The Curator of Schlock #25: The Exterminator

31 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, The Curator of Schlock

The Curator of Schlock #25 by Jeffrey Shuster

The Exterminator: He takes out the trash so you don’t have to.

1980’s The Exterminator from director James Glickenhouse is tour-de-force of violence, mayhem, and madness. The movie starts out during the Vietnam War where a bunch of American soldiers are being held captive by the Viet Cong. One of these American soldiers is John Eastland (Robert Ginty, of Warrior of the Lost World fame) and he watches in horror as one of his compatriots is nearly decapitated by one of the Viet Cong. I say nearly because his head just kind of dangles to side like a hangnail. Just as it seems John is going to suffer the same fate, John’s buddy Michael Jefferson shows up save the day. The Viet Cong get riddled with bullets and John and Michael go back home to New York City to work in a grocery warehouse.

Of course, the day comes when some local punks decide to start stealing cases of beer from this grocery warehouse. John discovers their nefarious plot and they hold him at knifepoint. Don’t worry. It’s not long before Michael bails John out again using some good old-fashioned street fighting to lay those punks flat on their backs. Unfortunately, Michael’s victory is short lived.

Those same punks corner him the next day and beat him until he ends up in the hospital paralyzed and breathing through a respirator.

John decides to go find the punks who did this to his friend. He locates them in a tenement building where they’re busy listening to “Disco Inferno” by The Trammps. You know, any punk gang that listens to “Disco Inferno” can’t be all that bad.

Still, I guess John would disagree with me since he shoots a bunch of them and throws their bodies in the basement for the rats to feast on.

John doesn’t stop there. He goes after a mob boss who’s been withholding money from paychecks and grinds him up in a meat grinder. He murders a pimp who specialized in providing young boys to powerful clients, one of whom is a U.S. Senator. The senator also has a yen burning young women with a soldering iron. John sets the pimp on fire and sends a bullet through the senator.

Throughout the movie, there’s a police detective by the name of James Dalton (Christopher George) who’s always on the trail of the mystery vigilante the news media has dubbed “The Exterminator.” And there you have it. Will detective Dalton crack the case? You’ll have to watch the movie! In leau of a trailer, here’s a video of “Disco Inferno.”

Six Things I Learned from The Exterminator

Dobermans are the ultimate in home security.
Rats will eat your face even if you’re still alive.
Don’t try to get the better of a man who’s holding you captive above a meat grinder.
“Disco Inferno” still grooves after all this time.
Bulletproof vests come in handy if you’re a vigilante.
Christopher George has a Cheshire Cat smile.

___________

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47) is an MFA candidate and instructor at the University of Central Florida.

Heroes Never Rust #26: Daredevil: End of Days

29 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Heroes Never Rust

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Daredevil: End of Days, Heroes Never Rust, sean ironman

Heroes Never Rust #26 by Sean Ironman

Daredevil: End of Days

In the late 1960s, a few years after the creation of the Marvel Universe, an edict was passed down to the comic creators that there should be only the illusion of change. There was a lot of money to be made with these characters, so, in some ways, they were frozen. The characters would never come to an end. In 2002, Marvel began The End series—comics depicting the end of certain characters and created by a writer and artist who had famous runs on the character before. Some of these, like Iron Man: The End and Incredible Hulk: The End, are one issue long, while others, like Wolverine: The End and Fantastic Four: The End, are six issues long. The longest is X-Men: The End, which is 3 six-issue mini-series. The best of The End comics, in my opinion, is Daredevil: End of Days, written by Brian Michael Bendis and David Mack, with art by Klaus Janson, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Alex Maleev. Many comics I’ve read that feature multiple artists end up awkward on the page, but Janson, Sienkiewicz, and Maleev, along with the writers, make the comic flow, with the change of art style always making sense. Also, unlike other comics in The End series, Daredevil: End of Days is considered to be canon, the actual end of the character.

Now, the problem with a comic stating from the outset that it will show the end of a certain character is that there may not be much tension. The reader knows the character will die or leave their superhero identity behind by the end of the series. If not, the reader may feel ripped off, tricked. Daredevil: End of Days solves the problem by killing off the hero in the opening scene. And not in a way that has the character jump into a building that explodes soon after. The reader is shown in great detail the death of Matt Murdock.

Pacing is this series’ best friend. Honestly, this is one of the most well-paced comics I’ve read in years. It opens with a full page shot of a close-up of Daredevil without his mask getting punched in the face. Comic fans will recognize the assailant by his white gloves as Bullseye. The inks on the image are heavy, making the fight look dirty and violent. Daredevil’s eyes are shut tight, or swollen shut. In the top left, with great placement, is a single small caption. “They say the fight itself lasted over an hour and forty-five minutes.” That’s all the reader gets on that page. The striking image stops the reader, who immediately feels the weight of the situation.

The next two pages feature a variety of panels showing the fight continue. Very little text is given to keep pacing up. On the top of page two, both characters stand beyond the panel’s confinement. The fight is like none before. They even break panel rules. Both characters are torn and bloody. The beaten Daredevil’s big defense is to throw a box poorly at Bullseye.

It misses.

As the fight rages on, pedestrians snap photos and record video.

Pages four and five are one shot. Just in case anyone doubted we’d be shown the death of Daredevil, he’s killed, clearly and absolutely. Swinging from left to right to allow the image to flow from one page to the next, Bullseye takes his stick and slams it through Matt Murdock’s head. We clearly see the stick come out the other side. Brains, blood, and dirt explode to the right.

In the background, cameras go off. A crowd has gathered.

The comic opens with the death of the title character.

Bendis and Mack have my interest. I have no idea where this story’s going. We don’t even know why the two were fighting.

Pages six and seven and another double page spread—this time of the Daily Bugle’s office. Now more text captions come into play. We’re not following Daredevil. The text caption from page one wasn’t Matt Murdock speaking, instead it was Ben Urich, a reporter from the Daily Bugle and a supporting character from the Daredevil comics. TVs around the office play footage from the fight. Urich is upset that people just watched the hero die after all Daredevil has done for the city. Soon, Urich is tasked with covering the death and begins to look into the meaning of Daredevil’s last word, “Mapone.”

For those that don’t follow Daredevil, the reader is given a recap, and then shown the character beating his old villain, The Kingpin, to death. “Heroes do not kill,” says Urich. He still doesn’t know what led Matt Murdock to his death, but we readers know that something got to him, something brought him to murder. The noir detective story is just beginning. We’ve seen two shocking deaths, but neither are played just for shocks. There’s a sadness to each death. Each had conseqences.

The real weight of the story though centers on Ben Urich. The Daily Bugle is going under. Print is dead. At Daredevil’s death, people just took pictures and recordings. Same thing at the death of the Kingpin. Bendis and Mack are not just telling the story of Daredevil’s death. Quite honestly, that’s a boring story. The comic is about the reporter Urich’s change to action. He’s not going to be one of those people who just watch. He’s going to figure this thing out. He’s the hero.

___________

Sean Ironman is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida, where he also serves as Managing Editor of The Florida Review and as President of the Graduate Writers’ Association. His art has appeared online at River Teeth. His writing can be read in Breakers: An Anthology of Comics and Redivider.

Versify #3: Poetry and the City

28 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Poetry, Versify

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Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Pamela Burger, Poetry, Versify, Walt Whitman

Versify #3 by Pamela Burger

Poetry and the City

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I am not a big fan of poetry about nature. I am a city girl through and through, and I like works that reflect an urban aesthetic. The thing is, living in New York day in and day out, it’s easy to forget what’s so great about the urban aesthetic.

About ten years ago, when I entered the MFA program in poetry at NYU, my father—not a poetry fan—asked me, “What do you even write about? You live in a city. How can a person in a city write poetry?”

I responded the way I often respond to my dad: I asked, “What on Earth are you talking about?”

“Well, you know, poetry is supposed to be about nature. Mountains, trees, beautiful things. There’s nothing beautiful in New York.”

The strangest thing about this statement is that my dad—and my mother, for that matter—has lived his entire life on the island of Manhattan and would sooner pull out his own hair than go camping. Once, when my parents and I were visiting my brother at college, he asked if we wanted to go for a nature walk in some nearby woods. My parents spent the four-hour car ride home laughing about this. “He wanted to walk in the woods!” They howled. “What does he think we are? Bears?”

So why was my dad so convinced that every poet would want to write in celebration of the natural world? When I pressed him, he said, “Well, that’s what I remember reading about. You know, Wordsworth, Shelley, didn’t they all write about nature?”

It isn’t surprising that someone educated in the fifties and sixties would have had such a profound and lasting exposure to the Romantic poets. To this day, heir views on the sublime power of nature have made an indelible mark on the way poetry is taught. But then, there are just as many writers who look to the city in the same way the Wordsworth and Shelley looked to the English countryside. But in a city where just getting to the office each morning is a study in irritation, it’s hard to maintain any level of wonder at the urban sublime. But for those of us frustrated with the daily grind, Walt Whitman is a great antidote. Now, there was a man who loved a crowd.

In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman’s ode to commuting in a pre-subway era, the great poet of New York addressed his fellow commuters, both present and future:

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

The poem celebrates the universal humanity of the city. Whitman calls out to the future New Yorkers “Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd.” The city for Whitman is its people, and the collective is sublime.

I thought of this poem recently, when I came across Poems by New Yorkers, a blog/social art project that pours meaning from one commuter into another. The premise is simple: Madeline Schwartzman asks strangers on the subway to write a poem. And, surprisingly, they do. Schwartzman then posts the poem, along with a photo of the writer and their handwritten work. My immediate response, before reading any of the poems, was of the eye-rolling variety. But my cynicism faded as soon as I started reading.

A lot of the poems are about actually riding the subway, and for those of us who face the frustrations of the MTA on a daily basis, it’s comforting to glimpse how others think about their commutes. But the spur-of-the-moment reflections about the writer’s day (link ), or the gripes about family, or the child’s ode to a polar bear are all more satisfying than musings about trains. When you sit in a crowded subway car surrounded by so many strangers, it’s easier to ignore the humanity around you than take it all in.

The short poems are not weighty, and they often forego poetic language in favor of prosaic observations, but they are delightful to read, if only because they return some humanity to the “crowds of men and women in usual attire” we pass by every day. The fact that many of the poems are about pedestrian matters is actually refreshing. The poems feel unselfconscious, truly spontaneous, because there isn’t time for revision. These poems reflect the immediate experience of being on a subway car, the visceral reality that so many strangers silently share every day. In this way, I think the project as a whole is a portrait of what can be inspiring about living in a big city. Besides, I’d much rather find the sublime on the subway than in a walk in the woods. I mean, what am I, a bear?

___________

Pamela Burger has a very short attention span, which is why she loves poetry. Her poems have appeared in several small magazines you might never have read. She lives in Brooklyn, teaches writing and literature, and is an instructional technologist for the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College.

In Boozo Veritas #26: An Open Letter To Misogynist Bloggers

27 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in In Boozo Veritas

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In Boozo Veritas, Misogyny, Teege Braune

In Boozo Veritas #26 by Teege Braune

An Open Letter To Misogynist Bloggers

Thanks to the internet everybody now has the opportunity to share their opinion about everything. Most of the time I use this technology to talk about drinking and literature. These are subjects I enjoy and perhaps, once in awhile, I can write something about them that someone else will enjoy too. This is ultimately my goal: to be entertaining and maybe sometimes even a little thought-provoking. I try really hard to keep my blog pretty positive, even if I don’t always feel this way in real life, because there is already enough hatred on the internet, and I don’t want to contribute to that culture, but you forced me to break my own rule because you are just so goddamn stupid I can’t take it anymore.

Do you really have such a problem with short haircuts on women that you feel the need to write blog after stupid blog about it? Is this really such a goddamn travesty with you that every time I login to Facebook I have to see another ridiculous article entitled “All Girls With Short Hair Are Damaged” or something equally as offensive? For the record, my friends are not sharing your idiotic blogs because they agree with you. Mostly they add a tagline like, “Is this for real?” because they are equally as dumbfounded as I am by your hateful rhetoric. I don’t know why I continue to read your poor excuse for writing. Sometimes I wonder if I actually look for things that make me angry. Okay, I guess I have my own issues too, but I have to say this: if your goal was simply to be inflammatory, then you’ve succeeded. You’ve aroused my ire, and now I’m coming for you.

Yes, I’m taking this personally but not for the reasons you think. It’s true my fiancé has short hair. I love her, am desperately attracted to her, and would feel the same whether she had short hair, long hair, or no hair at all. My opinion of her hair, or any other woman’s hair for that matter, is a moot point because women are not sexual objects on display for my approval. Their physical appearances and stylistic choices have nothing to do with me or you or our personal preferences. If you can’t find a woman who fits into your narrow, unrealistic prejudice of what women should look like, tough shit. Be lonely. It is nothing less than you deserve. Any woman would be better off without your stupid ass weighing her down. Your ludicrous reasons for long hair don’t even make any sense: its a symbol of youth and fertility? What the hell is that even supposed to mean? Based on what anthropological evidence do you make this claim? I think the reason that short hair bothers you is much simpler. I think short hair is often a reflection of a woman’s confidence and this is a quality that you are terrified of women possessing. This isn’t to say that women with long hair can’t be just as secure, but my guess is that you would rail against any other fashion choice that represented a woman’s independence. Short hair is an easy, obvious target, so you make it your scapegoat when what you are really saying is this: “I am scared shitless of any woman who doesn’t fit my limited and hateful misunderstanding of femininity.” Sorry, man, this is going to be a really frightening world for you.

So I’m not taking your blog personally because my fiancé has short hair. I’m taking it personally because it is an insult to people I love and for whom I have undying respect. I am taking it personally because you contribute to a culture that constantly attempts to dehumanize these amazing women, a culture that turns a blind eye to sexual assault, that apologizes for rapists, and blames victims for the violence acted upon them. I take it personally because I identify with these intelligent women more than I will ever identify with a hateful, ignorant misogynist like yourself, and I hold you personally responsible for the fact that after all the social progress we’ve made even in the last twenty years, we still live in a world that often treats women like nothing more than objects of men’s sexual fantasies.

My fiancé’s short hair is beside the point. That being said, heed this well, shit head: woe be it to the misogynist dirtbag who tells the love of my life she would be hotter if she had long hair. I would love to see the goddamn shit show that would take place if you had the audacity to do that, but we both know you never will. You’re a coward. You don’t even have the courage to write your blog under your real name. You use some fake moniker and hide behind the anonymity of the internet. Do you think you are some champion of maleness, finally saying what other men are thinking, redeeming manhood by calling out women? You are nothing but a sad agent of hate, squawking into the sea of voices that is the internet. I wish I could tell you that your opinion means less than nothing, but unfortunately this isn’t true. You are destructive, a bane to culture, an enemy on the road to progress, and we shall never be free until you are stamped out of existence.

___________

Teege Braune (episode 72, episode 75, episode 77) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.

Episode 82: Susan Lilley!

25 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Poetry

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Anthony Jacobson, Carlton Melton, Irvine Welsh, Jimi Hendrix, Literature of Florida, Marabou Stork Nightmares, Night Windows, Photos of Photos, Poetry, Satellite Beach, Smoke Drip, Susan Lilley, teaching, Trainspotting

Episode 82 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

On this week’s show, I talk to the poet Susan Lilley,

Plus Anthony Jacobson writes about how the books of Irvine Welsh changed his life.

Irvine Welsh is on the left, Tony on the right.

NOTES

Quentin Tarantino vows to shelve his upcoming film project, The Hateful Eight, after the screenplay’s first draft was leaked (according to Deadline).

The Florida Writers’ Conference goes from February 13th-15th, ending with the Florida premiere of Terry Giliam’s new film, written by Pat Rushin, The Zero Theorem. Click here to learn how to register for the conference.

Carlton Melton‘s “Smoke Drip,” from their album Photos of Photos, accompanied Anthony Jacobson’s “Hang-Up at the Gorgie Venture Hostel for Exceptional Young Men.”

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Night Windows

Episode 82 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

The Curator of Schlock #25: Savage Streets

24 Friday Jan 2014

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Jeffrey Shuster, Linda Blair, Savage Streets, The Curator of Schlock

The Curator of Schlock #25 by Jeffrey Shuster

Savage Streets (Linda Blair has awesome big hair!)

What’s this? A female vigilante? That’s right, everyone. Linda Blair can stand toe to toe with the Charles Bronsons and Dolph Lundgrens of the world and towers above the Tom Skerritts. It’s time for Savage Streets!

1984’s Savage Streets from director Danny Steinmann features Linda Blair as Brenda, a tough street cookie who lives by her own rules. These are the Savage Streets after all. Brenda has a girl gang of her own, the Sirens, but they don’t start trouble unless the creeps are asking for it. Unfortunately, there’s this gang of local drug dealers called the Scars and they’re as creepy as the come. They almost run over Brenda’s deaf/mute sister Heather (Linnea Quigly). This doesn’t sit well with Brenda and she and the Sirens take the Scars’ convertible for a little joyride. They fill it to brim with garbage and when the Scars discover what they did, their leader Jake (Robert Dryer) swears revenge.

Brenda and the Sirens attend a high school that’s completely out of control! Students don’t pay attention during poetry lessons. They make jokes during sex education class. They even insult the gym teacher behind her back. The head jock loves Brenda. The head cheerleader hates Brenda since the head jock is the cheerleader’s boyfriend. A catfight in the girl’s shower ensues. Unfortunately, it’s when Brenda is involved with this altercation that the Scars decide to rape her sister.

The cops won’t do anything about the Scars. With her sister fighting for life and death in the hospital, Brenda wants the Scars to pay for what they did. In the meantime, she has to help her friend, Francine, with her wedding preparations. Guess who turns out to be the Scar’s next victim? Jake lifts Francine over his head and throws her over the Expressway. One of his goons throws Francine’s wedding dress over while saying, “Here comes the bride. She’s all drenched in red.”

Brenda decides it’s time to take the law into her own hands. She teases her hair out to ginormous proportions and dons a skintight leather jumpsuit. She lures Jake’s henchmen into a trap with her feminine wiles. The goons wander around what looks to be a rug store, following the sound of Brenda’s taunting voice. When they finally catch up to it, all they find is a tape recorder. And then Brenda shoots one of them in the neck with a crossbow. The other falls into a pair of bear traps.

That still leaves Jake to deal with. Brenda toys with him, shooting an arrow in each of his legs. He manages to chase after her, but gets caught up in a snare. Brenda says she’s going to slaughter him like a pig. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but let’s just Jake gets what’s coming to him. If only there had been a Savage Streets 2!

Ten Things I Learned from Savage Streets

Linda Blair is dangerous
Crossbows are awesome.
80s teased out hair is awesome.
Paint can be flammable.
Poems are about sex and/or death.
Suburban teenagers keep their gang clothes hidden in their backpacks.
Linda Blair wears her sunglasses at night.
Pulling arrows out of your legs is messy business.
The more studs on your leather jacket, the more evil you are.
A thirty-year-old B movie can still entertain with the best of them.

___________

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47) is an MFA candidate and instructor at the University of Central Florida.

Loading the Canon #15: Chihuly in the Desert

23 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Art, Loading the Canon

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Loading the Canon #15 by Helena-Anne Hittel

Not Your Mom’s Garden Art!

Wait a second, I recognize that glasswork. Are we gonna do Chihuly AGAIN?

Yes. Yes we are.

A few weeks ago, I flew to Arizona with about 260 or so members of the Marching Knights for our performance at the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, where UCF became CHAMPIONS! Whatever time we didn’t spend either at rehearsals, in uniform, performing, or otherwise, we had a choice and three precious hours to spend. We could go to the Scottsdale Fashion Mall, the Musical Instrument Museum, or the Desert Botanical Garden. I had been reluctant to go to the gardens at first because of monetary reasons. I had a limited amount of per diem, after all. After a little more thought, though, this was an easy decision.

We have malls in Florida. Granted that Scottsdale was the size of three Millenias put together and I’d classify it as a good place to wander for a while, we’d be going there for lunch before we flew back to Orlando anyway. That was out. As for Option 2, I like instruments, and I like museums (DUH), but we were in the middle of Arizona. In the desert. The gardens were calling my name. There aren’t many cacti in Florida, I loved the climate out there (asthmatic lungs rejoice!), and really, how many other times would I be in Arizona? This was my second (last?) trip out there. While others complained and opted for the hotel or other venues (and I quote: “I don’t wanna go look at a cactus for three hours.”), I shelled out the $12 student admission fee and went in. It wasn’t until after I had done so that I realized that Dale Chihuly had installed art here, and that I’d be there to see it. So, I freaked out like a preteen girl at a Beiber concert throughout my time there. Armed with a dying iPhone that I’d forgotten to charge earlier, I took about 50 photos. Here is a sampling of said photos. I’m eternally thankful that Dale encourages photography. Put on some comfy shoes, Odysseans, we’re goin’ for a stroll.

I waltzed right past this magnificent work of art on the way in and didn’t even notice it wasn’t a cactus.. This is merely one testament to Chihuly and his team’s amazing skill.

It all works so perfectly here. The colors of the glass, even the reeds that you can easily pick out from the actual plant life, look natural.

___________

Helena-Anne Hittel (Episode 35, essay) earned a B.A. in Art History at the University of Central Florida.

Heroes Never Rust #25: The Important Stuff

22 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Film, Heroes Never Rust

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Heroes Never Rust #25 by Sean Ironman

The Important Stuff

When adapting a work into another medium, let’s say for the sake of this column adapting a comic book into a film, one can’t include everything. That’s understood by most audiences, I believe. What the adapters strive for, however, is to keep the important stuff, the stuff that makes the characters who they are. I find this especially true for the origins or the characters, and I say origins not just about what gained the character their superpowers but also when they decided to fight crime. For example, Krypton must explode in a Superman film. Batman’s parents must be gunned down in front of him. Uncle Ben must die in a Spider-man film because Peter Parker didn’t stop the gunman when he had the chance. Even with all the changes in the X-Men films, they are still sworn to protect a world that fears and hates them. That’s what makes them the X-Men.

One of the best adaptations of recent years was the first Iron Man film. One of the reasons the story was successful is not just that the filmmakers kept Tony Stark’s imprisonment and injury with shrapnel near his heart, but it gave him a character arc with starting him as a weapons manufacturer, like in the comics. It gives the character something to do other than get in a suit and fight bad guys.

There have been a few bad adaptations over the years, of course. A few I think, might have had problems with special effects or acting or the entire third act, but to me the most aggravating aspects of an adaptation is when the characters’ reasons for being are changed. To make this easier to follow, I’ll concentrate on three characters across four adaptations—The Punisher starring Thomas Jane, both Hulk films, and The Fantastic Four. I think these films suffer from the same problem. The characters are made to be too good. They want to save people, something bad happens to them even though all they want to do is help, and they become superheroes.

Let’s start with the Fantastic Four film starring Jessica Alba and Michael Chiklis. At the beginning of the film, Reed Richards, who later becomes Mr. Fantastic, wants to research some clouds of cosmic energy in space to study how evolution was triggered. He makes a deal with Dr. Victor von Doom to use Doom’s space station. For this, Doom gets the majority of the profits from whatever this experiment yields. Right away, Richards is the good man and Doom the greedy evil one. The experiment goes haywire and everyone gains superpowers. Richards continues being good and Doom continues being bad. There’s no meaning to it all.

There’s no character arc.

Plus, it simplifies the guilt Reed Richards has over Ben Grimm’s transformation into the Thing. If Grimm becomes a monster because Richards was trying to better mankind, it makes the transformation more of a bad accident and something one can forgive Richards for inadvertently causing.

In the comics, which take place in the 1960s, Richards is hell bent on beating the Russians into space. His mission has nothing to do with the betterment of mankind—only himself and America. The four sneak past guards to get to the shuttle, which has nothing to do with Doom. They steal the shuttle and blast off into space. The Fantastic Four are created due to Richards’s pride and selfishness. When Ben Grimm is transformed, the reader feels for him, not just because he’s grotesque, but because it was for a stupid reason. It was a mistake. The comic isn’t just about the possibilities of science, but a cautionary tale. It’s a morality play.

The Hulk adaptations go through something similar. In Ang Lee’s The Hulk, David Banner attempts to mutate DNA to allow soldiers to heal quickly in battle. He’s denied permission for human trials and puts himself through the process. This mutated DNA is passed on to his son, Bruce Banner. Bruce grows up and researches nanomeds, which he hopes can used for medical purposes. Things go wrong and he’s exposed to gamma radiation, mutating him into the Hulk. In The Incredible Hulk, while the film doesn’t cover the origin, there’s mention of the purpose of Banner’s experiments being immunity for humans to gamma radiation, as well as Thunderbolt Ross’s secret to continue the super soldier program that created Captain America. In both of these instances, Banner is made the victim of a laboratory accident while trying to better mankind.

But that’s not how the Hulk was created in the comics. Bruce Banner, in the comic book, was testing a nuclear bomb that produced a high gamma-radiation output. His goal was to kill people. Sure, he went out into the testing field to save Rick Jones, but the bomb didn’t go off by accident. His colleague, Igor Starsky, who was a Soviet spy, set off the bomb in an attempt to kill Banner and end the project. I understand you can’t have a Soviet spy in a time period when the Soviet Union doesn’t exist. The Hulk, though, is a metaphor for the result of our warmongering. It’s the result of our messing with nuclear power in an effort to kill. We have unleashed this beast onto the planet, a beast we cannot control. It’s not just good person has shitty luck.

The Punisher starring Thomas Jane is in the same category. My good friend Jeff Shuster recently covered Dolph Lundgren’s The Punisher, so I’ll cover the Thomas Jane one. Plus, I love Thomas Jane and will watch anything that man is in. In the film, like all three Punisher films, Frank Castle’s family is murdered and he becomes the Punisher. This is the only one of the three that spends time with the family, instead of beginning after that event has already occurred. Castle pisses off a mobster played by John Travolta, so Travolta has Castle’s family killed. Something similar occurs in the Lundgren version, with the family being murdered in a mob hit. It’s sad, yes, but at the end of the day the film becomes a revenge flick, making the Punisher like every other vigilante.

I love the Punisher. If I ever make a name for myself in writing, I want to write the Punisher, comic or film. I find him to be one the most fascinating fictional characters of the last few decades. But he’s far from a simple revenge story.

First, his family isn’t killed because Frank Castle pisses someone off while being a cop or other member of law enforcement. They were killed randomly. The family was having a picnic in Central Park and two rival gangs had a shootout. It had nothing to do with Frank Castle. It could happen to anyone. Second, Castle doesn’t just want revenge. He snaps. He’s a veteran of the Vietnam War where he witnessed atrocities that stayed with him long after the war. Read Garth Ennis’s and Darick Robertson’s Born when you get the chance for Frank Castle’s last tour in the war. Castle is a man who can no longer accept the gray area of the world. There’s no inbetween with him. He’s a psychopath who believes the bad members of society should be punished. While on one hand I may agree with him, storytellers need to balance that feeling with the other hand that says he’s a mad man and I should be horrified by his actions. I find the character sad. He’s witnessed the horrors of the violence we inflict on one another and lost his family, his future. He damns himself in an effort to say it’s not right, not fair.

The Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and the Punisher are all characters who get caught up in something greater than themselves—the weak parts of ourselves—our aggressive sides and the violence. Like the mythology before them, they are morality tales. While we’re glad they end up doing some good, they are not what we strive to be. They have two purposes. First, to serve as reminders of the bad things we can do to others and ourselves. Second, that no matter how badly we messed up, we can turn things around. Reed Richards fucked up. Ben Grimm is a monster. But they can help. They can do good. All of these characters are more complex than what adaptations have shown people. Sometimes it’s not the flashier sides of the characters that are important. I couldn’t care less if the Hulk wears purple pants or Johnny Storm is white. But who they were before their respective tragedies and what they do after is important. That’s worth keeping.

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Versify #2: Poetry and Film

21 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Poetry, Versify

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Versify #2 by Pamela Burger

Poetry and Film

Poetry and film seem to occupy two ends of the cultural spectrum; the general consensus is that poetry is esoteric and elitist, whereas film is fun and has mass appeal. Although I hesitate to recommend the much-loathed Martin Amis for fear of being thought a douchebag, I do highly recommend the story “Career Move,” from his collection Heavy Water. The New Yorker, who originally published the story in 1992, describes the plot as a “parody of the literary magazine world and Hollywood: the poets and screenwriters have changed places.” In Amis’s topsy-turvy world, a sonnet can open in 437 theaters and make seventeen million dollars in its first weekend. A screenplay writer can only hope, at best, to have his script published in a tiny magazine that pays nothing and has no distribution. It is an immensely satisfying read.

Motionpoems imagines a world where the populism of film and the esotericism of poetry don’t have to exist in opposition to one another. Their stated goal is to “broaden the audience for poetry by turning great contemporary poems into short films.” It is a wonderful idea, not only because it makes the poems more accessible but also because there is so much potential in pairing poetry with moving images.

The results are mixed. Some of the videos veer into the precious, as is the case when a five-year-old girl reads Richard Wilbur’s poem “Ecclesiastes 11: 1” or when Angela Kassube tries to flippantly imagine Todd Bass’s “Don’t Be Flip.” The poem itself is inspired, but the film makes its humor seem silly rather than witty; the images are easy, whereas, on its own, the poem derives its poignancy from its slyness.

The videos are almost always very literal representations of the images described: David Lehman’s lines “I was in a French movie/and had only nine hours to live” are accompanied by images of a movie camera and a metronome counting off the seconds. Robert Bly’s words “comfortable earth” are spoken over an animated drawing of the globe, and his “sumptuous heaven” is a layer of clouds and birds above the earth. I was disappointed that the motionpoems I watched did not exploit the possibilities inherent in the visualizations. Why does the command “listen” have to be accompanied by a sketch of an ear? How does that enhance the poem?

It’s true that the visual component makes the experience more immersive, and when watching the motionpoems I pay more attention to the words than if I were listening to the poem as an MP3. It also takes less effort to watch than to read a poem, so I am much more likely to watch more motionpoems than I am to click through to yet more written verse. But the ease of the medium need not translate into the films themselves. Watching many of the videos, I wanted the images to enrich the poem’s meaning, to complicate or elucidate what the poem communicates, rather than simply show me exactly what I was hearing. I don’t think the poems need to be made more digestible to reach a broader audience; the immersive experience of film already makes the text more accessible, and the familiarity of video perhaps attracts those who might otherwise turn up their noses at poetry. In other words, the films need not be simplistic to be popular.

That said, I encourage everybody to watch the motionpoems themselves, because many of them are quite are enjoyable and all of them are interesting. Mark Strand’s “The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter” gets fitting treatment by Scott Wenner.

My personal favorite is the fairly simple typographical imagery paired with a joyous reading of Thomas Lux’s “Render Render”. There is kickstarter campaign to fund an installation in St. Paul going on until January 15. And while I doubt we’ll ever see motionpoems open in hundreds of theaters and making millions of dollars, it’s an innovative project that seems well worth supporting, if only to let filmmakers and poets continue exploring the relationship between two very different but clearly compatible art forms.

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In Boozo Veritas #25: Bacchus in Black Tie

20 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in In Boozo Veritas

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In Boozo Veritas #25 by Teege Braune

Bacchus in Black Tie

Agriculturally speaking, people began fermenting grapes more recently than they’ve been fermenting malts or honey. Maybe its wine’s relative newness that make it seem inherently more refined than beer. Perhaps its cultural sophistication is merely a contemporary phenomenon. My friends and I certainly didn’t regard it as such our freshman year of college when we got wasted on cheap jugs of Carlo and Rossi, though I always found fascinating the deep burgundy hue of my vomit as I puked it up later that night. The craft beer world in which I have worked for the last six and a half years can be rather elitist about wine simply because it associates wine culture with elitism. As a professional beer geek, my love of wine has always been my dirty secret. As I matured and my palate climbed up the shelf, I too was seduced by wine’s allure. I thought of it as existing in a world that was sexier and more exotic than my own.

And yet let us not forget an important fact, that wine, for all its sophistication, is alcohol, and no matter how classy you are, enough of it will get any gentleman or lady drunk. Dionysus lurks in each molecule of ethanol eager for the opportunity to rear his mystic countenance. We’ve seen them, the wealthy middle-aged lushes dressed in jacket and tie only to wind up hammered at last call, sloshing their glasses of wine, purple splotches staining the front of their white shirts. Even at a wine distributor’s trade show, Dionysus makes his appearance in the subtlest of moments. Having found myself at one of these last week, I couldn’t believe what a formal endeavor the other guests made the event. After all, why bother to put on a suit or a cocktail dress just to sample a handful of wines in the middle of the afternoon at the Tampa Museum of Art?

I showed up in jeans and a T-shirt and had no professional reason to be there. My coworker Sara had invited me to accompany her, so I tagged along thinking it would be a nice distraction from my daily routine. Hell, maybe I’ll learn something, I thought without considering that every time anyone has tried to teach me anything about wine, I tended to forget the moment I had my next glass. At 10:30 in the morning, before we even left Orlando’s city limits, the wine reps were crawling up and down the aisle of the charter bus they had rented pouring their guests glasses of some of the best champagne I’d ever had and afterwards they hosted a blind tasting, goading their passengers into guessing the origin and grape of each of the multiple bottles of very nice wine that they were sharing. It was only after this liquid breakfast that they brought out the sandwiches.

The trade show was far from a full blown Bacchanalia, but one could see Dionysus creeping around in the corners. Their was the winery owner who reminded me of Vincent Cassel’s leering, lecherous ballet instructor in Aronofsky’s Black Swan. A small but handsome man with an unspecific continental accent, he compared all of his wines to women. Unsure how the analogy worked and increasingly uncomfortable with its connotations, I nevertheless nodded my head as he explained to me that his pinot noir was like a full-figured beauty in a corset. While spitting might be considered rude in other contexts that involved tasting hand-crafted products, it is standard practice at wine shows. One must take it for granted that they will be surrounded by elegant connoisseurs regularly spurting streams of sputum into plastic buckets. They do this to keep their palates as keen as possible, yet I find that one sometimes comes across a person who seems to be enjoying the spitting more than the tasting itself. Most attempt to accomplish the unfortunately unsophisticated necessity as daintily as possible, but I found a particularly well-dressed young woman perched next to me was expectorating her enormous mouthfuls of wine as loudly and sloppily as was seemingly possible. Did I see the glimmer of a Maenad in her otherwise elegant eyes? The abject had found its way in amongst all her finery. Sara and I quickly moved away from her to avoid being caught in the crossfire of the mess she was creating while a waiter snatched the nearly overflowing bucket of backwash from the table and presented her with a fresh depository for her detritus.

Feeling our taste for wine waning, Sara and I met up with our friend Jack and the three of us made our way to the Hub, Tampa’s historical dive bar located right next door the equally historical Tampa theater.

Photo by Sara Matthews.

Jack explained that he had offended all of the wine makers by criticizing their Chardonnays while the directions on Sara’s smart phone sent us wandering around downtown looking for the elusive bar. For an establishment that doesn’t serve any food, the Hub was surprisingly crowded for two pm on a Thursday afternoon, and though the atmosphere was nothing but a cloud of smoke, the cold metal chairs, checkered tile floors, and lack of any pretension was a welcomed change of pace from the trade show only a few blocks away. Sara, disappointed that the bar had run out of Genesee Cream Ale, ordered a PBR instead. Then, remembering that she hates PBR, ordered a gin and tonic that was almost entirely gin, and after deciding against that also, ordered a Cigar City Invasion. I found myself double-fisting her rejected PBR and the strongest gin and tonic of all time as I popped dollar bills in the juke box and played one old-school country standard after another.

Pretty well tipsy by the time we began to head back to Orlando, I became frustrated by my attempt to utilize the charter bus’s restroom. At some point during the trade show, the handle to the door had fallen off and the latch had gotten stuck preventing anyone from entering. Several of us tried to use my pocket knife to jimmy the door open, but as no one was entirely sober, we had little success until one of the reps decided on a new approach and threw his entire body weight into the flimsy barrier. Sure enough the entire door handle and locking mechanism dislodged itself and landed with a thud on the floor. Relieved that I would be able to use the restroom at all, I soon found myself once again perturbed when I discovered that the door in its fractured state wouldn’t stay closed on its own. I considered just how classy I must have looked trying to hold the door shut with one had as I attempted to aim my stream with the other, a task that was all the more difficult as we bumped and jostled our way down I-4. Dribbling urine on my own shoes, I found it humorous that wine of all things had brought me to this lowly state. I crawled back to my seat and drifted off to sleep wondering if elsewhere Dionysus had turned these otherwise high-brow wine enthusiasts into his ow subjects. I dreamed of men in suits on their hands and knees retching up wine, its flavors reinvented in their guts, women nursing their own dogs after tethering their babies to leashes in the backyard, filthy orgies in which wine and blood rained down on the revelers whose sophistication had finally succumbed to the Bacchanalia for which they had secretly always yearned.

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