Stuck in an Elevator with Burly Muzak: Rolling Stones "Hand of Fate"

Awesome song.

Burly Rant: Waiting for the Death-Ape

I imagine everyone has those moments, probably at strange times, that they know they are definitively going to croak. You hear the same crap from everyone you meet who has had these moments or lived through some trauma: enjoy every moment. Life goes by so fast. You'll wish you had all those minutes you wasted, at the end.

This sort of, what do you call it, opinion? Whatever it is, I find myself responding not with resignation of the truth of the matter. No, I'm pissed off.

If indeed our lives our designed toward some kind of goal, whether we were scarred-back slaves in Eygpt contributing to the pyramids, or a composer who created an iconic tune for some 1930s adventure hero, no one can accurately measure how much time was wasted against how much time was useful.

I think it's little wonder most people spend their "free" time getting tattoos and getting high. What else can they do, with death curling about their spines?

I'm big on people Having F*cking Jobs and contributing to society and, if they can, promoting the cultural art. That would include entertainment. Gene Kelly kicking off a wall with a smile. e.e. cummings showing you words that smell like the skin under a girl's ear. It's possible to enhance life with intellectual grandeur. If you don't think men in football uniforms aren't a physical poetry, you aren't paying attention.

I realize I'm waiting to die. It's there, a King Kong staring at me from the cover of the tallest trees. Yellow , bloodshot eyes big as windshields. Fangs embedded with old blood stains grinding with anticipation. I'm just a helpless little Faye Wray tied to totems by my wrists, aware of the death-ape and shrieking in the most unmanly way.

As we get older, the shadow of this great beast draws closer. Unlike the "real" Kong, you can bet this death-ape hasn't any desire to hurry his advance. That's old-age in a nutshell.

The more I hear people tell me to enjoy what I won't have on my death bed, still bound by vines on my aged little bruised-skin wrists with my big square bifocals and tiny old man head with hearing aid jammed in one ear, hoping there's a heaven so my Grand Soul will find peace, I have to admit: I lose the inherent survival instinct.

In a world where some attractive woman is followed home, raped and murdered and set afire by the human monster, or some tw*t kid is bitten by a bear at the zoo while trying to feed the Do Not Feed kodiak and resulting in the animal being destroyed in order to test it for rabies, I find myself incredulous. Am I expected to really hope for the best for Mankind? Am I supposed to assure all of you that Death Kong is not watching you from the shadows of the trees?

Shall I come down with cancer and spend my nights rolling among my intravenous tubes, weeping at the unfairness of it all, why me, why is this happening to me, I'm not one of Those People?

Do I get a moment to tell some uncomfortable teenager trying not to look at my horrible patchy skin and infected mouth that she should live life, enjoy every moment as if it's your last, the sunlight on your cheeks should be savored?

Who gets to tell all the f*cked up homeless people we all avoid and grimace at that they're going suffer until the death-ape comes? That they're going to suffer because the death-ape sort of enjoys watching them suck off sociopaths for cigarette money. The homeless maniacs talk to the death-ape. That's who they're talking to, when they pass you gibbering. They're intensely aware of the presence of Death Kong. They've made a kind of friend to ease back the sexual heat of bitter loneliness.

Personally, I'm not interested in platitudes about living in this world. I think it's too easy, a basketball lay-up, to derive comfort from all this hubris. No one deserves anything they have coming to them, and yet here we are. Smell the death-ape? His fur? The stench of his carrion breath?

I think this is why Apocalype appeals so much to me: a collective realization that every summer afternoon swimming with a pretty girl and her friends doesn't protect you from the final flesh-eating jungle nightmare. Some virus comes to engulf every happy moment you've ever had. A monster laughs while you squirm.

So what's the point? Tell the Death Kong f*ck you? Submit to a terror of living? Become the totem pole which binds you?

I don't know. Why not look around, like Captain Kirk in that episode where he was getting chased on a barren planet by a big superhuman lizard commander intent on killing him. Kirk found some bamboo, and some orange dust, and some black flint rocks, and he made himself a little cannon to shoot the sh*t out of the lizard guy. You can try that with Death Kong. It won't work, but it'll give you hope.

But regardless: do something. Get down with accepting that you're no more important than that poor son-of-a-bitch in ancient Eygpt who lived for maybe sixteen years if he was lucky before his heart burst lifting those f*cking carved boulders up those totems to reach the gods. That starving African kid with death-hollow eyes with the fly on his lip? That's you. Grasp it like it's the last sharp object between you and the rampaging hunger of the death-ape. Do that.

Burly Movies: INCEPTION (2010)

You'll hear a lot of people complain about how INCEPTION defies its own logic in order to have the plot plod on. Like Chris Nolan is just painting himself into a corner script-wise and has to shat out a deus ex machina to make it work.

Nothing like that really happens in the movie. You're asked to buy that a team of mind-heisters will risk their own minds and sanity and lives following their leader dude who may be leading them toward certain doom. But outside of that, nothing is contrived to the point where you can't accept it. Or at least, I did.

It's easy to read a description of INCEPTION and kind of know what you're getting. Too many are probably weighing the movie down with MATRIX-like depth it doesn't have, which THE MATRIX didn't have either. What it does have is a sterling conceit told in the most general way possible. The world of INCEPTION is a world in which technology has become emblematic instead of specific. We don't need to know how a machine that fits into a suitcase enables other human beings to enter consciousnesses that are not theirs. It's just not important, just as it's never been important with any important science fiction that has come along. And when I say "important SF", I am not talking about "Star Trek" and STAR WARS.

In movie terms, INCEPTION belongs in interesting times for sure. It's a 1960's SF movie made today. In fact, this is a "mission movie", where all the characters have a mission and must overcome every obstacle to its success. In science fiction terms, FANTASTIC VOYAGE and "Mission: Impossible" are key here. "Mission: Impossible" is pretty much the core plot structure of the movie: leader (DiCaprio) is introduced, the team is assembled, the mission is go, the audience is held suspended not by the crucial life/death dynamics nor whether the team will pull it off, but how they will pull it off.

This is not to say the stakes are not high, but they are most at their epicenter when DiCaprio as "Cobb" is forced to confront what is certainly the deterioration in his own mind. The mission is compromised by this insecurity, which the audience is privvy to early on. I've heard criticisms of DiCaprio's performance, but I'll say he's transformed himself into a Burly Man. It's official. He knows what he's doing, he knows the power of how he moves and how his words are spoken. He's a consummate male presence, an identifier, proven here and in SHUTTER ISLAND. Kudos to DiCaprio.

Everyone in the movie is dynamic without obvious cliches. As you can also read elsewhere, Jason Gordon-Levitt is a blossoming stud who owns this movie with its most incredible sequences, particularly the "anti-gravity hotel." Gordon "Don't Hate Me for Being a F*cking Stud"-Levitt is a strong, personable character within his own skin. He doesn't reach out to the audience, he lets them come to him. He seems like background fodder and yet this and BRICK, the "high-school Hammett" movie, reveal this guy's intense attention to great acting: he knows how to move, how to present thought without speaking. Great work by him, and a dude I will hopefully be enjoying for decades to come.

It also has little Ellen Page. She must taste like a dreamsicle, which is one of the two or three greatest things the Lord ever gave us.

INCEPTION is the best movie of this year, easily. Chris Nolan, the writer/director of MEMENTO, THE PRESTIGE and a couple of superhero movies, and now this thing, is producing good work time after time, undeniably. He's probably an insufferable arteest type, far as I know, but you can't argue with the effect of his movies. It's getting to the point where a Nolan movie is guaranteed to be interesting and arresting, as great movies should, just as M. Night's movies are guaranteed to stink on ice. Nolan can start chalking up a filmography right up there with some of the best. Even a second movie with a guy dressed in a Bat-dildo suit hasn't derailed him with its success. I think Nolan deserves some credit for not making a couple of arty movies and a couple of Bat-dildo movies, then spending the rest of his time on Earth snorting coke off some Hollywood skank's mons pubis. I'm sure he does some of that, but somewhere in there he does the work and we get INCEPTION. Which is fantastic for us.