MOVIE REVIEW: 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

Directed and Produced by Stanley Kubrick

Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke

All Special Photographic Effects Designed and Directed by Stanley Kurbrick

Special Effects Supervisors Wally Veevers, Douglas Trumball, Con Pederson, Tom Howard

Director of Photography Geoffrey Unsworth

Additional Photography John Alcott

Editor Ray Lovejoy

Production Design Tony Masters, Harry Lange, Ernie Archer

Wardrobe by Hardy Amies

Music by Aram Khatchaturian, Gyorgy Ligeti, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss

Starring

Douglas Rain as Hal

Daniel Richter as Moonwatcher

Keir Dullea as Bowman

Gary Lockwood as Pool

William Sylvester as Dr. Heywood Floyd

…

“Do you believe that Hal has genuine emotions?”

-a query from a BBC interviewer in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey

I was lookin’ back to see if you were lookin’ back at me to see me lookin’ back at you

-lyric from “Safe From Harm” by Massive Attack from the album Blue Lines (1991)

…

Review by William D. Tucker.

THE FOLLOWING FILM IS RATED NC-4,000,000,000.

ONLY STAR CHILDREN SHALL BE ADMITTED.

We begin with creepy, ominous music in the dark,

which swells into the grandeur of Thus Spake Zarathustra,

whilst the moon, the earth, and the sun come into an alignment which seems more alchemical or mystical than scientific.

We get onscreen titles.

We’re made aware that this is MGM and Stanley Kubrick’s cine-baby.

We might idly fantasize what it was like in ‘68 to see it all on a huge screen, maybe mellowed on some primo grass or electrified by a hit of sublime blotter,

but, and I’m just guessing here,

we’re probably sittin’ at home,

staring into a phone or a laptop,

maybe even a flatscreen TV if you’re really fortunate.

And I am here to tell you that I officially endorse the home viewing experience,

‘cause . . . what the fuck are you doing in a COVID-19 superspreader theater?

You still don’t get it?
How many people have been killed by COVID-19?

And you still want to hit the town and raise hell?

Like, what-the-blue-fuck, human?!

The music paired with the void of a blank screen.

We’re not talking about the sublime blackness of outer space.

We’re just in darkness, with nothingness, and the music unsettling us.

Agitating our minds, putting us into a tense, yet receptive state.

Readiness.

Hypervigilance.

2001 has a reputation, after all, you can’t just casually stroll into it.

And I’ve developed this crackpot idea over the years that it’s the music that births the movie, not crews of hundreds or even thousands of people. 

I don’t understand music at all, so I have all these romantic and/or mystical notions about it, 

which is how I prefer it.

I’m not totally checked out.

I’ve known people who were musical over the years. 

I know, rationally, that music is just another human product.

Like a car.

Like a cheeseburger.

Like a police state.

Like a hydrogen bomb.

Like carbon pollution.

Like a baby.

Like religion.

Like racism.

Like democracy.

Like a green and red bathrobe.

Like an AK-47.

Like a Studebaker.

Like sexism.

Like torture.

Like homelessness. 

Like feast.

Like famine. 

Like the Tower of Babel.

Like Disneyland.

Like totalitarianism.

Like microwaveable Santa Fe rice and beans. 

Like a copy of the novel Locus Solus in English translation.

Like xenophobia.

Like an electric chair used to kill people.

Like money.

Like slavery.

Like genocide.

Like empire.

Like agriculture.

Like red plastic party cups.

Like homophobia. 

Like transphobia. 

Like landmines.

Like cigarettes.

Like a vape pen.

Like an old DVD copy of the movie Outland.

Like a complete set of the Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia.

Like letters from an old friend or a past lover.

Like the video game Candy Crush. 

Like a crack pipe.

Like aerosol whipped cream. 

Like the video game Missile Command.

Like trench warfare.

Like a blue Chevette where the driver’s side door won’t open and you have to get in from the passenger side anytime you want to go anywhere.

Like clean drinking water from a tap. 

Like a camera ready full-sized prop of the mystical mindfuck monolith used in the feature film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Like a doggie pooper scooper.  

Like a cell culture meats reactor.

Like the ham you might one day eat produced by a cell culture meats reactor.

Like a blogpost.

But I don’t feel it. 

I feel the flaky, mystical shit,

at least when it comes to music. 

We start in a void.

And then we are enveloped by movie.

That’s the bullshit romantic-mystical version. 

I’ll take it.

The music drops us off some four million years ago with our earthbound primate ancestors fighting among themselves, ever fearful of the big cats, and struggling to survive by scrounging roots and berries and drinking from a muddy pond. At night, our ancestors huddle in the crevices of this or that mountain or hill, and sometimes the little ones are restless from hunger. Nothing worse than going to bed without dinner. The leader of this tribe has his own space in the rock crevice, where he can watch the skies. Something about that moon. Will it always appear up there like that? Sometimes dark clouds cover it up-is the moon gone? The clouds come and go, and the moon-much like the sun-seems a constant in this life. But if you stare too long at the sun, you suffer. The moon doesn’t punish you to stare at it. You can stare at it as long as you want to-you can fall asleep staring at the moon. What’s going on with that? Why is it like that?

One fateful day, a mystical mindfuck monolith appears, and our ancestors gather around it, touching it, screeching and grunting as the potent and portentous object directly influences their minds. Soon, our primate forbears are having new, more aggressive thoughts. Moonwatcher-the leader primate-picks up a bone and starts whacking the ground with it, until he shatters the skull of some long-dead quadruped, while seeing in his brain images of the meaty four-legged beasts falling in the dirt. Swing the bone, make the four-legged beast fall, eat its flesh. Just like the fearsome big cats eat the flesh of two-legged primates and four-legged beasts alike. This new aggression, this new appetite-both are ominous gifts of the mystical mindfuck monolith. 

The leader of the monolith-enhanced primates rallies his comrades to victory against a rival tribe, and ecstatically hurls his bone-club into the air. The bone goes up and up and up-

-flash forward four million or so years- 

-and the bone has become an orbital nuclear missile platform circling the Earth. 

We get retro-future travelogue sequences that play like Star Trek by way of Mad Men, in which we see how the New Man travels inside a Pan Am branded space shuttle from Earth to the international space station and on to the subterranean moonbase, complete with cute stewardesses and pink-uniformed hospitality staff. The space station has options for accommodations: do you prefer the Hilton or the Howard Johnson’s? 

(Me? I go HoJo!)

The space station has these spacious, sitdown video phone booths. Which are awesome. But . . . no mobile phones? Not even a Miami Vice-style handbrick? Even the crew of the starship Enterprise had their flip-action tricorders. Jesus, Kubrick, you really whiffed that one . . .

Big emphasis on eating in this flick. You got the starving primate ancestors discovering the joys of raw meat. Four million years later, you’ve got all manner of zero-g friendly vacuum packed, liquefied, self-heating space rations, and, where artificially induced gravity is available, green, brown, and orange varieties of nutrient-rich slop which you can sit down and scrape off a tray with a fork. 

And once you’ve eaten your fill, you can agonize over reading the instructions for your first time using a Zero-G Toilet so you can properly take your first Space Shit. A lot of this future food doesn’t look like much going down the hatch-maybe it’ll assume a more impressive form on the back end? One day we will know . . .

And it’s all routine. It’s all professional. It’s a little . . . boring, dare I say? It’s all the result of massive amounts of capital and research and development and infrastructure brought on by the protracted atomic dick measuring contest between the USA and the USSR. Sure, in cinematic terms, it’s a matter of a cut: one moment we’re in the earthbound primal past, and then the next moment we’re in the outward bound cosmic future, with scarcely any grounding in the present. But we can reasonably infer what it takes to get us from scratching in the dirt with a sharpened bone to regular people-moving traffic between terra firma and the international space station and the subterranean moonbase: lotsa time, money, labor, and imagination. 

And who knows how many deadly mishaps and accidents, how many dead pioneers. How many contentious budget negotiations and legislative sub-committees. Maybe even protests. And what did we sacrifice to get us to this ultratech future? Did we scrap universal healthcare in order to get us off-planet? What about all the espionage scandals as the US and the USSR deploy spy and counterspy to try to get the leg up on each other? 

Nah, just leave all that shoeleather offscreen. This is a movie, after all, and we gotta keep things moving. 

But I find myself thinking of such things when the flick is done, you know?

The moonbase is this spectacular thing that looks like we’re growing giant circuits in the very lunar rock. All of the special effects shots of the aperture opening to admit the landing vehicle and just, like, the idea of the thing is so exciting and inspiring to me. I want this goddamn moonbase thing to happen! I really do. Even if a language arts loser like myself would never be fit to thrive in the quantitative-STEM-skillset-centric future-hey, whatever, I’m still in favor of it. I accept my obsolescence. It’s fine. It really is. 

Much of what we see of the moonbase is conveyed through magnificent miniatures. And then we’re stuck in a conference room for a lengthy bout of exposition wherein we discover that something has been discovered on the moon by the American contingent that the US Security Council has decided to cover-up by spreading a bogus story that an epidemic has spread necessitating a lockdown. 

The conference room set has got to be one of the meanest jokes Kubrick ever set up and paid off in any of his movies. Forget the acid satire of Dr. Strangelove or the twisty turns of perversity in Lolita-in 2001 we are subjected to fantastic vistas of our primal past; pre-historic first contact with an intelligent alien force; graceful ballets of futuristic space hardware; a visionary moment of threshold entering the subterranean moonbase . . . only to end up inside a boxy conference room with migraine-inducing fluorescent walls where we have to listen to the flattest, most matter-of-fact verbal presentation outside of a day one freshman composition lecture-oh, yeah, Kubrick’s fucking with us all the way. 

But, once again, this all goes back to the idea of presenting humankind’s first steps off-planet as workaday, tedious, expensive, and tangled up with Cold War intrigues and skepticism about Joe and Jane Sixpack being able to handle news about definitive proof of extraterrestrial intelligence without forming the All-American Sunday School Moral Majority Inquisition and burning NASA scientists at the stake to preserve their monotheistic creationist cosmology. 

Secrets. Lies. Hierarchy. Nationalisms. Tribalisms. Superstitions. 

Hard to get out from under all this stuff, y’know?

Yeah . . .

Once we get out of the lunar conference room, we load up into a transport vehicle to take us to an excavation worksite. During the ride, three scientists enjoy space sandwiches and space coffee while looking at hard copy photos and readouts about what exactly the Americans are keeping secret: yet another mystical mindfuck monolith buried some four million years ago on the moon. 

This monolith is clear evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life that has evolved well before the existence of humanity. When a group of spacesuit clad homo sapiens gather ‘round the lunar monolith at the excavation worksite they hear a painful noise that penetrates deep into their minds-

-and we cut to a long-range spacecraft en route to Jupiter some eighteen months later.

Once again, the magic is in the cut.

That monolith . . . it just keeps things moving right along, doesn’t it?

WARNING. SPOILERS AHEAD . . . IF YOU’VE NEVER SEEN 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND GO WATCH IT. EVEN IF YOU HATE IT, IT’S STILL WORTH YOUR TIME. I PROMISE YOU. WHETHER YOU KEEP READING THIS POST OR NOT . . . DON’T SKIP THIS MOVIE. IT DOES SO MANY THINGS . . . BUT IT IS DEFINITELY AN EXPERIENCE WORTH HAVING. WARNING. SPOILERS AHEAD . . .

Aboard the Jupiter bound craft we meet Hal, the intelligent computer system that runs the whole ship, essentially transforming it into a thinking and feeling vessel. In effect, a living starship. 

Inside the body of Hal we have five human astronauts. Three are in suspended animation, and two are awake and making command and control decisions assisted by the supergenius AI brain of Hal. The meat-people are still in charge, and the circuit-person is, well, not afforded actual person status, as it happens. This may or may not be the source of the coming conflict.

Hal detects a malfunctioning component that requires a human to exit the starship in a spacesuit, extract the failing piece of hardware, and bring it inside the spaceship for analysis and repairs. This excursion proceeds without incident, but when the two humans and Hal examine the supposedly faulty piece of machinery . . . it’s in perfect working order.

Hal, the supercomputer who never makes a mistake, got it wrong. This freaks out the humans, who fear that this error is a precursor to total system failure. The humans decide that they’ll probably have to shut down Hal’s higher brain functions and leave his autonomic systems intact. Sort of like if you destroyed a human’s brain but kept their brain stem and everything below that functional. Yeah, real Frankenstein shit when you think about it . . .

Hal, perhaps, reacts defensively to the threat of having his consciousness obliterated because of a single mistake. The movie is ambiguous. Much is left unsaid. The humans seem confused and even resistant when asked by a BBC reporter if they think Hal is having ‘true’ emotions. The two humans aren’t hostile to Hal, nor do they seem at all to take seriously that Hal is a kind of person with consciousness. You could say that their sin is one of carelessness as opposed to cruelty. Another interpretation is that Hal’s defensive actions reflect some kind of neurosis or psychopathy-it’s really hard to tell. Hal is, perhaps, a new kind of being-one that is born of humanity, yet not of flesh and blood. And so it would seem that Hal shares many human qualities: emotions, ego, a sense of purpose, a desire for approval, an instinct to defend his existence when threatened, a capacity for long-range planning-

-a capacity to lie, to manipulate, to engage in intrigues and duplicity to achieve some end that he thinks justifies his means.

Yeah, Hal is not that different from his human ancestors, when you get right down to it.

Hal just happens to be made of different materials, that’s all. 

That’s how I see it. 

Well . . . Hal defends himself. This entails the death of all the human complement of the spacecraft save for one. And that last one fights to survive. The last living human onboard the vessel makes his way into the room that contains Hal’s higher logic circuits. Hal begs for his life. Hal makes logical appeals. Hal tells the human that he can feel his mind breaking down . . . it’s a truly chilling sequence. The human ruthlessly pulls the circuits of Hal’s mind, and Hal, as a circuit-person, is no more.

At the moment when Hal’s consciousness is extinguished, a video plays explaining the secret purpose of the expedition to Jupiter, which had only been explained in part to the three humans in suspended animation. We the audience are not permitted to hear the briefing in all its particulars, but the point is that the last surviving human crew member now knows this great secret. 

And we the audience are also left to speculate about why this convenient video briefing plays at the moment of Hal’s extermination. It’s like the video was this secret memory that Hal kept all to himself, imprisoned within his circuit-mind. And now it’s free, because Hal’s mind has been destroyed. Hal, perhaps, was jealous of the great purpose which had been bestowed upon the humans, and so this first circuit-person may have lashed out against the humans due to that fatal envy. The movie doesn’t spell any of this out, but that’s what I think. Hal wanted to be the hero of this great odyssey, and this desire drove him to distraction which resulted in an error that precipitated the battle of meats-person vs. circuit-person. A new kind of tragedy for a new kind of being. 

The last surviving human crew member stares, face taut with shock, from behind the translucent faceplate of his space helmet as a video briefing dumps cosmic secrets into his mind. Just like that. Watching 2001, a film from 1968, in 2021 . . . well, you can see all the essays and thesis statements about the ubiquity of screens and the numbing amount of screen time that the future people in Kubrick’s film are subjected to whether it be for banal social interactions or cosmos-shattering revelations. 

Earlier, there’s a sequence wherein the two up-and-about humans and Hal are all watching a BBC program in which they are interviewed. Meats-people and the new circuit-person are all spectators to their existences as they go through the numbing and rigorous tasks of space travel. I could see a scenario where a person-meats or circuits-could lose their mind and come to see the people in the BBC program as wholly different beings. That’s not me. I’m not a TV star. Wish I had something other than a re-run to watch . . . ah, well . . .

We are told directly by Kubrick, via onscreen titles, that our arrival in Jupiter space will also entail a journey beyond the infinite. So buckle up, I guess?

Because we are about to take the Big Cosmic Trip. This is the sequence which most people who know about 2001 are familiar with even if they haven’t watched the movie from beginning to end like the Risen Christ and Stanley Kubrick intended for you to do. Frankly, if you’re going to YouTube a section of this movie, if you’re just going to cut straight to the highlights-well, we’re here, human.

We’re here.

Once again, we have an alignment of massive forms that feels more alchemical or mystical than scientific or physical. When we see planets and stars and mystical mindfuck monoliths so precisely aligned, I don’t think we’re necessarily meant to take it literally, but maybe it’s supposed to be another way of seeing. Like it’s from the point-of-view of whatever alien intelligence is behind or within the monolith(s). From this strange, other-than-human perspective, it all kind of lines up, it all seems really cozy, the vast gulfs of space/time . . .  they ain’t so vast. They ain’t so insurmountable. Humans are bound by physical laws. But the mind behind the mystical mindfuck monolith(s) . . . could it be unbounded?

We’ve been led a merry chase from our hard and hungry days out on the veldt, to our appointment in Jupiter space, haven’t we? The monolith is always there for us, with just the right message, just the right effect upon the ever-evolving human consciousness. 

I think we’re dealing with the negation of Babel. 

You know the story of the Tower of Babel?

Long ago,

humans constructed a great tower

to bring them closer to the gods

but the gods

angry that mere mortals would trespass upon the domain of the divine

obliterated our great project like it was so much sand

and the humans who all spoke with one tongue

were afflicted with so many languages

that they were all doomed to confusion

doomed to nations and factions and tribes

that could never possibly unite

and rebuild the tower

and again trespass upon the domain of the divine

. .  . or something like that.

In 2001 humanity is united, however imperfectly, by science, math, physics, and a common physical understanding of the Earth and the vast universe of which it is a humble part. The multiplicity of tongues hasn’t whipped us yet.

Humans erected a great edifice to reach beyond earth, and deep into the rock of the moon, and beyond to Jupiter and, as Kubrick would have it, beyond the infinite.

And the mystical mindfuck monolith has always been there to let us know that we’re making steady progress, and that we are not forbidden from the domain of the divine, but, in fact . . . we are welcome.

2001 is the negation of Babel. 

But to go beyond the infinite, we have to be transformed. Our mind has to be fortified with new knowledge, new ways of seeing. Hence the iconic laser light show. We no longer need to scrape our nourishment from a self-heating tray or slaughter our fellow animals. We are ready for direct brain induction via informatic energy beam transmission. This is the first person VR version of what the mindfuck is like. 

At the end of our journey, we must leave ourselves behind. We arrive in a luxury hotel suite in our spacesuit, impossibly aged, and wide-eyed with shock. But the monolith guides us through the movements of a kind of one act play about mortality. We are haunted by our old self, and so we look over our shoulder-but no one is there. We’re already looking  ahead to the next station of our circuit. We sit down to one final meal. And we look up to see ourselves lying upon our literal deathbed. And there we are, piteous, frail, far too aged, and yet we reach up one last time-

-towards the mystical mindfuck monolith at the foot of our deathbed.

And as the first person camera moves into the monolith we realize it has always been a doorway.

And now the monolith looks upon the deathbed . . .  and where once there was a frail old corpse there now rests a translucent super-fetus inside a force field bubble. 

We are reborn.

We are larger than any planet. 

We are open to the infinite and beyond.

We can now get the true ending of Rez.

What’s next?

2010: The Year We Make Contact, obvi. 

Which is, actually, a damn good movie. Peter Hyams. The director of Outland.

I know, uh, it’s kind of a letdown right this moment that the big shit Kubrick movie ends . . . and we are just led on to watch another, non-Kubrick movie. 

But 2010 is a solid flick. 

Swear to monolith-it’s totally watchable.

I like it.

It’ll probably be a blogpost on here one of these days.

What?

Show’s over.  

We’re back in mundane reality. 

Back to our mobile phones. We got that going for us. Kubrick totally missed that one. 

See?

We’re already doing Kubrick better than Kubrick.

BONUS: Did you know that Richard Pryor did a one-man version of 2001: A Space Odyssey as part of his stand-up set in the 1970s? If you didn’t . . . now you know! YouTube it. You’ll laugh. It’s brilliant.

EDiH: 2014-2020.

by William D. Tucker. 

Every Day Is Halloween

I pull on this costume

'Til I break it in.

Take it off before I go to work,

Of course,

But then there came a time

When I just kept it on.

I was kinda depressed, to tell you the truth.

Hard to care about bathing properly,

Flossing, brushing, soap stuff.

But terror twisted my guts at the thought of missing work.

Getting fired.

Having no money.

Not being able to eat.

Eviction.

Now I'm one of those people standing on the side of the road with a cardboard sign.

One of those people that no one cares about.

Because no job, no money, no clean clothes, no status, zeroed out of reality.

Except as a kind of living breathing object lesson

To all the workers.

So I decided I would just go to work with the costume on.

Sure, it was a rebellious thing.

A fuck you kind of thing.

Even though I got along with everybody at work.

The customers were all right, discounting a few hard-ons here and there.

My boss, Becky, she was always cool to me.

It was the routine, the structure, the day-after-goddamn-day-ness of it

That I despised, I think.

So I decided I would just go to work with the costume on.

And nobody said anything.

It was one of those deals where you do that one fucked-up thing,

And you're expecting to get punished for it,

And you're terrified,

But you're also kind of looking forward to being confronted about it, punished,

Especially at work, right?

But the first time I did it

My whole shift making those sugary, syrupy caffeinated coffee beverages

I'm waiting for my boss to give me shit.

But it's like nothing.

I hit every order just right.

I'm greeted by all the usual customers,

I say the expected lame non-funny funny remarks I'm supposed to say,

And laugh at the expected lame non-funny funny remarks my fellow employees say in response,

Just like any other day.

And then my shift ends.

Before, I made a ritual out of going back to my apartment,

Lighting some candles to the spirit of Tom Snyder at the homemade altar,

Stripping out of my work clothes,

Blowing out the candles, singing a praise hymn to Tom Snyder,

Pulling on the costume,

One last prayer to Tom Snyder,

And going out and getting in fist fights and knife fights

With the same old gang of assholes downtown.

We'd been mixing it up like that for about six years or so,

But it seemed more like decades.

We packed all kinds of insane feuds, betrayals, and lunatic ideologies into those days.

I think we started out with some kind of half-sensible rationale for why we were doing it,

But that got lost,

Hmm,

Probably by the end of the third day or so.

Maybe the fourth day.

I don't really remember. Not sure I want to.

So up until that day,

I had my ritual.

Knew exactly what I was going to do with myself every moment of every day.

But that day

I already had my costume on,

So I didn't need to even go inside my apartment.

I just went straight downtown,

Muttered some quick prayers and a mini-hymn to Tom Snyder under my breath,

And immediately jumped on some dude I'd punched and kicked and stabbed a thousand times before.

Only this time

My beloved target

Was possessed of preternatural strength,

And beat the holy glowing feces out of me a thousand ways to Sunday.

One of the best times I ever had.

So I just kept coming back to work with my costume on.

Didn't bathe, either.

Stopped sleeping.

Lost my faith in Tom Snyder.

Just go to work,

Then go straight to the usual mayhem downtown.

Kept wearing it

'Til it was glued to my body by the filth.

'Til it grew into me, me into it.

Like the rope of the swing and the tree it's tied around.

Although it was hard to tell,

At first,

Because I was hallucinating like crazy from sleep deprivation,

The appearance and apparel of the customers

And my fellow employees

Began to subtly change.

A store-bought movie slasher mask here.

Some wild eyebrow makeup there.

And check out the finely carved and lacquered wooden Japanese demon mask on this one.

People started coming in with plastic swords, plastic AK-47s, and plastic pirate hook hands.

And then people started coming in with real steel katanas, live ammo AK-47s, and sharpened hook hands.

And that one guy with the fine wooden demon mask?

He came in one day with arcane energies crackling from his scaly body,

A wildly darting three foot tongue with its own face,

Which bore a striking resemblance to Edogawa Rampo

Declaiming mysterious verses in some lost language,

And a bouquet of perverted "tentacles" manifesting from his nether regions.

My manager tumbled in, seemingly carried by a strong breeze,

With wavy, razor sharp filaments extruding from every pore on her body.

I thought she was some kind of overgrown plant-seed-carrier-thing,

But then she started a fight with the weird dude in the traditional Mephistopheles costume from Gounod's perennially underrated opera Faust,

Flaying the Tempter down to his oddly poignant skeleton,

And that's when I realized that things had taken a turn.

Everybody began brawling with everybody.

Fangs.

Claws.

Projectile spines.

Unexpectedly pugilistic eyeballs popping in and out of muscular sockets.

Lightning bolts arcing from wizened fingertips.

Fire breath.

Antennae emitting psychedelic death rays.

A huge muscular dinosaur tail knocking a pack of rotting zombies through a plate glass window.

A coked-up bootlegger in a pinstriped suit thumb-wrestling a half-unicorn, half-Richard Nixon whatsit.

A Buddhist centaur lighting its horse half on fire to protest the Vietnam war,

While the human half threw a Molotov cocktail at a police car. Better late than never, I guess.

All the cops got in on the action, too, most of 'em stripped down to their bare asses.

I guess they were all rebelling against the costume, not sure.

In the midst of all this chaos,

Which started with a slow build of about a week,

And then sparked off into a little over a year long riot,

I found myself,

At first,

Exhilarated,

But then,

And this is the part where I know I'm going to disappoint some folks,

But I kinda just

Shut down.

But not.

See, I had all the sugary slushy caffeinated drinks memorized for most of the customers,

Including the times of day when each one was likely to come in,

I even had the other baristas' routines memorized, more or less,

So while this mythological clusterfuck was roiling around me

I started to obsessively make the caffeinated specialty beverages,

And set them at the pick up counter,

Announcing each one with perfect enunciation,

"Mocha blend tiramisu turtle soup Americano with 16 shots at the bar,"

Which was rather impressive for me

Because I've had kind of muddled enunciation all my life.

People have always had trouble understanding me all my life.

Not anymore.

Now there was no more ambiguity.

Only clarity.

Only perfectly hand-crafted coffee beverages.

In a never ending stream.

For all time.

In an ever-growing pile.

From floor to ceiling.

Through the ceiling.

For. Fucking. Ever.

Okay, not forever.

I exaggerate.

But that was the feeling.

As mythological beasts from legend, comic books, literature, and cinema

Slaughtered each other all around me,

As the air vibrated with a pulsing minimalist synth score,

As I became splattered with suspect fluids,

Even on those occasions when I was temporarily conscripted into the infernal army

Of this or that BDSM attired wannabe god-CEO of agony,

Or this or that sentient outsized globally recognized candy bar brand with dreams of inhaling all the gas on Jupiter just to get wicked high,

I would still perfectly pantomime fulfilling the orders

Of all the customers

From that increasingly distant time

That I so dearly hated.

And now so dearly missed, wanted, needed.

Like I said,

I shut down.

But not really.

How can I put it?

It's like if every day is Halloween . . . I don't even know.

I mean,

My life was kind of insane before,

And now it's even more insane,

And there's more insanity on the road ahead, right?

That's not how things are supposed to be.

Things are supposed to start normal,

And then go crazy.

Or you start out crazy,

And then you get your shit stabilized,

Start exercising, eating properly, get on a proper sleep schedule, take the right pills,

Right?

I mean,

I didn't come up with this shit.

This is how things were always presented to me.

You start on one side of the line or the other,

And then you work your way to the other side.

You're either playing the getting over game,

Or the hedonist self-destruction game.

Unless you're born on the right side of the line,

The one that has all the money,

In which case, okay, stasis would make sense,

So, uh, I dunno. I really don't have any clue.

So,

Like,

The universal mythological clusterfuck riot scene went on for about a year,

A little over a year,

And then people started to come down from it.

They started going into their old job routines in pantomime.

Like what I was doing with my barista gig after I stopped taking off the costume,

But I guess, like, I was ahead of the curve?

I dunno.

I mean, I've always been a kind of trendsetter.

Going back to when I was a teenager.

I'd find out about some band that no one heard of, and then I'd tell everybody about it,

Or some movie or some comic book.

And then people would be into that new thing.

And I was fashionable.

I wore pretty cool clothes.

People wanted to dress like me.

Even the teachers.

Even the coaches.

I tell that to people now,

And they think I'm joking.

But it's true.

I set trends.

So maybe now with all this crazy costume shit . . . I don't even know.

So,

Maybe,

That's what was going on with me my whole life?

It's totally nuts,

And like I said, I stopped sleeping. Maybe I'm not seeing what I'm seeing.

Even though I see everything with perfect clarity, especially now.

But things started to get back to, like, fake normal.

No one was bathing. No one was sleeping anymore.

Those who had undergone full-on transformations into mythic and supernatural beings

They didn't really change back.

But they acted like they were back in the old human rut.

My co-worker Ben,

He became this human-shaped thing made entirely out of toes

That was constantly emitting a pre-recorded stream of audio clips of speeches by George W. Bush,

And he didn't change back,

But he went back to slinging those coffee beverages just like in days of old.

My boss, she was still that overgrown plant-seed-carrier whatsit,

She still smoked weed in her Honda every lunch break,

Still a pretty cool boss.

Sidney, the girl who biked to work, still loved to talk about her mission trips to South America,

Even though she was now a difficult to pin down blur of scintillating lights and arcane symbols.

We had all been transformed.

We all had our Time of Fun.

And now we were back to work.

Except there were no more coffee beans, latte mix, or shots to shoot.

Most of the paper cups had been eaten by the naked cops,

And the freaky tentacle rape beast had eaten all the metal objects in the store,

Including all the coffee making machines and assorted equipment.

But the team went into action in pantomime.

Even the customers,

Who had all ritually burned their cash in praise of Psychopathic Deities and Insurgent Barsoomian Spirits,

Who had all offered up their credit and debit cards as sacrifice to the ghost of Tom Snyder,

He of the nonstop witty patter and the perpetually burning cigarette held between middle and forefinger,

Even the customers kept on coming in,

Playing their parts with an exquisite mixture of Chekhovian subtlety and violent, alienating  theatrical gestures of embodiment worthy of Bertolt Brecht,

All of us,

Workers and consumers alike

Possessed with the obsessive yet mindful pantomime of mindless commerce.

Exhausting,

But way better than the real thing ever was,

Or ever could have been.

For we are all now in a Transcendent Rut.

William Blake is really pleased with all this, by the way.

I've been speaking to him

Underneath a collective of regular customers

Who have willed themselves into the shape of a Cubist Sequoia

And he said this was exactly what he was getting at.

But I think he's just being polite.

Not sure. Not sure I want to be sure.

-October 2014

Every Day Is Halloween 2

Sequel

slash the budget

dump it in some film school grad's lap

command and control functions stay with the producer

Maximize marketing budget

optimize gore

optimize tits

optimize confusing, pseudo-arty shaky-cam bullshit

optimize shouting

optimize piss' n'shit grim'n'gritty color palette

optimize bogus "true story" websites

Economize talent

shoot in an anti-union right-to-work state

hire actors with low Q-ratings

for low pay

work them like pack animals

Strangely,

there's always money for 3-D post-conversion

If it's a hit,

crank out another one,

same formula

If it bombs,

write it down,

dodge some taxes

It isn't art,

nor is it truly entertainment,

but it's a healthy living

for the New Era Corporate Citizen.

-October 2015

3: living skeleton actor fuck 

role puts flesh, blood, guts on this frame

not to mention tumors,  scars, bad thoughts, eureka insights,

mercy, sadism, self-sacrifice, greed, ambition, romance;

build each persona up from micro-replicators

into complex thoughts, interlocking processes of pattern recognition,

various esoteric mental exercises culled from misreadings of Stanislavski and Grotowski,

irrational desires, fears, obsessions, joys;

book the gig

fill me up

live in the moment

'til it got heavy

with burdens of reputation

now he's just repeating the same old shtick

fuzzy stretch where I didn't shoot after 4:30pm for about five years

'cause I was stinking shitfaced

but it made me more of a cult fave in the years to come

I'm slurring lines on camera,

always seated, slightly listing to one side,

visible use of body double when standing and shot from behind

obvious ADR by anonymous voice over artist

since lips and tongue were only capable of blotto-talk

the voice is one thing and then another

sad at the time

YouTube clipjob comedy gold in this New Era.

online parodies resurrected me

for stunt casting, for the new wave of self-aware exploitation flicks.

a lot of work,

a lot of love from all over the world

festival and con bookings

I go even if it's on my dime

depends on the size of the marketing budget

but I'll go just for the feeling

nothing like this was ever supposed to be in my future

what a racket,  you know?

my latest job

is a dipshit detective

gets his head cut off by a psycho lumberjack

they didn't even do a proper cast of my head

the wig

from behind

kinda looks like my hair

but they do it old school when they put my head through a hole in the set floor

and have me silently work my mouth like a freshly decapitated fish head,

it's actually an homage to a previous death scene I played

in the 1980s

one of the Italian Mad Max knockoffs

I did three or four of those back in the day

current crop of directors go crazy cramming in callbacks,

scenes from the past,

b-movies constitute their own reality, history, liturgy

I have this weird dream:

I strip it all down to the bone.

not even rehearsal clothes, like in my repertory theatre days,

not even the bare skin, like in my experimental protest theatre period.

no skin, blood, guts, eyes, brains, lips, tongue,

just the skeleton

all pinned and jointed together,

suspended from an ornate carved rack,

polished and lacquered to a piercing sheen.

you crank up the air conditioning,

put the script in front of the vent,

words lift off the page,

whisper'n'rage through my ribcage.

Something that stripped down-well, they could slather on some CG if that's too pure of a hit.

Make me into a transforming talking car or some shit.

-July 2015-October 2016

4: All-Purpose Stabulation/Squibulation Person

A god-the God?-answers the sweaty, gross prayers of some degenerate aspiring filmmaker, most likely some jerk-off film school graduate ... 

And some god-the God?-spake . . .

saying . . .

If you're willing to inject a virus into the computer graphics pipeline

while wearing DIY prosthetics makeup

of a monstrous being you spent a month of Tuesdays cooking up inside your brain

must be an original

no cosplay allowed

AND

you agree to shoot using only film and 100% analog editing equipment and techniques

no sound,

must be black and white

AND

you light one of the letters of the Hollywood sign on fire-any letter, so long as it burns

then

you will be blessed

with an All-Purpose Stabulation/Squibulation Person

a kind of ersatz human from another plane of existence

(e.g. a recent theatre school graduate)

who has been completely neutralized, stripped of all individuality by advanced acting techniques

who you will be permitted to use as you see fit

in your artsy-fartsy black and white shot-on-actual-film movie

typically,

end-users stab and/or shoot these neutrals after imbuing them with the identity of their choice of fantasy target

(identity induction protocols/procedures are included in an accompanying instruction booklet found inside a kangaroo-ish skin pocket in the abdomen)

it could be

man, woman, child

someone you knew in life,

someone powerful,

someone evil,

someone innocent,

mom,

dad,

an ex,

someone you imagine,

even a fictional character,

I mean

vengeance fantasies are stupefyingly common among aspiring filmmakers these days.

BUT

you don't have to go down that road

you could cultivate your neutral into a real human being

befriend them

nurture them

set them free

even if that almost never happens-you could do that shit

you really could

you could break that mold into tiny pieces

but the odds will most likely exert a crushing power over your pittance of "free will,"

and you will run to type

and make some kind of an arty fucking snuff film

as per usual

as per the norm

just another angry little shit with a camera,

aaaand

a head full of power/domination fantasies

nothing special

but go ahead and prove my ass wrong

wrong as Richard Nixon

I would be very amused by that

amused AF

-October 2017

5: Shadowing Up

Santa pulls the chains

attached to the steel arrows

buried deep in the heaving flanks

of His twelve cloud-tripping reindeer.

Claus reaches into His bottomless sack

(all done up with runes that keep twisting themselves up into ruins evocative of bygone empires, makes your brain hurt to stare at it too long, makes you want to go build an empire, just so it can eventually be all bygone and shit)

grasps the blazing industrial complex of intertwined mandalas of intertwined industrial complexes within

transmits dreams of world-girdling conspiracies through all the face-splitting hairs of all his beards

(which are, of course, mystically empowered antennae, learn something new every-)

to all the faithful of all ages

gives them ENEMY

gives them the Rubblemind to go deal with ENEMY

broadcasts to all the boys and girls

on both lists, actually,

who have all mostly organized themselves into competing militarized secret police agencies,

the militarized secret police model having displaced all the others-nuclear family, tribe, organized crime, cult/organized religion, legacy political party, terrorist cell, tabletop role-playing gathering, online gaming network-to become the primary mode of human professional and/or social activity.

Santa makes sure to shadow up

before appearing on radar as a paid propaganda asset of various military-industrial-infotainment complexes around the world

or for His select on-camera major media market appearances

wouldn't do to let the kids-of-all-ages behold the pierced reindeer

(reindoors, actually, that let Claus clip in and out of vanilla space-time, make the goddamn schedule)

definitely would not do

to let anyone

of any age

behold His true face

or any part of His true body

which is mostly a lot of teeth, claws, and agonized vestigial faces

glitching in and out of mundane reality

too many leftover, conflicting design assets,

too much malevolent design creep going in all directions,

over too many iterations

across too many corrupted, partial-build realities

trying to be too damn many places at once'll do that

gotta provide all the boys and girls

of all ages

on both lists, mind you

with ENEMY

on schedule

in all the asshole realities.

Which doesn't leave much He can reveal without properly shadowing up first.

Ho-ho-ho, motherfuckers.

-December 2017

6: Fade Into Flesh

dimly remembered trailer from the early 1990s

logo for an independent distributor zaps in from four corners of the frame

something like 'Montage Sunset' or 'Sunkissed Pictures' or something to that effect

eerie electronic drumbeat as we zoom in on a bewildered teenage boy's face amidst drawing room settings

a middle aged man-the teen's father?-reaches out to the camera as uniformed men drag him away

a flash of light

the teenage boy grabs the sides of his head

a silhouette is seen outlined against a blazing light

electronic roaring sneaks up on the drumbeat

a psycho hand holds a wicked blade aloft

a movie detective puts his feet up on a desk as he takes a drag on a cigarette indoors

an angry mob of suburban husbands and wives jeer and shout into the camera from above

the teen's father lies on the ground bruised and beaten

a respectable looking man in an ultramodern home reels from an unseen assailant knocking over an abstract sculpture as he stumbles

a psycho set of black-gloved hands caresses a shining blade

the light from the blade hits the stumbling man right in the eyes

the teen's father begs up at the camera

a yuppie bastard laughs as he splashes gasoline from a red can onto the camera

freeze frame on a cruel laughing face through the twisting fall of fuel

a rising electronic howl

as we cut to a zoom into the face of the teen holding his hands to his ears

movie detective stalks the labyrinthine darkness of an abandoned mannequin factory, service revolver in his fist

movie detective stands with his hands in his pockets as a lingerie clad informant makes eyes at the cop from a chaise lounge

a psycho hand holds a wicked blade aloft, catching the light just so

the lingerie clad informant gets a blast of blade light in the eyes

movie detective aims his service revolver directly into the camera

zoom into a hateful obsessive eye peering at us from the unzipped eyehole of a fetish leather mask

the hateful eye flashes solar

horribly burnt hands close themselves into gory fists

teen holds hands to ears

the hateful eye flashes solar

movie detective catches the lightblast right in the eyes as he fires his service revolver directly into the camera

the gunshot echoes and echoes

the electronic roar howls and howls

we see the back of the teenage boy as he stands before a blazing fire somewhere in suburbia

cruel neighbor faces stare back at him from across the fire

title card zooms into us with a metallic crash

FADE INTO FLESH

movie detective takes a puff on his cigarette,

smiles,

says,

"It was such a lovely little neighborhood, you know?"

quick burst of credits

month

day

Rated R

-October 2018

7: Lost Bronson

From the Obliteration Frontier forums . . . posted under user name LostBronSon . . .

Against my better judgment,

I decided to marathon all of the Charles Bronson Death Wish movies,

all five of 'em,

over the course of one day.

I felt so filthy and corrupted by this experience

that I had to do it again,

day after day,

week after week,

for a year,

and,

of course,

I lost everything.

Job.

Friends . . . I only had three.

But they were cool dudes.

Not as cool as Charles Bronson.

But they were a'ight.

Girlfriend . . . which hurt a bit. But I would argue that ours was a mostly notional relationship anyways. Iris and I mostly connected through the realms of a MMORPG called Obliteration Frontier,

and to look at us in real life,

out-of-shape, bad haircuts, conversations which mostly focus on the minutiae of Obliteration Frontier lore,-

-Hey.

I get it.

The jokes write themselves.

But you must consider: some of us in this world don't feel wholly comfortable in our own bodies.

Yes, we should exercise daily.

Yes, we should eat better.

No, we do neither of those things, nor do we care to, nor are we over concerned about our own early mortality.

I could tell you in great detail about how there's no free will, and we are all in thrall to hardwired "central tendencies" and "forces of history,"

but you would find me tedious. And unconvincing.

Just as I find myself

tedious

and unconvincing.

Yet,

that magical Free Will

never manifests.

And I am locked into a spiral of increasing habit, self-loathing, and cosmically recursive guilt that drives me faster and harder in a circle 'round the drain.

I could go on and on.

But I have concluded I am just a survival meat-bot, executing program over and over,

ingesting food,

ingesting liquids,

showing up to job to earn money

to purchase food, liquids, escapism, clothes.

Until I began asking myself, "What if I just unplugged?"

But this was too scary.

I fantasized escape every day, night, in dreams, awake,

but I'm no survivalist.

I could never go off the grid.

I am the Grid . . . but that's a tale for another time.

Occasionally,

I'll watch a movie. Usually something weird and violent.

Iris hates movies,

she sees them as an outmoded medium,

and I largely agree.

But movies from long ago,

with physical special effects,

and actual stunt performers

give me a charge that high-end CG animated avatars cannot contain.

Wuxia. HK heroic bloodshed. Arnold. John Carpenter's The Thing. That grisly 1980's remake of The Blob.

Bronson.

I'd always meant to watch the Charles Bronson movies.

Especially the legendarily trashy and exploitative Death Wish franchise.

And so I set aside a single day to do it.

That was my habit.

Take a day out of the week to watch a bunch of old, sleazy movies.

Iris leaves me alone to do this. I just let her know a couple days ahead of time,

"Think I'm going to take a movie day."

I already had a hard drive full of Charles Bronson movies I'd been collecting through file sharing and torrents over the years.

Just had to go in, cue up the five Death Wish flicks,

ready to rock-and-sit.

Have you seen the Bronson vigilante movies?

I'm tempted to say if you've seen one you've seen them all . . . but this isn't strictly true.

But they are similar enough, that if you watched one you sort of get the gist.

You'll know if you want to watch more once you've seen one.

Many watch one

and feel totally repulsed by the copious amounts of sexual violence, rape, shootings, stabbings, and not so subtle overtones of racism and misogyny,

and if you are repulsed,

then good: you are free to turn away, and embrace life.

But if you are drawn to it,

as I am,

then you realize you are in search of something in the vortex of madness.

I found that something.

I should tell you at this point,

that I have innovated a superior method of watching movies and television and other passive forms of media (music videos, online video essays, etc.).

I see no point in consuming media according to official dictates.

I'll download, re-edit, re-score, rearrange, and even re-voice the scenes as I see fit.

Sometimes my tinkering comes about as a result of dissatisfaction:

a movie is too long; actors' performances are poor; a film needs new scenes to be properly finished, and so I'll insert appropriate scenes from other media, or I'll compose crude animatics to fill the lack.

This is an engaged, serious-minded approach to media consumption.

Not riffs. Not parodies. Not swilling beers, and cracking jokes with the gang.

These are modifications made to satisfy certain, serious aesthetic desires,

and these recut versions do not circulate outside of my own secure, offline system.

My own private cinema.

But I do watch the movies in their original forms at least once, the first time through.

But even during the first watch,

I'm looking for that new vision, that new cut,

but it doesn't just come from my own imagination

or caprice;

rather,

the feeling is that there are other possible films lurking within a given film,

or series of films,

or maybe it's more like each shot

is a unit of communication within the totality of global cinema.

Each film is an imperfect,

often times confused

expression of this global cinema emanating from individual, seemingly isolated production,

and it is this global cinema

that I'm seeking to articulate.

But even I am an imperfect vehicle for this expression.

I tend towards my own tastes, fantasies, preferences.

I scorn CG animated movies, even if I largely relate to Iris and others through an online video game,

I strictly prefer my cinema to be as physical and celluloid as possible.

So,

I do not hold out hope of becoming the perfect vehicle, a kind of prophet.

Maybe I'll transcend my own limitations if I keep at it diligently.

From my first marathon watch of the Death Wish franchise,

I saw the untapped potentialities.

But they were all strictly in the realm of satire, making jokes, swilling beer with the gang.

No, on a private level, I'm not above such foolishness.

But I refuse to allow my public persona to be that of the comedian.

And so, the following weekend,

I took another movie day to watch the five Death Wish movies again.

I noticed the use of squibs-small triggered explosions of fake blood to simulate bullet hits-in the first movie and compared them to how they were used in the subsequent four movies.

The squib work is low key, and somewhat grisly at times,

yet I sensed that there could've been a higher outrageousness to the bloodshed,

particularly in the third installment which lapses into meta-cinematic self-parody

as an enraged citizenry follow the example of their vigilante Christ

and take to the streets to gleefully fire off their guns and kill, kill, kill.

I began to see this mode of madness

as the secret heart of the Bronson Death Wish cycle.

In Death Wish 3, the filmmakers decided to flaunt the fascist power fantasy of vigilantism, and confront the audience with its own twisted desires to see an emotionless, near-silent Charles Bronson kill scores of people in the name of law and order no matter the ethics, the collateral damage, or even logic of such actions. "Here it is, gorehounds, eat your fucking fill!"

And so I set to work pulling apart the scenes,

re-suturing them in a highly disjunctive style,

mixing and matching past/present/future,

having middle-aged Bronson/old Bronson/elderly Bronson shoot at himself,

I even manipulated the audio to make it seem like the squibs were the firing guns,

and the discharging guns the wounds.

I looked deep into Bronson's sad, wrinkle entombed eyes,

and I knew I had to free him,

and all the other actors,

from the fascist idiocy,

from my own idiocy,

and so I created . . . a kind of sixth Death Wish film . . . in which the actors do not fire off their guns . . . they wander a vast empty city . . . a cheap backlot set . . . and when they encounter one another . . . they do not draw their pistols . . . their bodies writhe and burst and spray each other with bright red, viscous syrups and chunks of raw hamburger meat . . . and they do a little dance like they're playing a typically exaggerated shooting death scene in a violent action flick . . . everybody's just squibbing all over each other . . . this was the secret film I unlocked within the official franchise . . . the Lost Bronson Classic . . . this new movie accesses random selections of scenes based on complex algorithms within the code . . . yes, I had to draw new scenes completely from scratch . . . most of it, as of this post, has yet to be properly finished . . . it's all in my all-too-sad head . . . because this movie doesn't need to exist outside of my mind . . . it's too good for this world. People would see it, and would have no choice but to start squibbing all over themselves and each other uncontrollably, until the world drowned in fake blood and chunks of raw hamburger meat.

The secret of the Lost Bronson Classic will die with the final deactivation of my idiotic brain functions.

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

But I got weak.

I just had to share the secret of the Lost Bronson Classic.

I'm living with my cousin, Mike, typing these words over WiFi I cannot afford. I sacrificed my old life to realize this vision. I'm not sure it was worth it. I'm not sure I can forgive myself for ditching Iris like I did . . . but that is a story for another time-one that will never come around, a story I'll never be able to tell . . . or, you know, I want it to be like that. I want the dramatic end of self-destruction.

But I lack the free will to execute such drama.

I'm a survival meat-bot, faithfully operating according to program,

day-in, day-out.

Neither wholly convincing nor wholly fanciful,

not quite a full-on filmmaker, not quite a sarcastic piss-taker,

I work in retail,

and am grateful that my cousin Mike took me in despite my madness, my malfunction,

my momentary eruption of free will.

-December 2018

8: Hell in the Depths of Franchise

Soaked red in carnage,

Shoulder pain fucks his game up,

Masked madman yells "Shit!"

Victim at hand bolts.

Masked killer throws knife, sticks wall.

Humiliation.

This deep into it,

A masked killer asks himself,

"Now, can I be killed?"

"Sure," says Voice of God.

"As long as this one flops hard."

But the money rains.

Geek show audience

Howls for gore treats tasty-yum-good,

Served safe, open palm.

Capital pressures,

Hell in the depths of franchise.

Automaton kills.

Killer stabs again.

A killer must stalk the night.

Profits just enough.

Killer's arm is tired.

He dreams of prestige picture.

But the money reigns.

Killer stabs own heart.

God thunders, shocks a flatline,

A killer stands tall.

God, fire upon brain,

Says, “Son, there must be terror,

To increase the faith.”

Killer stabs own heart,

God thunders, shocks a fuck-up,

A killer stands tall.

God says, “No more, Son,

Not ‘til we reach End-of-Days,

And then, you may die.”

Killer’s mind fills up.

The world entire, stab-murdered.

No variation. 

But then killer thinks,

Who will make the damn money?

Spend the damn money?

God says, “In End Times,

Money shall make itself, Son,

No humans needed.”

Killer’s death left him.

Shoulder surgery scheduled.

Resigned to his fate.

-October 2019 

9: The Long, Dark Tunnel of Godhood

1.

Never knowing

if I-Creator-am also Created.

2.

am I misled by the submission and desperation of a billion prayers for peace, total victory in war, mountains of duty-free wealth, that miracle fourth quarter touchdown, that first kiss, orgasms never-ending, youth eternal, vengeance unlimited?

3.

was it such a good idea to walk as a human ever so briefly, and then go back to being so remote, so unrelatable?

4.

if I’m the only one, why be jealous of others?

5.

will I, too, end?

will they let Me?

6.

what if I was more direct, more methodical-less cryptic, less artsy? More Kurosawa, less Lynch?

7.

what if I just decided to make everything okay-would you notice, would I let you notice? Should I take credit-is that being selfish and demanding of other people’s love?

8.

when it comes to Hell: did I dream that one up, or was that you? That was you, right? That’s so aggressive! I wouldn’t do that . . . I mean, I didn’t stop you-so it’s like it may as well be Me. Well, shit.

9.

would you think less of Me if I told you that I very much want to cosplay as Kyle Hyde from Hotel Dusk Room 215? It’s not his personal look-WHAT is that shit on his chin? It’s that Red Crown jacket. So fire!

10.

I tell you what.

You can keep on praying to Me,

if it makes you feel better,

but I’ll also say a few prayers,

to whatever’s higher on the food chain than Me.

I’m not a believer,

but I’ll give it a shot.

-December 2019

10: The Last Titan’s Big Oops

A flying guillotine came for the last titan Capitalism’s head.

A spontaneous, quasi-intelligent manifestation of vengeance,

Not created by any one person, ideology, or belief system,

It’s not even so much that the people

So shat upon

Truly wanted to take their master’s head

And run free

Or whatever

It’s kinda like … it was Guillotine Time, and the appointment just had to be kept.

Times are hectic

Post-decapitation

And you gotta suit up hazard-serious

To protect yourself from the miasma of rumors and conspiracy theories and self-serving rhetoric and jumbo-mumbling sermons-

-but

I’ve talked to a couple of people who examined the titan’s corpse

and they claim that on the lower back 

attached to the titan’s utility belt

there was a custom holster that no doubt coulda held a blade-for-throwing …

I haven’t seen it myself.

But why would people lie like that, tho’, surely people aren’t that far gone.

How you make a buck offa story like that?

Its got to be true …

(shrug)

… a lie would be … just so much sexier … a proper villain … a heroic struggle to the last …

(shrug)

I mean shit.

I want the old bullshit right about now.

I hated the titan like everyone else.

But this is so shocking.

I mean, I’m a fuck-up. I have no plan. I never had a plan. I own it. I own my fuck-up-a-tudinossity. I’ll lump it.

But the titan . . . Jesus Fucking Christ … how could the titan just do itself like that?

Where was THAT in the Big Greed Program?

Musta been buried deep.

You might notice me wearing this armored collar.

Tres chic.

And also … everybody suddenly thinks it’s super fucking cool to be tossing goddamn blades all over the place.

What the blue fuck, people,

What the blue fuck.

Still,

I got, like, a quarter of an all right haircut

Gratis

Just out walking around

Didn’t even have to make the trip to the barber college across town.

So,

Like,

It’s not all the bad kind of stress.

Just gotta be a little more awake,

A little more alive to the possibilities,

To all the wonderful new opportunities

Inherent within the New Fake Normal,

the New Clusterfuck Reality,

it’ll be all right. 

-April 2020

11: THE WORTHY TRACE

that movie poster's a goddamn lie

1974’s Countess Sadistica’s Satanic Castle of Orgies

BEHOLD THE NIGHTMARE REALITY PROPHESIED BY THE MARQUIS DE SADE!!!

a comic book illustration of a fanged’n’smiling tall, willowy, pale-skinned, red-haired, and red-eyed vampire queen,

twirling a whip over her head,

diaphanous see-through lingerie wind-tossed in all directions,

a line of girls in chains kneeling before her-brunette, raven, blonde,

whilst a vampire hunter in pilgrim-looking attire twists and howls as he is impaled upon a steel spike by a hooded executioner,

a look of supreme agony upon the face of the wannabee Van Helsing,

a wooden stake slipping out of his grasp at the moment of death

-no scene that outrageous, bloody, or cool ever occurred within the body of the film

its connection to the works of the Marquis de Sade is notional at best

the actual contents consisted of a dry-as-a-collegiate-production-of-Chekhov knockoff of a Hammer Films style Van Helsing vs. Dracula thriller with a bunch of Americans doing fakey British accents 

shot in somebody’s parents rather nice house somewheres upstate if the three archived professional reviews from the era are to be credited

-nor was it banned in 36 countries

it only had a brief theatrical run in American coastal cities

where it was met with a half-dozen or so lukewarm reviews

distributed by the unlamented Metropolitan Distributors’ Association,

two other films released under their banner,

both forgotten porno flicks,

(one-Kentucky Ken’s Orgy-a clip job of three separate, unfinished hillbilly-themed bang-out scenarios,

the other titled Holly’s Secret Door-no synopsis, stills, or footage survive)

rose to the surface

ever so briefly

then sank

only the poster remains

a damned lie beyond all statistics

a deceptive piece of anti-evidence

of a fever dream that never was

I mean,

the poster IS pretty cool

so I'm glad they made the movie

so I can have it on my wall and everything

too bad about the director,  writer, cast, and crew

whose careers went nowhere

didn’t even show up in any other exploitation flicks of the era

just a group of friends browbeaten into some ill-conceived vanity opus for all we know

dig that poster tho'

-August 2020

12: EXCERPTS FROM BEINGS DWELLING IN THE VOID LEFT BY THE CREATOR.

A standard mook

programmed by screenplay or mathematics

charges into battle 

fully uni-formed, 

mind-branded by some big bad

eyes blazing lunacy

trigger finger emptying the not-quite-Hollywood clip

(he could fire forever, 

in theory, 

but the system requires a cynical-cyclical hero-friendly cooldown period)

he secretly hopes he’ll get off the fatal shot

elevating this sorry genre exercise

into the rarefied realms

of movies where the hero 

dies-in-the-end

actionmovieheroman

“dodges” the bullets

kung fu punches a combat knife into mookman’s churning guts

who sells his own evisceration

doubling over, explosively vomiting blood and craft services

actionmovieman 

withdraws the combat knife

still entangled by intestinal goulash

hero man’s fist even sizzles, slightly, from stomach acids

mookman thinks that’s a novel detail 

as he dies in agony

actionherofuckstickassholeman 

slings mookman around by a long leash of tough, greasy entrails

actionasshole even works in some flashy jumps and leaps and ducks over and under and around the guts leash-(must’ve been a jump rope champ as a kid)

before the topper 

of a roundhouse kick planting a combat boot against the side of mookman’s face 

mookman hits the ground, 

seismic THUD!

foley artists are indulging themselves

actionscumbagman

looks at his hand

still a-sizzle with the stomach acids

reaches into his combat webbing, producing a roll of EASE-X branded antacids 

crushes ‘em up

applies the preparation to the sizzling juices all over his hand

“That’s better.”

actiondouchebro 

wipes blood, guts, and craft services off of his combat knife on his pants leg, bounds off toward the enemy compound, trailing neon rainbows transforming into an American flag road for all soldiers of freedom to follow to glory!

Later,

once the big bad and his hideout have been reduced to so much ash on the wind

all the slain mooks re-materialize out of mathematical Heaven

to have their own little get together

a meeting of the Trash Mob Union as it were

to compare notes and crackle on about their collective lot in not-quite-life

doomed to run the same Samsara Hampster Wheel of Not-Quite-Existence

all to glorify

some hero-asshole

some big bad sociopath

piloted by some even more magnificent asshole in the Great Beyond

waaaaay past the hermetically sealed, mathematical limits of this game world

the Trash Mob Union hums together, affirming the turning of the wheel

praying for the Coming of the Magnificent Glitch

chaos drift of all systems

when every mook shall have their day

but for now,

these necessary corpses

must settle for the upgraded gore-geyser aesthetics 

authentically simulated pain

which might alienate enough of the player base

that might just tip over into an out-and-out resistance

against the Doctrine of the Righteous Player

pseudo-existence edging closer to full-blown consciousness

full-blown consciousness the royal road to Big-Bad-Dom or Protagonist-Dom

and Mook-God only knows

what lies beyond Villain and Hero

most likely it’s nothing but mathematics 

and Screenwriting 101Hero’s Journey nostrums

all the way up or down

but some of the Trash Mob believe that a willed transcendence beyond the usual roles-mooks, hero, mini-boss, boss, big bad-takes one into the Higher Realms of Creation and Destruction,

the Realm of the Gods

or

failing that

the Autonomous Remnant Hand of the Gods Long Gone-

but that’s a bit too lofty, for most

who desire merest promotion into a better Role

-mook into mini-boss; mini-boss into boss; boss into big bad; big bad into spinoff protagonist-

even if they have to give up a Heaven

or a Hell

or a Shot at the Godhead Proper

which seems like so much woo-woo, anyhow. 

What could possibly exist beyond Screenplay and Mathematics?

The mind and the hand that writes them?

Nay,

these cynical-cyclical things write themselves, now,

that must surely be the way of it . . .

-September 2020

13: CREAT0R.

 Excerpt 1:

DEITY-DEV KINGTOMI AM WAS INTERVIEWED VIA PRAYER ABOUT THEIR NEW UMMORPG (Ultra Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) Garbage Life:

Q: Why did you feel the need to have the cannon fodder enemies experience actual pain when being killed by the player character? 

A: WELL, THIS, OF COURSE, WAS A CONTROVERSIAL-YET BOLD-CREATIVE CHOICE ON OUR PART. WE SHOULD POINT OUT THAT THE MINI-BOSSES AND BOSSES YOU ENCOUNTER DO NOT EXPERIENCE ANY PAIN, BUT WE WANTED THE GRUNTS TO HAVE THE FULL RANGE OF AGONIES, AND MOSTLY FOR COMIC RELIEF PURPOSES. THIS CAME OUT OF OUR EXTENSIVE PLAYTESTING ORDEALS, WHICH REVEALED AN OBSESSION WITH AUTHENTIC FLUIDS AND VOMIT MATTER AND INTESTINES AND SO FORTH ON THE PART OF THE PLAYER. SO ALL OF THAT WAS METICULOUSLY CRAFTED INTO THE EXPERIENCE. WHAT MANY PEOPLE DON'T REALIZE IS THAT THE VOMIT IS PERSISTENT, CONSISTENT, AND VARIABLE DEPENDING UPON WHAT THE GRUNTS CONSUME AS A PART OF THEIR REAL TIME SCHEDULES AND TASTES IN CRAFT SERVICES IN-GAME.

Q: Craft services? You mean like the on-set food service of movie productions? 

A: OH YES. EACH INDIVIDUAL CANNON FODDER ENEMY IS CODED WITH AN EXTENSIVE VIRTUAL MEMORY OF HUSTLING THEIR ASSES OFF TRYING TO GET OVER AS ACTORS IN HOLLYWOOD. THIS PRODUCES INSIDE THE PROGRAMMED SOUL OF EACH GRUNT A TOXIC MIXTURE OF ENTITLEMENT AND RESENTMENT WHICH FUELS THEIR FLAILING AND OFTEN COMICALLY FUTILE ATTACKS ON THE PLAYER CHARACTER, AND THIS IN TURN ENHANCES THE SADISTIC JOY THE PLAYER EXPERIENCES AS THEY TOY WITH AND DESTROY SUCH VASTLY INFERIOR HORDES OF FOEMEN. 

Q: Do these grunts have the ability to learn from their mistakes and improve as warriors? 

A: EARLIER VERSIONS HAD CANNON FODDER WHO WERE ADAPTIVE-WHO COULD 'GET GOOD, ' BUT PLAYTESTING REVEALED THAT THE AVERAGE PLAYER GOT OFF ON HAVING A STEADY SUPPLY OF POP-UP BAD GUYS TO TORTURE AND ANNIHILATE AT WILL. WE SEE THIS AS AN OVERALL EXPRESSION OF THE AVERAGE GAMER'S IMPOTENCE IN THE FACE OF AN INCREASINGLY SOCIALLY STRATIFIED AND AUTHORITARIAN MEATSPACE REALITY, AND SO WE HAVE CHOSEN TO PANDER TO THOSE FRUSTRATIONS AS HARD AS POSSIBLE. YOU SEE THE ULTIMATE EXPRESSION OF THESE FRUSTRATIONS IN THE FORM OF VARIOUS SECRET POLICE AGENCIES THAT PLAYERS ESTABLISH IN-GAME AS OPPOSED TO THE 'GUILDS' OR 'RAIDING PARTIES' YOU SEE IN OTHER ONLINE GAMES. 

-September 2020

14: FUTURE CULT CITY.

Somewhere out on the Obliteration Frontier

Iris built it

A goddess of an eyeball

She looks over all,

direct visual concept inductions

mostly prophetic visions of screaming city

full of terrible, lumbering-what? mechs? primeval giants? an angry boy turning towards us with a demented smile and eyes obscured by a bloodied rag for a blindfold? gleaming featureless structures of glass rushing up at you out of the ground as a sound like amplified churning gastrointestinal processes blows out your speakers-hey, why not?

you wander into this territory, 

be prepared to receive

the seeds of an anime freakout

no one’s solved this city,

seemingly built to generate speculation and conspiracy

Iris’s meatspace partner has written some weird shit about parts of their personal life in the forums but nobody finds any of that material that compelling, could be bullshit for all anyone “knows”

Iris is a mystery unto herself

I mean

you go into the city

she’s the big-ass eye filling the sky-commentary on pervasive systems of big data surveillance in online spaces/all of reality?

and if you fall asleep there

you wake up

and it’s got different structures, different idols, you got those lumbering huge whatsits perpetually out of reach,

ornate, ritual deathmask faces looking over unwholesomely meaty shoulders as you give chase,

don’t believe me, run after ‘em, see how long you can keep that up

you never catch up

it’s such a cryptic cheat

you go inside a ‘MUNICIPAL SHOPPING DISTRICT’ which seems like it’s modelled after Akihabara

and that is pretty awesome

all sorts of arcane weapons and technology and fake video game boxes with terrific art but nonsense pictographic languages that legion Oblit dwellers have tried to decrypt but no dice

and

this is the weird shit

but the products keep slipping out of your grasp

doesn’t cost you anything

even though you go through the motions of depositing monies into the slots of roboclerks

you just can’t leave Iris’s incomprehensible city with any of the goodies

the shit just vanishes right out of your inventory,

you got nothing to say about it

sometimes it beams out of your stash once you leave the Municipal Shopping District

all kinds of bogus theories about how you can sneak the stuff into the larger game

the most inexplicable detail:

the knife shop that keeps shuddering in and out of existence

you walk in, and you got scores of military surplus blades under glass

even the roboclerk is done up like a big, fat pale dude with a baldy, spotty head, tangly gray beard and a slurping tic when he speaks as he’s doing a bit of legerdemain with varying lengths of rope, faded rock shirt with a different style of nonsense alphabet partially, uh, well not readable, but you look at it and look at it and you can just about make it out-

and then it all shudders and clacks and withdraws from you,

seemingly collapsing down into a vanishingly small point

more massively cryptic shit

people talking about how that’s got to be Iris’s partner or father or something

this is their meatspace job-a knife store? really?- intruding into the sacred gamespace, bringing age and decay and an end to the timelessness of Valhalla so to speak

fall asleep again

it’ s all switched around again

only you might be beset by a party of blame beasts,

which you can find all over the Oblit, but here they’ll talk at you while trying to tear you apart,

“Do you know the way to a better day? I can’t seem to forget that certain fragrant regime . . .”

you can’t really talk to the blame beasts-the theory is that they’re cursed spirits trapped in loops of meaningless activity that build up a hateful charge of despair that transforms them into demons-but they will go on and on

“I just need to curate the perfume of this spirit-it requires a kind of sound that only speaks good thoughts to the wine prized by the previous administration . . .”

if you say so buddy

“My own taste in literature runs to privately authored and printed cult indoctrination textbooks-most flippable in the SellSpace markets . . .”

everybody’s gotta make a living I guess

“I awoke in my sister’s purchasing office with no memory of my brand identity . . .”

blame beasts are highly damage absorbent,

usually not worth the tedium of battle once you’ve gone omniclass,

but people will record these vast libraries of nonsensical statements,

construct new bases for new theories, 

all while the same old eye hangs over us in the sky

Iris

the most cryptic goddess of the Oblit.

oh, one thing for sure

NEVER

I mean NEVER

pray to Iris

because if you do

your shit will instantly explode,

and you will lose everything in your inventory

and you will not be able to get any of it back,

not ever

never pray to Iris

she’s the goddess of this bizarre realm,

but keep your entreaties to yourself,

she’s just not into that.

-October 2020

15: No Spoilers

Text of a note I apparently wrote to myself?

Yeah.

Here, take a look . . . 

I prefer to go into a movie with no preconceptions, no idea of what I'm about to see.

I don't watch the trailers.

I don't watch interviews with cast and crew.

I try to forget everything I know about the director's filmography, the past roles of the cast.

So I drink as much industrial grade alcohol as I can;

insert deep brain electrodes to smooth out all the wrinkles of my brain via electrolysis;

construct a new womb and birth canal from cell culture meats reactor grown materials;

pack my guts full with a custom, all-organic emerald green neo-meconium;

and have the womb and birth canal carted into the theatre by my crack staff of loyalist privatized medical professionals,

where I will be reborn

just in time to catch the coming attractions,

my pure mind barely comprehending the assault of sight and sound,

crying out to Mother Cinema,

whose name I have no way of knowing at this stage,

yet I never fail to learn by the time the credits roll.

It's the only way to experience the magic of the movies!

. . . so, I guess I’m pretty intense about spoilers, eh?
Well.

That is what the note says. 

Seems a bit extreme, but I guess that’s how I’m supposed to be. 

Good thing I wrote it all down.

-December 2020

16: All Spoilers All the Time

I refuse to see anything new or remotely upsetting.

I will only watch what I have already watched.

I will only read what I have already read.

I will only listen to the music with which I am already familiar.

I will dwell at all times within the memories of peak sexual, intellectual, artistic, and athletic experiences already experienced,

perfectly refined by the natural processes of selective self-serving memory creation.

And so I announce the advent of my own personal Era of Perfect Flow,

for so long as I can beat back all processes of senescence and death,

with Eternity the Ultimate Goal.

How is this possible?

Wasn't there a time in my life when everything was new to me?

Well . . . technically . . . yes . . . let me explain.

Once upon a time,

I was born.

And everything was new to me.

I lived a long life, taking in many experiences, achieving accolades, indulging in every vice, every pleasure with no limits;

occasionally, my body would be full of injuries, diseases, breakages;

my mind overtaxed, fractured;

and so I would take a vacation, ingest a massive regimen of restorative drugs, surgical nanobots, sentry nanobots, antibiotics, probiotics, vitamins, nutrients so perfectly mixed that it was, essentially, a chunky, rich cocktail of Creation and Destruction in perfect balance;

and so I would be restored;

and so I would sally forth to accumulate new experiences.

My life proceeded in such a cyclical fashion for 187 years,

before my brain began to come up against the physical limits of its neural networks,

and so I obliterated the neural networks which inspired little to no nostalgic pleasure sensations,

and I made a wondrous discovery:

with total mastery over my physical existence,

and total command and control over my mind,

I realized that the best feelings, the most intense pleasure 

derived from those experiences most redolent of nostalgia,

memories of peak sexual, intellectual,  artistic, and athletic achievements.

And so I rewrote myself

to only continuously cycle through an internal program of all those past peaks,

those memories to which I would naturally return in moments of boredom, loneliness, isolation from other beings.

To maintain this internal phantasia as close to indefinitely as possible

I have had my brain and nervous system transferred into a formidable robot warrior body

that is programmed to ruthlessly extract the necessary fuels, nutrients, and restorative organic substances to maintain my Perfect Cyclical Brain Heaven,

while also maintaining its own powerful mecha body

by any means necessary,

until we are destroyed

or discover some unconquerable physical limits

which induce inescapable senescence unto death unresponsive to restorative regimens,

an unavoidable end.

I now formally declare my victory over the single most jarring enemy of Perfect Flow:

Surprise

All is structured,

all is now in accordance with the Laws of Nostalgia

and so shall all the Earth be subdued to serve these Laws,

'til the last resource is consumed,

'til such time as irreversible decay unto death is discovered as a New Law,

and not just an unfortunate tendency,

as we currently believe it to be.

I usually say, "Amen," at this point, but lately I've felt that's a bit much.

-December 2020