Two psychiatrists were walking down a hall.
One turned to the other and said, “Hello.”
The other one thought, “I wonder what he meant by that.”
Tag: hell
January 31, 2012
January 21, 2012
The Annotated Ann Coulter: Volume I
Concerned citizens have debated the Ann Coulter question for many years now. Does Coulter sincerely believe in the often ridiculous positions she champions in print, on Fox news, and during her campus lecture tours? Or, as many have suggested, is Coulter an ongoing “performance” project of some kind, a hyperbolic parody of conservative anger and illogic dreamed up by a conceptualist collective somewhere in the Village? Rachel Maddow has recently attempted to make this same “art school” argument about GOP pizza magnate and freelance genital inspector Herman Cain, but in truth, it is Coulter who first compelled left-leaning cultural elites to contend with the enigmatic posturing of feckless fascism. So, for example, when Coulter claimed after the meltdown of the nuclear reactors in Fukushima that there now exists “burgeoning evidence that excess radiation operates as a sort of cancer vaccine,” baffled bystanders could only wonder at her motivation. Regardless of one’s position on nuclear energy, no one would really take a “pro-meltdown” position, would they? Talk about seeing the glowing silver lining around a hazy cloud of Cesium-137– this has to be a stunt, right? Ultimately, however, Coulter’s “intent” in her books and punditry is not all that important. Be it sincere or a sham, the effect on American culture and politics remains the same. If you want to drink from a mountain stream, after all, it matters little if a horse up river pissed in the water by design or by accident; either way, you still have a mouth full of horse piss.
On the other hand, if Coulter’s act really is a bluff, and she in fact spends all her free time in Manhattan clinking cocktails with book editors, gallery curators, and a few cynical but discrete Ivy League professors, laughing about the endless gullibility of the stupid hayseeds who are paying for her new walk-in jacuzzi–then don’t we owe it to her miserable captives to set them free? If, back in 1964, I had been struggling to sit through all 8 hours of Warhol’s Empire, I know I would certainly have appreciated it if someone had come into the theater to let me know it was okay to leave, that I was just a prop in the execution of someone else’s conceptual stunt.
Perhaps those of us who identify with progressive causes would benefit by digging a bit deeper, by subjecting Coulter’s oeuvre to a more sustained and probing form of textual explication. By “deconstructing,” if you will, the logic of the Coulterian universe, there is a chance–a slim one, I will concede–that we might better understand, a). what she professes to believe; b). whether or not she really believes what she professes to believe; and c). the sensibility of a readership that truly believes that she believes in things that she may or may not actually believe.
The only way to do this, I propose, is through a line-by-line examination of the work itself–what we in the academic game sometimes call a “close reading.” As a slanderous, treasonous, godless, guilty, and demonic member of the professorial class, I hope that I might be well-suited to such a task. In the interest of critical self-reflexivity, I will admit up front that I think she’s probably faking it, that she doesn’t really believe most of the positions she advocates (like carrying heavy water for the “pro-meltdown” community). But I am willing to keep an open mind, and if somehow Coulter can win me over with the strength of her arguments, I will be more than happy to concede that she is correct and that my “liberal” ass deserves immediate incarceration for crimes against the state, at least until it arrives at its final destination in hell where Coulter and other heavenly conservatives can pelt me and my fellow damned with burning copies of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche.
Let us begin with Coulter’s fourth book, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must). Though the title remains confrontational (it implies, you see, that talking to a liberal is so unpleasant that one would do everything in his or her power to avoid such a fate), I begin here because this book suggests, at least implicitly, that some type of dialogue might still take place (at least as of 2004, the date of the book’s original publication). Admittedly, in Coulter’s ideal form, this “dialogue” would be a Thanksgiving dinner wherein a witty “conservative” systematically decimates the sophistry of her uptight liberal relations by demonstrating that there is no problem in the 21st century that can not be answered by some creative combination of Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and Jesus. To put a positive spin on this otherwise depressing scenario, let us emphasis that this scene at least has us all sitting at the same table, as it were, and that if Coulter’s woefully naive young cousin doing an Anthro degree at Smith began choking to death on the ceremonial wishbone, she still might have enough empathy to get up and administer the Heimlich maneuver (then again, perhaps Coulter really does have the courage to commit an unparalleled act of pure Objectivism: No one help her! It is not in our interest to prevent this lazy, under-achieving masticator from choking, for her death shall leave more turkey and stuffing for the rest of us! Turn the highchairs this way so that the babies might also learn this lesson well!)
So let us begin (Coulter’s prose will be in bold black, my annotations in red).
A special note to conservative readers: Given that modern American conservatism has now become indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia, there will be no attempt made here to “persuade” or “convince” you of anything. Rather, much as one might address a co-worker who suddenly professes a belief that extraterrestrials are filling his head with voices telling him to kill the neighbor’s dog, the following will proceed from the assumption that logic and reason are of little use in convincing you of anything, and that your best hope resides in a carefully monitored regimen of Haldol or Thorazine. I’m so sorry. If somehow appeals to cooperative reason and socio-economic justice prevail in the future, we will try to send a time machine back to rescue the rest of you from yourselves. Until then, good luck. Also, I think someone on your local public access station just suggested adding a penny in sales tax to help clean up that toxic dump site that’s been festering out by the Johnson place and breeding all them mutant super-raccoons—your time might be better spent writing a letter about how the free market is the only way to deal with the mutant super-raccoon problem, and that you’ll shoot any city animal control officer who comes on your property to implement a socialist “one-size-fits-all” campaign of mutant super-raccoon eradication.
1How to Talk to a Liberal
(1) Historically, the best way to convert liberals is to have them move out of their parents’ home, get a job, and start paying taxes.
Coulter begins here with a touch of folk wisdom, essentially adapting Churchill’s bromide, “If you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative at 40 you have no brain,” so that it might better appeal to her most loyal readers (crucially, however, Coulter is not willing to concede the 20 year-old part of the equation. Even deciding to share your toys in preschool would be counted as a moronic flirtation with wealth redistribution). Conservatives love using this quotation because they believe it imbues the speaker with a type of practical philosophy born of hard-won experience and incontrovertible common sense. By dropping it into everyday conversation, the conservative signals that he or she possesses the necessary intellectual depth to reflect on life’s big questions, but still has not been swayed by the more “complicated” book-learned philosophies favored by liberal elites.
Unpacking the sentence, we see three interlinking assumptions:
1. Liberals are children.2. Liberals are unemployed.3. Liberals do not pay taxes.
By casting the liberal as a child who will, under ideal circumstances, be “cured” by confronting the more sober truths of adulthood, Coulter endorses the rather sad but protoypically conservative position that the world is what it is and nothing will ever change it. Only children believe that the world’s inequalities and injustices might be productively challenged. The “adult” conservative, on the other hand, knows how the world “really works,” and that the child-liberal will eventually understand that s/he must give up the ridiculous aspiration for a world that is less horrifying. Most often, this “adult” perspective is the product of having been worn down by age, fear, and fatigue so that no other possibilities remain imaginable. A mortgaged and mirthless 40 sees what carefree 20 cannot–life is an endless struggle to acquire shit and protect it from other people who want to take your shit, all so that when you get really old you don’t end up dying penniless in a ditch. Thus it has been since Thog the caveman first suckered-punched Grunda the hill person so that he might steal his woman, jaguar paw, and pointed stick.
By choosing to open her 2004 book with a generational mapping of right and left, Coulter gives us some insight into her core readership. While I have no empirical data to back this claim up, I am willing to follow Coulter’s lead here in baseless speculation to suggest that her books are most avidly consumed by white men who are married, middle-aged, and fairly well-off (given that this is the key constituency of the Republican party, this would not be surprising). Why this particular demographic? Because Coulter “gets” them, she understands the frustration of being a “wealth-producer” surrounded by parasitical sucklings–the wife, the kids, an idiot brother, the city, the state, public education, tollways, welfare deadbeats, the chronically ill, and so on. Thus the appeal of the regressive Randian fantasy of holding one’s breath and refusing to “produce” so as to teach all the ungrateful morons around you a lesson (much as the toddler will withhold feces during toilet training as a way of protesting the oppressive discipline of the parents). 
Yes, Coulter–or at this point, “Ann”–truly understands the middle-class white guy’s pain. She arrived on the national scene during the dark days of the Clinton presidency, a Godsend as the most vocal in a new battalion of younger, blonder, female Republicans who at last showed the world that not every right-winger had to look and talk like Robert Novak. Prominently unattached, Ann is the kind of gal you fantasize about while putting on your cleats to play the back nine at the country-club. Unlike your mollycoddling wife, Ann would understand the horror of having your oldest son come home from college to announce his plans to be a professional “graphic novelist,” or seeing your daughter go out every weekend with a trio of pierced weirdos who are most obviously homosexuals. Ann knows what it’s like to have your hard-earned pay taxed by an evil bureaucracy that wants to throw that money away on the prostitutes and drug dealers you sometimes think you see loitering around as you drive to the baseball stadium downtown. And with Ann by my side, I would never lose an argument ever again. Next time that wise ass liberal neighbor of mine points out that I’m much more likely to get shot by my own gun than to shoot a burglar, Ann would be right there to call him out for the dickless coward he really is! In fact, I wouldn’t mind if she called me a few names as well. Don’t get me wrong–I still think it is the man’s role to take the lead in any relationship. But when I see Ann in that tight, little leather vest…I don’t know, suddenly I want her to get mad at me. Really, really mad. I want her to tell me what a worthless weakling I am. I want her to yell at me for nicking the upholstery in the Beamer. I want her to lock me in the bathroom with just bread and water until I work up the courage to go tell off those pricks at the Sanitation department for cracking our new trash bins, just because they’re too lazy to put them back down gently (and I pay there goddamn salaries with my taxes!). And then I want Ann to hold me as I cry and cry. Why has the world become so scary and why don’t I understand anything anymore? How could anyone be against a flat tax, Ann, I just don’t get it–it’s so obviously and objectively fair to everyone. What do you mean you found a picture of Ashley’s vagina on her cell phone? Why would she do that? I don’t care what anyone says, Ann, this democracy will only really work as long as white people are in the majority.
And so on.
It would seem explicating the first line of Coulter’s book has taken more time and space than I anticipated, so perhaps this is a good place to stop for now. See you next time…maybe. I can’t decide if it’s really worth it or not.
Editor’s Note: I would also like to note that in googling the phrase “annotated Ann Coulter,” I discovered another site that had this idea long before me. You might want to visit them as well (here).
January 21, 2012
"I Had Sex with Hitler and then Almost Fed His Brain to a Condor"
If you’re like most dolts produced by the American education system, you probably actually believe Adolph Hitler died in his bunker in 1945 when the Russian Army reached Berlin. Such ignorance is understandable, given how important it was, then and now, to protect the world from the terrifying REALITY of the situation, namely this: At the end of WWII, Adolph Hitler’s brain was surgically removed, placed in stasis, and then transplanted into a willing new host! Most likely, “Hitler” is still somewhere on the planet today, scheming, ever scheming, to return and complete his plans for world domination. My money says the brain is now in Rick Perry. Every Texas yahoo talks about secession now and then, but Perry’s recent campaign pledge to annex the Sudetenland is troubling to say the least.
They Saved Hitler’s Brain (aka The Madman of Mandoras) (1963) dared speak this truth in the tortured logic of Z-cinema some fifty years ago. Legend has it that the film began shooting in the late fifties–only to be shut down by Nazi agents in Hollywood looking to suppress its startling revelations. It took the courage of a rag-tag band of UCLA students in the early sixties to shoot some additional framing footage, thereby padding out the original film by ten or fifteen minutes so that it might get distribution and thus see the light of day. But it turns out the Nazis had nothing to worry about. The temporal rift created by grafting together the film stock and styles of the late fifties and early sixties was so jarring that the movie elicited only jeers and ridicule. For years it played in the post-fringe graveyard of late-night television, leaving an astonished few to admire the stamina of the actor forced to kneel for hours at a time behind an old ham radio set and under a bell jar in order to “sell” the illusion of functional decapitation.
Happily for lovers of historical drama, the saga of Hitler’s itinerant brain did not die with that noble, yet failed cinematic experiment. In 1973, novelist Roland Puccetti tried once again to alert the world to the ongoing hazard presented by allowing Hitler’s brain to remain at liberty, giving us the sublime revisionism of The Death of the Führer (Arrow Books-1973).
I have now read Puccetti’s book. Before recounting its alternative history of the years after the Second World War (absolute and total spoiler alert), let me say this: The Death of the Führer MUST be adapted for the screen as soon as possible. How it hasn’t already ended up as a major motion picture is a true mystery, one that makes me suspect Nazi sympathizers are once again pressuring Hollywood to ignore the R-rated bombshells contained in this book. The Death of the Führer is everything Inglourious Basterds hoped to be–but done with such economy and ease that it utterly shames Tarantino’s lumbering attempt to pass off what are essentially five interminably long dialog scenes as some kind of fast-paced caper film. If you want brutal and stunning Nazisploitative action, then Puccetti is your man.
We begin at a Bavarian ski lodge some time in the 1960s. A young man–his name is unimportant, call him Mr. Framing-Device if you like–has twisted his leg and must stay off the slopes. An old man sitting on a bench nearby accurately diagnoses the skier’s condition from afar–for you see, this old man is a doctor: Karl Giesvius. As so often happens when strangers meet in the Bavarian Alps, their conversation soon turns to Hitler. Karl, it turns out, knows the REAL story, which he proceeds to tell us:
Ten or so years after the end of WWII, Karl had been sitting in a Parisian cafe when suddenly a local rushed in and begged him to attend to a dying man elsewhere in the city, a dying man who claimed to have information about the whereabouts of….Hitler! Understandably intrigued, Karl rushed to the man’s bedside to hear a startling confession: “I assisted in the removal and transplantation of Hitler’s brain!” Later, after the man dies, Karl looks through some old photos and verifies that the dying man had indeed been a member of the Führer’s personal medical team. He decides to fly to Berlin and begin his investigation.
First task: get inside the Führerbunker and see if any clues are still there. Now, you might think the Führerbunker would have been picked over for just about any and all items of historical import, and that accessing it would be difficult if not impossible. But this turns out not to the be the case. Consulting a map of the compound, Karl figures out where the ventilation shaft should be, and after moving a few well-placed rocks, he’s unearthed the entrance. After shimmying down the vent, he’s the first person to stand in the Führerbunker since the Russians collapsed the entrances at the end of the war. What’s down there? Junk, mostly. It would also appear a Russian soldier took a retributive shit on Hitler’s bed, an extremely resilient shit considering it somehow survived for a decade before Karl descended into the bunker to witness it. He checks out the conference room. Nothing. Eva Braun’s bedroom. Nothing. He’s just about to give up and/or suffocate from a lack of oxygen when finally Karl discovers a hidden passageway connecting Hitler’s bedroom to… a secret surgical theater!
Looking around the tiled room with his flashlight, Karl discovers a bloody operating table and scalpels that still have hair on them (the hair of Hitler!). Strangely, though the Nazis had apparently pioneered the art of brain transplantation, they still didn’t quite understand that one should shave a surgical area before operating. Karl continues his search for evidence. His flashlight illuminates a strange object on the floor. Bingo! It’s a brain!
Hitler’s brain? Well, no, actually–Karl quickly reasons it is the brain of the poor schmuck who donated his body so that Hitler could have a new ride. This was some particularly good writing, I thought. Here Puccetti captures the urgency of the situation back in 1945. With the allies advancing, Nazi doctors had no time to wash down the operating theater nor throw away the old brain–a point Puccetti emphasizes by revealing that the floor-brain is still in the steely clutches of the forceps used so many years ago to wrench it from its skull! There’s also a bucket of congealed blood nearby, but Puccetti does not speculate as to why the brain didn’t end up there rather than on the floor. Also, we are left to wonder how this brain tissue, much like the enduring pile of Russian infantry crap in the next room, could survive more or less in tact for over a decade.
Karl’s investigation continues. He finds a plaque bearing the name of the surgical genius responsible for all this brain shuffling: Dr. Wilhelm Tager. Karl is flabbergasted. Tager, as it turns out, was his buddy from medical school before the war, his old fencing partner, and a genius of neurology who finished at the top of their class. That just about seals it. Find Tager find Hitler’s brain, he reasons. And then he can kill them both!
After a little more detective work, Karl tracks Tager down to a remote castle somewhere in Spain. Next obstacle: How to infiltrate a well-guarded compound full of evil Nazi scientists? Here Karl decides for an elegantly direct approach–he simply floors his motorcycle and breaks through the front gate (as seen on the action-packed cover above). That might seem crazy, but Karl’s plan is actually a bit more complicated. After taking a few Nazi bullets and wrecking his bike into a tree, it is Karl’s hope that Dr. Tager will attend to him and then recognize him from their college days. And this is precisely what happens. After surgery, Karl wakes up and tells his “old friend” that he just happened to be vacationing in Spain and that the throttle on his motorcycle just happened to get stuck–that’s why he crashed through the gate uncontrollably.
One might think that the Nazi brain trust (those entrusted with the Nazi brain, that is) hiding out in Spain would be the most paranoid gated-community on the planet–but no one seems to question the fact that Karl, unseen by Tager since before the war, has suddenly and seemingly coincidentally arrived on their doorstep. Before you know it, all the Nazis have welcomed Karl into their little clique, probably because Karl wastes no time fishing for Hitler leads by constantly bemoaning the fate of the Third Reich.
Later, once he’s completely healed from his injuries, Karl is invited to a big party hosted by the owner of the castle, the beautiful Baroness Gerda Bach-Wisliceny. The party goes well as Karl learns a few new tidbits by eavesdropping. But still no sign of Hitler’s noodle.
Things really heat up later that night when a guard knocks on Karl’s door. The Baroness has requested a private audience. Well, one thing leads to another, and before you know it Karl and the Baroness are in her bedroom ripping off each other’s clothes. And then this happens:
Her fingers dug into my arms with sharp nails, her back arched spasmodically, she started to pull me down deep into a bottomless pit. Somewhere within my body a train of cold liquid left its station with relentless fury and plunged on to its destination.
Here Puccetti is telling us, as artfully as he can, that Karl is about to ejaculate into the Baroness. The story continues.
Gerda’s eyes opened widely now. The pupils looked dark in the fire glow, much darker than before, and somehow beyond them and behind them there was a deep rustling of Teutonic forests, of shadowy predators roaming in the night…Only then did I raise my trembling, terribly tired fingers to her head, slide them under the golden hair and feel the bony ridge across her skull. Only then did her lips part to give the fateful cry.
‘ICH BIN DER FUHRER.’
Yes, friends, our intrepid hero and narrator has just enjoyed a simultaneous orgasm with Adolph Hitler– a drop-dead gorgeous Hitler, mind you, but Hitler nonetheless (an alternate cover for the book foregrounds this reveal a bit more forcefully). 
Some might be thinking this was surprisingly enlightened on Hitler’s part, this willingness to have his brain transplanted into a woman. Funny thing about that–it was actually a complete surprise for the Führer. Later we learn that Tager and his team had a young, strapping Aryan male all ready to host Hitler’s brain, but the kid died during surgery from an unforeseen complication. The original Baroness Gerda Bach-Wisliceny, a loyalist if ever there was one, stepped right up and volunteered her body. Man, was Hitler ever mad when he woke up. But we are told that the Führer eventually warmed up to and even embraced the idea of being a sexy Baroness. Realizing it made for a good hiding place, the brain decided to stay put.
But back to the post-coital revelation that our narrator just had some manner of queerly heteronormative gay sex with Hitler. “What would I do,” wonders the reader, “under such circumstances?” Given that Karl is dedicated above all else to his mission, he loses no time recovering from this quite literal “mindfuck” and stabs Baroness Hitler-brain straight through the heart, leaving her for dead.
For the next twenty or so pages, Karl is on the run trying to evade capture in the compound. He jumps a guard and steals his uniform, which buys him a little more time to wander around the castle in search of a way out. Eventually he finds another series of hidden passageways leading deeper and deeper into the castle’s foundations. Finally he stumbles upon, wouldn’t you know it, another goddamn secret operating theater! No sooner have you killed Hitler’s host body than his evil surgical team is right back at it putting his brain in yet another body. Actually, Karl probably should have seen this coming. After all, as narrator, he of all people should understand the basic premise of his own story. Caught off guard indulging in some well-deserved self-recrimination, Karl is taken into custody and whisked away to a holding cell.
You’re probably thinking at this point that Karl himself is destined to be the new donor body for Hitler’s brain. Makes sense. Hitler needs the body and the Nazis no longer need Karl–that’s certainly what a lesser writer would settle for here. But Puccetti has other and much more incredible ambitions. Karl is wheeled into surgery alright, but finds that his nemesis Dr. Tager instead plans to implant a type of experimental electrode “harness” in Karl’s brain. In fact, he forces Karl to remain awake as he cuts off the top of his skull and inserts the electrodes one by one. Later, in post-op, we discover that Tager and his assistants can now control Karl’s actions simply by pushing the appropriate buttons: THIRST, HUNGER, LUST, etc. This is the sort of thing Nazi doctors live for, apparently. Bouncing Hitler’s brain from body to body is a neat trick and all, but Tager’s real ambition is to rule the world by implanting electrodes in every human skull! We also discover here that Tager has no real investment in Nazi ideology–he chose to ride Hitler’s coattails only because Hitler seemed–at the time at least– the most likely to make his dream of global brain control come true. He would just as easily have cast his lot with the Americans or Russians, if need be. That’s just how evil Tager is–the pure evil of pure science.
After some pleasure/pain interrogation from Tager and his buttons, Karl is taken back to his cell, which it so happens is a glass cube. There he devises a brilliant plan. He will break the glass by ramming his head into the wall, which will also probably disable the brain-electrode stuff at the top of his brain. At the very least, he reasons, it will interfere with its optimal operation. Gathering his strength and courage, he runs headlong into the glass–so hard that he blacks out. When he comes to, however, he finds the plan has indeed worked–there is nothing but shattered glass all around him (and no guards, apparently). Karl quickly runs back to the lab and pulls all the wiring out of the control-console so that Tager cannot send any more brain signals.
But the console can be quickly repaired, Karl reasons. No, there is simply no way around it, the electrode net in his brain must come out. But how? Who will do the delicate surgery? Karl. Karl will do the surgery. Karl will do the surgery on himself. Brain surgery. Karl will perform brain surgery on his own brain.
Are you beginning to understand why this novel must be committed to film as soon as possible? I already have Scarlett Johansson down for the role of the Baroness. As for Karl…well, who cares really? I just want to see the scene wherein Scarlett Johansson reveals that she is actually a busty receptacle for Hitler’s devious brain. I would trade you any number of Final Destinations and/or Centipede units for such a moment to be captured on film.
Back to the brain surgery. Karl sets up a mirror to see the top of his head. “The scalp was easy,” Karl tells us. Then the skull bone. Then the membrane covering the brain. Underneath are the electrodes. Though delicately inserted only hours earlier by Dr. Tager, Karl finds he is able to simply rip them out of his brain with no real consequences. But the suspense isn’t over:
There I was, nude and exhausted, unarmed and with the whole top of my brain exposed to raw air. If I so much as leaned forward, the cerebrospinal fluid encasing my brain would spill out; I could imagine the sticky liquid dripping over into my face and blinding me.
To make matters worse, a guard suddenly appears and interrupts the operation. Luckily, Karl still has the presence (and fluid) of mind to dispatch him with a nearby bone saw. But there he remains, his brain still exposed to “raw air” and all of his brain juice about to spill out. He decides he has no time to stitch the membrane and just goes for wiring the skull back in place. After that he’s so tired that he just kind of flops his scalp back over the bone, figuring he’ll deal with that after he’s finished killing Tager and finding Hitler’s new cranial hideaway.
Eventually he corners Tager and forces him at gunpoint to the “vault”–the most secret of secret chambers in the bottom floors of the castle. Inside is the requisite vat with Hitler’s pulsating brain floating inside, awaiting its new host. As an incidental detail, we are also told there are two crossed sabers on the wall as part of the castle’s Coat of Arms. Almost immediately, however, this proves not to be incidental as Tager calls Karl’s bluff on the number of bullets in the gun, which leads directly to the two men retrieving those very same sabers and reliving their days as college fencing opponents (remember? I told you about that earlier). Karl is worried, for he never beat Tager in their university matches, but it remains his only hope. Thrust and parry. Thrust and parry. And then Karl spies an “Auto-Destruction” button on the wall. It’s true. He really does. A big red button that will blow everything up. Even if Karl can’t escape, he can blow up the entire castle, Hitler’s brain, and all the remaining Nazis at the same time!
Karl pushes the button. No, you fool! screams Tager. Ten minutes to absolute annihilation. Just then Karl sees that the brain vat has become unmoored and is rolling into the periphery of his vision. Two quick ballet leaps and he is standing over the bubbling vat. He then drives his sword directly into the Fuhrer’s brain! Tager screams in horror, and Karl takes advantage of his shock to stab Tager “in the crotch” all the way back to the pelvis. Tager collapses, and in doing so, knocks over the now pinkish red vat of brain and blood. Hitler’s brain slides across the floor where Karl, not wanting to leave anything to chance, scoops it up. 
Karl must escape–the castle is still going to blow at any second. Miraculously, he discovers another secret door leading to some kind of mining-car contraption below. Still clutching the well-stabbed yet still relatively cohesive Hitler brain, he jumps in and releases the brakes. A bloody Tager crawls along the tracks begging for mercy. But no dice. Karl rides the mining-car out of the castle and out into the open air. There he sees a mighty condor flying through the sky, and considers throwing Hitler’s brain on the grass so that the majestic bird might swoop down and carry it away. For that would be a fitting final indignity for Hitler’s stupid evil brain–snatched up by razor-sharp talons and fed to a nest full of baby condors. Just then the earth rocks with the force of the castle exploding. In the end, Karl simply falls on the brain and “collapses” it good and flat.
Victory!
Back to our Bavarian ski-lodge in the present day. The story over, Mr. Framing-Device doesn’t know what to think. Did this old man really have sex with Hitler in a woman’s body, operate on his own brain, and then almost throw Hitler’s brain to a hungry condor? Just then a nurse appears on scene to retrieve Karl–the sun is setting and it’s time to go back home. Mr. Framing-Device takes the nurse aside and asks if he might visit Karl again some day. “Why not?”the nurse responds, “visiting hours at the sanatorium are open to everyone.”
And there we leave it. Karl might be crazy. Then again, he might just have a bad case of tuberculosis. I guess the next generation of historians will have to make the ultimate determination: did Tager somehow get the brain back and put it in Scarlett Johansson, or did it end up in the bellies of a dozen hungry little condor chicks?
January 21, 2012
I Saw That Show Where People Travel Back in Time to a Spielberg Movie from the 1980s.
Conventional wisdom has it that science-fiction doesn’t do well on television, or at least on network television. Too expensive to produce and too limited in its appeal. Earth 2. Firefly. The Event. V. None made it beyond 30 or so episodes. “But what about Battlestar Galactica?” cries the guy with the phalanx of Cylon Centurions protecting his iMac from the incursion of various snack-related threats, “that was the greatest TV series of all time!” Cool your jets there, space-boy, that was first-run syndication and a whole other kettle of space-fish. For the most part, network executives listen to sci-fi pitches with the same enthusiasm that label heads used to reserve for concept albums. A plucky band of space pirates raiding ships in the Van Allen belt, played for love and laughs but still true to the principles of actual science? Great…let me clear Thursday night for you.
Meanwhile, over at NBC, the peacock has made the daring decision to program sci-fi during its storied Thursday-night block of comedies. Taking a nod from the 80s girl-robot oddity, Small Wonder, upcoming episodes of Whitney will reveal that the show’s sassy lead is actually under the brutal cybernetic control of her bionic ass, an implant turned sentient that now demands endless display and tribute. As seen so prominently in the first two episodes, the imperious buttocks frequently compel their helpless host to wear silly costumes that better accentuate the bio-butt’s perky insouciance. Will Whitney’s jaunty yet evil ass ultimately demand admiration and tribute from all of the earth? Just what does Whitney’s ass want of us? Stay tuned and find out.
But it is Fox that may well be taking the biggest sci-fi gamble, partnering with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin’ productions for Terra Nova, a mind-bending entry into that subgenre of sci-fi typically known as “a real hoot.” The basic premise here involves the standard Spielbergian narrative-focalization family-unit traveling back in time 85 million years to start over in a new human colony, one that seeks to escape the tech noir future so cruelly foisted upon the earth by Arnold Schwarzenegger back in the 1980s.
We open in the Chicago of 2149, where every cliché of our collective dystopian future must be mobilized in just under twenty minutes in order to motivate Jim and Taylor Shannon’s rather impulsive decision to flee the civilized world so that their children might touch dinosaurs. In this horrible future of 2149, we are told, the air is really bad, oranges are rare, kids have never seen the moon, and the government strictly enforces a two-child limit on breeding. Worse yet, decent middle-class families with Irish surnames are forced to live in small apartments that, while they would be palaces to most of the world’s population in 2011, are shown here to have the bad taste and abysmal feng shui that comes standard with a galley kitchen. 
Now, I realize I’m supposed to think this is the most horrible fate imaginable, and that any sane person would gladly run blindly into a wormhole for the chance to eat a fresh peach and see the Big Dipper. Perhaps it’s because I live in the Windy City, but all I could think of was how amazing the Chicago of 2149 looked, as if five Hong Kongs had been smashed together on the shores of Lake Michigan, all interconnected by tubular monorails and reaching up into a perpetually hazy sky. It looked like a city where a million different adventures were taking place at that very second—an urban paradise where you could eat any cuisine in the world, network on your quad iReality device, solve a perplexing future-crime, and have your scrotum painlessly tattooed… all at the same time. Why anyone would leave this citadel of wonder is anyone’s guess, especially for little more than an opportunity to repeatedly hammer one’s thumb building some kind of prehistoric hut in which to store a sumptuous harvest of nuts, twigs, and berries, most of which no doubt fished out of the great steaming piles of Apatosaurus shit surrounding the Terra Nova compound. 
If you subscribe to Spielbergian logic, of course, you would do this because nebulous “government” agents represent a hazard to your dear sweet innocent children. Sure enough, as the Shannons gather at home to savor their precious orange, the police arrive unannounced to investigate a rumor that the family is harboring an illegal third child (which they are). Not being the sharpest tool in the shed, dad (Jason O’Mara) hides the contraband toddler inside an air vent, thus insuring that the child will start crying from claustrophobia and dust mite infestation in under a minute (which she does). Jim takes a swing at the cop and ends up in jail, thus initiating a pre-credit action sequence in which dad must escape from the pokey, pick up a suitcase stuffed with child #3, and get to the wormhole in time to meet his wife (Naomi Scott) and other two kids. Once again, our sympathies are supposed to be with the Shannons, sharing their outrage that the government would be so evil and repressive as to enforce a ban on having more than two children. Still, you have to think that if ol’ Jim would have just snipped his vas deferens, his family and the world would have been better off, leaving more oranges and kitchen space for everyone else.
Once we get to Terra Nova, both the Shannons and the viewers have a lot to learn in order to make this a functional weekly franchise. We discover that Terra Nova was founded by Nathanial Taylor (Stephen Lang)—a great white father who was the first to stumble through the wormhole. There are dinosaurs, of course, and a big fence separating the community from the more interesting narrative possibilities outside. Then there are “the sixers,” a group of castaways that apparently crashed on the other side of the island—a splinter group of settlers who live near the quarry and continually hassle the Terra Novenians. There are also lots of boss machine guns and sonic pulse weapons, as well as a motor pool stocked with all kinds of military vehicles.
So, in this effort to “save” the human race and rebuild humanity without “repeating all the same mistakes,” we can see that Terra Nova is already D.O.A. from scene one. A charismatic patriarch, nuclear families, guns, gasoline, and a mysterious Other living out in the woods—why not call the show Red State Nova instead? How long until the Shannons are standing in line for a shot of cyanide-flavored Kool-Aid, convinced the mysterious Robamanites are about to raid the compound and take away the colony’s best guns and cutest children?
I will admit that at this point I took a break to pay the delivery guy and eat some Thai food, so I missed a good 15 minutes or so of the premiere’s first hour. From what I can surmise, however, this is when we learn that Terra Nova exists in an “alternate time stream,” which is of course the chicken-shit way of explaining oneself out of various time-travel paradoxes (i.e. if Terra Nova “succeeds,” isn’t it inevitable that it produce the very future that allowed the Shannons to go back in time? Or, wouldn’t the existence of Terra Nova skew history to the extent that the Shannons might never have existed in the first place and thus could not go back in time to follow House? An “alternative time stream” takes care of all that, space nerd, so just enjoy the ride).
The true highlight of the first episode, however, is the moment when the Shannons are shown to their tasteful bungalow, complete with hardwood floors, a breezy open floor plan, and even a little SoCal landscaping. Incredibly, though they were just living in a supposedly hellish cube in a Chicago high rise of 2149, everyone seems vaguely disappointed—like they expected better digs in 85 million B.C. Truly, American privilege knows no limits. Happily, Mom decides they might salvage the space with a rug of some kind…that is, if they have rugs in 85 million B.C. It is an anxious moment, played for pathos, in which the family realizes–perhaps for the first time–that they now live in a world without the riches and comforts that come from living in proximity to a strip of Big Box stores.
With some basic exposition out of the way, Terra Nova then chugged into a second hour that was strictly about making work for Spielberg’s old raptor pals from the nineties. The terror begins when the son (Landon Liboiron), like any rebellious high school senior, ditches his mandatory orientation session to hang with a cute girl and some other teens from the rec center. Together they sneak outside the fence so they can drink some moonshine they have brewing out in the jungle and play a little G-rated grab ass. Before you know it, they are at the center of a standard Jurassic era scenario—trapped in a vehicle and getting knocked around by a pack of bloodthirsty dinosaurs! The producers must think this is a major draw for the series, since this dinosaur evasion sequence ended up eating about thirty minutes of screen time. Run! Shoot! Growl! Scream! Run some more! But in the end, everyone’s okay, and the son has learned important lessons about obeying dad, respecting the rules of Terra Nova, and following the directorial cues for interacting with CGI beasts that aren’t actually on set.
The second episode ends with an attempt to get us invested in the mystery of some inscrutable cave scrawling, folding in a bit more Lost folderol to hook the easily hookable into thinking something more profound might be at work here (beyond a table of writers treading water from week to week). The scribbling, it would appear, is the work of the Great White Father’s missing son, who now lurks the jungle as a primordial Boo Radley. Given the already pissy relationship between the men in the Shannon clan, this certainly puts Terra Nova in the running for the most Oedipal series of 2011. 
All in all, Terra Nova is just what you’d expect in a craven attempt to travel back in time to the stronger and more certain entertainment franchises of the golden nineties. Apparently, though, not everyone was pleased with the two-hour premiere spectacular, as evidenced by the following comment at imdb (the very first, no less):
Apparently, the dinosaurs are bullet proof because they wouldn’t take ANY damage! All you saw was a ricochet effect off them, and in some cases they were using a 50 caliber gun mounted on a transport vehicle. This wasn’t a plot point or anything so it comes off as very lazy special effects. This then leaves the problem, if the guns don’t hurt the dinosaurs, why would you take a weapon out to defend yourself from them if it doesn’t work? I mean they had about 6 guys shooting one and it eventually turned and ran. I can see maybe they wanted to tone down the blood and death a bit in the pilot but it came off as a major flaw.
So there you have it, Fox. You wanted to do science-fiction? Just remember the type of fans that come with the genre. This customer won’t be happy until you spend a couple extra million animating some convincing bullet trauma to T-Rex’s face. And are you ready to withstand the overly long and ridiculously self-righteous letters you will get once you cancel Terra Nova? Maybe it’s not too late to greenlight that new Gordon Ramsey show where he tears down little kids’ lemonade stands. Or, given that Terra Nova’s premiere got bested by the second episode of Two and a Half Men, maybe we can look forward to Charlie Sheen emerging from the wormhole at mid-season. That would be Terraterrific!
UPDATE: Episode 2 (or 3, depending on how you count them) featured a pretty straight forward rip-off of The Birds (1964), with tiny (but deadly!) pterodactyls taking the place of Hitchock’s murderous crows. Episode 3 (or 4) promises an “amnesia virus” sweeping through the compound. Could Terra Nova signal its fundamental contempt for television any more loudly?
January 21, 2012
25 More Imaginative Deaths for Charlie Harper
1. Butt-plug misfire.
2. Complications from experimental Hep-3 treatment in Mexico.
3. Beaten to death by Gaddafi’s crack team of female bodyguards.
4. Hummer. Hummer. Cliff. Pacific.
5. Murdered in violent altercation with Hollywood celebrity Charlie Sheen.
6. Melody to new cereal jingle accidentally opens fifth circle of Hell.
7. Killed in duel for the hand of Miss Kandy Kardashian.
8. Toxic blood condition created by years of exposure to unrestrained farting in house.
9. Pornslide.
10. Autoerotic asphyxiation while watching DVD of Platoon.
11. Mauled at L.A. zoo in drunken attempt to fellate tiger.
12. Eaten by .5 Man.
13. Bloody bathroom suicide that Bertha simply will not clean up.
14. Drawn and quartered in accident with new sex harness.
15. Beaten to death with tire iron by the ghost of Jack Warner.
16. Killed by Alan Harper in attempt to harvest and transplant magical penis.
17. Murdered by his own prostate.
18. Stroke triggered by sheer hilarity of all-night Punk’d marathon on MTV.
19. Complications from most violent yet most hilarious kick to groin ever captured on film.
20. Rose found wearing his skin.
21. Body spontaneously dissolves leaving behind only a stain of liquid putridity.
22. Crushed by safe containing 25 million dollars thrown randomly out a window.
23. 3 x 8-ball = 24-ball.
24. Utter f@#king boredom.
25. Dildo on staircase.
January 21, 2012
Its Never Sunny Anywhere
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia just began its seventh season on FX. With any luck, the series will bounce back from a sixth season that, as any objective Phillyphile would agree, was uneven at best. Last week’s premiere, “Frank’s Pretty Woman,” was certainly a good start, returning “the gang” to the moral muck in which they thrive best (Frank decides to marry his favorite prostitute, the gang decides she needs to be “classed up,” hilarity ensues).
Sunny may well be the most distinctly “American” sitcom on the air at the moment. That claim will make many bristle, I’m sure, especially those sensitized by post-graduate name-calling to resist any and all such sweeping generalizations about nationhood and identity. So let me clarify: the series does not (and could not) speak to some impossible unity of “American experience,” whatever that might still mean for anyone beyond Tea Party time-travelers; instead, it rather doggedly documents a certain mindset that is unique (or perhaps just particularly widespread) in the USA of the twenty-first century.
Like many sitcoms, Sunny is a hybrid of earlier successes given its own distinctive twist—what might best be described in industry shorthand as a more loathsome Seinfeld meets a downscale Cheers. From Seinfeld, the show borrows the now ubiquitous formula of urban singles who seemingly have little to no responsibilities beyond cultivating their skills at bantering. Sunny also replicates the 3 guys/1 gal structure—but with the crucial addition of Danny DeVito’s “Frank” as the gang’s debauched and wholly irresponsible patriarch (Frank was a brilliant addition to the show’s architecture. Father to the borderline American Psycho Dennis (Glen Howerton) and his ever-annoyed sister Dee (Kaitlin Olson), Frank doesn’t really seem to give a shit about anyone other than himself—devoting his senior years to drinking and whoring. But as he either has (or had) money stashed away, he becomes the default protector/bankroller of the gang’s various misadventures).
But while Seinfeld and company most often worked over the everyday minutiae of middle-class aggravation (“first-world problems,” as some now call them), Sunny’s crew seems to bicker endlessly about absolutely nothing at all. More to the point, each character is typically so dug in defending his or her own delusional take on the sitcom situation at hand that, in the show’s best moments, it creates a polyphonic exchange of variously narcissistic and selfish monologues that amplify more than answer one another. Often this is the crucial ingredient in separating the best episodes from the average—whether or not cast and director have captured the best possible group rants on film (last season, for example, some of this banter—typically so “natural’ to the cast—seemed a bit more forced, for whatever reason).
Obviously, people everywhere in the world often argue about completely stupid and pointless things. The distinctly American flavor of Sunny, I would argue, stems from the fact that each character, despite being a woefully uninformed and misguided idiot, is always completely and wholly convinced that he or she is 100% correct in any and all arguments—so much so that any actual communication, dialogue, and persuasion as we typically know them rarely if ever take place. Characters will on occasion convince one another to cooperate in enacting a scheme of some sort, but most often these are only alliances of momentary convenience—each member of the gang is ready, willing, and able to screw over the other at the drop of a hat. If Seinfeld famously lived by the credo “no hugs,” Sunny remains steadfastly committed to the principle of “no empathy”…for anyone…ever. 
Set primarily in the crappiest bar in Philly’s most dilapidated neighborhood, Sunny also references Cheers, but with an emphasis on capturing more honestly the milieu of the chronic drinker (Paddy’s, or its Boston equivalent, is where Cliff and Norm would eventually end up after drinking away their pensions). The “bar” set (or its displaced cousins like “Central Perk” and the “Peach Pit”) has long been central to TV architecture—public spaces where characters can congregate for jokes and plot points. Typically these sets weave the characters into a larger social world—the cast surrounded by various extras that circulate to signify the characters’ integration with our own reality. True to the wicked inversions of Sunny, however, Paddy’s bar is a bleak and generally empty space. It is occasionally packed on special occasions in service of the plot, but for the most part has no clientele and merely serves as an echo-chamber for the inane bickering of the cast. This isolation is further underscored in the exterior establishing shots that invariably depict the bar as standing alone in a beaten-down warehouse district devoid of all humanity, a place where one expects to see a tumbleweed blow by festooned with used condoms and dirty syringes (at left, L.A. exterior used for Paddy’s–courtesy Flickr Yousuba&!).
American comedy is frequently concerned with the invisible shell-game of “class,” typically in ways that stylize poverty to make it either a momentary comic irruption in middle-class life or the launching pad for eventual middle-class success. Sunny, on the other hand, is particularly candid in examining the thin line dividing crippling destitution from out-and-out homelessness. Given their location, the gang is constantly mixing with addicts, prostitutes, criminals, and—perhaps most magically—various shady characters that Frank and Charlie meet “under the bridge.” Slightly better off than their neighbors, the gang’s relation to the human misery all around them is like that of most Americans—instrumental indifference (their repeated dealings with “Cricket” come to mind). Building on this bedrock of a permanent underclass with no possibilities or aspirations, individual episodes often focus on the particularly American delusion–cultivated by almost everyone occupying a position other than Fortune 500 CFO or crack whore—that every citizen of the USA is middle-class and rising. Dennis, Dee, and Mac (Rob McElhenney), in particular, are constantly misjudging their positions on the economic, educational, and cultural ladder (Frank and Charlie (Charlie Day), for different reasons, don’t appear to care one way or another).
If nothing else, Sunny signifies how far television has come from the days of Buffalo Bill. A noble one-season failure in 1983-84, Buffalo Bill was a much-heralded MTM sitcom starring Dabney Coleman. The show garnered a lot of attention as the first sitcom to feature a lead character who was often “unlikeable” (a matter of judgment, obviously, as all of us no doubt have a sitcom lead from the 50s, 60s, or 70s we would like to punch in the face. I’m looking at you, Hawkeye). With Sunny we have an entire ensemble of assholes.
With one notable exception, perhaps unexpected in the show’s original design. Despite the program’s general commitment to venal nastiness, Frank and Charlie’s warped father-son vibe has become somewhat of a moral anchor for the series. Frank, again, has lived the middle-class “dream” of marriage, kids, and a house in the ‘burbs—but has decided, rather courageously, that he’d rather crash in a horrifying studio apartment and devote his time and energy to getting fucked up and laid as much as possible. Meanwhile, his room and Murphy-bedmate Charlie is the show’s sole remaining innocent, a guy that one could imagine, given the right circumstances, might end up institutionalized either out of injustice, inconvenience, or a simple misunderstanding. Like the rest of them, Charlie has his schemes. But he also seems relatively content to never leave Philadelphia so that he might continue devoting his life to trapping the bar’s prodigious rat population.
So, to summarize: uninformed, narcissistic idiots constantly arguing at cross-purposes, standing in a dying business in a dying neighborhood, ceaselessly scheming their way toward greater class mobility and failing utterly, but protected from their unrelenting idiocy by the residual capital reserves of their putative father—what could be more American than that?
January 21, 2012
I Saw That Movie Where All the Apes Get Mad and Take Over the World
First of all, credit where credit is due. Thank you, Hollywood, for finally making a film this summer that didn’t make me wish I had stayed home to express my cat’s blocked anal gland with a Q-Tip. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is actually really, really good. Surprisingly good. True, it did require the industry to dip back into the stockpile of science-fiction ideas that existed before Star Wars transformed the entire genre into little more than an endless sword ‘n’ sandal flick with more and better weapons, but if that means getting a Zardoz reboot next, I’ll take it.
If anyone reading this is in or near Malibu, by the way, please kidnap Michael Bay and force him to see Rise immediately so that he might learn the basics of scene articulation and narrative structure. If Rise can make me misty-eyed over a big, dumb ape taking out a helicopter, surely Bay can learn how to help us keep track of who is a Transformer, who is a Decepticon, who is Shia LeBeouf, and why we should even care in the first place. Okay, obligatory Bay = State of current cinema joke out of the way, let’s proceed…
Let me say this: I wish Rise of the Planet of the Apes were happening right now. I wish super-intelligent apes were swinging through the trees this very moment ready to lay waste to our sorry civilization. It’s about time another species took over for our terrible stewardship of the planet and of ourselves. Millions starving. Inequality increasing. Axe Body Spray still on the market. At this point, the ghost of Paul the psychic Octopus deciding affairs of state with an aqua-Ouija board could probably run most governments better than we humans. And look, we all know this movie is only showing us our inevitable future. Apes may not learn to talk and organize themselves into medieval fighting formations, but it’s even money we end up taking ourselves out with a virus that we will probably invent for profit. It may be an additive used to extend the shelf-life of Cheezy Bread Stix or a fine mist Steve Jobs sprays into the atmosphere to make Apple users misplace their dongles and cords that much quicker, but it’s going to happen, we’re going to take ourselves out in a way that is cosmically embarrassing. 
That’s why it’s so great that Rise targets San Francisco as the first city to go—It’s an open attack on all the Trekkies out there who imagine that Frisco will be the gateway for projecting our boring, homogenized cultural differences of the future out into the universe so that we can lecture other cultures (alien ones, no less) on what they should and should not be doing. You say the future is a bank lobby in space where we all obey the prime directive whilst discovering every civilization in the universe has its own form of brightly colored liquor? I say it will be genetically mutated monkeys ripping out our tracheae and kneecaps just for the hell of it.
In this respect, I always thought Spielberg missed a real opportunity with the Jurassic Park series. After humans stupidly brought dinosaurs back to life, wouldn’t it have been great if a bunch of pterodactyls got loose, bred in such numbers that we couldn’t really control them, and then occasionally swooped down to snatch away house pets and small unguarded children? Not so often that we had to declare a “War on Pterodactyls,” obviously, but maybe with the same frequency as people being hit by lightning—just enough to remind us of what dumbasses we were for bringing dinosaurs back to life in the first place, or for trying to play an extra hole of golf in the face of an advancing thunderstorm. I salute Rise for having the courage to remind us that it is often our very intelligence that makes us the stupidest ape of all. Imagine how much more free and full of life you’d feel if you could simply entertain yourself by throwing your own feces at various comic foils, as opposed to feeling dead inside after paying $14 to see Kevin James do it for you (wait, crossover alert: the mad-as-hell apes of Rise invade Zookeeper, radicalize the non-human primates, and then all escape the film to leave their bewildered human cast-mates wondering where the next fart joke will come from). 
Like all science-fiction, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is of course an allegory. I’ve heard many say this week, either in jest or quite earnestly, that the film is a great parable about the Tea Party—angry right-wingers as angry apes rising up against their oppressors. That’s a really nasty swipe, of course, seeing as how gratuitously insulting it is to apes. After all, the apes of Rise all learn to cooperate for the common good. They share their cookies and divide the labor “from each according to his need, to each according to his ability.” They also learn very quickly how important it is to get a good education, as in that scene where the guard catches them all going to night school. Say what you want about how smelly, dirty, or damned they might be, but an ape isn’t the type of creature that would prefer to shit in coffee cans and stack them on his neighbor’s property line rather than pay that extra penny in sales tax to refurbish his community’s sewer system. No, an ape is smarter than that.
Actually, as far as parables go, I think the film is much more interesting in its kinship to the zombie genre. A few years ago I delivered a paper in London (at the Cine-Excess conference) on the zombie film as a rather playful indulgence of a collective and accelerating social death-drive. Zombies are scary—particularly those British ones that cheat by running extra-fast—but there’s also something exhilarating in seeing the entirety of our social world absolutely destroyed. After all, what’s so bad about being a zombie? You’re still somewhat sentient, apparently, certainly more so than if you just watched 100 Ways to Leave a Game Show or paid actual attention to the last Katy Perry CD all the way through. Moreover, the only thing that can kill you is a clean brain shot—and once everyone else in the world is also a zombie, that isn’t very likely to happen. Zombies don’t have to work or pay mortgages or worry about their personal appearance anymore—what’s not to like? 
If anything, Rise is even more candid and enthusiastic than most zombie films in indulging our desire to watch humankind snuff it—you’re on your feet by the end cheering the primate army as they hoist us brainiacs by our own R&D petard. Hurray for the noble apes! Hurray we’ll all be coughing up blood and dying soon! True, it’s a shame the death of humanity will mean no more incredible specimens like James Franco, Freida Pinto, and the hypothetical primates they might spawn, but that’s a small price to pay for exterminating assholes like that guy in the Ape house with the cattle prod or the pilot-neighbor-from-hell living next door. If I had a neighbor like that, I’d be personally injecting local raccoons with anything I could find in the hopes that one would eventually turn sour and spray his patio furniture with some form of mutantly toxic urine.
So kudos once again, Hollywood, for getting it right this time. I eagerly await the next installment when all the CGI Apes are rather surrealistically talking (which I hope will be even weirder than imagining Roddy McDowell’s mouth flapping behind the latex in the original series). I also hope the sequel has the guts to show thousands of Americans waiting around to die from the mutant virus, sad they will soon be no more, but ecstatic that they didn’t have to see their tax dollars wasted on government medical research or to support the implementation of Obama’s goddamn socialized medicine scheme.
January 19, 2012
Effective Immediately, the Entire Northwest Sales Team Will Be Sacrificed to Quetzalcoatl by Mark Rooke
Hi, everyone. Hope you’re all having a fantastic Thursday. Thanks again for agreeing to meet on such short notice—I know we’re all super busy with the close of the quarter, but I just wanted to take a moment out of this hectic week to announce that the Northwest sales team has blown through their goal of 1.5 million to a record-breaking 1.7 million in new contracted sales for Q4. How great is that? High fives all around, you guys. And in light of these accomplishments, I’m pleased to announce that, effective immediately, the entire northwest sales team will be sacrificed to Quetzalcoatl.
Helen, could you sharpen the Tecpatl before we begin? And Barry, would you remind your design intern that our ritual daggers are not for paper cutting? I love the kid to death, but if this shit keeps happening then we’ll need to talk. About sacrificing her, I mean.
While Helen is working the whetstone, I’d like to call out a few names who really made this unprecedented earnings record possible. Remember Janet’s presentation to our client at OmniCorp that raked in a staggering sixty percent of our revenue for the quarter? She met her responsibilities with zeal and determination, ripping through that project with an almost frightening intensity. Let’s follow her example, shall we?
And who can forget Mitchell’s three-hour long conference call that secured our final contract for the quarter. When the client told him that all of their infrastructure solutions needs had been met for the fiscal year, did he take “no” for an answer? Of course not! He fought tooth and nail for that business, securing it only out of sheer determination of will.
Come to think of it—do we still have that rope left over from last week’s piñata party? If Mitchell treats this news about our offering in the same way he does his quarterly sales goals, I’m thinking we’ll need it.
Before we begin, I’d like to say that we listened to all of the feedback received from last quarter’s ritual, and I’m happy to announce that a “splash zone” has been marked with in gaffer’s tape along the first two rows of folding chairs. Keep this in mind when you choose your seat—I don’t want to see any more dry cleaning bills on monthly expense reports.
Like I said, I’m thrilled that we came together as a company to execute this plan, and I’m just as delighted that we can come together again and execute the team itself. I couldn’t be more proud of these guys. To Tlalocan!
January 19, 2012
Historys a Bitch: A Dog Walk Through Time: Hound Dog by Robb Fritz
“Elvis and The Beatles were the death of music.”
— My parents.
- – -
I was always a Beatles man, not Elvis. I remember arguing the Fab Four versus the King with my parochial schoolmate Margaret all the way from St. Joseph’s Elementary to her house, though what the basis for the argument would have been is a mystery to me now. Were we actually arguing the merits of “Here Comes the Sun” versus “Hound Dog” and “Love Me Tender” versus “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”? Or was it more along the lines of “Elvis is cute and he knows how to dance!” (with a hip-shaking demonstration) versus “They float through this dreamland in a yellow submarine, and there’s this weird house with Frankenstein, and there’s this funny little Nowhere Man and the Blue Meanies and they get old and turn into babies and stuff!” I was driven in part I’m sure by mom’s tacit approval of The Beatles. Though she was officially opposed to everything they stood for (see the above quote), I know she secretly liked Paul’s lyrical side since as a piano teacher she never had a problem teaching easy piano versions of “Yesterday” and “Lonely People.” Margaret had posters on her wall of the young, smoky-gazed Elvis. Since a similar poster of John, Paul, George and Ringo did not grace my own, on devotion points alone I conceded defeat.
On June 5, 1956, when Elvis was a rising star nearing the height of his power, he made a soon-to-be-notorious second appearance on The Milton Berle Show, introducing his version of “Hound Dog,” a song that had recently become his standard closer. Elvis had been refining his performance of “Hound Dog” for two months, testing the reaction of his audience with every move, and honing his delivery to a science. For the first time ever he would be performing without a guitar, Berle’s having convinced Elvis to leave it backstage in order to “let ’em see you, son.”
Elvis started the song at a fast clip leading into a sharp, short solo by guitarist Scotty Moore, and free of a guitar, danced all over, gliding over the floor as he spun his leg opened and closed like a screen door banging in a crazy wind. He then cut the song off midway and restarted it as something near a bump and grind crawl paired with a slow occasionally hip-thrusting dance to match. From the song’s fast start to its hothouse finish, each trademark Elvis leg flip and every shrugging, almost diffident hip gyration was accompanied by screams and amazed laughter from the audience. Milton Berle, “Mr. Television,” loved it, and raced onto the stage, clapping a pleased Elvis on the back and mussing his hair saying, “How about my boy?”
The initial reviews were mostly positive, but eventually the moral backlash kicked in. It’s hard to imagine on this side of the ’60s the level of hysteria that ensued after his appearance. Ben Gross in the Daily News raged, “Elvis… gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos. What amazes me is that Berle and NBC-TV should have permitted this affront.” The Catholic weekly America published a full-length diatribe titled simply “Beware Elvis Presley.” And Ed Sullivan declared Elvis “unfit for family viewing,” swearing he would never allow Elvis on his show.
Elvis protested his innocence, insisting, “I’m not trying to be sexy, it’s just my way of expressing how I feel when I move around.” Whether this was true or not there wasn’t a post-pubescent individual with eyes in his or her head who didn’t know what Elvis’s brief but poignant hip thrusts were all about. Regardless of the intended thrust of his thrusts, there was no doubt that they fucked mightily with the moral zeitgeist of TV Land circa 1956. He insisted that he wasn’t trying to be a rebel, something about which he was genuinely sensitive because of his real concern for his much-adored mother’s feelings. What Elvis didn’t grasp was that in 1956 his simple desire to keep it real was itself a revolutionary act.
How things have changed. Just this month the Supreme Court was debating whether they should strike down all “indecency” rules for primetime. Chief Justice Roberts, the father of two young children, said (in more of a desperate plea than a constitutionally defensible position), “All we are asking for is for a few channels” where parents can be confident their children will not hear profanity or see sex scenes. In its way, Elvis’s appearance on The Milton Berle Show was TV’s gateway drug, the ‘50s sensimilla to today’s TV heroin. One wonders what would happen to the brains of the same critics were Lady Gaga to take Marty McFly’s DeLorean back to 1956 and do her thing on the same show. They would no doubt think they’d died and entered the ninth ring of hell.
Ironically, despite the moral outrage over the song’s performance, “Hound Dog” really isn’t even a paean to sex. Written in 1952 by Mike Leiber and Jerry Stoller, two young Jewish kids from Los Angeles with a shared obsession with R&B, it was intended as a musical middle finger to some worthless pond scum who’s done the singer wrong. They’d written it for blues legend Big Mama Thornton, who later described them as a couple of kids with the song “written on the back of a paper bag.” She altered it as she saw fit, made the phrasings her own, and had the members of her band howl like dogs behind her. She recorded the song in early 1953, and it was released in March. Within the first week of its release, based on a rave in Billboard, another singer recorded a country version, and by the year’s end a total of six country recordings of the song had been released. By 1964, 24 recorded versions of the song—including Elvis’—would exist. It was the biggest hit of Big Mama Thornton’s career.
Her version could hardly be more different than Elvis’, a growly rhumba blues that would be completely at home on basically any Tom Waits album from Rain Dogs on. The lyrics—Lieber’s originals—are more straightforwardly bluesy and make more narrative sense. To my taste Thornton’s version is much grittier and more soulful, and has the deeply satisfying feel of being sung with full vitriol to one particular scumbag, as opposed to Elvis’s more impersonally tongue-in-cheek version. In a 1987 interview, Lieber said that the chorus was code for “You ain’t nothin’ but a motherfucker,” and with Thornton’s fiery growl it’s not a difficult substitution in the mind to make.
Elvis would have known Thornton’s original, but he found his pop version during his first time performing in Vegas. Despite the ill fit between his style and the adult, sit-down audience for which he and his band were performing—like Spinal Tap playing for the air force officer’s club—Elvis loved Vegas, blissfully unaware of the central place it would eventually have in his life. He and the band spent their free time seeing other musicians perform around town. He and his band’s favorite was the lounge act for the Sands, Freddie Bell and the Bellboys.
The Bellboys had had a minor hit with their own pop version of “Hound Dog” the year before in 1955. To turn it into a pop song, they had dropped a verse and changed the lyrics—to Lieber’s great annoyance—so that the hound dog in question is no longer “snoopin’ round my door,” but is now “cryin’ all the time” and the phrase “you can wag your tail/but I ain’t gonna feed you no more” was tossed in favor of the rhythmically nimbler if narratively less sensible phrase “you ain’t never caught a rabbit/ and you ain’t no friend o’ mine.” It now served as the Bellboys’ main showstopper, and Elvis his band, drummer D.J. Fontana, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, decided they had to add it to their act. It would quickly become Elvis’ closer for a long time to come.
Lieber and Stoller, ‘50s hipsters to the core, weren’t pleased with the pop direction Freddie and the Bellboys and then Elvis had taken their song. They were dismissive of Elvis’ ability and assumed he was ignorant of his music’s history, probably in nearly exactly the same way I was once dismissive of Justin Bieber. For my part, I assumed Bieber was just some A&R guy’s bubbly commercial product: take cheesy love song, add cute young singer, and stir. Then I humored my daughter, five years old and suffering from, as she then mispronounced it, “Beaver Fever,” and, together with her and my wife, watched the Bieber documentary Never Say Never. While it’s safe to say I’ll never be listening to "Baby " on my way to work, the movie was genuinely fascinating and watching Bieber as a three-year-old playing on his toy drums and then at five on his real set is pretty much a wonder to behold. For Lieber and Stoller, it would be the summer of ’57 when they were hired—largely against their will—to write the songs for Jailhouse Rock, that they finally befriended Elvis and grew to appreciate both his very real talent and his deep love and knowledge of R&B.
A month after the hip shake heard ‘round the world, Elvis was scheduled for a July 1st appearance on The Steve Allen Show. Allen, for the benefit of the more prudish members of his audience, had made some public noise about possibly canceling Elvis’s appearance, but with Elvis at the top of all three charts that existed at the time—R&B, pop and country—there was little chance of that actually happening.
Instead, Allen devised a plan for cleaning Elvis up. The night of the show, Allen introduced “the new Elvis Presley,” one dressed in white tie and tails. He opened with his current pop hit, “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.” Then Allen wheeled out an actual female basset hound wearing a small top hat strapped to its head. The hound gazed at the audience with a supremely sad, baleful face, refusing to look at Elvis despite his numerous good-humored attempts to turn her head and sing into her doleful eyes. Elvis remains a good sport, but it’s clear from his body language, from the stunted jerks of his head and shoulders, that he is working fiercely to not burst into his now-notorious hip swivel, like a schoolboy trying to restrain a bobbing knee. In the end, Elvis, a dog lover himself and eventually an owner of many, many dogs as well as a menagerie of other animals, gives the hound a genuine hug, and nuzzles it and kisses it on the neck, probably in sympathy as a fellow sufferer.
That night The Steve Allen Show killed The Ed Sullivan Show in the ratings. Sullivan had repeatedly vowed to never have Elvis on his show, but as J-Biebs would say, never say never. Within two weeks Sullivan caved, eventually signing Presley for not one but three appearances, the first slated for September 9. Sullivan blew off criticisms of his reversal, saying he had been going on hearsay, and about Elvis’s Milton Berle Show appearance he did a complete and unapologetic 180, accusing everyone else of overreacting by saying, “I don’t know why everybody picked on Presley, I thought the whole show was dirty and vulgar.”
On July 2nd, the morning after The Steve Allen Show, Elvis and his band would finally commit “Hound Dog” to vinyl. After 31 takes, they had the full two-minute blast complete with Scotty Moore’s jangly guitar solo (Moore would later refer to it as “ancient psychedelia”) and D.J. Fontana’s trademark machine gun drum attack. That afternoon they recorded “Don’t Be Cruel.” The single of “Hound Dog,” with “Don’t Be Cruel” as the nominal A-side, was released on July 13th and would hit the #1 spot slightly over a month later, on August 18th, where it would remain for a record-breaking 11 weeks, replaced only by his own new single “Love Me Tender” on November 3rd. “Hound Dog” would become Elvis’ best-selling single ever, and in 2004 Rolling Stone would place it as #19 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, the highest rank for any of Elvis’ eleven entries on the list.
January 16, 2012
An Excerpt from Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice by Voice of Witness
[Originally published September 14, 2011.]
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Available now from Voice of Witness, Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice, is edited by Alia Malek, an author (A Country Called Amreeka) and former Department of Justice attorney. A groundbreaking collection of oral histories, Patriot Acts tells the stories of men and women who have been needlessly swept up in the War on Terror. In their own words, narrators recount personal experiences of the post-9/11 backlash that have deeply altered their lives and communities. For more information about Voice of Witness visit voiceofwitness.org.
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On March 24, 2005, Adama Bah, a sixteen-year-old Muslim girl, awoke at dawn to discover nearly a dozen armed FBI agents inside her family’s apartment in East Harlem. They arrested her and her father, Mamadou Bah, and transported them to separate detention facilities. A government document leaked to the press claimed that Adama was a potential suicide bomber but failed to provide any evidence to support this claim. Released after six weeks in detention, Adama was forced to live under partial house arrest with an ankle bracelet, a government-enforced curfew, and a court-issued gag order that prohibited her from speaking about her case. In August of 2006, Adama’s father was deported back to Guinea, Africa. Adama, who had traveled to the United States with her parents from Guinea as a child, also found herself facing deportation. She would spend the next few years fighting for asylum and struggling to support her family in the United States and Guinea.
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The morning of March 24, 2005, my family and I were in the house sleeping.
Someone knocked on the door, and my mom went and opened it. These men barged in, waking us up. I always sleep with the blanket over my head. They pull the blanket off my head, I look up, I see a man. He said, “You’ve got to get out!” I’m like, What the hell, what’s going on?
I saw about ten to fifteen people in our apartment and right outside our door in the hallway. They were mostly men, but there were two women. Some had FBI jackets, and others were from the police department and the DHS. We were all forced out of the bed and told to sit in the living room. They were going through papers, throwing stuff around, yelling and talking to each other, then whispering. I heard them yelling at my mother in the background, and my mom can’t speak much English, and they were pulling her into the kitchen, yelling at her, “We’re going to deport you and your whole family!”
This whole time, I was thinking, What’s going on? What are they talking about? I knew my dad had an issue with his papers, but I didn’t think that my mom did. They kept saying, “We’re going to send all of you back to your country.”
Then I saw my dad walking in, in handcuffs. They had gone to the mosque to get him. It was the scariest thing you could ever see; I had just never seen my father so powerless. He was always this guy you didn’t mess with. If he said do it, you did it. He was just someone you didn’t cross paths with.
They took him to the kitchen, whispered something to him.
He sat down, looked at us. He said, “Everything’s going to be fine, don’t worry.”
And then I knew nothing was fine, I knew something was wrong. They told him to tell us what was going on. He told us that they were going to arrest him and they were going to take him away.
The FBI agents told me to get up and get my sneakers. I was thinking they wanted to see my sneaker collection. I have all types of colors of sneakers. I went and grabbed them. I said, “I have this one, I have this one, I have this one.”
One of the agents said, “Choose one.”
My favorite color is blue, so I picked up a blue pair and said, “This one.”
He said, “Put them on.”
I said, “Okay, but I know they fit me.”
He said, “Put them on!” He was very nasty. Then he said, “All those earrings have to go out.” I have eight piercings on each side, a nose ring, and a tongue ring. I went to the kitchen to take them off, and they followed me in there.
My breath was stinking. I asked, “Can I at least brush my teeth? My breath stinks really bad. Can I use the bathroom?”
They said, “No. We have to go. You’re coming with us.”
I said, “Where am I going to go? Am I going with my dad?” I put on my jacket. They let me put my headscarf and abaya on. Then one of the women took out handcuffs. I panicked so badly, I was stuttering, “What did I do? Where are we going?”
First time in my life, I’m sixteen years old, in handcuffs. I looked at my dad, and he said, “Just do what they say.”
My mom didn’t know I was going. When we got out the door, she said, “Where she go? Where she go?” the agents said, “We’re taking her,” and they held my mom back. The man who seemed to be in charge put his hands on my mother to stop her.
They took me and my dad and put us in the same car. I was scared. I said to him, “What’s going on? What’s going to happen?” My dad said, “Don’t say anything, we’re going to get a lawyer. It’s okay, everything is going to be fine.”
There were two Escalades driving with us. I was looking around, paying attention. I recognized the Brooklyn Bridge, I recognized a lot of landmarks, but I didn’t recognize the building where my father and I were taken. We got out of the car and we walked past a security booth where the cars drive up to, before taking a ramp beneath the building to the parking lot. Once we were inside the building, they put me in my own cell. It was white, with a bench. No bars. No windows. There was a door that had a tiny glass pane, and I could see who was out there. I just saw a bunch of computers and tables, and people walking back and forth and talking. I kept seeing them talk to my dad.
I don’t know how long I was in there.
I was nervous, I was panicking, I was crying, I was trying to figure out what was going on. And I was constantly using the bathroom.
The toilet was an open toilet, though. There was a camera on the ceiling in the middle of the room. I was wondering, Can they see me peeing? I just wrapped blankets around me as I was peeing.
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Hours later, Adama was removed from her cell for questioning, during which she learned that she was not, in fact, a U.S. citizen. While being fingerprinted, she saw that another teen from her mosque, named Tashnuba, had also been detained. Here, she recounts her final interrogation before being transported to a detention facility in Pennsylvania.
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Finally I was brought to another room. This room had a table, a chair on one side, and two chairs on the other side. A federal agent walked in. She said, “I need to talk to you about something.” The questions she was asking had nothing to do with immigration. They were terrorism questions. She asked me about people from London, about people from all over the world. I thought, What’s going on?
The male interrogator told me that the religious study group Tashnuba was part of had been started by a guy who was wanted by the FBI. I had no idea if that was true or not.
The study group at the mosque was all women. So it was women learning about religion, women’s empowerment, why we cover, how we do the prayer, when to pray, things like that. It was more for converts and new people who had just come into Islam. There was nothing about jihad or anything like that.
I wasn’t part of the group, but Tashnuba was. We were the same age, sixteen. So, they asked me about this group and they told me they’d taken my computer and my diary. My diary was a black-and-white notebook. I had phone numbers, I had notes, I had stories in it, I had everything. Basically, they asked me about every contact in there, they asked me about every little thing. But, there’s nothing in there about jihad, there’s nothing in there about anything that’s suspicious. There was nothing in there at all. So I wasn’t worried.
They said, “We have your computer, we can find whatever you’re hiding.”
I said, “Go ahead, look in my computer. I have nothing to hide.”
They kept making a scene, like there was something big there. They said, “Don’t lie to us. If you lie to us, we’ll have proof, we’ll catch you in your lie.”
I knew there was nothing in my computer, but at the end of the day, I started to doubt myself. I thought, Okay, what’s going on now? Is there something there? Their technique is to make you doubt yourself. But then I thought, Wait a minute, I’m not this person. What are they talking about?
The interrogation lasted a long time. This Secret Service guy came in. He asked me how I felt about Bush. I said, “I don’t like him.” I was being very honest with them. There was nothing to hide.
The Secret Service guy was just too aggressive. He said, “I don’t understand—why do you choose to cover when women choose to wear less and less every day?”
I said, “It’s freedom of choice. Some people want to show some stuff, some people want to hide things. Some people want to preserve their bodies, some people don’t want to. They want to show it to the whole world.”
He said, “I don’t understand. You’re young, why are you doing this?”
Then they asked me about Tashnuba. They asked me about her name, they asked me about her family, but I told them, “I don’t know her.”
They said, “Tashnuba wrote you on this list.”
I said, “What list?”
They said, “She signed you up to be a suicide bomber.”
I said, “Are you serious? Why would she do that? She doesn’t seem like that type of person.”
They were trying to make me seem like I was wrong about who I knew and who I didn’t know.
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