ANCILLARY PRODUCTS #13:

 

Brindle Couture is a new line of fashion forward apparel that replicates that oh-so-cuddly "canine tiger stripe" look that Man's Best Friend so effortlessly rocks.

Dresses. Blouses. Skirts. Jackets. Blazers. Hoodies. Shorts. Slacks. Jeans. Jorts. Culottes. Vests. Jerseys. Socks. Stockings. Tights. Leggings. Athleisure Wear. Intimates. Socks. Hats-

-anything you can imagine is now available in Brindle Couture Mode!

Additionally, we guarantee that if you wear Brindle Couture while hanging out with other people who really like dogs you are sure to get all the pets and scratchies and liver treats you could ever want! Not to mention premium walks and curbside scoop service for that big fat shit you've been intestinally shaping out of all those treats! Not to mention, your irresistibly cuddly vibes are sure to get you turbo laid all weekend!

Brindle Couture. For the true dog lovers.

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #66:

PROSLAVERY DESANTIS CRITICIZES WHITE SUPREMACIST TRUMP FOR SKIPPING GOP DEBATE.

YOU (DON'T) KNOW #3:

When I was a child I feared alien abduction.

As a teen, I thought alien abduction was so fuckin' stupid, and I wanted nothing more than to key up their flying saucers, and slap cold cuts all over the hull overnight to fuck up the saucers' paint job, dude!

As a college student, I realized there was no such thing as an alien abduction, and so I sought to narcotize my nihilism with online gaming, drugs, booze, social media, and marathon sessions of group fucking.

As a grad student, I wrote my postmodern thesis: Anal Probe Semiotics in a Post-9/11 Universe: On the Limits of Saucer Shaped Discourses.

My PhD thesis was titled Probing the Field: Extraterrestrial Analities from Roswell to Tic-Tac.

After getting my PhD I took a position at the respected Shindig Institute think tank. I headed up the Office of Probity, in which, as part of a larger fact finding initiative, I took on the role of an alien and carried out numerous abductions. Indeed, I had become the very thing I once feared!

And now, in my disillusioned middle age, I know the truth: the one I most wanted to abduct . . . was my own self . . .

Elaborate sighs and swooning unto death.

MANDATORY RULE #3:

For at least a year, whenever you're talking to people, replace the word 'angry' with 'sangria.' You will most likely find that most people do not seem to notice the substitution, or, if they do notice, they assume you're just tripping over your words. If someone, somehow, figures you out, and confronts you, do not panic. Simply admit nothing, deny everything, and clearly pronounce the word 'angry' over and over again as a demonstration that you have been saying the correct word correctly all this time. 

The whole point of this rule is to allow you to constantly deceive people in a benign low risk fashion that incrementally builds your confidence for more ambitious future endeavors: founding a cult of personality, inciting World War III, stealing the Statue of Liberty, divine apotheosis, etc. 

Sure, it may feel like nickel and dime shit while you're going through it, but rest in assurance. 

No steps are wasted on this journey of conquest. 

All is Well. 

All is Grind.

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #65:

 

U.S. GERONTOCRACY OFFERS WEALTH OF INSIGHTS INTO LIFESTYLES OF THE PROTEROZOIC EON.

THEME MUSIC FOR EVERYTHING #4:

Theme of Highway Hypnosis Metamorphosis: Dr. Chaos Main Title Theme by Hironari Tadokoro (Dr. Chaos NES OST)

Put this on when you find yourself driving deep into the night.

You may find yourself changing . . . for better, for worse, hard to say. You start to forget the things that trouble you. Your attachments detach. The people that kept you down lose their faces, you forget their names, your cares and your calculus realign into fresher shapes and calibrations and directionalities. I tend to think it's for the better.

In the morning, you're in a new place, with a new outlook, you might even have the power to change the traffic laws with but a thought. Make those red lights green forever.

. . . for some reason I imagine an alternate version of Psycho where Janet Leigh, for whatever reason, drives past the Bates Motel, just keeps motoring on 'til she arrives in San Francisco where she meets Jimmy Stewart who's all fucked up about a lady he thought was dead but now she's alive again or he thinks she's alive, and in any case maybe they can help each other out . . .

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #15: THE EXPENDABLES 4 (2023)

 

Sadly, steroids and green screen do not a watchable movie make.

Two words . . .

 . . . PROPHETIC SHART . . .

Prophetic shart

audible appalling

but impressive

to authors

of hagiographic

shart chronicles

of course

even if

reviews bad

popular audience

also rejects

but culpable

them selves

for spread

of bastardized

beer drinker

shart cultures

through out

the nation

elite hostility

ramping up

obviously against

pop shartistry

Implacable Stride

Outta Heart

Of Massive

Shart Explosion

Ornate Advertorials

Seize Mind

of nation

Pop Shart

Cultural Dominance

elite sharts

obsolescence now

elite sharts

Naturally Returned

During Cyclical

Economic Downturn

Conservative Nostalgias

Classing Up

The Sharts

All Predicted

By The

Prophetic Shart

Of Yore

Kinda Neat

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BURNING QUESTIONS IN A UNIVERSE OF MYSTERY #62:

 

So, you know . . . these boxes? 

With the pasta in 'em?

They're not exactly Fort Knox, are they?

I ask, even though I already know the answer.

So . . . on one occasion I opened a box of rotini-like the colorful rotini, of course-and when I was grabbing handfuls of rotini to drop in the boiling water, I noticed a dead cockroach in among the other rotinis. 

Well . . . I hate food waste.

Boiling the pasta . . . that oughta sanitize the bug germs, if any there be, right?

And, like, bugs themselves are a known source of protein-I have that correct, right?

Sooooo . . . I grab the cockroach corpse, crush it up, pull it apart, sprinkle it into the boiling water-like a seasoning, isn't it?

I think so.

Like I said, I hate food waste.

Cockroaches aren't magically separate from the food chain, are they? 

I could be a bird or a cat for all that dead roach knows.

Plus, I got parmesan and olive oil at the ready. 

You might even forget about the dead bug by the time you're working that colander, couldn't you?

Sure.

It could be exactly like that, couldn't it?

https://patreon.com/WilliamDTucker

MOVIE REVIEW: THE CITY (1939)

 

Directed and Photographed by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke

Written by Lewis Mumford and Pare Lorentz

Music by Aaron Copland

Narrated by Morris Carnovsky

. . .

"It's here. The new city. Ready to serve a better age. You and your children . . . the choice is yours."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

The City is a film which celebrates a new kind of city that no one who has spent any amount of time in a real life city would recognize as an actual city. This new type of city is empty, spacy, and antiseptic, with no skyscrapers, no street food vendors, no graffitti, no racial diversity, no loud music, no people talking to themselves, no poverty, no passion, no struggle, no culture,  no dreams beyond skin crawly fantasies of a perfectly white-washed orderliness. My understanding is that in its time The City was intended as an earnest vision of how to solve the economic inequalities of a society devastated by the Great Depression, and afflicted by unregulated industrial pollution and crowded slums full of impoverished workers. In 2023, The City comes across as an unconvincing crank's rant against cosmopolitanism gussied up with phony pseudoscientific prattle about clean, orderly living giving birth to clean, orderly hearts and minds. The corn is strong with this one. Get those RiffTrax guys to roast it, that could be something.

The City begins in an Edenic self-sufficient village of water wheels and metal workers, where everybody knows everybody else, and, one assumes, where everybody is in-breeding like crazy. Humans and their technologies are in perfect accord. But alas, the Fall From Grace is nigh! Behold the Satanic Mills of Industry and their attendant slums! The skyscrapers full of greedy bankers and day traders!  The Sunday Drive of bumper locked traffic climaxing with an over the cliff car crash worthy of Toonces the Driving Cat! The noise and press of vast street crossing crowds supervised by uniformed police and regulated by flashing lights! The mechanized speed of city folk as they stuff their faces from the automated lunch counters! The horror! The horror . . . gives way to the Grand Solution: the Paradise Regained of Garden Cities . . . which the strident narration insists are not homogenized suburban enclaves even though they definitely look like shitty suburbs. The Heaven, the Heaven . . . 

The narration is done in a style of quasi-poetic scientism which brooks no dissent. It reminded me, strangely, of Morpheus's monologues to Neo in The Matrix . . . especially if you imagine an alternate version wherein Morpheus is a deluded charismatic cult leader as opposed to a liberator. Think about it: the virtual cityscape in The Matrix has many of the negative qualities described by The City: the mechanistic regulation of human activity, the overbearing police presence, the rule by an insular power elite. The City's narration speaks of people having to become like frantically hustling intelligent machines in order to stay in the proverbial rat race. This idea of dehumanization is common to both The City and The Matrix. Both movies present the idea of escaping an illusory metropolis as leading to a larger freedom-a liberation from total mechanization. 

Sure, The City makes some valid points. Cities, as we know them, are divided along fault lines of social inequality: racism, white supremacy, economic inequality, gender inequality-The City gestures towards this with its criticism of capitalist greed, authoritarian cops, and corporatism. But The City ignores the cultural richness of cosmopolitan existence, how proximity to others offers opportunities for artistic innovation as well as connection and community. The City evokes the alienation and anonymity of city life, which is a valid observation. Many who live in cities do feel isolated among the crowds. The fast pace of city life can be alienating, even depersonalizing. But The City's solution of a flattened, white-washed suburb is not even remotely convincing. It must surely have been ruthlessly heckled even during its premiere at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

The City . . . doesn't get cities.

COMICS REVIEW: HEAD GAMES: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL (2017)

 

by Craig McDonald and Kevin Singles with Les McClaine

Adapted from a novel by Craig McDonald.

Published by First Second in 2017.

. . .

"It's a bitch to outlive your world."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

So . . . you have books. Novels. Fiction. They get written. They get published. Some get made into movies: American Psycho, Jurassic Park, The Hunger Games, Dr. No, The Lord of the Rings, Fifty Shades of Grey, Perdita Durango, Wild at Heart, Black Rain, Les Miserables, Dracula, The Color Purple, Frankenstein . . .

Non-fiction books also get made into movies: All the President's Men, Lincoln, Oppenheimer, 12 Years A Slave, Heaven and Earth, The Big Short, Moneyball, Charlie Wilson's War, Fast Food Nation, Thirteen Days, Born on the Fourth of July . . .

Books can also be adapted into comic books (a.k.a. graphic novels). Plenty of literary classics have been turned into comics and/or manga: various plays by Shakespeare, various stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Kafka's The Trial, 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, Octavia E. Butler's Kindred, The War of the Worlds, The Martian Chronicles, The Handmaid's Tale, No Longer Human, The Prophet, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Tale of Genji, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Don Quixote, Dracula, City of Glass, Perdita Durango, Fahrenheit 451, those Richard Stark books, Frankenstein . . . 

Usually, as far as my experience goes, these adaptations don't typically involve the original authors. If the work being adapted is quite old, it's usually because the original author is long dead. Living authors are usually busy writing their next book, so it isn't practical to take the time to write a whole new script for a movie or a comic book iteration of the prose fiction original. It also seems to be a common sentiment that writing prose is usually a separate skillset from screenwriting or comics scripting therefore you need people specialized to the task, though this is far from a settled matter. I sometimes think that comic book adaptations of novels are a bit risk averse due to a fear of displeasing the source material's fanbase. I mean if you read a comic book version of 1984 that ended with Ewoks liberating Winston and blowing up Big Brother you'd probably take to the streets in protest. So these "graphic novel" takes on literature tend to closely replicate the prose originals for better and for worse. 

But I found a comic book adaptation of a novel written by the original author in one of those dollar discount stores back in 2019. Those places sometimes have interesting selections of books, usually remaindered copies of popular bestsellers, but for awhile it felt like you could locate super cheap copies of intriguing nonfiction stuff, like critiques of U.S. militarism, history, memoirs-hardback copies of books that are usually futilely priced around $30 brand new, but look a whole lot sexier for $1 (now it would be $1.25). 

And, yes, the occasional comic book. 

Including Head Games, a "graphic novel" adaptation of a book adapted by the original writer in collaboration with a couple of artists. 

But, uh, I didn't buy Head Games because it was adapted by the original author. I bought it because it was a cheap comic book, and I can't resist a cheap comic. Especially when it's 160 pages for $1 plus applicable sales tax-whoa baby! At a price that low, I'm guaranteed to enjoy it even if it sucks. I had no idea what it was about. I did not recognize the names on the cover. I wasn't even sure if I liked the front and back cover art. I assumed it was some kind of a horror tale due to the skull on the front cover. The back cover depicted a trio of what I took to be vampire hunters: a lady with a cross around her neck and two dudes with guns. Nothing amazing, but sometimes comics don't have to be amazing so long as they tell an engaging story. I don't remember, but I'm sure I peeked inside the actual book . . . but maybe I didn't. More and more I suspect this was a pure impulse buy. 

So, I bought Head Games for a buck+applicable sales tax back in 2019 . . .and I think I was gonna read it . . . but time passed, and it was an impulse buy, and I had other things to read . . . and then at some point during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic I had it in a stack of comics I intended to read in lieu of raising hell out on the town: a collection of the Doug Moench/Herb Trimpe Godzilla comics, Miller and Mazzuchelli's Born Again, a black and white collection of Jack Kirby's New Gods, Fun Home, one of those Lynd Ward woodcut novels, and a couple of volumes of Love and Rockets-and Head Games was basically top of the stack. But it kept getting demoted. Of course I re-read the Moench/Trimpe Godzilla collection first. That's just who and what I am. And then the Kirby book. Aaaaand . . . my memory's a little fuzzy as to what came next. I think I got caught up playing Shin Megami Tensei IV, but, well, a lot of the pandemic felt like one deluxe sized day. And I'm not sure it's actually over. Politically, sure, we in the USofA collectively gave up, like, I dunno . . . Day One? Day Two? What's the COVID-19 body count up to now . . . ? Say, why am I giving a fuck? Presidents, Governors, and regular folk all stopped caring, right? Sure. 

But back to Head Games . . . basically I read, like, all of the other comics I had accumulated . . . and then I still wasn't ready to take a chance on it. I still had some Kirby shit I wanted to read and re-read. The library hooked me up with three fat volumes of black and white reprints of 1960s Avengers. Those Marvel movies put me to sleep, but I get super activated by the primal comics. I was writing some silly shit about video games, so I was messing around with video games. There was always something else. Usually something comfortable, something familiar, and I'm a big re-reader, so . . . Head Games just didn't scan for me. I hate to be such a brand loyal consumerist slob, but I was totally freezing out the new guys, so to speak.

And then, a couple of weeks ago . . . I noticed a book that was unfamiliar to me. Head Games. I didn't remember buying it, not at first. Was it something gifted to me? Did I steal it? Did someone leave it here by mistake? I picked it up, opened it, started reading it . . . and I was like, Oh, I bought this back before the Deluxe Day of Pandemic . . . as I read I realized it was an adaptation of the first book in a series of historical hard-boiled crime thrillers about a tough guy who writes tough guy stories who gets threaded into the 20th Century histories of Mexico and the United States. So, you have a fictional lead character rubbing shoulders with Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway, Prescott Bush, Pancho Villa-it's kinda like Forrest Gump by way of James Ellroy. 

The art style is in-the-moment with occasional flashbacks, anchored to real world locations, lots of shootouts and guilt-ridden interludes of self-reflection all in black, white, and piss gold. It's gold because it's about the pulp protagonist facing the end of his personal Golden Age . . . and it's piss because he's a drunk in a world of liars and killers and thieves. The action centers around various unsavory characters fighting to obtain the skull of Pancho Villa, including gangs of cannon fodder frat boys dispatched from the sinister Skull and Bones Society based out of Yale University. Head Games isn't quite a conspiracy theory book, but it does take a cynically hilarious view of the pampered and the privileged. 

In short, I put off reading the impulsively purchased Head Games throughout most of that Deluxe Day of Pandemic because it was an unknown quantity . . . and then I rediscovered it amongst my shit, and read it on an impulsive whim in a single sitting. And it was great. 

Head Games has an incredibly effective structure. I don't want to give too much away beyond that, but it does a very good job of putting across the dilemma of its main character who is a 57 year old two-fisted pulp hero whose body is still barely up for a fight but is also just starting to fail him as his alcoholism and long-untreated diabetes begin to degrade his eyesight and his mobility. Truly, he's a hero of both piss and gold. And it is my opinion that Head Game's clever story structure is the result of the direct involvement of the original writer, a newcomer to the field of comics writing who was just protective enough of his book that he was able to nudge the project into unpredictable territory, but not so stubborn as to be closed off to the uniquely expressive qualities of comics. If I have a criticism, I do think the very last page is a bit of a letdown, most likely due to it being a blatant setup for a sequel, but that's a problem with many forms of serialized storytelling. Endings are tough.

Head Games . . . I had to play a game with my own head to finally read it. 

What a world!

COMICS REVIEW: AN ENTITY OBSERVES ALL THINGS (2015)

by Box Brown

Published by Retrofit/Big Planet Comics in 2015.

. . .

"I'VE GOT TO UPDATE MY PIZZA BLOG!!"

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Here, in An Entity Observes All Things, we have a collection of nine satirical short science fiction stories told through the medium of comics in which advanced technologies both answer and create deep seated human desires for power, knowledge, control, and social acclaim. There's also a theme of technology giving people what they want-or what they think they want, or what they've been manipulated to want by social media, big data, corporate marketing campaigns, and so on-even as the supposed fulfillment leaves people in a kind of perpetual stationary jog cycle. 

Fantastical behemoth machines stalk the universe, mind-machine interfaces facilitate full immersion VR gaming as well as direct outside access to private memories, warp speed space flight's enabled, and humans are still hung up on the same old issues: unresolved conflicts with their dead parents; lust for glory; boredom in the face of numbingly repetitious and complex technical tasks; unsustainable resource expenditures; guilt-ridden professional aspirations; the desire to be worshiped as a god-in-the-flesh; the pursuit of immortality; getting stressed out about traveling long distances; the desire for a popular podgrift; the desire for social media brand ubiquity; love of money-same shit, different century, but now with toyetic giant robots. 

The characters are cartoonishly direct in expressing their desires, even within the more candid internal monologue styles of a couple of the stories. It was as if the confessional direct address mode of vloggers had been fully normalized to the point where it's how people communicate with themselves inside their own minds. You're not just marketing yourself to the external audience . . . you're now marketing yourself to yourself. Digitized capitalism now squats within hearts and minds, both rent free and at the dearest price. 

The art style is flat, clean, and whimsically infographic. Each story uses white and two or three other colors. The look is perhaps influenced by NES games; cutesy indie games for PC; nefariously twee trend forecast presentations given inside hip open plan offices; and those cutaway schematics of the Fantastic Four's Baxter Building and Avengers HQ in ye olde tyme Marvel Comics. I was instantly suspicious that I was being sold attractively packaged cereal by a YouTuber, and I think that's part of the intended effect. 

And I want to emphasize that if they made toys and playsets out of the mechs and floating cities and spacecraft featured . . . I would probably want to buy 'em all. That's what's so clever about An Entity Observes All Things: it induces consumer desire even as it unmasks it. Author/artist Box Brown could well be a hipper "Indie" George Lucas in the making, with an army of plastic future soldiers positioned for an epic product marketing blitzkrieg. Time will tell.