THE NEW DREAM #20:

chased up to the roof

pursued by shitpapergod bursting free at long last of septic tank

but I fall back into house

depraved Santa Claus compulsions forcing me to dive down chimney

no doubt

it's vanguard tip-of-the-spear Xmas marketing brainhack bullshit

so I fall back into house

all mazed-up

shitpapergod hot on my ass

seeking home,

natch,

all those years I thought I was obeying nature's intestinal-digestive protocols

but actually

I was producing a future deity of vengeful resentment

on some kind of grody installment plan

crackers and Christ

I zig and zag and just plain burst clean through confusy walls

oh yeah

'til I'm scrambling up the exterior of the ever expanding house

I climb so good

I make excellent time

future squirrels study the fuck out of my techniques

dude, they fucking print textbooks off of my action

I lose myself in climb ecstasy

accidentally attain escape velocity

fall up forever

now

when you dream of falling

like

down

a myth asserts that if you don't wake up before you impact then you die in real life

so

if I'm dreaming of falling up forever

and I don't wake up

then does that mean I live forever in real life?

of course

this ends up as one of those anticlimaxes

I'm standing on plain solid ground of a sudden

just in time to see that nasty old septic tank trucked off to some other hole in the ground

a beefy faced gladhandy man congratulates me for finally choosing to get hooked up to municipal sewer services 

or something

while the shitpapergod howls in frustration

I assume

due to some abstruse metaphysical logic

of modern sewers

dispersing the shitpapergod energies

then I'm doing one of those Spike Lee floating dolly scenes

all through my suddenly spacious, uncluttered home

thrill of the chase

already fading

thinking about tradeoffs for this and that

silly immortality stuff

not even bubbling up into brain

redirection of mental resources

some new initiative

aborning-

BURNING QUESTIONS IN A UNIVERSE OF MYSTERY #63:

 

Want some brownies?

I can't possibly eat 'em all by myself.

You should have at least one.

Mom's recipe.

Imbued with her love.

No?

Don't want to ruin dinner, eh?

Makes sense.

Well . . . maybe I can make this work all by myself.

Eyes retract deep inside skull. Sharp teeth wrigglepierce their way out of the meats rimming the sockets. Nostrils distend with a crackle of cartilage as new teeth manifest there, too. Drool pours from the four new mouths. A dense wall of fart noises as new stomachs bloom within the abdomen. 

There we go. 

Heh . . . now all these brownies don't seem like much.

Less of a gorge, more of a snack.

You turn away from the feast, glad to have a prior appointment.

MONDAY'S THRESHOLD #3:

IN THIS LIFE OF ILLUSION . . . DOOR IS THE REWARD OF DOOR . . .

1.Door Main Theme/Goji Tsuno (Door (1988) OST)

2. Character Creation/Kevin Manthei (Wizardry 8 OST)

3. Welcome to the Battlezone/Paul Di'Anno's Battlezone 

4. I Blew Up the United States/Was (Not Was)

5. Kingdom/Snacks

6. Dancer in a Daydream/Ace of Base

7. Cool Fantasy/Kojiro Shimizu

8. Shop Theme/Mosq (Devil Summoner: Lost Memories OST)

9. Entryway/Hiroyuki Masuno(Shadowgate NES OST)

10. Orion/Mark Styles

11. Dash Under the Ground&Explorer/Hitrison cover. Originally composed by Tsukasa Masuko for Digital Devil Story:Megami Tensei 2 OST

12. Intro/KAJ (Germs: Nerawareta Machi OST)

13. Wise Guy/Joe Pesci

14. Tactical Stacking/JVF Clique

15. Office/KAJ (Germs: Nerawareta Machi OST)

16. City of the Angels/Wang Chung (To Live and Die in L.A. OST)

17. Fujita 1999/KAJ (Germs: Nerawareta Machi OST)

18. The Ambush/James Horner (Clear and Present Danger OST)

19. Shed 1999/KAJ (Germs: Nerawareta Machi OST)

20. Main Theme/Huang Shu-jun (Rebels of the Neon God OST)

21. Cathedral 1999/KAJ (Germs: Nerawareta Machi OST)

22. Demon Whisper/Fenrick

23. Dancing Crazy Murder/Ryota Kozuka and Toshiki Konishi(Shin Megami Tensei V OST)

24. Last Mission 1999/KAJ (Germs: Nerawareta Machi OST)

25. Way Out/The Boylords

26. Track 45/Kei Tani (Panic! Sega CD OST)

27. Pumpkin Pon/Kenji Ito and Yasuyuki Suzuki (Lux-Pain OST)

28. Sapphire Elegy/Michiru Yamane and Yasuhiro Ichihashi (Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia OST)

29. The Heroic Trio Theme/Anita Mui (The Heroic Trio OST)

30. The Terrorists/Lalo Schifrin (Sky Riders OST)

31. La Soiree/Freedom Fry

32. Beyond the Time/TM Network (Char's Counterattack OST)

33. Theme from Medical Center '71/Lalo Schifrin (Medical Center OST)

34. Dr. Chaos Main Title Theme/Hironari Tadokoro (Dr. Chaos NES OST)

35. Kill the King/Masters of Reality

36. Labyrinth/Hitrison cover. Originally composed by Tsukasa Masuko for Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei 2 OST.

37. The Van Man/Bob Chance

38. The Chase of Highway/Nobuo Uematsu et al (Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children OST)

39. Final Boss/Tatsuya Matsumoto (Eliminate Down Arcade OST)

40. Hypothetical Battle Song for a non-existent RPG/Hitrison

41. Final Stage/Azusa Hara and Hiroaki Yoshida (Heavy Barrel NES OST)

42. Final Stage/Azusa Hara and Hiroaki Yoshida (Heavy Barrel Arcade OST)

43. End of All We Know/Girls on Film

44. Youkou/Kayo Konishi and Yukio Kondo (Elfen Lied OST)

45. Proto Man Theme/Yasuaki Fujita and Harumi Fujita (Mega Man 3 NES OST)

46. Flash of the Blade/Iron Maiden

47. More Data/Negativland

48. Self-Control/Laura Branigan

49. Training/Yuji Ohno (Ashita no Joe 2 OST)

50. Savin' the Day/Alessi

51. Heat/Kenji Ito and Yasuyuki Suzuki (Lux-Pain OST)

52. Novacane/Beck

53. Gryphis Glaucus/Chu Ishikawa (Tokyo Fist OST)

54. Battle B8(Lucifer II)/Ryota Kozuka, Kenichi Tsuchiya, and Toshiki Konishi (Shin Megami Tensei IV OST)

55. Wyrm/Cerberus Shoal

56. Solar Samba/Yuji Ohno (Ashita no Joe 2 OST)

57. Corde Sensible/Freedom Fry

58. White Storm/Masaharu Iwata, Hitoshi Sakimoto, and Hayato Matsuo (Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen SNES OST)

59. Stayin' Alive/Tropical Fuck Storm

60. Battle in the Forgotten City/Nobuo Uematsu et al (Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children)

61. We Killed the Moonlight/Still Corners

62. Grease/Frankie Valli (Grease OST)

63. World Revolution/Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu (Chrono Trigger SNES OST)

64. Holy Diver/Dio

65. Powerslave/Iron Maiden 

66. The Light Pours Out of Me/Magazine

67. Megatron/Der Eisenrost

68. Storytelling/Michal Michalski (The Cat Lady OST)

69. Door Main Theme/Goji Tsuno (Door (1988) OST)

. . . NOW, CLAIM THE REWARD OF THE DOOR INTO MONDAY . . .

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #29: FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S (2023)

 

Much like the video game from which it's derived, this is pseudo-horror for diaper babies that will no doubt get an unearned boost from YouTube and TikTok grifters.

MOVIE REVIEW: DEATH POWDER (1986)

Written, Produced, and Directed by Shigeru Izumiya

Music by Kiyoshiro Imawano

Cinematography by Kazuo Komizu

Special Make Up Effects by Yuichi Matsui

Starring

Shigeru Izumiya as Harima (thief)

Takichi Inukai as Kiyoshi (bounty hunter)

Rikako Murakami as Noris (bounty hunter)

Mari Natsuki as Guernica (android/replicant)

Tomoko Ohtsu as Guernica 2 (android/replicant)

Kiyoshiro Imawano as Dr. Loo (mad scientist)

Tamio Kageyama as Mr. Hacker (Scar People boss)

. . .

DR. LOO MADE ME

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

From the depths of Japan's Bubble Economy comes a future mish-mash of Blade Runner, the gooey monster transformations of John Carpenter's The Thing, science fiction narco-gangsterism, and a dash of TV tokusatsu gadget warriors vs monster of the week style action. All of this is presented in terms of lo-fi Video Toaster visuals of bombed-out warehouses intercut with music videos and a still picture slideshow. 

The plot concerns a pair of bounty hunters who are tasked by a gang known as the Scar People to track down a stolen female android called Guernica. Guernica is an artificial person designed as a new style of robot to serve the whims of humanity. The word Replicant is used, thereby implying that Guernica is a vatgrown slave much like the doomed artificial beings in Blade Runner, complete with false memories and a four year lifespan. The one key difference between the Replicants of Blade Runner and Death Powder is that as Guernica approaches death her body produces a strange powder that causes people to uncontrollably mutate. The titular powder carries Guernica's memories along with it, thereby facilitating a strange new reproductive cycle based around bodily transformation and being-to-being memory transfer. This is all presented in gooey body horror terms, but we also see the corruption and avarice of a cyberpunky status quo in which everyone is either a heavily armed mercenary free agent or a blindly loyal gangster with a procedurally scarred face to signal one's fealty to a big boss. The Death Powder, in this scheme, becomes a kind of arms race commodity that armed factions battle to monopolize. 

Death Powder is comical in the sense that the conflict seems to be about who gets to become an oozing, avaricious monster first and fastest. It's a sort of inversion of the values of tokusatsu action shows like Kamen Rider in which a transforming cyborg superhero lethally polices more grotesque mutating monster villains. In Death Powder everyone is either a villain or a pawn of a villain operating within a cutthroat brakes off capitalist economy. 

The best scene comes near the very end, when a trash out crew shows up to clear a condemned building of debris and squatters only to find themselves disappeared by a video meats door. The implication is that the Death Powder is beginning to mutate not just people but the very material basis-private property-of capitalism into a wild, untameable monster. Now, your stuff doesn't just own your ass-you're its food! You'll just have to see it for yourself.

Mostly, though, Death Powder is about the atmosphere, the style, the ratty nth generation VHS dub vibes. Good luck finding a version with both legible subtitles and all of the scenes intact. Even so, Death Powder is that rare work that increases in creativity even as it has been damaged by neglect and lack of digital remastering. It's a dystopian science fiction horror flick dealing with themes of capitalist aggression, mutation, and contingency that has been mutilated and mutated into a bizarre cult object by time and tide. I usually don't go for throwback videotape aesthetics but Death Powder is just too perfect in how it merges form and substance.

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #28: EVANGELION: 3.0+1.11 THRICE UPON A TIME (2021)

Thematically intriguing, but I was put off by the heavy-handed anti-Walkman propaganda.

HUMPDAY THINGS I LIKE #12:

I like those unsold pilots from the early '00s where everybody's chasing every kind of variation on the formula cop show. Specifically, the variants that tried to make cops look as cool as possible. The dude cops are all gym-ripped, steroid-juiced, and fresh from the hairdresser's chair. The lady cops all got the low rise jeans, Ahab-worthy whale tails, and post-coital shower hair. Only the killjoy internal affairs jerks are presented as being kinda creepy-basically, IA is positioned as the classic John Keel style Men in Black or the Agents from The Matrix. You got that driving techno music and flashy editing and jittery handheld camera work. Of course, the city's experiencing a next level crimewave-murders, rapes, bombings, robberies, letter writing serial killers, gang wars-because everyone's eager to make the waiting list to get into Club Police . . .

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #69:

 

PAZUZU SUES CATHOLIC CHURCH FOR UNLAWFUL EVICTION.

FRESH (HELL) TRANSLATIONS #3:

"I'm going through faces . . ."

This is what the strange being in the shiny masked future person outfit seems to be saying in a sewage choked monster voice. It's most likely a riff on the old Black Sabbath lyric.

The band calls itself Aesop and Walt. It's just one person in blindingly reflective Straylow cosplay gear with a variety of speakers built in that output sound from a tablet manipulated by a pair of gauntleted hands. They perform just the one album length song which consists of a clattery post-dinner-rush-clean-up soundscape which metamorphoses into an arrangement of chunky hydraulic future door noises that then progresses into what sounds like churning gastrointestinal processes which blazes into a driving chiptune funk beat before all but dropping out into a near subliminal basso droning which gradually dissipates into nothing. That's the programmed soundscaping. The vocal consists of a live performance of all dialogues, songs, gratingly empty laughter, and other human sourced vocalizations from the 1968 movie Faces, which has led some to describe Aesop and Walt's show as a solo version of the movie, but I'm not sure that fully captures it. Aesop and Walt's delivery is gross and sludgy like they're trying to sound like a submerged swamp monster or something. I guess maybe the swamp monster's brain was able to siphon the wifi signal of someone streaming the movie on their mobile device or laptop. Most people will not be able to tolerate the entire 136 minute performance, let alone comprehend it. I only blundered into partial understanding by Googling around about Aesop and Walt which is referring to a line of dialogue from Faces-which turned out to be an exhilarating independent movie about miserable middle class white collar types who play out their lives inside boxes of various sizes until the thrilling climactic moment when this gigolo dude busts loose and goes running out of a window, across a roof, down to the yard, down a modest hillside, and into the street all in one take-defintely not that old mumblecore bullshit! It's like the indie equivalent of John Wick or something. Seriously, even if Aesop and Walt isn't your thing, go watch Faces, it's all kinds of fun. 

My favorite thing about Aesop and Walt is that they have their own power source so when the venue cuts the juice out of irritation it doesn't mean shit. Aesop and Walt just rock around the clock in the dark, no fucks given, no shit taken. 

Aesop and Walt also comes strapped with a rock salt shotgun, a rubber bullet blaster, and a compliance spray dispenser if the audience decides to rise above a dull roar and ascend to full-on heckler status. There's even a video floating around the Internet of Aesop and Walt allegedly deploying a person-portable homebrew kitbash analogue of DARPA's infamous Active Denial microwave weapon to pacify an especially rowdy crowd of beer drinker assholes at a show in Florida, but some say it's a hoax. It's tricky because there are multiple unknown persons touring at any given time as Aesop and Walt, and you can tell it's different people due to the simultaneous bookings in different parts of the country and variations in the detailing of the Straylow cosplay getup. So, it's probably the case that one of these versions of Aesop and Walt is carrying a person-portable Active Denial rig, but maybe not all of them. Some of these people are, perhaps, more ambitious with their DIY loadouts than others, or so it would seem.

To be sure, Aesop and Walt's pop prospects are below zero. I'm not even sure if I actually enjoyed the show, but I am surely grateful that they hipped me to Faces-a movie that is itself a kind of stealth musical if you think about it. Moreover, Aesop and Walt embodies a new artistic militancy, a willingness to do actual battle if necessary to seize and defend their moment upon the stage against all assholes. 

The conventional entertainment value is low, but there is surely neatness in this bizarre musical entity.

EVERY DAY IS HALLOWEEN 23: CRIMSONSPARR

Crimsonsparr

came back from the war

not his choice

but all the same

he was greeted by the Fates

"Now is the Age of Leisure and Order, what you fought for, is here, deep down, in this wandering place of recreation murderstalk corridors staffed by premium snuff musclegrafted POW convict labor to get your very own first person slasher trip working; packed with technological goods that overmaster your ass with endless maintenance ultimatums; and all the Discount Fucking, so don't fall in love, else it'll rip you up all over again"

and it wasn't so much

that Crimsonsparr never knew how to have fun

more that he resented the fact

that he had gone to so much trouble

to rip himself apart

on what he thought were his terms

but now he was supposed to accept this New Destruction

hadn't he earned the rubblemind

in his own way

didn't he make a point

of mass prisoner slaughter in tightly arranged geometric choreographies

of never meeting a registered cultural site he didn't blast to pieces

what about the waste tracks he laid across downtown cores, and the libraries burned, hospitals demolished, his Schools-Into-Craters Initiative, Crimsonsparr even took his battle to the rural areas, he didn't discriminate between city and suburb, didn't he pull it all together,

of course people resent you your virtuosity,

only ever like you

when you stay in your lane

just do the one thing

share the glory 'round

Crimsonsparr got it, okay,

he was just coming from the Old School of grind,

but whatever

it's fucking fine

and how 'bout those viral videos of chopping the heads off dogs

hadn't he earned the rubblemind

in his own way

if it had been here all along

undergoing commercial product development

in glowing anticipation of the All Quadrants Launch

then for what damn reason had he been fired into theatre

Crimsonsparr had no love of the uniform, the costume,

for he was a wild and hairy and burning beast

scarcely able to maintain a military mold

but he did maintain

maintained the fuck out of it

when it made no difference

but the difference he convinced himself it made

even then

he inkled

that lie

that fucking lie

in his own way

-later, when he was a lot less upset, Crimsonsparr served as the Official Shroudhounder Product Ambassador. He and his creative staff summoned the decapitated dogs from the land of the dead to implement them into a modular Meta-Combiner Omni-Action Doll. This was marketed as an Adult Collector's Item with an air of desirable mystery to it in that you couldn't buy it in the usual way. Of course, if you had the rubblemind you could see it right there in the Crimsonsparr section with all the other figures and playsets; but if you were without the rubblemind then it got a lot trickier. Shroudhounder, in that case, chose its customer. This led to all sorts of ancillary products: bogus guides for making yourself more attractive to Shroudhounder so as to increase your likelihood of being chosen for customership; fakeass mental rubble supplement pills and powders; and a whole galaxy of vlog content creators pushing phony conspiracy theories and invented accounts of Shroudhounder sightings-ultimately, Crimsonsparr had to go to war all over again to destroy the pirates and the copycats pooping out pseudo-Shroudhounder products, which led to his orchestration of a multifront proxy war within the Non-Aligned Special Economic Zone. Crimsonsparr himself was killed by a nameless vatgrown mercenary during the Battle of Burnguy Mall, but this account has been disputed in recent years. The major Rival Narrative has it that Crimsonsparr accidentally killed himself when he performed a sloppily executed summon attack using the buggy-as-fuck Mecha-Shroudhounder product. The Rival Narrative has some weight to it due to the notoriously high rate of catastrophic meta-malfunctions that plagued the Mecha-Shroudhounder product line. Amusingly, in the past decade a Crimsonsparr cosplayer has bubbled up out of some hell to claim the mantle, even launching a line of life-sized action dolls molded in the war hero's image. Traditionalists have performed the suitable style of outrage over this stuff, even as the big-as-life toys surpassed all sales records of comparable products, leading to the usual cycle of shortages'n'riots'n'counterfeits'n'regional conflagrations'n'media hype-

in the fullness of time

the Crimsonsparr Cosplayer

displaced the war hero original

within the public rubblemind

in a confessional all-too-vulnerable vlog

the Crimsonsparr Cosplayer addressed the 

by that point 

century-long controversy

with a mixture of uplifting bootstrappy aphorisms

Shroudpowder-based Vitality Enhancement Shake recipes

and hintdrops about horizonal dramas aborning

And concluded with the following,

"Sometimes, y'know . . . you just have to get out of your own way."

-October 2020-October 2023