The Curator of Schlock #73: Scanners 3

16 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Horror, The Curator of Schlock

The Curator of Schlock #73 by Jeff Shuster

Scanners III: The Takeover

Everybody wants to rule the world,

but only Liliana Komorowska deserves to!

If Scanners 3: The Takeover isn’t schlock then I don’t know what schlock is. I know what you want to know. Does this movie feature exploding heads? Yes, it does, but it’s so much more than that, Mainly because of actress Liliana Komorowska and her absurd performance of a super villainess bent on world domination.

The movie starts out at a Christmas party where there are some Scanner deniers.

How dare they? Some doof in a Santa Claus suit wants his friend Alex, a Scanner, to prove to the naysayers that scanning is a real thing.

Alex wants nothing to do with this until one of the naysayers calls him a party pooper. Alex then telekinetically pats her butt before using his scanning powers to make his Santa Claus friend glide slowly across the rug. Some jerk grabs Alex’s shoulder and he loses control, hurling Doofus McSanta Claus out the window of the fortieth floor. Alex’s friend becomes a splat on the pavement, ruining the Christmases of the children looking at the grisly scene. Alex then, predictably, moves to a monastery in Thailand.

Still, this movie isn’t really about Alex. It’s about his sister, Helena Monet (Liliana Komorowska) and her quest to take over the world and be as evil as she can be.

She doesn’t start out that way. She’s just a boring Scanner who has violent headaches due to the voices swirling in her head. Her adoptive father is trying to find a cure to keep the scanning at bay. This cure comes in the form of tiny electrodes you stick behind the ear. Unfortunately, this cure comes with some side effects. The electrodes turn you evil!

Evil Helena has a Polish accent and perfectly groomed eyebrows, which makes her perfect for world domination. When a bird craps on her at breakfast time, she explodes it with her mind. When her jerk boss at the satellite company refuses to give her a promotion, she makes him dance around in his underwear in front of the clientele of a five star restaurant. She later makes him dive head first into an empty swimming pool.

Evil Helena goes back to some mental institution where this old scientist did horrible experiments on her when she was little. She explodes his index finger with her mind.

Evil Helena then grabs a Polaroid camera, making the doctor say cheese right before exploding his head.

She complains about how the eyes always come out red in Polaroid photos. Ha! An orderly comes after and she telekinetically makes him pee his pants. Ha! She then sets the captive Scanners free, telling them that they don’t have to be at the bottom of the dung heap. They can be at the top.

Of course, it’s not all business for Evil Helena. She also likes to have fun, if by fun you mean sipping champagne in a Jacuzzi naked while you drown your adoptive father so you can take over his drug company. She then forces the board to declare her president, makes her new personal assistant ditch his girlfriend, has her way with him while discovering she can use her Scanner abilities to control people through television air waves. With her Scanning abilities allowing her to take over all the world’s television stations and pharmaceutical companies, Evil Helena is poised to takeover the entire world. And why not? If we’re going to have a world dictator, at least we can sleep easy knowing she has perfect eyebrows.

Five Things I Learned from Scanners 3: The Takeover

Don’t bring a gun to a Scanner fight.
One world dictatorship isn’t so bad.
Scanners can blow up heads underwater with relative ease.
Nimbo Bimbo is Canadian for Nurse Practitioner.
Never invite a Scanner to your Christmas party!

_______

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.

The Lists #15: The Worst of the ’80s

15 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Music, The Lists

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The Lists #14 by Scott Hoffman

The Worst of the ’80s

“Kyrie Eleison” – Mr. Mister

This bloated, pretentious mess reaches for great inspirational heights and falls far, far short of its goal. “Kyrie Eleison” is Greek for “Lord, have mercy.” Mr. Mister chose the phrase supposedly because they liked the way the words sounded. The title of this song should be “Lord, what were we thinking?”

“A View to a Kill” – Duran Duran

James Bond themes are by nature hit and miss (except, of course, for Monty Norman’s classic jazz riff). When they are good, they are very very good and when they are bad they are horrid. Sort of like Bond’s puns. Perhaps then, D2 shouldn’t be blamed for this disappointing effort. But Bond’s babes, bombs and fashion formula seems to be the inspiration of D2’s own image and ethos…consider, for example, their video for “Hungry Like the Wolf.” You’d think they would’ve put more into this.

“God Bless the U.S.A.” – Lee Greenwood

Nativist, jingoist Reagan-era tripe meant to make us feel good about gutting social programs, recklessly building up our already bloated nuclear arsenal, and invading small Caribbean islands for self-aggrandizement and profit. Oh, don’t get me started….

“Goonies ‘R Good Enough” – Cyndi Lauper

Not good enough, really. Lauper made this for Steven Spielberg’s forgettable mid-80s summer flick Goonies. The song is as about as good as the movie. Which isn’t saying much. Not everything Spielberg touches is gold. But we all know that.

“(I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight” – Cutting Crew

Please, stay dead.

_______

NOTE: This list originally appeared on High Bias

_______.

Scott Hoffman (Episode 66, essay) is an independent scholar and native Austinite living and working in his hometown. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University in 2005 and is currently revising his manuscript Haloed by the Nation: Popular Martyrdom in Contemporary America. In 2008, he was nominated for a Lone Star Emmy for researching and writing The World, the War and Texas, a public television documentary about Texans during the Second World War. His publications include “How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria? St. Maria Goretti in the Post-Counter-Cultural World” in The CRITIC and “Holy Martin: The Overlooked Canonization of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” and “‘Last Night I Prayed to Matthew:’ Matthew Shepard, Homosexuality and Popular Martyrdom in Contemporary America,” both in Religion and American Culture. This year he completed compiling an LBGT Resource Guide for the Austin History Center. In his spare time Scott likes to sing like nobody’s listenin’ and dance like nobody’s watchin’, which means he tends to wail and flail his arms a lot…

Heroes Never Rust #76: Dodgin’ D-Day

14 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Heroes Never Rust, Violence, War

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Garth Ennis, War Story: D-Day Dodgers

Heroes Never Rust #76 by Sean Ironman

Dodgin’ D-Day

Garth Ennis’s and John Higgins’s War Story: D-Day Dodgers follows Second Lieutenant Ross, a British soldier joining up with B Company in Italy. The Western Front has begun with Normandy and the Allied Forces are gaining ground in France. The Russians are driving Germans back to Germany. But, the war in Italy is slow and tedious. They are the forgotten soldiers. Newspaper headlines back home talk about the Western Front, and most of the supplies and soldiers are given to that effort. The leaders in the Italy campaign need men, need supplies, so they come up with a dangerous mission to earn headlines, a suicide mission. The men know the mission is a suicide run, but they do it anyway. This being a Garth Ennis comic, the brutality of war is on full display as everyone is killed. The target is barely discussed, only that it’s a daylight attack. The target doesn’t matter. The army wants the headlines back home, so, impatiently, they make a crazy move.

These soldiers are called D-Day Dodgers because public perception at home is that the war in Italy is a cake walk and that the war in France is the tough front. Lady Astor, the first woman to sit as a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons, supposedly called the men in Italy D-Day Dodgers because they were avoiding the “real war.” A song called “The Ballad of the D-Day Dodgers” was composed as a response to Lady Astor’s remarks. This song is given in the comic in the final section as the corpses of the men readers have grown attached to are shown.

How much of our actions are controlled by what we want versus what others think?

These soldiers know they are marching toward their death. They discuss it. The idea isn’t buried deep down and they are trying to fool themselves. In the mission’s planning meeting, the lieutenant is told after the mission he will be promoted to Major. When Ross congratulates him, he says, “I’m going to be a corpse.” The lieutenant explains to Ross that everyone will die because they have to advance across open ground in broad daylight. They’ll be killed before they’ve gone ten yards. On the day of battle, they arm themselves and they set out. The lieutenant gives Ross his Thompson because Ross forgot to request one. When Ross goes to say what will he do without his Thompson, the lieutenant responds, “For Christ’s sake, David, it doesn’t matter now! It doesn’t matter, can’t you see that?” On one hand, I want to say that these men are brave. They are given an impossible job, and they still try. They still go out there knowing it will be the last thing they ever do. Another part of me thinks they are cowards. They know it’s not the right thing to do, but they stay within the confines of their job duties and they march. Sometimes, when a person breaks orders and defies the institution, that person is considered brave, considered a hero. Yet, sometimes, when someone understands their responsibilities and goes to their death, that act is considered brave. Where’s the line?

Is it suicide? They know this act will kill them and they still perform the act. Or do they need to pull the trigger on their own gun, their own bullet needing to tear through their brain? And if it is suicide, is it wrong? Suicide can be a heroic act, can it not? Or do they have a responsibility to live? Do they have a responsibility to fight back against an institution trying to control them, an institution that thinks so little of them?

They are men caught between larger forces. The British military cares little for their lives. The Italian and German forces want their blood to soak into soil. The public back home, their neighbors, coworkers, friends, think they are sitting out the war in paradise. Like the lieutenant said, it doesn’t matter now. Nothing matters. Perhaps there’s a comfort they find in marching toward their death. At least, they know when they will die, how they will die. It’s the easy battle. They know what they have to do. Maybe it doesn’t matter if the British military is wrong, or that the public is wrong, or that the soldiers should stand up for their lives. Perhaps the soldiers marching to Hell is their fuck you to the public back home. They fought the hard fight and they lost. They didn’t have it easy. They had a job to do and they put their lives on the line. What could the public say then?

That brings me back to my earlier question: How much of our actions are controlled by what we want versus what others think? How much of me is me and how much of me is what you think of me? The older I get the less I think of the idea of individualism. I don’t think it exists. I am what society has made me. I am not independent or self-reliant. Perhaps some people would say that of course I am because I moved out to Arkansas from Florida alone, that I live alone. But, that’s not really independent, isn’t it? I moved from one community to another. The community affects me, shapes me. And the community of these men, these soldiers, these D-Day Dodgers, shaped them. Would they have died without the actions and thoughts of their community? Well, yes, just not there in Italy. As I revise what I hope to be my first book, I keep coming back to a line I wrote, that sometimes it seems that we are affected more by what we don’t have control over than by what we do. That life is a series of reactions, instead of actions. The more I read, the more I live, the more I come to believe what I wrote.

_______

Photo by John King

Sean Ironman (Episode 102) earned his MFA at the University of Central Florida. Currently, he teaches creative nonfiction and digital media at the University of Central Arkansas as a visiting professor. His work can be read in The Writer’s Chronicle, Redivider, and Breakers: A Comics Anthology, among others.

Buzzed Books #18: Betty Page, Queen of Curves

13 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books

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Bettie Page, Bunny Yeager, Madison Strake Bernath, Petra Mason

Buzzed Books #18 by Madison Strake Bernath

Bettie Page: Queen of Curves

Do not mistake Bettie Page: Queen of Curves by Petra Mason as simply a coffee table book of sexy photographs. Not that these aren’t seductive pictures—there’s plenty of gorgeous skin lining the pages. Queen of Curves is about more than just the model, focusing much of its text on the photographer Bunny Yeager, who was at the time the Page photos were taken, all of 25 years old. Yeager had never even sold a picture before, and Page was her first nude shoot. Despite her inexperience, Yeager managed to photograph a softness in Page, which is absent in the famous S&M photographs of Page’s earlier career.

Perhaps it was because Yeager was a woman, or perhaps it was because she had been a model herself, but these photos capture something unique in this iconic model’s story. The photographs in Queen of Curves (which portray a 32-year-old Page at the end of her modeling work) depict a story of two women, one budding and one in her prime, working together to create beauty.

Yeager and Page are at their best, in my opinion, when they shoot photo-stories. These give us a chance to see Page in motion.

Yeager loved to shoot her models as they engaged in activities. She liked movement, and Page was athletic and hard-working. She, according to Yeager, could hit and hold poses that other models of the day couldn’t.

The most famous of these photo-stories is probably the safari shoot in Boca Raton’s Africa USA. In that series, Page is seen straddling a cheetah, hanging from a branch with a knife in her mouth, and spearing a fish, all in a self-made cheetah print “jungle girl” costume. She looks sexy, fierce, fun, sultry, and, at the same time, surprisingly innocent. It’s this innocence of the female form that Yeager is so talented at capturing.

Interestingly, the book ends with Yeager’s and Page’s first photo shoot together. It’s a glamorous nude sequence filled with pinup shots of Page looking alluringly at the camera. What makes these photos so fascinating? According to Yeager, “Certainly the beauty of the model and the composition and the lines of the pose have a great deal to do with it, but it takes a bit more to enhance it with the hypnotic quality that keeps the viewer wanting to return and take a second and a third look.”

That bit more is Bunny Yeager herself. Bettie Page: Queen of Curves will draw you back again and again. Its beauty, sex appeal, and playfulness are too intoxicating for just one look.

_______

Madison Strake Bernath (Episode 46 and 75) is a writer of both creative nonfiction and fiction. She graduated with an MFA from the University of Central Florida with a thesis of travel essays. She is currently an assistant nonfiction editor at Pithead Chapel. In her free time she sucks the life out of cats and berates herself for failing to write/read something.

Shakespearing #25: Troilus and Cressida

11 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing, Theater

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Cressida Among the Greeks, David Foley, Shakespearing, Troilus and Cressida, Trojan War

Shakespearing #25 by David Foley

Troilus and Cressida

You have to let critics do what they do, and one who reviewed my play Cressida Among the Greeks said that, although the press release cited both Chaucer and Shakespeare, I was clearly following Shakespeare much more closely. I found the claim bewildering at the time, and it’s even more bewildering now that I’ve re-read Shakespeare’s play. For better or worse, my play is a pretty straightforward telling of the old tale, and Shakespeare’s is…um…not.

For one thing, he’s not much interested in Troilus and Cressida, or rather he’s interested in them as one piece of a larger image he’s constructing. The image is a two-way mirror in which love and war become dark reflections of each other, both suffuse with vanity, irrationality, duplicity, and senseless loss. Of course, the Trojan War invites such linkage. Helen comes in for a fair amount of abuse here (Diomedes commends her “whorish loins”), but like all the other tarnished ideals in the play, she remains serenely unconcerned.

The ideals of love and war keep crossing currents in Troilus and Cressida. When Aeneas delivers Hector’s challenge to single combat, it’s on the grounds of love: to contend who “hath a lady, wiser, fairer, truer.” In an irony so fleeting you might miss its acrid bite, Agamemnon answers, “[I]f none else, I am he.”

In this context, Troilus and Cressida are just another ideal mocked in the execution. Their closest parallel in the Greek camp is Achilles and Patroclus—Patroclus whom Thersites refers to as “Achilles’ brach [bitch]” and his “masculine whore.” The men spend their time lolling “upon a lazy bed,” and now and then Patroclus pops up to parody the Greek commanders. This last information comes from Ulysses, who uses it both to work up Nestor and Agamemnon’s wrath and perhaps to slyly mock them. (How is he able to describe the scene so vividly if he hasn’t sat there laughing along with Achilles?)

It may be that the pair truly at the heart of Troilus and Cressida is Ulysses and Thersites. Ulysses is given the longest speeches and the richest language. His speech about degree is often cited as Shakespeare’s ringing endorsement of the social order. That makes sense. I guess. But the speaker is Ulysses, the Odyssey’s “man of twists and turns,” and he’s devious here as well, manipulating the vanity of Achilles and Ajax at the service of a cause everyone agrees is absurd. Thersites is the intellectual id of the play, turning all the finely wrought wisdom of Ulysses and Nestor into bile. We’d like to believe Ulysses speaks for the play’s ideals, but the world of the play belongs to Thersites.

Which bring us to Cressida. I’ve always told people that I wrote Cressida because both Shakespeare and Chaucer seem to lose interest in her after she goes to the Greek camp. Now it strikes me that Shakespeare loses interest earlier. In her first scenes Cressida is vibrantly witty and alive, but in the scenes of love and parting her emotions seem ginned up, the language, for Shakespeare, pallid. And her explanation of her treachery is a moralizing treatise in rhymed couplets. It may have been Shakespeare’s intention to pull back from Cressida, to have her retreat into mystery. She becomes another ideal that dissolves, without explanation, into mockery. Troilus’s bafflement turns metaphysical: “This is, and is not, Cressid…[A] thing inseparate/Divides more wider than the sky and earth.” Troilus and Cressida is a bitter play, but is the bitterness directed against love or war or just the failed world itself?

_______

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Episode 134: Stuart Dybek and Denise Duhamel!

10 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Poetry

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Blow Out, Denise Duhamel, Ecstatic Cahoots, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Moss Hart, Moss Hart's Act One, Opera, Paper Lantern, Poetry, Stuart Dybeck, Tosca

Episode 134 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I share another Miami BookFair International interview, this one with fiction writer and poet Stuart Dybek,

and I also talk to the poet Denise Duhamel,

plus Jim Ross writes about how Moss Hart’s Act One changed his life.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Act One NOTES

In Orlando, come hear me, Kimberly Lojewski, Robert Metcalf, and Tiffany Razzano read prose at There Will Be Words on January 13th.

On Tuesday, January 20th, 7 P.M., Leslie Salas will lead a workshop on imagery at the Orlando Public Library, Herndon Branch

On Saturday, January 24th, 11 A.M., J. Bradley will host a love poem workshop at the Orlando Public Library.

On Saturday, January 24th, 7 P.M., come hear Boris Fishman read from his novel, A Replacement Life, and me read poetry at the Gallery at Avalon Island.

Read veteran Joe Sacco on his view of the role of satirical comics in response to the Charlie Hedbo story.

Read Matt Taibbi on the way the news media has covered the Charlie Hedbo story.

Here is the Frederick News-Post‘s editorial about Kirby Delauter’s threat of legal action against using his name in an unauthorized way in reporting on county commission meetings.

_______

Episode 134 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 #72: Scanners II

09 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, The Curator of Schlock

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The Curator of Schlock #72 by Jeff Shuster

Scanners II: The New Order

(Same as the Old Order)

I have it on good authority that David Cronenberg refuses to give his blessing on a Scanners remake. This leads me to the inevitable conclusion that he must have approved the Scanners sequels. Oh yeah. I bet you didn’t know there were Scanners sequels. I bet you didn’t know there were four sequels to Scanners. There may be more than four, but I’m not digging any deeper. I’m also too cheap to buy these suckers, but luckily Hulu shows them free of charge, with some commercial interruptions. The asterisks thing worked last week, so why mess with a good thing?

***

Scanners 2 starts out promising enough. There’s this whole Blade Runner thing going on with some Vangelis -nspired music (unless Vangelis was hard up for some cash and actually composed the score for this diamond in the rough.) Some homeless guy enters a video arcade that seems like a big hit with the younglings.

The homeless guy steals some popcorn and quarters, plays a round of Operation Wolf without even touching the light gun, blows up a few pinball machines with his mind, and telekinetically throws some security guards around. You see, this is why I don’t like Scanners. They have no respect for private property! He collects mannequins too! Maybe he’s waiting for one to turn into Kim Cattrall.

***

It’s only after the commercial break that I discovered that the creepy homeless guy isn’t our protagonist. Our hero’s name is Mr. Kellum and he’s studying how to do open bypass surgery on dogs. He likes puppies and is from Vermont. Now he’s living in the big city where random women ask him out to dinner at Italian restaurants and even kiss on the first date!

There are Scanner drug-dealing robbers who can scan people to death. The chief of police wants to find a Scanner with a virgin mind for some new order he’s creating. I have yet to see one head explode. So disappointing.

***

Mr. Kellum goes to get some pesto sauce for at the request of his date. I think she’s boiling spaghetti in a pot. (I’m not a big fan of pesto. Just throwing that out there. It’s an overrated sauce.) A bunch of bank robbers decide to rob the convenience store, shooting some people in the process just for kicks. Mr. Kellum unleashes his scanner rage on the robbers managing to burst the brains out of the back of one of the robber’s skull. Not as good as the Cronenberg classic, but not too bad.

I’m only about 35 minutes into this movie and I can already tell this is a Canadian production.

It smells of those early 90s Universal Action Pack movies and syndicated television shows like Time Trax and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. Scanners II: The New Order does hail from 1991 and was directed by Christian Duguay. He was born in Quebec. Aha! I knew it!

His directing credits include Hitler: The Rise of Evil and Lies My Mother Told Me.

***

For the rest of the movie Mr. Kellum becomes a kind of scanner cop. He attacks a milk poisoner at a milk factory who goes by the name of The Milk Murderer. The Milk Murderer was angry that he never made manager at the milk factory so he poisoned two cartons with strychnine. The homeless makes some old guy blow his brains out. The chief of police makes Mr. Kellum scan Mayor Frazoni so he can become new acting dictator of the city. What? I can’t keep track of this movie anymore! I’ve lost the plot. Scanners II is just plain goofy!

5 Things I Learned from Scanners II: The New Order

Scanners can hear a person’s thoughts. Oh wait. Oh wait! I learned that from the first Scanners movie.
There’s a lot of snow in Canada.
Scanners aren’t tools to be used for the betterment of society!
Scanners don’t think they’re human. See! They think they’re better than the rest of us!
Scanners can never know true love.

_______

Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.

Heroes Never Rust #75: None of Us Angels

07 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Heroes Never Rust, War

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Chris Weston, Garth Ennis, War Stories, War Story: Johann’s Tiger, Winston Churchill, World War II

Heroes Never Rust #75 by Sean Ironman

None of Us Angels

Garth Ennis loves to write about war. His comics are filled with violence—Preacher, The Punisher, The Boys, etc. A few years back, he created a collection of war stories, two volumes featuring four standalone stories with different artists. The first, War Story: Johann’s Tiger, was drawn by Chris Weston (Ministry of Space). Toward the end of World War II, Johann, a Nazi soldier, leads four men in their Tiger tank. Johann knows the war is lost and makes it his mission to deliver his men to safety. However, Johann doesn’t want to be saved. Throughout the war, he has performed horrors—burning towns to the ground, shooting prisoners. After his men are safe, he will do his best to die in combat. “I cannot imagine it proving difficult. Thousands do it every day. I know I have forfeited my right to live, but I am still too much the coward for suicide.” Of course, his plan fails. His men die in combat, their last act being throwing Johann out of the tank and to safety. In the end, Johann is taken captive.

There needs to be more stories told from the point of view of Nazis, from the losing side of any war. Winston Churchill said, “History is written by the victors.” How many stories from the Americans side can we have? There is, in a way, a bit of propaganda in a story told from the viewpoint of the victors. If Johann was John, an American solider, no matter what horrors he committed during war, the reader could fall back on the idea that America had to enter the war to save lives. Johann’s actions are, in a way, more complicated and interesting because no good came from them.

Interestingly, even though the storyline follows a Nazi soldier who has performed horrors while at war, concentration camps are never mentioned. The Holocaust is never referenced. Johann, as bad as this sounds, could have fought on either side of the war, for any country. Some may say that ignoring the worst of the war is copout, but I prefer it. A lot happened during the war. We should remember all of it.

At one point, Johann asks himself, “Did I believe in Hitler’s War of racial purity? Did I think those people less than human? No, that was the problem: I didn’t think at all. I did whatever I needed to at any given time. No notion of morality constrained me.” That line really hit me. I think when people discuss why others have done such horrible things, people tend to try to figure out how someone thought that the action performed was the right thing to do. But, I don’t think that’s the case most times. I can look at my own life and see the bad that I’ve done, and even when I went through with it, I didn’t think those things were right. I can’t think of anything that I’ve done that I realized later was wrong. I knew it then, and I still did it. To me, that’s worse. We don’t act even for our own sense of morality. We do bad things not because we think they’re good, but because we convince ourselves that we have to do bad. We rationalize.

Just the other day, I told a friend, “Let me be the asshole.” I’ve said that a lot over the years. I find, I believe, some sense of sacrifice in it—to do something bad because I tell myself it’s the only way. The world isn’t perfect and we’re all fucked anyway, so I’ll damn myself to perhaps help someone else. What an awful thought. Johann kills Americans. He killed Russians. He killed innocents. He killed the wounded. But, he will help his men get to safety. His men, soldiers like him, must be helped, for some reason. Who knows the horrors they have done throughout the war? Maybe Johann, even though he doesn’t admit it, feels like one last act of redemption before death might help him out in the afterlife.

Recently, I was telling a woman that instead of fight or flight, I’ll just sit there and take the beating. I truly believe that a person should know how to take a beating. I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired. If I go to the bar tonight and a man wants to fight (not that this has ever happened before), I’ll probably just let him beat me until he tires or I die. I was small growing up, always the smallest boy in class. But I fought when kids tried to pick on me. Running never helps. Running makes you a coward, gives the opponent power over you. They know you are afraid. But, fighting doesn’t do anything either. It’s not like in those sitcoms where the kid stands up to the bully and the bully respects them or some shit. No, you just get the crap beat out of you. I think taking the beating is the way to go. Make it seem like it ain’t no thing. That’s the only power I think you have—it’s the only way to make them seem powerless over you.

War. What the fuck? Let’s say, like Johann, you fight, you kill, you beat, you survive. Let’s say, I stand up to that guy at the bar and I win. I beat the living shit out of him. Years ago, my puppy, Hankelford, ate some comics of mine. Went right to one of my shelves and picked them out one by one. And I hit him. I was angry. Some of those comics were out of print and I still haven’t replaced them all these years later. I hit him and I stood over him, and he looked at me. And I felt worse than I had when I saw my comics torn. To realize that inside you is the power to hurt and kill is a sobering moment. Or it should be at least. I wouldn’t make a good soldier. I guess I’m not manly to many of you.

Maybe I should care. But, I’m just too fucking tired of this world to care. Johann even rationalizes that he doesn’t kill in his tank. The tank is it’s own entity. “Big Max protects us. Kills to save us.” This is what bad men do—take themselves out of the equation. They separate themselves from the action. They create passive language. Right and wrong, good and bad, have nothing to do with it. Just a man choosing the easiest way for himself. But, it builds up. It did for Johann, at least. All that shit. It builds. But, perhaps others have a higher tolerance. Perhaps that’s why war will happen again and again, and comics like War Stories can fit in with any generation. Perhaps that’s why we still tell stories from a war that ended sixty years ago. It’s still relatable today—one of the worst wars in the history of mankind.

_______

Photo by John King

Buzzed Books #17: Pen & Ink

06 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books

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Cheryl Strayed, Isaac Fitzgerald, Pen & Ink: Tattoos & The Stories Behind Them, Roxanne Gay, Wendy MacNaughton

Buzzed Books #17 by John King

Pen & Ink: Tattoos & The Stories Behind Them

For writers, there is this paradox about tattoos: body art often both symbolizes and continues a story in someone’s life, yet the nature of body art is never just about words, or else, why get body injected with ink in the first place, rather than, say, write an essay?

Tattoos defy literary expression. They resist verbal narratives just as much as they provoke them.

What’s more, the artistic quality of tattoos can seldom be conveyed by photographs, since photographs impose their own two-dimensional context of limited light and perspective on the body.

Knowing Isaac Fitzgerald through my interview way back on episode 42, I was keen to see how he would use this paradox in his new book, Pen & Ink: Tattoos & The Stories Behind Them.

From the outset, what makes Pen and Ink remarkable is the artwork by Wendy MacNaughton. In lieu of photos, her illustrations, with water-colored accents, convey the visual sense of tattoos in a way that pops off the page. This translation, or adaptation, of tattoos seem both bohemian and similar enough to traditional tattoo styles of art that the entire book feels coherent and vital, the images of tattoos foregrounded by relatively realistic cartoons of the bodies of the storytellers.

One of the cool ways this book swerves from a traditional text is the lettering, which is either actual block-letter script mixed with cursive or else a decent-looking imitation of that in a font. That maneuver avoids the stiff formality that I cannot avoid on this blog.

The brief commentary by tattooed people sometimes evokes the poetry, the surprise in emotions they’ve discovered in life, or hard-won realizations they’ve made in life, and the illustrations convey the sense of the tattoo more than a photo would. The combination of the two is totally fucking sweet.

The observations by, for lack of a better term, non-writers, appear throughout along with some of your favorite artists and writers, like Tao Lin, Cheryl Strayed, and Roxanne Gay.

Sometimes the texts are short, and the illustrations complex, and other times the script consumes the page next to a simpler image. The asymmetrical has its place. The complex meets the complex. Every page is a surprise.

Pen and Ink Detail

Pen & Ink reads like a good book of poetry, like an illustrated sonnet sequence. It makes literature out of the experience of tattoos without being fucking precious, or pretentious, or opaque, or ugly. This book is as strong and weird and reckless and smart as the people in it.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.

Shakespearing #24: Twelfth Night

04 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing, Theater

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

David Foley, De Profundis, Jeanette Winterson, Shakespearing, Sonnet 20, Twelfth Night

Shakespearing #24 by David Foley

Twelfth Night

I am sure that a lot of the coyness and silliness that accompanies productions of Shakespeare that include cross-dressing roles is an attempt to steer them clear of the Queer.

This is Jeanette Winterson in one of her more high-handed modes, and it always makes me want to roll my eyes a bit. “Oh, Jeanette,” I want to say.

And yet.

You have to give her Twelfth Night. It’s pretty queer. It’s queer even if you’re just reading it, and I can only imagine what it was like seeing it back in the day when an adolescent boy played Viola who’s disguised as an adolescent boy who’s hiding a secret crush on an older guy (who agrees to marry him/her without ever having seen him/her in women’s clothes). And another boy played Olivia who falls in love with a boy who’s really a girl played by a boy. And then there’s Antonio, the seafaring man (you know how they are) whose desire for Sebastian, “[m]ore sharp than filed steel,” drives him to risk all in Illyria, and whose anguish at the supposed Sebastian’s betrayal (“how vild an idol proves this god!”) might come from De Profundis. What kind of echo is it that Antonio shares a name with the man who pledged a pound of flesh for his beloved Bassanio in Merchant of Venice?

Scholars will tell me I’m misunderstanding these things, that the Elizabethan ideal of male friendship would amply contain the love of both Antonios for their friends. Sure. But. It’s also true that the obliviousness of straight folks has always allowed the signals of queerness to travel through the ether unremarked, caught only by certain attuned apparatuses.

If you sometimes get a queer vibe off Shakespeare, it’s more a matter of catching those signals than, say, Sonnet 20, which can still be construed as a hyperbolic expression of male friendship.

One such signal, though admittedly an ambiguous one, is how good he is with women. It’s exciting to see Shakespeare produce, so soon after Rosalind, a cross-dressing female of an entirely different stripe. Where Rosalind is witty, Viola is lyric, whether in the yearning breadth of the “willow cabin” speech or the pooled melancholy of “Patience on a monument.” And Olivia is just a great character. She’s smart, funny, contradictory, and wonderfully human. I said in my Hamlet posting that Shakespeare is sometimes not good with female sexuality. But I want to temper that. He’s actually quite good with female desire. (Perhaps another signal?) Look at Juliet. Look at Olivia.

These signals, faint enough, may be illusory, but I’m interested in the question they bring up, which I can express (clumsily), “How does a culture of queerness express itself in this or any age?” When I search the internet for information on Elizabethan homosexuality, I get lots of stuff about male friendship and the severe social, religious, and legal strictures against homosexuality, plus the usual caveats that the notion of a homosexual person is a relatively recent construction. But it seems to me that certain things persist through time, and among these are the ways in which men who share a sexual taste proclaim to each other their separate and special status. It doesn’t so much matter whether Marlowe actually said, “All they that love not Tobacco and Boys are fools.” It matters that, to his accusers, it sounded like something someone might say. Shakespeare may not have intended to send the signals Twelfth Night does, but there must have been men in the audience who winked at each other when they received them.

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