. . . I'm not much for praying.
But recently I started praying to Fred Rogers and Lain Iwakura to rain down flavorful herbs and spices to put some taste on all this frying meat.
You know.
'Cause of the global warming.
. . .
I'm a hit at the open mic.
now look
if you play Faxanadu
you will find
that it contains neither a fax machine
nor any trace of a ‘can-do’ attitude
despite the title
which clearly promises some combination of these two elements
I would have even settled
for the two promised elements presented all on their own,
serially,
with no hint of combination or collaboration between the two promised elements
nothing doing
you really gotta wonder
‘bout the people
who worked so hard
coming up with such a clever title
that clearly promises a fax machine and a ‘can-do’ attitude
most likely in some form of combination
the very title
Faxanadu
is so clearly a combination of the two elements under discussion
and we have a game that does not live up to the title
what we get is a cryptic fantasy medievalist wander-maze full of hostility and occulted paths forward,
just try to advance in a speedy fashion,
don’t even bother calling ahead because you can’t,
everything’s in-person,
no communications network,
items and information must be sought out, obtained, and delivered laboriously,
and one can argue that “Hey, there’s your can-do attitude!”
but such an outlook is surely ground down to nothing by the damned wandering tedium,
I disdain every last bit of this,
and I can only wonder
at the depths of disillusionment
those who created the title
must feel
for surely
if it had been up to them
the game would’ve lived up to its title
but no
not a bit
and so we continue to live in a world of shit
-July 2021
I’m after the Red Falcon, right?
Not much context, no cut scenes to glaze me with that sweet, sweet exposition head-to-toe.
Am I even a soldier?
I kinda think-just based on the kinda jaunty way I run-that I must’ve been a-what do you call it? One of those guys who goes running across the football field naked-
-a streaker!
Yeah.
‘Cause the guy, the little guy on the screen-
-the player character?
-like, the little guy . . . he’s just got that obvious confidence, you know?
-lotta people disdain a streaker, but, and this has been born out in various research studies, but your average streaker . . . they actually have above average confidence,
which is interesting.
Anyways.
That’s just me gettin’ a read on the basic body language, tho’, you don’t have to be too impressed with that.
And we have
uh
We just have machines merged with monsters
You got, like, an alien monster sorta built into the military hardsite.
Or maybe-I dunno-maybe the Red Falcon’s critters
maybe they just
like
grow all of their weapons and infrastructure and supply lines right outta their bodies.
Like imagine if you had animals
like cows or horses or chickens or what have you
and you could get ‘em to birth, um, automated gun emplacements and, um, rockets,
you would maybe need a rhinoceros or an elephant to birth a tank or an armored personnel carrier-for the really big things you’d need big animals-
-but we have these, uh, these looming-huge extraterrestrial beasties
-they just, I guess, up and stole all of H.R. Giger’s shit, this, uh, this whole biomechanical grisly abomination routine
-fuck, dude, you can flog any damn thing into a cliche, can’t you?
Yeah . . .
But, um . . .
-oh, so . . . I guess when we get deeper into it
I guess these could be ultratech facilities for vatgrown organic entities, they just grow their personnel, then, okay, that’s probably what I would do
-I think, uh, I think that’s a steal, as well,
wasn’t that in Neuromancer? With the vat-grown ninja?
-and Aliens with the huge queen alien squeezing out her whole operation, which is a pretty awesome path for evolution to take, I think,
I wish,
Uh,
I wish cosmic evolution
would shape my ass
so that I could just secrete or birth or shit or whatever
an entire occupation military force
-for that . . . I would definitely trade the carefree life of a streaker.
Depend upon it, dude!
I’d take over the whole operation.
But, okay . . . this is the really weird part.
You get your power-ups for your gun from those capsules that sort of fly through the air-
-so . . . you just . . . why would Red Falcon do that? Just allow such open access to the arsenal like that?
-’cause the weapons capsules are clearly, uh, they’re just very clearly branded with that Red Falcon logo-maybe I’m not supposed to have access to those-but you just shoot ‘em and they drop whatever kinda weapons-
-seems like a serious security lapse-
-but, maybe, I dunno.
Maybe ex-streaker dude is, uh, is a disgruntled member of the Red Falcon army, and so this whole game is about a former cog in the machine deciding to strip some fuckin’ gears, y’know?
-or, it could be the case . . . that just the way the Red Falcon is running this whole place is just . . . I don’t even know . . . just super irresponsible-just, like, making lethal military grade weapons not just available, okay, but the guy-this Red Falcon guy-he’s literally sending his killing implements flying out and among the population-his own people-and saying, “Here you go, have fun!” Which sorta sounds like a-like the NRA’s Ultimate Dick-Beating fantasy-is that what’s going on with Red Falcon? I dunno. Could just be that he’s a-uh-that he’s just a deeply troubled person with too many death-toys, y’know? I dunno . . .
. . . wait-a-minute.
Maybe
What this is
Is the Red Falcon
Has a death wish
He’s sending out the hardware
In the hopes that someone will load up on the toys
And bring down the house
‘Cause Red Falcon can’t bring himself to do himself
There’s still some residual survival instinct
And so that’s where the ex-streaker enters the death picture
‘Cause this whole system is just crazy-fucked
Anybody who would run their world like this
Must be on a death-trip-to-the-max
Maybe
Maybe we could’ve worked things out with Red Falcon
Maybe it didn’t have to be this way
Just a little bit of arms control
Could’ve gone a long way
Y’know?
Well.
I feel kinda bad for Red Falcon, now.
The Guy was just trying to make sense of his shit.
All he had to go on was power, right?
The pursuit of power.
Who doesn’t want some power?
Red Falcon just took it over the top.
I pity this guy.
Clearly . . . he wanted power, and he thought it probably would make him look cool if he copped all his style and his, uh, all his accessorizations from that freaky H.R. Giger shit and Soldier of Fortune magazine and, uh, and the scary matte black tactical end of the cyberpunk shit and, you know, I get it-you gotta live your inner vision. But this is just, uh, this is just incredibly dysfunctional.
And so goddamn rigid, too.
You play this game enough times, and all of the Red Falcon’s shit-his whole operation-it just has these repetitious patterns to it-everything has a schedule. Red Falcon is clearly an authoritarian efficiency and routinization nut. The dude has no give in his, uh, his whole existence. But there’s a fatal flaw in that-’cause once you know the patterns, the routines, the rigid over-and-over-and-over-againness of it all-
-ah, man, I just-
-if only someone could’ve talked to Red Falcon-
-but would he have listened?
Guys like Red Falcon . . . they don’t listen to anybody.
They listen to someone . . . they think they’re being weak.
But we all need a little, uh, a little friendly advice along the way.
Fuck, dude.
The Red Falcon’s . . . uh . . . it’s like he had an auto-destruct fate inside him.
It’s a downer to come up against that one.
But when the war is done . . . I guess my onscreen dude can go back to being a streaker. Strips off his clothes and runs jauntily into the horizon.
John Wayne never did that. If John Wayne had tried to strip off at the end of The Searchers? Where he’s all forlorn and cast out of the space of domesticity and he’s babying his arm-the guy, like, he would’ve been forty-five minutes just trying to get out of that fuckin’ girdle he wore to control his huge-ass gut. So no stripping off for that guy.
But we can do it.
We’re quick and leanly pixeled and done with all the bullshit.
It’s time to run naked and free into horizons of glory.
And as we run, we shake off the ashes of auto-destruct Red Falcon.
Maybe end up as the player character of some obscure adults only game where no one’ll be freaked out by our streaker routine.
Maintain that confidence.
We’ll find home.
Or home’ll find us.
-July 2021
. . . I think I'm being sneaky
then a security asset looms pale before me
my head implodes
I have to start over
the wages of slickness, I suppose
the world demands a certain narrow path of traversal, a certain set of tasks, all in a certain order
to circumvent,
to sequence break,
all that gets you
is a certain and familiar doom
but you can get used to the imploded head routine
it gets into this thing where it's a live joke you can also record and share
like ejecting from your cockpit over and over again in Wing Commander 'til they bust your ass outta the Space Force
failure's the only option
if you would find the walls of this or that world
'cause the walls'll find you in any event
hardwired fuck-up destiny and all that entails
ah, to be so sure and so doomed
docile and omnipotent, or omni-impotent as a noted restroom stall philosopher long wrote down
it's a crisis in the news I hear . . .
looms pale before me . . .
. . . The Eroticism of the Armadillo.
Go ahead.
Look it up.
Or better yet: try to get a book deal off of this title.
Let me know how it works out for you.
I'll wait.
. . . since I last ate at an Olive Garden.
And my bowel movements have been way more chill and insightful-philosophical, even-during this time.
In another ten, I anticipate taking a shit that will resolve the current crisis of quantum physics.
Truly, we can all now confidently look forward to a future of solutions and glories!
. . . wherein I was attending a community theater production of A Few Good Men starring Corky St. Clair as Colonel Jessup.
It was intense.
In the end
everyone has to become an Ultima dispenser
'cause that final multistage boss battle . . . how many times you want to fuck with that?
best just to nuke 'em
loose that expanding cerulean obliteration sphere, and be done with your day
mm-hmm
and that's why magic has to disappear from the world
that goddamn arms race logic
just turns everyone into a living weapon of mass destruction
yeah
it's a tough scene
a shame
it really is
but that's the price of peace, I guess
-May-June 2021
. . . and I feel fine.
The actual shot?
Nothing to it.
I sat in a chair.
I rolled up my sleeve.
A nurse did the hard part.
For both jabs, I didn't even feel the needle go in.
Made me paranoid the first time that my nurse was some kind of stealth anti-vaxxer.
The true enemy, as always, is Your Fellow Human.
But not that time.
Next day, I felt a bit of soreness in the arm.
No other symptoms.
Same deal the second time.
No true enemies, a welcome change of pace.
Yeah . . . not much of a story here.
You may recall being told that conflict is the heart of any good story.
Soooo . . . I guess this would be . . . a bad story with a good ending?
I'll take it.
Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara
Written by Kobo Abe
Produced by Tadashi Ono
Cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa
Edited by Fusako Morimichi
Sound by Kenji Mori and Junosuke Okuyama
Titles designed by Kiyoshi Awazu
Starring
Kunie Tanaka as the Man in White
Hisashi Igawa as the miner
Kazuo Miyahara as the son
Sumie Sasaki as the candy seller
Kanichi Omiya as the second miner
Shigeru Matsuo as the farmer
Hisashi Igawa as union miner Otsuka
Sen Yano as union miner Toyama
Kei Sato as the reporter
Kikuo Kaneuchi as the photographer
Hideo Kanze as cop
…
"Why did you kill me?!"
…
Review by William D. Tucker.
A pair of subsistence miners wander hills and mountains, seeking work, a little boy in tow, while one daydreams about getting a secure union job, and the other fantasizes about being reborn as a demon in hell.
Okay, the child is also a subsistence miner. The guy who daydreams of unionization seems to be his father, though the details of this are left vague. I found myself interpreting this desperate trio as an improvised family unit-wanderers in the wilderness deciding not to be totally alone, at least for the moment. They come from nowhere. They might be fugitives from justice-except I'm not sure 'justice' exists in the world of this movie. So, like, they're fugitives from injustice, I suppose. Perhaps they exist because a writer wrote a screenplay and a director supervised a casting call and jobbing actors showed up to do their thing.
The trio con an elderly farmer into mining his property for non-existent ore-but it could also be the case that the old man simply took pity upon the obviously malnourished three and set them upon an absurd task so they can maintain a tragic working man's pride. The wages of this job are balls of sticky white rice and water.
A sinister dapper man dressed all in white surveils the union-dreamer at a distance with a telephoto lens. This MIW-Man-in-White-rides a motorscooter and eventually reveals himself to be an assassin working for the mining company or an allegorical embodiment of murderous capitalism or a mad psychopath or a stand-in for some authorial figure-God? Fate? A novelist? A film director?-or all of the above. Or none of the above. Maybe he's just a guy likes to fuck with people. Maybe he's a MIB-Man-in-Black-in disguise as a MIW. Like one of those dudes who intimidates UFO witnesses and tries to keep a lid on Mothman and the Goatsucker. Maybe this creep realized he could make a better living as an enforcer for capitalism instead of fooling around with the high strangeness tinfoil tabloid crap. Makes sense. That's probably what I would do in his situation.
The trio find their way to a recruiting station for the big mining company in the region, and the demon-dreamer gets arrested for some unspecified crime and dragged out of the film. The union-dreamer is given directions to a worksite after he is shown a photo of himself.
"Follow this map to your new boss."
Our union-dreamer does as he's told and ends up murdered by the MIW en route to a bogus worksite that turns out to be nothing but an abandoned town. But in this cruel world, death is not the end. Nor is there an Afterworld-no Heaven, no Hell. No Jesus, or Buddha, or Satan, or God, or L. Ron Hubbard waiting to embrace you. You’re just a ghost who can't communicate with the living, who can only spectate the ensuing desultory police investigation of your own corpse, and holler impotently for justice and answers and reasons why that do not exist in this reality.
Believe it or not . . . it actually gets worse for our ghost.
Because as he wanders the land, invisibly trailing cops and journalists as they investigate his brutal murder, he discovers that he has a double. This double is a miner who is also a union leader. The assassin was seemingly targeting this other more consequential guy, and mistakenly killed the subsistence miner. Our ghost realizes that his death was not only pointless . . . but that this other guy who looks exactly like him has been living his dream. What a mindfuck, right?
Meanwhile, our MIW bribes a potential murder witness into silence . . .only to later murder her on a whim. This witness is a candy seller scraping by in the abandoned town. She is also the person to call the police and report our subsistence miner's murder. And, before she is strangled to death by the weirdly indecisive MIW, she is raped by the uniformed cop who responds to her call. The candy seller also ends up as a pissed-off ghost.
I suppose the one good thing is that the ghosts can see each other and speak to one another. The dead can commiserate . . . but only with the dead.
And it gets worse for those among the living. The actions of the MIW end up causing paranoid conflict among the unionized miners who are already pressured by the company to fight among themselves for more productive veins of ore.
It doesn't end well.
But it all looks and sounds amazing.
Authentically harsh outdoor locations evoke industrialized man-made hells-on-earth shot in pristine deep focus black and white.
Gruelling summer weather and its effects upon human bodies are captured for-fucking-real on film. No pampered Hollywood pretty people luxuriating inside air conditioned green boxes on this one.
No stunt team, either. When a couple of pissed-off dudes fight to the death in the mud and slurry of a tapped-out former mining site, it's as down and dirty as you can get short of a snuff picture.
The discordant soundtrack hammers home the theme of a world where injustice for the living means restless ghosts and cruel children who pull apart frogs for fun.
That's right: the little boy survives, but who knows what kind of killer he may grow up to be after all the trauma, starvation, isolation, and moral insanity to which he has been exposed.
Hey: maybe that’s how you get a headstart on the MIW career track.
Pitfall is an immaculately bleak hellscape for the whole family!
. . . ROLL ONE DIE.
FREELY INTERPRET THE RESULT TO MAXIMIZE YOUR JOY HOWEVER YOU PLEASE.
AND IF YOU DON'T HAVE A DIE . . . JUST PRETEND.
. . . I actually really admire the Disney Vault concept.
So much so that I make a point of storing all of my most classic boogers and poops inside a Tucker Vault.
So Act Now!
Tasty-Good!
Get Yours!
So Fragrant!
Before They're Gone 4-Ever!
. . . I'm like, "Who cares?"
I didn't want that shit in the first, middle, or last place.
And then I break whatever furniture I can get my hands on, punch out the nearest tough dudes, and smash the windows of various automobiles and storefronts.
But then I spend the entire weekend crying myself to sleep.
Disney knows how to break your heart.