SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ MAY 24, 2016

1. This online comic will entertain you, give you serious nostalgia, and make you think twice about the pleasure you get from the pain suffered by some of your favorite cartoon characters. It will also buttress your belief in the fundamental goodness of the "soft conservative" values espoused by Mike Judge's King of the Hill.

2. Yer old pal Jerky is no Star Wars fan, but he is a fan of expansive info-graphics like this one, which tells the entire story of Star Wars IV: A New Hope, in two, glorious dimensions! I'd love to see more movies broken down into their basic components like this. It's pretty kick-ass.

3. Which brings us to today's final must-see offering, a recent [adult swim] masterpiece of hauntological stylistics that goes by the title Lords of Synth. If you're anything like yer old pal Jerky, I think you're gonna be sharing this one with your friends for weeks to come. It's a triumph of short form esoteric comic genius.

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ MAY 9

1. One of the Anglosphere's best living writers, Don Delillo, has produced some of the finest novels of the post-war era. From his more traditionally Modernist early works, such as End Zone and Ratner's Star, to his mid-career "apex" masterpieces White Noise, Libra, and Underworld, to his later, shorter, Postmodernist novels, such as Cosmopolis and Point Omega, Delillo has never stopped growing, both as a cultural observer and as a prose stylist. Now, he's got a new novel coming out. It's called Zero K, and if Joshua Ferris' review for the New York Times is to be trusted, it's gonna be a freakin' doozy. Check it out:

In “Zero K,” DeLillo’s 16th and latest novel, Jeffrey Lockhart arrives in the middle of the desert at a remote compound called the Convergence. Variously described as an “endeavor,” a “faith-based technology” and “the first split second of the first cosmic year,” the Convergence is a cross between a think tank and a state-of-the-art hospice: the Santa Fe Institute meets Sloan Kettering, with a dollop of Heaven’s Gate, all of it given over to Christo for interior decorating. Whatever it is, the Convergence coolly ignites the imagination. Jeff hopes to get his bearings, at least geographically, when he asks his father, the billionaire Ross Lockhart, where they are. “The nearest city of any size is across the border, called Bishkek,” Ross answers from deep within blastproof walls. He continues: “Once you know the local names and how to spell them, you’ll feel less detached.” 

We are, in other words, far from the neocolonial world described so tendentiously by Charles Maitland. We are in a vision of the future, a postracial, post-postcolonial world where Westerners like Ross and Jeff are but one contingent of a technocratic cult with a single aim: to rid the world of that absolute, all-­defining force, that ultimate despotic colonizer, death. For the Convergence, as it turns out, is a cryonic suspension facility where the dead are frozen in anticipation of that day when resuscitation is medically feasible. Jeff has arrived there to say a temporary goodbye to his stepmother, the archaeologist ­Artis Martineau, who is dying of several disabling diseases. 

... This is fiction in touch with the starker parables, with Kafka and Beckett, with the austerity of bare rooms and declarative, uninflected sentences. I was uncertain as I read these early pages. Had DeLillo created a world of pure abstraction where the reader would be left to float in the ­zero-gravity chamber of the death fable, everything to think about and nothing to latch on to? But this is only one of several canny feints in the book, which continually shape-shifts and reimagines itself. In the end, it all adds up to one of the most mysterious, emotionally moving and formally rewarding books of DeLillo’s long career.

If that doesn't sound as amazing to you as it does to me, I don't know what to tell you. Read the rest of this review at the NYT site. I'll have my own review once I've bought and read the book, which shouldn't be too long from now.

2. For today's second "must read" article, I bring you Amanda Gefter's The Case Against Reality, her compelling profile of a scientist who claims that our senses aren't just imperfect, they're downright deceptive. And I'm talking, like, on the most fundamental ontological level, here, folks. Her story begins:

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like. 

Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.

Believe it or not, it only gets trippier from there on out. You can read the rest of this disturbing, mind-bending essay at The Atlantic's website. It's a long one, but it's well worth the effort. You'll feel smarter for having read it (which isn't always the case with the writing one finds in The Atlantic these days).

3. And finally for today, I'm delighted to report that [adult swim] has begun producing more of those late-night freak-out videos we all love so much. The most impressive of the bunch this time around (so far) is the third offering by Alan Resnick and friends, who have previously given us the horrific Unedited Footage of a Bear, and the more traditional, but still disturbing, Live Forever As You Are Now (both of which have been featured in past editions of DDD's Suggested Reading List). With This House Has People In It, this talented team has given us their most unsettling creation yet, jam-packed with surreal goings on, sinister subliminals, and multiple avenues for obsessives to explore, revealing literally hours of extra, related content that helps to unravel the video's central mystery. Watch it here, below, then check out Night Mind's detailed analysis of the video... if you don't mind potentially losing a substantial chunk of your sanity, that is. Enjoy?

POETRY: UNTITLED

Right: the Cain-Hand, Abel slew.

Left: Behind. 

Left: Holding the bag.

Right: the thing that Might makes.

Right: Not asked for. 

Taken.

PRINCE, THE ELEVATOR, AND THE DEVIL

A CBS News article published in the wake of Prince's untimely death just over a week ago explores one particularly ironic detail about the location where the Purple One apparently met his Maker.

Music icon Prince was pronounced dead shortly after being found unresponsive in an elevator in his Paisley Park compound in Minneapolis. 

That detail is haunting fans who point to the bizarre connection to a line in his hit song, "Let's Go Crazy," in which he sings, "Are we gonna let the elevator bring us down? Oh, no, let's go." 

The article goes on to explain why this coincidence was more than just a "spooky" irony for music producer L.A. Reid, a close personal friend of Prince's. 

"One time I was with him privately and he said, 'You know what the elevator is right?'" Reid recalled. "He said. 'Well, the elevator is the devil...' And so for me it was like really haunting when I read that he was found in an elevator."

To some of you, this might sound a bit goofy; like an attempt to add an extra frisson to an event that is sufficiently tragic without having to introduce a supernatural element. Regardless, I beg your indulgence, for a moment at least, as I attempt to take Prince's cryptic comment seriously, and try to unravel his potential theological meaning.

Let's start with the word: Elevator. Cambridge defines it as "a device like a box that moves up and down, carrying people and freight". Merriam-Webster's definition is both more poetic, and more pertinent, describing an elevator as "one that raises or lifts something up". 

Aha! Now we're getting somewhere.

Consider... The Elevator. The One Who Elevates according to His Will, therefore exalting some (those whom He elevates) while leaving others to suffer in a debased or somehow lesser state. 

The Elevator, in this "Princean" Theology, would be the one responsible for propping up such obvious unworthies as all those myriad hereditary, multi-generational elites who live "elevated" lives of idle leisure and comfort while profiting off the toil of those who have to struggle just to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves from the elements.

In other words, the Elevator is beginning to sound a whole lot like the Biblical "Lord of This World", unequivocally identified in scripture as being none other than the Devil.

So when Prince asks us "Are we going to let the Elevator bring us down?", what I hear is the following:

Just because The Powers That Be happen to be a pack of vile, Satanic, Moloch-worshiping elites who've been placed in exalted positions thanks to the malefic supernatural intervention of "The Elevator" (which would account, at least, for the apparent universality of their anti-human perversion), and have thus been granted near totalitarian mastery over every single societal control mechanism (i.e. global finance, science and technology, the media, the arts, academia, the military)... does that mean we Little People, down here at the bottom, have got to give up on everything? That we shouldn't make music? Or make love?

Prince's answer to that question is: "Oh, no! Let's GO! LET'S GET CRAZY!"

And to that prayer, I can only add: AMEN.

PRINCE (1958-2016)

Lemmy. David Bowie. Keith Emerson. Gary Shandling. And now, Prince, The Purple One. His Royal Badness, is gone. Snatched away from us during what seemed like a career upswing, at a time when most everyone was prepared to, even if begrudgingly, admit his objective greatness and the legitimacy of his claim to the title of bona fide Musical Genius.

A prodigy with (thankfully) a bit of a Napoleon complex, Prince wasn't just a multi-instrumentalist; he was a master of multiple styles, as well. He had the funky groove of a young James Brown. He had amazing and intuitive Jimi Hendrix-like guitar chops. He had an experimental drive and force of will not unlike that of Frank Zappa, with whom he also shared a hatred of Warner Bros and a lifelong devotion to maintaining a racially and sexually integrated touring band. Also, like Zappa, he could be a strict disciplinarian, was incredibly prolific, and died far too young, with much left to do, and much of his life's work sealed in a vault, waiting to be discovered. 

Image-wise, Prince played the gender-bending game more successfully than anybody else, surpassing even the great David Bowie, if only because the latter was so alien that he often transcended sexuality completely, whereas Prince at his best was able to bring a visceral erotic dimension to the numinous... no small feat. And he did it all while flaunting a sleek, tight, unmistakably masculine physicality not unlike that of his fellow diminutive, Bruce Lee. 

And style! From the first glimmers of his super-stardom, the album 1999, Prince dressed and carried himself as though he were some kind of sexual superhero, or an ambassador from an alternate, funkier, sexier dimension. He was an urban Dionysus, a sophisto/aristo avatar of the Great God Pan. The man was a fucking giant and, if the legends are to be believed, he was also a giant of fucking.

For those of us who didn't know him on a personal level, perhaps the most inspiring aspect of Prince's life is that he was an artist, all the way. Yes, he had raw talent, seemingly gifted by God or Mother Nature with musical abilities beyond that of his fellow humans. And that alone would have been enough for most of us. Not for Prince. He didn't spare himself the disciplinary rigors through which he put his band mates. He never stopped sharpening his chops, honing his craft, reading, learning, investigating, and applying the fruits of his efforts to the incredible gifts that he made. For his audience; for us. For you. 

And now he's gone. 

This essay by A.J. Hartley, titled "Bowie, Prince, and a Note to (Baffled?) Millennials" does a pretty great job of articulating what it is that a lot of us are feeling these days, and of enumerating the evidence that we have, in fact, turned some kind of collective, cultural corner. I mean, intellectually, we all understand that time marches on and death claims us all--even the most legendary--but there's more to it than that.

Personally, while "Purple Rain" was a favorite back when it was everyone else's favorite, I would never call myself a super-fan. Which is why I'm finding it hard to account for the level of grief I feel. His music keeps coming at me in waves, breaking in sadness on the Heideggerian shores of Dasein. And even though "Purple Rain" definitely makes the short-list of songs in the running for Absolute Perfection status--up there with the likes of "Hallelujah", "He Stopped Loving Her Today", and "Ace of Spades"--I can't help but think he would have wanted his fans to remember him, at least in part, as the sexy motherfucker from the video for "Kiss".

Here it is. Sorry for the bad quality. Copies keep getting taken up and pulled down over copyright infringement, which is kind of cuckoo for a promotional video, but there you go. 

Watch, listen, enjoy, and remember.

SUGGESTED READING LIST, APRIL 22, 2016

1. This New York Times op-ed piece about the growing threat of non-Muslim religious and politically conservative movements and organizations contains some information that might seem counter-intuitive to some people reading this. It begins:

THIS month, the headlines were about a Muslim man in Boston who was accused of threatening police officers with a knife. Last month, two Muslims attacked an anti-Islamic conference in Garland, Tex. The month before, a Muslim man was charged with plotting to drive a truck bomb onto a military installation in Kansas. If you keep up with the news, you know that a small but steady stream of American Muslims, radicalized by overseas extremists, are engaging in violence here in the United States. 

But headlines can mislead. The main terrorist threat in the United States is not from violent Muslim extremists, but from right-wing extremists. Just ask the police.

Before I leave you in the NYT's capable editorial hands, here's an info-graphic containing another intriguing if uncomfortable info-nugget that suggests a certain lack of proportion as regards where US law enforcement's priorities and resources are currently aimed.

2. Over at The New Inquiry, A.M. Gittlitz has written a very interesting piece about how today’s Alt.Right, New Right and techno-futurist circles are echoing the unorthodox beliefs of Nazi cosmologists. See if you feel a chill shiver of disturbing recognition creep across the back of your neck as you read this essay, which begins...

Shortly after the National Socialist party consolidated their power, a writer named Peter Bender convinced some Nazi brass to attempt an experiment that, if successful, would send a rocket from Magdenburg to New Zealand. The intercontinental ballistic missile was still decades away from completion, but Bender believed he had figured out how to attack the other side of the Earth—by firing directly into the sky. 

He had come under the influence of an American occult group that believed in a particularly bizarre variation on the Hollow Earth theory. While the concept of habitable layers beneath the Earth’s crust had been popular for centuries amongst occultists, Bender’s Hohlwelt-theorie argued that the Earth was a vault within an endless field of matter. The sun was somewhere in the middle of this vault, and the stars in the sky were the lights of cities from the other side. 

“An infinite universe is a Jewish abstraction,” wrote Bender. “A finite, rounded universe is a thoroughly Aryan conception.” The anti-Semitic aspect of the theory attracted the attention of Herman Göring but was quickly dismissed in favor of Hanns Hörbiger’s slightly less fanciful World Ice Theory. The idea nonetheless remained compelling to some, and the German Navy attempted to locate British fleets using astronomical instruments.

Hollow Earth and World Ice theories were only two particularly laughable examples of a Nazi cultural regression that included radical alterations in the fields of mathematics, psychology, and physics. It is arguable that the rejection of Einstein’s theory of relativity in place of Deutsche Physiksprevented the Nazis from developing nuclear technology and many other weapons. ...  

Better known than their cosmology was the mystical underpinnings of the Nazis’ firm belief in racial superiority. SS leaders Rudolph Hess, Wilhelm Landig, and Karl Maria Miligut developed a cult based on the Nordic pantheon, esoteric rituals, and psuedo-anthropology. Landig, already a major influence on the occultist Thule Society that influenced National Socialist theology in its earliest days, developed the Black Sun as the cult’s symbol. ...  

Nationalists, Radical Traditionalists, and the futurist “neoreactionaries” deploy the myth that inverting these divisions, instead of abolishing them altogether, help us conceive of an idealized bygone time. The internationalist, anticapitalist, and egalitarian aspects of the last half-decade of struggle have only furthered modernity’s march away from these simpler times, they argue, and should be disregarded as agents of degradation.

It should not be news to anyone reading this that the Black Sun has already risen in Ukraine, Greece, and Hungary, using a different name wherever it goes: Avoz, Golden Dawn, Jobbik. This piece will help you recognize the nature of the Beast.

3. With the recent court decision quite rightly finding Canadian radio celebrity Jian Ghomeshi not guilty of a variety of sexual assault charges (not that this decision gave him back the career, or life), a reactionary movement has arisen that claims we should always believe claims of rape and/or sexual assault. This Center for Inquiry article examines an unfortunate implication of said proposition, namely the fact that accepting every claim of rape and/or sexual assault at face value involves swallowing a whole bunch of heinous, life-destroying lies. Please read the article - and maybe this very informative Wikipedia page on the surprising prevalence of false rape accusations- before showing up at my place with torches and pitchforks. M'kay?

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ APRIL 19, 2016

1. As if the previous Suggested Reading List entry from increasingly mandatory website The Intercept, featuring former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince's efforts to put together his own private offensive-capable air force, wasn't enough to get your brain's conspiracy sensors waggling, why not try this story about how the CIA's venture capital company In-Q-Tel is backing a cosmetics firm with technology to collect DNA from its users skin? Our story begins...

SKINCENTIAL SCIENCES, a company with an innovative line of cosmetic products marketed as a way to erase blemishes and soften skin, has caught the attention of beauty bloggers on YouTube, Oprah’s lifestyle magazine, and celebrity skin care professionals. Documents obtained by The Interceptreveal that the firm has also attracted interest and funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. 

The previously undisclosed relationship with the CIA might come as some surprise to a visitor to the website of Clearista, the main product line of Skincential Sciences, which boasts of a “formula so you can feel confident and beautiful in your skin’s most natural state.” 

Though the public-facing side of the company touts a range of skin care products, Skincential Sciences developed a patented technology that removes a thin outer layer of the skin, revealing unique biomarkers that can be used for a variety of diagnostic tests, including DNA collection. 

Skincential Science’s noninvasive procedure, described on the Clearista website as “painless,” is said to require only water, a special detergent, and a few brushes against the skin, making it a convenient option for restoring the glow of a youthful complexion — and a novel technique for gathering information about a person’s biochemistry.

2. Our old pal David Cole usually has his musings published at Taki's (not a particular favorite of yours truly's, but whatevs), but this time, it's personal. Which means he decided to unveil the latest twist in his ongoing life's saga on his personal website, which has a permanent link on this very page. And it's all got to do with the "lovely" lady pictured above, who goes by the name of Wendy Rae Leaumont. Here's a tiny taste of what David is dealing with these days:

Totally out of the blue, celebrated Burbank art gallery owner Bill Shafer posted a very kind comment about my book on Instagram. Bill’s Hyaena Gallery is quite the local institution, and his comment was a happy surprise, made quickly unhappy by Leaumont, who was one of Bill’s Instagram followers. She began plastering the thread with hostile comments. She menacingly pledged that I’m going to “get killed soon enough,” but she didn’t stop with a simple death threat. She ridiculed my late mother, who passed away after a lengthy illness in April 2015. 

One year ago exactly. So my blood is up as I write this. 

I’ve never written publicly about my mom’s passing. This is the first time I’ve mentioned it, and it’ll be the last. Suffice it to say that I have no words to describe how depraved and vile someone has to be to publicly post a taunt regarding someone,anyone’s, dead parent. That kind of evil is beyond me. Especially coming from a woman who never misses a chance to brag about what a good “Christian” she is.

There's more. Read on.

3. And finally today, I bring you a three-part podcast about "loops" (don't worry... the parts are short) from the increasingly popular audio documentary production and dissemination node known as Radiolab. This particular set of programs is described thusly:

In this episode of Radiolab, Jad and Robert try to explain an inexplicable comedy act, listen to a loop that literally dies in your ear, and they learn about a loop that sent a shudder up the collective spine of mathematicians everywhere. Finally, they talk to a woman who got to watch herself think the thought that she was watching herself think the thought that she was watching herself think the thought that ... you get the point.

Trust me... it ends up being a lot more interesting than the above sounds... even though I have to admit, the above does sound pretty fucking interesting. ENJOY! I sure did!

MEDIAVORE // FILM ~ AAAAAAAAH! WE ARE NOT MEN

You might remember Steve Oram from his decade and a half of continuous character and background work in such worthy Britcom projects as Green Wing, The Mighty Boosh, Tittybangbang and Steve Coogan Live. Or perhaps you remember him as the bearded half of the comically bumbling yet oddly endearing serial killer couple in Ben Wheatley's magnificent 2012 satire, Sightseers.

However, it doesn't much matter how--or even if--you knew of him beforehand. Because there is nothing in Oram's pre-2015 catalog that could possibly prepare you for the certifiably insane masterpiece of hyper-subversive comic audacity that is Aaaaaaaah!, his ferocious and fearless directorial debut, which he also self-financed for reasons that will become apparent as you read on.

Described by Cine-Vue's Martyn Conterio as being an "anthropological social satire/horror-comedy" that is "like a collaboration between Dogme '95 and Chris Morris", Aaaaaaaah! is, at its core, a relatively straightforward exploration of interpersonal dynamics among a small group of friends, neighbors and acquaintances in a quiet, leafy section of South London. The surreal twist on this relatively mundane premise is that all the characters behave as though they've had their brains switched out with those of great apes.

Here is the trailer for Aaaaaaaah!

There is no dialogue in this film. Or, more precisely, there is no complex language, as the characters communicate via crude, pantomime gesticulations, as well as vocalizations consisting of grunts and huffs of varying intensity. The written version of this ape language, which can occasionally be spotted on street signs and in adverts, looks like this: "// oooo / oo /// o". Discussions, or what passes for them, are often interrupted by flashes of violence and cruelty, crude sexual propositions, and the occasional fart. The score, made up almost entirely of improvisational sonic tone poems by King Crimson and Robert Fripp, compliments the action absurdly well.

The plot involves a pair of males--an alpha (played by Oram) and his submissive sidekick (played by Tom Meeten)--who wander out of a woodsy suburban copse and into a household already beset by seething familial, romantic, and inter-generational conflicts, throwing the fragile established order into chaos. The household consists of a mother and daughter, (Lucy Honigman and Toyah Wilcox) and mom's alpha boyfriend (Julian Rhind-Tutt), who has a submissive sidekick of his own (Sean Reynard). Complicating matters is the family's fifth wheel, the exiled paterfamilias, beautifully portrayed by Britcom MVP Julian Barratt.

You might think such a heady set-up would lend itself to the filmmakers indulging in a bit of heavy-handed social commentary. Fortunately, you'd be wrong about that. In an interview with HeyUGuys.com, Oram states: "There are no metaphors and no intended comments. It’s just details that I hope people will enjoy, find funny and laugh at."

And oh, those details! Aaaaaaaah!'s hilarious gross-out highlights include a store manager ejaculating on a photograph of Prince Harry, a disgusting cooking show watched by the females while the men play a primitive motorcycle simulator video game, and poor Noel Fielding getting his knob bitten clean off by an angry shoplifter.

And yet, the filmmakers' avoidance of allegory notwithstanding, there's something about Oram's walk-through of his conquest's flat during a party, wherein he continually marks his territory by pissing on every surface, that manages to transcend the grotesque and speak to certain unspoken truths about masculinity and our culture's relationship with our baser animal instincts. Perhaps it's for this reason that, in his enthusiastic review for the "men's issues" column from The Telegraph UK, Tom Fordy claims that "every man should watch Aaaaaaaah!". Meanwhile, over at The Guardian, their shorter, 3-star review chose to focus on "the film’s despair at the ways women respond to such shows of mastery".

Ultimately, Aaaaaaaah! is an incredibly bizarre and transgressive experimental film that also works as a comic entertainment, simultaneously relate-able and recognizable yet disturbingly alien, and therefore worthy to sit alongside the best of Bunuel.

If you think you've got what it takes to watch Aaaaaaaah!, you can currently download it at the iTunes website via this direct link.

***

MINI-INTERVIEW WITH AAAAAAAAH! CREATOR STEVE ORAM

After reaching out to his management via Twitter, I was recently fortunate enough to get a chance to ask Mr. Oram a few questions about his film, which he graciously agreed to answer for me via email. Here, now, is the sum total of our online exchange.

JERKY: Can I get a rough estimate of the budget? And was it entirely self-financed, or at least entirely independently financed, as I've seen intimated (but never confirmed) in various media stories about the movie?

STEVE ORAM: Yes it was an entirely self-financed movie. Paid for with proceeds from a TV voiceover I did. It was entirely independent and so without any 'creative' input from outside. The actual budget - well think of the lowest budget feature film you've seen, it's about that.

JERKY: Was the addition of the sub-titular appendix "We Are Not Men" an after-thought for the North American market, to make it easier to find in search engines? And does it have (as I suspect) a Nietzschean meaning?

STEVE ORAM: I wish! The search engine thing is an absolute nightmare. On social media anyone searching for it will just come across a thousand people going aaaaaggh! about someone's haircut or something. I wouldn't say I aligned myself with Nietzche or any philosophy. It's just the idea that we aren't as special as we kid ourselves to be. We're no better than any of the other animals at the end of the day.

JERKY: That ending... WHY?!?!?

STEVE ORAM: Well I hope the ending feels true to human nature. Julian Barratt's character is totally disenfrachised and emasculated throughout the film and this has to have its catharsis. Quite often an audience will actually laugh at the ending which astonishes me. Maybe this is an awkward thing, I dunno. Or else there are a lot of sick people in my audiences.

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ APRIL 15, 2016

1. Okay, take a deep breath and dive right in...

On a crisp Saturday in November 2014, a black Mercedes SUV pulled onto the tarmac of an Austrian specialty aviation company 30 miles south of Vienna. Employees of the firm, Airborne Technologies, which specialized in designing and equipping small aircraft with wireless surveillance platforms, had been ordered to work that weekend because one of the company’s investors was scheduled to inspect their latest project. 

For four months, Airborne’s team had worked nearly nonstop to modify an American-made Thrush 510G crop duster to the exact specifications of an unnamed client. Everything about the project was cloaked in secrecy. The company’s executives would refer to the client only as “Echo Papa,” and instructed employees to use code words to discuss certain modifications made to the plane. Now the employees would learn that Echo Papa also owned more than a quarter of their company. 

A fit, handsome man with blond hair and blue eyes got out of the Mercedes and entered Airborne’s hanger. Echo Papa, who was often just called EP, shook hands with a dozen Airborne employees and looked over the plane. “He was the sun, and all the management were planets rotating around him,” said one person present that day.

Thus begins this epic Intercept investigative report about Erik Prince, founder of the "private security" (i.e. mercenary) firm Blackwater, and Grade A War Pig who will one day be crawling on his knees, begging mercy for his sins, while Satan, laughing, spreads his wings. It's an incredible story about one rich asshole's ambition to circumvent pretty much all the laws in his efforts to create a private, fully kill-capable private airforce. We're talking crop dusters outfitted with missile and bomb ports, pods for mounting high-powered 23 mm machine guns, advanced laser targeting capabilities, etc.

2. And for today's second offering, I bring you yet another incredibly important article, this one about the super-shady origins and ultra-creepy, unspoken goals of the so-called “alternative media”, in the particular case of Art Bell's Frankenstein creation, Coast-to-Coast AM. Hopefully, this detailed and devastating article will constitute the crack in the dam that precedes the deluge that ends up washing the rats out of the foundation, because a reckoning is long overdue for the vast sheeple factory that the so-called Alternative Media has turned into.

3. And now, for a feel-good story to help you recover from the two above massive injections of truth serum, here is the absolute BEST STORY EVER about how a promoter for The Rolling Stones got to humiliate Donald Trump in his own freaking house. It's also a story about the thuggish depths to which Trump is willing to sink (hired goons with brass knuckles?!) and how Keith Richards and the Rolling Stone road crew are genuine bad-ass motherfuckers, willing to back up their co-workers with whatever kind of muscle is required for the job.

MEDIAVORE: FILM ~ BULLET REVIEWS

DEADPOOL ~ You know all the hype surrounding the release of Mad Max: Fury Road? How so many critics and reviewers claimed that it "revolutionized the form" and "redefined the action film"? Personally, although I enjoyed it, I didn't see what all the fuss was about. Deadpool, on the other hand, lived up to its hype and more.

Tonally perfect with its deft blend of slapstick comedy and ferocious, R-rated violence, the acting and characterizations, the overall look, the choreography, the set-pieces, the attention to the tiniest of details, and the sophisticated (for this genre) non-linear narrative, all combine to make Deadpool the most successful comics-to-movie adaptation in the history of the genre.

Furthermore, playing off Ryan Reynolds' comedic running commentary as an in-context symptom of his mental illness (note that he never breaks the fourth wall until he undergoes the horrific, torturous process that awakens his mutant powers) was probably the masterstroke in a movie jam-packed with strokes of subversive genius... and other kinds of subversive stroking, as well.

Just a brilliant, gonzo, fucked up and fucking awesome love letter to everything Fredric Wertham tried to warn us away from. I don't even care that this movie's planet-cracking popularity is making that poopy-head Rob Liefeld rich beyond the wildest dreams of mortal man. Deadpool is that freaking good.

...AND CURRENTLY, VIA VIDEO ON DEMAND...

FILTH ~ British director Jon Baird's adaptation of Irvine "Trainspotting" Welsh's novel about a dirty Scottish copper using every diabolical trick in his prodigious metaphorical book in order to secure a promotion certainly lives up to its title.

Filth pretty much wallows in the kind of hyper-stylized, surrealistic, boundary-pushing depravity that we've come to expect from the latest wave of post-whatever UK filmmakers.

All the increasingly familiar elements are here: the unreliable narrator, the constant breaking of the fourth wall, occasional bursts of 'zany' hijinx up to and including wacked-out animation, irony up the wazoo, etc.

Like the aforementioned Trainspotting, Filth's evolutionary predecessors definitely includes the likes of Nicholas Winding Refn's Bronson, Jon Glazer's Sexy Beast, and goes all the way back to Lindsay Anderson's ...if, Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, and (believe it or not) A Hard Day's Night.

In fact, Baird wears his Kubrick fetish on his sleeve, complete with a couple of direct references (a 2001 poster makes a surprise appearance at one point), which I, of course, enjoyed. However, depending on your level of Kubrick fandom, your mileage may vary. In fact, I'll be posting a detailed rundown of all the Kubrick references in Filth in an upcoming essay for my Kubrick blog, KubrickU.blogspot.com.

While Filth may be a bit much for most viewers - it's most definitely not a date film - I found it to be a sufficiently entertaining diversion, and James McAvoy acquits himself well in a somewhat risky role.

For fans of violent, transgressive, gleefully nasty British crime movies, the decision to buy, rent, or download Filth most likely won't result in regret. Who knows? You might even learn a little something about yourself by the end of it!

THE INVITATION ~ Don't let the emerging and highly exaggerated narrative of director Karyn Kusama's allegedly poor treatment at the hands of film industry types sour you to The Invitation's myriad cinematic charms. This tightly wound, slow burn thriller is a virtual clinic on how to evoke and sustain paranoia, and build level upon level of suspense.

The film starts with a couple, Will and Kira, driving to a party in the Hollywood hills. Neither one seems overjoyed to be attending. It turns out to be a dinner party put together by Will's ex, Eden, who has since married Dave, a music producer. Many of the former couple's friends have been invited to the house, along with a few new friends that Eden and Dave (whom we learn had a serious drug habit) met during some kind of New Age style "healing" retreat in Mexico.

As the party begins and the narrative unfolds, we learn that Will and Eden's marriage ended in tragedy upon the accidental death of their young son, Ty, and Eden's subsequent attempted suicide.

At one point, Eden and Dave bust out a videotape featuring what they consider to be a beautiful, transcendent moment from their Mexican retreat. It goes over poorly, with one guest describing the behavior on display as being cult-like. Dave and Eden decide to lighten the mood with a grown-up variation on the game of Truth or Dare. Once again, this only serves to freak out one of the more sensitive guests. In fact, The Invitation works best when it dramatizes the potentially disastrous consequences of ignoring danger signals in favor of maintaining an even social keel.

I can't say much more about this film without spoiling it, so let me just conclude by telling you that it begins and ends with a bang, and takes you on one hell of a ride in between, coming damn close to greatness in the process.

THE BORDERLANDS ~ Found footage horror movies and mockumentaries are a weakness of mine. From the gloriously ridiculous This Is Spinal Tap to Peter Watkins' incredible and essential Punishment Park, there's just something about the conceit and the format of the mock documentary that grabs hold of my attention and refuses to let go. One of my favorite films of the last few years is What We Do in the Shadows, which is kind of a Spinal Tap for Kiwi vampires. So feel free to read the rest of this review keeping my prejudice in mind. If you hate found footage movies, then don't even bother continuing to read. 

Now that that's out of the way, am I saying that The Borderlands succeeds to the degree that any of the above-mentioned films do? No, I am not, and no, it doesn't. What it is, however, is a pretty solid, well-acted, beautifully shot indie horror flick that is well worth 90 minutes of your time.

The story is fairly straightforward. The Vatican sends a trio of priests to a remote Scottish village to investigate a miracle that has allegedly taken place in an ancient church there. The event was partially caught on video, so the team has been instructed to outfit the church (and their rental house, for some reason) with a battery of cameras. They're even forced to wear go-pros wherever they go. The whole thing plays out like an extended game of Call of Cthulhu, that classic table top, pen and paper, role-playing game that was at the heart of the 80's Lovecraft revival.

It also ends on a note that will either leave you stunned, paralyzed, and shocked in utter, mind-numbing terror... or rolling your eyes in derision. It all depends on your level of personal investment in the characters, and maybe also on your propensity for connecting the various narrative and sub-textual dots, as well as your susceptibility to the eldritch lure of Lovecraftian awe. Personally, for me, it worked like gangbusters. Highly recommended!

***

Where to Watch: iTunes, Amazon, Charter, Comcast, Google Play, DirecTV, Playstation, SuddenLink, Time Warner, Verizon FIOS, Vudu, XBOX.

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ MARCH 21, 2016

1. I love amazing art, and I especially appreciate amazing artists who work in the more traditional forms, like painters who use actual paint in their paintings. I know, groundbreaking idea, ain't it? Anyway, when I do come across an artist whose work moves me, like, for instance, this piece does...

...I like to give them a shout-out in the hopes that maybe you folks out there will enjoy the work as much as I do. And so, without further ado, here is a huge gallery featuring the obscure, broken worlds of Russian painter Sergey Kolesov, aka Peleng! Oh, and if you'd like to see his beautiful Wonder Woman portrait, just stroll on over to his LiveJournal.

 

2.  Speaking of hipping you folks to awesome stuff, it's been far too long since I last linked to Nicholas Gurewitch's Ignatz Award-winning webcomic site, Perry Bible Fellowship, which is quite possibly the most consistently funny, intelligent, and unabashedly beautiful online comic currently being published. I mean, just look at this...

Not that it can't be ridiculous for ridiculousness' sake, as in this choice example...

Sometimes, an individual strip's humor can stray perilously close to "Dad Joke" territory. For instance...

But some jokes can also be "inappropriate", NSFW, and occasionally PG-13, as in this early strip...

I guess the thing I most appreciate about the Perry Bible Fellowship is that, if you keep clicking through the archive, you're pretty much guaranteed to find a strip that will be among your all-time favorites. Probably more than just one, now that I think of it. It's that freaking good. Oh, and you should totally buy his book. Pro Tip? Get the first collection, because the second collection is going for like 800 dollars for some reason.

3. And finally for today, I bring you Citizen Shane, an amazing lo-fi documentary about a tragedy-haunted, morbidly obese, serial killer-obsessed fellow by the name of Shane Ballard who ran for sheriff of Lownes County, Mississippi, on an anti-corruption, pro-pornography platform. As fascinating as this documentary is, the story behind it is just as wild. In fact, nobody would know of its existence at all if it weren't for our old pal Don Alex of Subterranean Cinema. Don, one of the world's most respected and hardest working collectors of, and authorities on, obscure films and video, used to trade and sell tapes with Shane. One day, Shane sent Don a copy of this documentary about his life and his run for elected office, which he'd produced with the help of some friends. Shortly thereafter, Shane would take his own life, igniting a charcoal fire indoors and asphyxiating himself. So, essentially, this documentary is all that remains of Shane Ballard, a man whom I think you're going to be glad you got to know, even if only via this one hour of video on Youtube. I'd say "Enjoy", but this isn't that kind of movie. Now watch.

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ MARCH 18, 2016

1. If, like me, you're curious about the kind of people who say they want Donald Trump to be President of the United States of America, you might want to take a gander at this collection of testimonials put together by The Guardian. It's jam-packed with surprises, like the "Hispanic Attorney" who claims that Trump "has demonstrated, at heart, that he is a caring person"; the "Scientist who Likes Both Bernie and Donald" who claims to be "very concerned about radical M-Muslims"; and "the Former Occupy Protester" who claims that Trump "is ripping the soul of America apart... and we deserve it". Sounds like some pretty solid thinking going on there, doesn't it? You really need to read this collection of cuckoo-bird cries for help, even if only for the sheer entertainment value of it all. Armageddon... it's the Greatest Show on Earth, and we've got front row seats!

2. Setting aside politics for a while, I was recently reminded that I don't give sufficient thanks to some of the people and sources that have influenced, entertained, or even just impressed the hell out of me over the years. In terms of cinema, I can't think of anyone whom I haven't met in the flesh that has had a bigger influence on my own taste for and appreciation of cinema than Don Alex, creator of the great (and now sadly departed) website known as Subterranean Cinema. After going through a bunch of personal issues, and coming out on top, Don Alex has brought Subterranean Cinema back in an easier to maintain blog format (sound familiar?) and the results are very much worth your time and attention. I mean, where else are you going to find a free PDF version of the classic Amos Vogel book Film as a Subversive Art, or the legendary "lost" Rospo Pallenberg script for the long-promised film version of Stephen King's apocalyptic megabook, The Stand, or a fully illustrated web version of Alejandro Jodorowsky's long out of print book, El Topo: A Book of the Film? With so much more, and still more to come! If you're a true fan of cinema, then you need to check it out, and count your blessings!

3. You know, when it comes to nationalized embodiment of Purest Evil, it usually comes down to a shoving match between Western-style Fascism (fronted by Hitler and Mussolini) and Eastern-style Totalitarian Collectivism (fronted by Stalin and Mao). HOWEVER! In terms of kicking off some truly terrible trends, or treating political foes and colonial subjects alike as though they were of a different species, or engaging in wanton sadism on an unprecedented global scale, a pretty good case could be made for the British Empire being ranked near the very topmost among despicable world historic control projects. And no, the examples collected in the above-linked article do not all come from the late-19th century (even though many of the worst crimes listed do come from that time). Somewhere in the middle of these collected atrocities sits "The Crushing of the Iraqi Revolution", in 1920:

In 1920, the newly-formed nation of Iraq was tiring of British rule. Charged with guiding the new state towards independence, the Empire had instead installed puppet leaders. turning the place into a de facto colony. Fed up with their imperial overlords, the Iraqis turned to revolution, only for the British to unleash wave after wave of atrocities against them. 

First the RAF conducted nighttime bombing raids on civilian targets. Then they deployed chemical weapons against the fighters, gassing whole groups of them. But the real horrors came in the aftermath, when the victorious British decided to use collective punishment against the offending tribes. 

From that point on, any tribe that caused a fuss would have one of its villages randomly annihilated. Specific orders were given to exterminate every living thing within its walls, from animals to rebels to children. Other villages were subject to random searches. If the British found a single weapon, they would burn the place to the ground, destroy the crops, poison wells, and kill livestock. They’d sometimes target weddings to terrorize the population. In short, the British deliberately targeted civilians in a campaign that lasted the better part of half a decade, all because a few Iraqis had dared to ask for their country back.

And guess what, folks? That's, like, one of the LEAST brutal and offensive entries on this Quasi-Satanic Top Ten List. I strongly urge you to familiarize yourself with this information. It really helps put the current "crisis" - troubling as it may be - in its proper, historical perspective. You'll be thanking whatever God you believe in that the Sun finally set on "the Empire on which the Sun Never Set".

KEITH EMERSON (1944-2016)

THE LAST HALLOWEEN: COMIC AND FILM STILLS SET TO SCORE

This is pretty great. My long-time creative partner Marc Roussel, who directed the short film version of my 8 page comic The Last Halloween based on a script we co-wrote, has put together a video to showcase our film's amazing score, which was created by our friend and frequent collaborator Christopher Guglick, pairing it with stills from the film and pages from my comic. Thanks, Marc... Now it's time to get back to work on our next batch of projects!

SUGGESTED READING LIST (TRUMP EDITION) ~ MARCH 3, 2016

1. If, like many other Americans (and citizens of the world) these days, you're sitting at home scratching your head trying to puzzle out how the USA could possibly have reached the abyssal precipice upon which it now stands poised... you shouldn't be. Because the tracks were laid for the Trump Train - which so many of our fellow humans seem all to eager to hop aboard as it

chugs with increasingly dread-fraught inevitability towards an unprecedented apocalyptic abyss - was first laid over fifteen years ago. In an article entitled Revenge of the Simple, Rolling Stone Magazine's Matt Taibi explains: 

To hear GOP insiders tell it, Doomsday is here. If Donald Trump scores huge tonight and seizes control of the nomination in the Super Tuesday primaries, it will mark the beginning of the end of the Republican Party, and perhaps the presidency. But Trump isn't the beginning of the end. George W. Bush was. The amazing anti-miracle of the Bush presidency is what makes today's nightmare possible. 

People forget what an extraordinary thing it was that Bush was president. Dubya wasn't merely ignorant when compared with other politicians or other famous people. No, he would have stood out as dumb in just about any setting. ... Bush went to the best schools but was totally ignorant of history, philosophy, science, geography, languages and the arts. ... Bush showed no interest in learning and angrily rejected the idea that a president ought to be able to think his way through problems. ...  

There are educational apps that use groups of images to teach two-year-olds to recognize that an orange is like an orange while a banana is a banana. Bush was stalled at that developmental moment. And we elected him president.

The always excellent Taibi goes on to explain how Preznit Dubya's personal Svengali, Karl Rove, banked on the notion that decades of cultural debasement, combined with highly orchestrated right-wing talk radio propaganda campaigns cooked up in billionaire-funded conservative think tanks "left huge blocs of Americans convinced that people who read books, looked at paintings and cared about spelling were either serial killers or scheming to steal bearer bonds from the Nakatomi building." It's an excellent series of riffs, and it ultimately leads to a discussion about the blowback from such ambitious civilizational engineering which leads, now, to...

... Washington freaking out about Trump in a way they never did about Bush. Why? Because Bush was their moron, while Trump is his own moron. That's really what it comes down to. And all of the Beltway's hooting and hollering about how "embarrassing" and "dangerous" Trump is will fall on deaf ears, because as gullible as Americans can be, they're smart enough to remember being told that it was OK to vote for George Bush, a man capable of losing at tic-tac-toe.

There is no comfort offered here, folks. Taibi claims that "we're about to enter a dark period in the history of the American experiment", and yer old pal Jerky couldn't agree more.

2. Make no mistake... yer old pal Jerky is no fan of Mitt Romney. He's a New Millennium Republican after all, and is thus a willing representative of, and standard bearer for, the worst, most greedy, venal, arrogant, bigoted, ignorant, elitist, phony, limited, authoritarian and spite-fueled voting bloc in the history of American democracy. And yet his speech today at the Hinckley Institute in Utah, wherein he savaged Donald Trump with a withering volley of honest, fair and accurate put-downs and insults, was a thing of beauty, and not just because watching right-wingers devour their own makes for great entertainment. It was beautiful because, watching it, you got the sense that there's a very real possibility that the GOP may actually be disintegrating from the inside out. I mean, just watch this thing!

"His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University." Savor that. Swish it around in your mouth for a while, then swallow it. Nice, isn't it? Now consider; whether the Republican establishment's obvious contempt for Trump ultimately leads them to force a brokered convention where they pull some smoky backroom shenanigans to oust him (thereby alienating a huge segment of their base), or simply pushes Trump into exiting the party in order to mount a third party campaign (thereby guaranteeing a Republican defeat), it's all bad news for the Conservative Movement. Because, let's face it; they can slice that shit cake any way they like, but they're still gonna be left with a plate full of shit.

3. John Oliver, host of HBO's satirical news magazine Last Week Tonight, has tried his best to make his show a Trump-free zone. It was a laudable goal, but the stress and strain of trying to cast his gaze away as Trump's bloated, reptoid countenance continued to bloat, swell, and metastasize across and throughout the media ultimately proved impossible. Which brings us to the following video, which serves as yet another bit of evidence in support of the thesis that the best contemporary political news reporting comes from comedians and/or comedy show hosts. Just watch, and maybe when you're done, stroll on over to MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain.com and install Oliver's "Drumpfinator" app. It transforms all web-based instances of Donald Trump's name into his original archaic German family name, "Drumpf", for multiple reasons, all of which will become obvious once you've watched the video.