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. 

JERKY PICKS THE WINNERS FOR TONIGHT'S OSCARS!

As some of you may already know, in my capacity as editor-in-chief and sole content provider for The Daily Dirt circa 1999-2006, yer old pal Jerky had what can only be described as an incredibly impressive track record when it came to predicting who would win at the Academy Awards, particularly in the Big Four categories (Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Picture).

This year, unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the fire in the belly passion required to write up my traditionally hilarious full accounting of the reasoning behind my ever prescient choices. But when I woke up this afternoon, rolled over, flicked my mouse to wake up the computer monitor and was reminded that tonight was Oscar night, I decided I had to write SOMETHING. After all, I owe it to you... the fans.

And so, without further ado, here are my sure-to-be accurate, no-miss Oscar night winning picks! You can bet the kids' college fund on these locks, folks... winners all, or double your money back!

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
WHO SHOULD WIN: Mark Ruffalo, for Spotlight.

WHO WILL WIN: Sylvester Stallone, for Creed.

WHY: Duh! Because #OscarSoWhite, of course.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
WHO SHOULD WIN: Who cares?

WHO WILL WIN: Son of Saul, straight outa Hungary

WHY: *cough* HOLOCAUST *cough*

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

WHO SHOULD WIN: Rachel McAdams, in Spotlight.

WHO WILL WIN: Jennifer Jason Leigh, in The Hateful Eight.
WHY: The wanton, misogynistic sadism of the Old White Men who make up the Academy, who really got off on seeing JJL getting the shit kicked out of her for three hours straight... or was it four? Kinda felt like five, to me.

VISUAL EFFECTS

WHO SHOULD WIN: Mad Max: Fury Road.

WHO WILL WIN: Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
WHY: The Hollywood Establishment needs to throw that stink burger at least a couple Oscar bones, and this seems like one of the best places for them to do so.

ANIMATED FEATURED FILM

WHO SHOULD WIN: Inside Out.

WHO WILL WIN: Anomalisa.
WHY: For proving once and for all that feature-length animated films can be just as ponderous, pointless, and dishwater dull as real movies can. Way to go, guys!

CINEMATOGRAPHY

WHO SHOULD WIN: The Revenant.

WHO WILL WIN: The Hateful Eight.
WHY: Because the Academy knows they'll never hear the end of Tarantino's whining about it if they don't at least give him this one. "70mm Roadshow Presentation" my fat white ass.

FILM EDITING

WHO SHOULD WIN: The Big Short.

WHO WILL WIN: The Big Short.

WHY: Because this film is incredibly well paced, which is a result of excellent editing, so it actually deserves to win.

DOCUMENTARY – FEATURE

WHO SHOULD WIN: The Look of Silence.

WHO WILL WIN: Amy.

WHY: Because, depressing as it may be to admit this, most people care more about an alcoholic celebrity crackhead doing herself in than they do about one of the most horrific episodes of recent history, wherein roving gangs of anti-communist street thugs swept the Suharto regime into power in Indonesia circa 1966, killing between 1 and 3 million of their fellow citizens in the process, without any of them ever having to face justice for their actions. The Look of Silence is a sequel of sorts to 2012's The Act of Killing, and both are more terrifying than any horror film ever made.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

WHO SHOULD WIN: Inside Out.

WHO WILL WIN: Straight Outta Compton.
WHY: Because, incredible as it may seem, this is the one and only nomination - in the single, solitary category - that has any relationship whatsoever to "the Blacks", as Donald Trump calls them. So they pretty much don't have a choice. They have to give Straight Outta Compton the Oscar. Which is going to be doubly hilarious when this guy takes the stage to accept his statuette...

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

WHO SHOULD WIN: Room.

WHO WILL WIN: The Martian.
WHY: Because the journey from tech geek's self-published hobby-novel to world-beating, feel-good, box-office-domination is just the kind of Cinderella story the Academy likes to kid itself into thinking is emblematic of the Hollywood "brand".  

BEST DIRECTOR

WHO SHOULD WIN: George Miller, for Mad Max: Fury Road.

WHO WILL WIN: Tom McCarthy, for Spotlight.
WHY: Because they forgot to nominate Ridley Scott for some reason.

BEST ACTOR

WHO SHOULD WIN: Matt Damon, for The Martian.

WHO WILL WIN: Leonardo DiCaprio, for The Revenant.
WHY: Dude wants it so bad, he allowed himself to get raped by a bear. Let the baby have his bottle, already. 

BEST ACTRESS

WHO SHOULD WIN: Brie Larson, for Room.

WHO WILL WIN: Jennifer Lawrence, for Joy.

WHY: Because Cate Blanchett already has two Oscars, nobody knows how to pronounce "Saoirse", and everybody in the world wants to get with J-Law. I mean, have you seen those "Fappening" snaps?!

BEST PICTURE

WHO SHOULD WIN: Spotlight.

WHO WILL WIN: The Martian.
WHY: Because the collective IQ of the global "Anglosphere" seems to have experienced a significant and distressing drop over the past several months (see the recent Republican debates for evidence of such).

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ FEBRUARY 18

1. Matthew Yglesias thinks America's constitutional democracy is going to collapse. On this topic, he writes:

Some day — not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies — there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we're lucky, it won't be violent. If we're very lucky, it will lead us to tackle the underlying problems and result in a better, more robust, political system. If we're less lucky, well, then, something worse will happen. 

Very few people agree with me about this, of course. When I say it, people generally think that I'm kidding. America is the richest, most successful country on earth. The basic structure of its government has survived contested elections and Great Depressions and civil rights movements and world wars and terrorist attacks and global pandemics. People figure that whatever political problems it might have will prove transient — just as happened before. 

Rather than everyone being wrong about the state of American politics, maybe everyone is right.

But voiced in another register, my outlandish thesis is actually the conventional wisdom in the United States. Back when George W. Bush was president and I was working at a liberal magazine, there was a very serious discussion in an editorial meeting about the fact that the United States was now exhibiting 11 of the 13 telltale signs of a fascist dictatorship. The idea that Bush was shredding the Constitution and trampling on congressional prerogatives was commonplace. When Obama took office, the partisan valence of the complaints shifted, but their basic tenor didn't. Conservative pundits — not the craziest, zaniest ones on talk radio, but the most serious and well-regarded —compare Obama's immigration moves to the actions of a Latin-American military dictator. 

In the center, of course, it's an article of faith that when right and left talk like this they're simply both wrong. These are nothing but the overheated squeals of partisans and ideologues. 

At the same time, when the center isn't complaining about the excessively vociferous complaints of the out-party of the day, it tends to be in full-blown panic about the state of American politics. And yet despite the popularity of alarmist rhetoric, few people act like they're actually alarmed. Accusations that Barack Obama or John Boehner or any other individual politician is failing as a leader are flung, and then abandoned when the next issue arises. In practice, the feeling seems to be that salvation is just one election away. Hillary Clinton even told Kara Swisher recently that her agenda if she runs for president is to end partisan gridlock. 

It's not going to work.

Click on the link above to find out exactly why Matthew Yglesias believes what he believes, and try not to panic too much. Twas ever thus.

2. Personally, I have only seen just under half of the films on this list of The Fifty Weirdest Movies Ever Made. Thanks to my friend Spidey for sending me this, because the next few months of my movie watching life just got an incredible boost of weird-ass mind-bombs injected into it. I mean, who can resist such out-there fare as the recently deceased Andrzej Zulawski’s Jerzy Żuławski's On the Silver Globe, described here as: 

A three-hour spaceman journey straight into the center of Zulawski’s poetic heart, On The Silver Globe is the director’s most phantasmagorical film. In 1976, Zulawski embarked on the largest-scale film production in Polish history, and over the course of two intense years, executed an eye-popping, grandiloquent sci-fi epic concerning astronauts who crash-land on the moon and kickstart their own bizarre, primitive society. Sadly, the Polish government deemed the film subversive, shut the production down just before shooting was completed, and destroyed its film print materials, sets and impossibly lush costumes. Ten years later, using secreted footage, Zulawski was able to piece together a version of the film that came as close as possible to his original vision—and the results will defy your mind, as even in its reconstituted form, On The Silver Globe is a true brainquake that effortlessly takes you to dizzying heights, and just keeps on elevating.

And that's one of the LEAST bizarre films on this list. Watch at your own peril! Viewer discretion is advised.

3. I found the experience of reading Tony Schwartz' New York Times essay "Addicted to Distraction" to be a profoundly disturbing experience. It begins:

ONE evening early this summer, I opened a book and found myself reading the same paragraph over and over, a half dozen times before concluding that it was hopeless to continue. I simply couldn’t marshal the necessary focus.  

I was horrified. All my life, reading books has been a deep and consistent source of pleasure, learning and solace. Now the books I regularly purchased were piling up ever higher on my bedside table, staring at me in silent rebuke. Instead of reading them, I was spending too many hours online, checking the traffic numbers for my company’s website, shopping for more colorful socks on Gilt and Rue La La, even though I had more than I needed, and even guiltily clicking through pictures with irresistible headlines such as “Awkward Child Stars Who Grew Up to Be Attractive.” ... 

“The net is designed to be an interruption system, a machine geared to dividing attention,” Nicholas Carr explains in his book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” “We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive.” 

Addiction is the relentless pull to a substance or an activity that becomes so compulsive it ultimately interferes with everyday life. By that definition, nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet. It has arguably replaced work itself as our most socially sanctioned addiction. 

According to one recent survey, the average white-collar worker spends about six hours a day on email. That doesn’t count time online spent shopping, searching or keeping up with social media. The brain’s craving for novelty, constant stimulation and immediate gratification creates something called a “compulsion loop.” Like lab rats and drug addicts, we need more and more to get the same effect. 

Endless access to new information also easily overloads our working memory. When we reach cognitive overload, our ability to transfer learning to long-term memory significantly deteriorates. It’s as if our brain has become a full cup of water and anything more poured into it starts to spill out. 

I’ve known all of this for a long time. I started writing about it 20 years ago. I teach it to clients every day. I just never really believed it could become so true of me.

I urge everyone to read this essay in full. It's a sobering rumination on what's happening to all of us, at all times, in this Brave New World of ours. The ramifications are, potentially, devastating on a civilizational level.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"He broke out all over in assholes and shit himself to death."

- Nixon aid Dean Burch describes George Herbert "Poppy" Walker Bush's reaction upon learning of the existence of a document in the possession of by Bay of Pigs, JFK assassination and Watergate co-conspirator E.Howard Hunt, which he was threatening to make public if certain strings weren't pulled to help him out of a jam. Not to worry, however... Hunt's wife was soon murdered in a suspicious plane crash (which also destroyed the aforementioned document), and Hunt got a million dollars' hush money, so everything turned up roses for all involved! Google it if you don't believe me.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"Please clap" supplants Hemingway's six-word story as the shortest, saddest story ever told.

- Nate Goldman makes Coca-Cola come spraying out of yer old pal Jerky's nose with this "bon mot" tweet about a recent trauma experienced by Republican also-ran (and Bush Crime Family member) Jeb Bush in New Hampshire.

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ FEB 3, 2016

1. Set aside a couple hours to check out this century-plus overview of American comedy as assembled and curated by a team of comedy "experts" at Vulture.com. It purports to identify the 100 jokes, sketches or comedy moments that shaped a century of funny. While there are some entries here that I wouldn't have chosen, especially some of the new millennium selections, it's still very much worth checking out. Maybe I'll try my hand at assembling an alternate group of self-declared experts in order to put together a list of our own. Selections and volunteers appreciated.

2. Once you're done wasting half your day with the above overview of American comedy, why not spend the OTHER half wasting it with this encyclopedic overview of the greatest electronic music albums of the 1950's and 60's? Article author Joseph Morpurgo sets the ground rules:

The great electronic albums of the 1970s get plenty of kudos – but what of their predecessors? Casual accounts of the history of electronic music tend to point back to familiar sources: Suicide’s babble’n’hum; Cluster, Klaus Schulze and the rest of the Krautrock squad; the stygian mulch-music of early Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle; and of course Kraftwerk’s meticulous robot pop. Further back? Well, that’s when things tend to get a little foggy. Experiments with recorded electronic music actually date back to the 1940s (hell, depending on how you define “electronic music”, they date back to the 1880s). As early as the mid-1950s, predominantly electronic LPs were already being pressed, marketed and sold to the a willing (if slightly confused) public. Half a century down the line, many of these records still sound fantastic. Some are fascinating relics with plenty to say to the contemporary listener; others sound impossibly ahead of their time. ... Ground rules set – and inevitably occasionally broken – here they are: 15 essentials from electronic music’s Big Bang.

Check it out. No matter your tastes, you're all but guaranteed to find something that appeals to your particular, personal brain circuitry.


3. If you haven't seen The Answers yet, you're missing out on a pretty great, inventive, emotionally potent short film. Everything about this production, from the writing, to the acting, to the production values, is top notch. As a short film maker myself, I'm always encouraged when I see real, honest, worthwhile effort put into one. Kudos to everyone involved. You can watch it here and now:

MEDIAVORE // COMICS ~ THE COSMIC HORROR OF "NAMELESS"

NAMELESS (Image Comics) ~ In this miniseries' six immensely satisfying issues, Grant Morrison serves up a heaping helping of Lovecraftian science-fiction, generously fortified with his trademark juxtaposition of heady, historically-accurate occultism with genre conventions and pop culture tropes. Handling the visual side of things, Chris Burnham makes an astonishingly successful go at aping frequent Morrison collaborator Frank Quitely's style, minus the latter's glacial, deadline-mocking turnaround rate.

Experiencing this gorgeously-rendered, mind-bending-yet-familiar narrative was a tremendous pleasure, so I'll do my best to make this a spoiler-free review. In fact, I won't be engaging in much analysis at all. This is really more of a preview for Nameless, or an enthusiastic recommendation, than anything else.

The basic elements of the story are as follows: A freelance occultist referred to only as "Nameless" is drawn into billionaire space mogul Paul Darius' clandestine efforts to deflect a massive asteroid that is hurtling towards the Earth, while simultaneously investigating some peculiar markings and structures that have been spotted on its surface.

If the above sounds a bit like Constantine does Armageddon, that isn't too far off the mark. But don't be fooled... Nameless is NOT some hastily thrown together pastiche. It features an intricate, non-linear assembly of nesting narratives that demands and rewards close attention.

From the first pages, in which Nameless sneaks, Inception-style, into someone's dreams in order to steal a powerful psychic artifact, we're never quite sure where we, or the characters, stand. Forever poised at the brink of revelation, the occasional glimpses of the hideous, alien reality behind the thin camouflage of sensory perception are sufficient to send even the strongest fleeing for the comfort of blind, blessed ignorance.

Nameless includes several genuinely disturbing moments, as well as a few vividly rendered scenes of graphic physical violence. It's also packed with goodies for lovers of esoterica, amateur occultists, and others interested in such paracultural oddities.

So how "paracultural" do things get, exactly? Well, as Nameless begins to realize that our Solar System has been the battlefield for an aeons-spanning interplanetary war between the deities, demigods and monstrous abominations who populate the mythological pantheons of the Sumerians, the Mayans, and various unknown "others", he decides to protect himself and his spaceship crew using the symbolic Enochian pseudo-language devised by Elizabethan court magician John Dee... an insight that comes to him while under the influence of one of Brion Gysin's hallucination-inducing Dream Machines. There are also some majorly twisted Tarot cards on display. But I've revealed too much already.

If the above sounds as good to you as it would to me, then you're in luck! A collected edition of Nameless is coming soon, which means you won't have to keep going back and forth to your local comic shop, waiting for up to eight freaking weeks before being able to gobble up the next incredible chapter, which usually takes no more than 20 minutes' reading time. Fortunately, thanks in no small part to Burnham, Nameless improves with each reading, so it will probably have a long, happy publishing life.

I'm not being paid to say this: Buy your copy of Nameless the minute it hits store shelves. Or heck, buy it now using this link, and Amazon will toss a couple pennies in my general direction! Go on... you know you want to!

QUOTE OF THE DAY & SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ JAN 30, 2016

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"This is a chronicle of the Bush Era with no colour-coded Terror Alerts; no Freedom Fries; no Halliburton; no Healthy Forests Initiative (which opened up wilderness areas to logging); no Clear Skies Act (which reduced air pollution standards); no New Freedom Initiative (which proposed testing all Americans, beginning with schoolchildren, for mental illness); no pamphlets sold by the National Parks Service explaining that the Grand Canyon was created by the Flood; no research by the National Institutes of Health on whether prayer can cure cancer (‘imperative’, because poor people have limited access to healthcare); no cover-up of the death of football star Pat Tillman by ‘friendly fire’ in Afghanistan; no ‘Total Information Awareness’ from the Information Awareness Office; no Project for the New American Century; no invented heroic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch; no Fox News; no hundreds of millions spent on ‘abstinence education’. It does not deal with the Cheney theory of the ‘unitary executive’ – essentially that neither the Congress nor the courts can tell the president what to do – or Bush’s frequent use of ‘signing statements’ to indicate that he would completely ignore a bill that the Congress had just passed. It is astonishing how many major players from Bush World are here Missing in Action. Entirely absent, or mentioned only in passing, are Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Yoo, Elliott Abrams, Ahmed Chalabi, Ayad Allawi, Rick Santorum, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Richard Armitage, Katherine Harris, Ken Mehlman, Paul O’Neill, Rush Limbaugh. Barely appearing at all are John Ashcroft, Samuel Alito, Ari Fleischer, Alberto Gonzales, Denny Hastert, John Negroponte and Tom Ridge. Condi and Colin Powell are given small parts, but Rummy is largely a passing shadow. No one is allowed to steal a scene from the star. The enormous black hole in the book is the Grand Puppetmaster himself, Dick Cheney, the man who was prime minister to Bush’s figurehead president."

- From Damn Right, I Said, Eliot Weinberger's post-modernist tinged review of George W. Bush's autobiography, Decision Points, for the London Review of Books. It's so pomo, even Foucault makes an appearance!

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SUGGESTED READING LIST

1. They found it! Long considered a “lost film” (defined as a known work with no surviving copy), 1962’s Pages of Death was ranked number fourteen in Gambit magazine’s list of fifteen “lost” films.
A 16mm print of the film was recently discovered in the collection of the Portland, Oregon based Oregon Historical Society. Writing in Vintage Sleaze, Jim Linderman describes Pages of Death as the story of a teenage boy who “hung out reading pornography at Baker’s Variety Store until he couldn’t stand it any longer and murdered a girl in a whipped up frenzy of smut inspired rage.” And now you can watch it, here!

2. I find it oddly delightful that Brave New World author Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four author George Orwell had arguments debating the comparative merits of their speculative dystopias that were not unlike the arguments my fellow students and I had while undergrad English students. This Open Culture essay, Entitled "My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours", begins:

In 1949, George Orwell received a curious letter from his former high school French teacher. Orwell had just published his groundbreaking book Nineteen Eighty-Four, which received glowing reviews from just about every corner of the English-speaking world. His French teacher, as it happens, was none other than Aldous Huxley who taught at Eton for a spell before writing Brave New World (1931), the other great 20th century dystopian novel. Huxley starts off the letter praising the book, describing it as “profoundly important.” He continues, “The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it.” Then Huxley switches gears and criticizes the book...

Click on the link for the rest.

3. Beauty, brains, natural talent, and now, Star Wars money (and immortality). Wow!  Saara Forsberg... It's not fair!

MEDIAVORE // FILM ~ BULLET REVIEWS IN BRIEF

THE BIGGIES

STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS ~ Somewhat enjoyable, ultimately disposable opening salvo in Disney's continuity-redefining jump-start of George Lucas' inexplicably popular, intellectually moribund, decades-long series of glorified toy commercials. Of course it's the most "successful" film in the history of cinema.

SPOTLIGHT ~ One of the best journalistic films since All the President's Men, this extended look at the Boston Globe's Spotlight investigating team's groundbreaking 2001/2002 report on the Catholic Church's cover-up of massive pedophilia among the clergy is chock-a-block with interesting performances, great cinematic flourishes, understated and subtly powerful moments of revelation, without ever falling prey to the urge to be exploitative or overly sentimental. Mature, powerful, enjoyable.

THE HATEFUL 8 ~ as with every Quentin Tarantino since Kill Bill, there were things to love, and things to hate. Lots of cheap tricks disguised as shocking revelations, wonderful use of the ultra-wide
screen (some excellent staging and shot compositions), but ultimately too long by about an hour, and what little narrative heft it does have doesn't manage to ground it at all. For such a bloated thing, it sure was insubstantial. Also, there are way more than 8 characters in this thing. Cheat!

THE BIG SHORT ~ The Wolf of Wall Street, only more so. Probably the best movie about financial malfeasance that I have ever seen, and that includes most documentaries. This one was a great surprise to me, as I'd heard little about it before watching. A true story that is even more infuriating than Spotlight, and that's saying something.

THE SMALLIES

THE RIDICULOUS 6 ~ This is the Adam Sandler movie where all the native people employed as extras and in small roles decided to walk off the set because of the racist, caricaturist way in which the script dealt with them. And you know what? That's probably the funniest thing about this whole damn project.

HELL BABY ~ The creators of Reno 911 (a personal favorite) threw together this Satanic-themed pregnancy horror-comedy and invited a bunch of their comedy peers (including a game Rod Cordrey, half of Key and Peele, and a totally naked half of Garfunkle and Oates) to join them in New Orleans for some movie shooting and some Po Boys eating. Mildly entertaining, but ultimately disposable.

THE VISIT ~ M. Night Shamalamadingdong is back with this R-rated, found-footage, glorified "Goosebumps" episode. I actually liked this, which is kind of miraculous, considering who made it. I wouldn't be surprised to find out he didn't play a very large role in the writing of this project, because it actually works.

THE CONGRESS ~ Perhaps the most successful combination of animation and live action since Who Framed Roger Rabbit, this thoughtful, profoundly postmodern deconstruction of the ways in which the Hollywood machine chews up, digests, then shits out its employees (aka its victims) is also one of the most profound works of cinematic philosophy in recent decades, asking many big, important questions, and offering answers that enlighten, even if they don't comfort. Must see cinema, a feast for the eyes, the mind, and the soul.

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ JAN 23, 2016 (TIME-WASTERS EDITION)

1. I've decided to try doing something new with this latest edition of the Daily Dirt Diaspora Suggested Readings List: Waste everyone's time with meaningless bullshit! And so, with that in mind, I give you... TRUMPLINGS! Go on, click it! And be sure to explore all the clicking options. Unlike voting in one of our sham, post-modern Western democracies, you won't live to regret it, I promise you.

2. You say that your musical tastes are unconventional, eclectic, and unique? You fancy yourself to be a fearless explorer of the avant garde, someone who likes to listen to "weird" music? Well then, here's a list of albums that Mojo Music Magazine considers to be fifty of the very weirdest albums in the history of commercial recordings. I don't suppose it will come as a shock to regular readers that a couple of my favorites are on this list, including the one represented by that handsome fella in the image above. Some of these picks aren't weird at all, by the way. "Piper at the Gates of Dawn", weird? Genius, yes. Weird, no.

3. And now for a real time-waster, try this incredibly detailed Canadian Business Report story about the unprecedentedly humiliating collapse of would-be retail "titan" TARGET CANADA! The author, Joe Castaldo, attempts something akin to a Hunter S. Thompson "Gonzo Journalism" approach, a conceit they attempt to reinforce via the inclusion of Ralph Steadman-style violent, slashing, graphical text overlays (click here to see what I mean). As an added bonus, be sure to check out this hilarious annotated map pinpointing exactly on the planet where all of TARGET CANADA's $3.4 BILLION worth of creditors are located. Even my tiny hometown of Edmundston, New Brunswick, Canada makes the list! 

THE DIGITAL AS ART AND ART AS THE DIGITAL

"You never did the Kenosha Kid."