all kinds, in other words. But many feel pressure to put on a kind of performative positivity in order to ward off criticism about bad attitudes or accusations about lack of commitment. 

The manga Grey appeals to me because it is a very cleverly done dystopian meritocracy where only the strongest survive and everyone else dies horribly. It is a system implemented by an intelligent computer system that uses robotic weapons systems to enforce a Forever War of All Against All, pitting human communities against one another for turf and points. The more you kill, the more points you get, and the closer you get to becoming a person of status within this ultraviolent system. 

You start out as one of the People-poor, desperate, no rights, no luxuries, no climate control, no healthcare, scavenging for food, and forever suffering the contempt and the abuse of the Troopers-the militarized striver class that fights the absurd computer-mandated wars.

Troopers kill. The more they kill, the more points they rack up and the closer they get to becoming Citizens. 

Citizens get to live in the City-a fabled metropolis where you’ll have every comfort and every kind of gadget and toy and pleasure available to you. No voting rights, of course. It’s not that kind of Citizenship. This is the Consumer’s Paradise where you get to glut yourself for the rest of your days, no longer concerned with the struggles of the People. You got yours. Fuck the rest.

Our hero in this nightmare world is Death. Grey Death. Uh, that’s, like, the dude’s actual name. First name Grey. Last name Death. And when we first meet Grey, he’s living in a bare room with the love of his life, a woman named Lips. Uh, that’s, like, her actual name. Lips is tired of scavenging for scraps and being brutalized by Troopers who love to bully the People, so she decides to sign up for the Big Win and become a Trooper herself. When Lips is killed-as most Troopers are-her superior officer brings her helmet to Grey as a memento. Grey dons the helmet-printed with the word Lips and a cartoon image of kissy lips and adorned with a couple of bullet holes-and decides that it’s time to kick maximum ass all over the eternal battlefield that is now Planet Earth. 

Grey, as it turns out, is the Ultimate Trooper. He kills. He is grievously wounded. He is often the lone survivor of military operations. He heals. He kills again. 

Grey’s killing prowess comes not from hatred, but from cool. Grey’s superpower is his preternatural ability to keep his head under fire. He gets frustrated now and again. But he’s not a scoretaker, he’s not a grudge-keeper. Grey allies himself with whoever will get him closer to the fabled City. Today’s enemies are tomorrow’s comrades. 

As Grey’s war grinds on, he takes on allies, who often die. He upgrades his weaponry and his body like he sees his own body as an endlessly malleable video game avatar. Whatever parts need replacing, replace ‘em. New varieties of mecha vehicles and exotic beam weaponry coming down the pipe? Time to re-skill. Whatever he needs to do to dominate, Grey does it-to himself, to others, it’s all one to the Ultimate Trooper. 

Grey is the most magnificent product of a mad system that seeks to eliminate all human qualities save murderous competence. 

And, despite his coolness, a calm fire burns inside Grey. You see, he has to get to the City, because the City must be destroyed. Grey’s just the one to wreck all the shit, is all. If the system didn’t want someone like Grey to exist, then it should’ve figured out a different operational basis. G.I.G.O.-Garbage In Garbage Out, doncha’ know. 

This is a tale told in black and white, stripped-down line work-as per usual in old school manga. The action is fast, cinematic, it all happens-as Scott McCloud would have it-in the gutters between panels. Or, in movie terms, in the cut. We Readers are just not quite fast enough to keep up, and so we see the moment before-enemies closing in on each other-and the moment after-the kill, the explosion, the shockwave of a Krag Shot or other exotic energy manipulation weapon unleashed. 

Grey seems to detach from himself, and ironically regard himself as the hero of a fictional story. He almost seems to have become aware of his status as a 1980s manga badass. He doesn’t quite go full Animal Man. It’s more like a weird by-product of the system of dehumanization implemented by the computer overlords. If you give people a whacked-out video game nightmare reality, then most will be destroyed by it, and you get to maintain control. But if someone gets it-if they manage to grok the overall game-then that’s your digital ass. 

Or could it be that such a system is the output of a deeply dysfunctional computer mind? 

Could it be that Grey Death is the manifestation of the system’s inherent self-loathing and desire to self-terminate?

If that’s the case, it’s a helluva way to go . . .