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.

Tuesday's Burly Rant or I Was Born to Love Latinas

So, what is everybody going to do when the Earth sh*ts the bed, a great big hole opens in the sky, and we're living on a cinder?

Here in Virginia, we've been experiencing over 100 degree temperatures pretty much daily, until just today. 100 degrees with an index of 116. Does it really matter whether it's 112 or 116? I'm a man, I don't even use AC in my vehicle. I use it sparingly, because I feel it's a challenge to the whole human race hiding indoors with their AC units cranked up, blowing their hot fumes into the environmental carnival tent and causing untold damage to my heart. I don't necessarily blame people I suppose, though it'd be nice if they gave a sh*t about anything except "not being hot." In another fifty years, when your grandkids are outside playing in environmentally-controlled space suits because the air quality is about the same as a Viet Cong rat hole doused in Agent Orange, and your clean water supplies and all evidence of it have to be hidden so your neighbors won't potentially kill you and steal it, you can pat yourselves on the back for a job well done. Nobody has lived through this kind of heat before, because People of the Past didn't have the ecological nightmare of carbon monoxide mixed with acidic humidity from charbroilled clouds or seeping up from a crumbcake Earth.

The recent trend is to "Go Green." It's nice to see. People are changing out their 100 watt bulbs for energy-saving ones, and recycling. All that saved money goes right into their SUV's gas tank.

I recycle. I'm not "environmental." That would suggest I want there to be a planet for people to inhabit. The only people I like are in Ray Bradbury stories. They are good, fundamentally, dreamers with adventure in their hearts and a romantic interest in the passage of time. I still believe all people living west of Elvis Presley's house and north of the Red River and southeast in a diagonal line from Portland, Oregon are just like the people in Ray Bradbury's books. Those people have been to Mars and have strange stories told to them by an Illustrated Man on a lonely country road. Those people have never heard of the Black Lagoon of the Gulf BP Oil spill. Those people think American Idol is what the best college football player in Iowa wins. Older adults whittle sticks with pocket knives, creating little rockets they give to kids to play with. Porn hasn't been invented. It's just love between a girl and a boy looking up at the stars.

I saw a Ray Bradbury person today, or at least someone who would have inspired Bradbury. She was a beautiful Latina with her dark hair tied back, in a sleeveless brown dress with those folded layers over the legs like Carmen Miranda used to wear. She lifted the skirt part so she could walk fast, showing off good strong legs. She was a mature woman on a city street trotting barefoot across hot tarmac. I nodded to her while driving past and in the rearview she smiled with her face tilted back as if she was actually happy. It was a moment that made the very atomically-small Bradbury portion of my brain wonder if I'd somehow contributed to her happiness. I'm just a thick-armed creep in a work van, but maybe she sensed I thought she was beautiful in that moment. Maybe she knew I was born to love women like her. It pleased her to know this. She continued jogging toward some destination, low-striding like she was about to be joined by two lines of shirtless dancing boys for an impromptu paean to the Bronze Gods of Heaven and Earth.

It strikes me that only Ray Bradbury people can make me care about the Earth. We all know tigers are being slaughtered and unique plant/insect species are being eradicated every single day. This leads to a black bear chewing the intestines out of some hunter in Alaska and the fearful platitudes of a culture praying to be assured Nature is not coming for revenge.

But when we come to the proper conclusion, we find that human beings are the worst thing that ever happened to Earth. Agent Smith is right: humanity is a virus. The Cosmos, or God/Jack Kirby's Celestials/Lovecraft's Cthulu, would probably let us alone for millions more years. At least until the next five-mile wide meteor devolves the planet into a roiling mass of lava and disposable diapers. The Cosmos has no real interest in Man's fate, so Man has decided to apply an endgame to His Own legend. Every great hero needs a great end. Mankind has decided to writ large using vast ecological disasters to drive home the point: there is no future. Every child born into this world is on the verge of becoming Soylent Green in a boiling raw-sewage sh*tpond in what used to be Denver, Colorado. And if that's so, what becomes of the Ray Bradbury people? The obvious? They burn, just like everyone else? At fahrenheit 451? Or fahrenheit 600?

And once it gets that hot, does it really matter if it's 451 or 600?

Three for Thursday: Burly Dames

Angie Dickinson. And melon. What God hath wrought, let no man put asunder.

Tuesday's Burly Rant or I Love You Harlan Ellison

I'm thinking of trying to maintain a purely misanthropic theme by forcing myself to raise hell over something.

It's hard to be angry and not be petty. But I'm angry most of the time. I have no real reason to be angry, other than that I haven't acheived my career goals. And people suck, along with the culture of f*cking stupidity they have wrought.

Is this the best time, or the worst time, to be alive? Well, it smells infinitely better than it did a thousand years ago, I'm sure. At least when you had a bunch of people together who didn't have the benefit of being slathered in fine oils because they were born into royalty. Human beings are foul because we're walking germ infestations. I won't touch anything in a public restroom. Yet I'll eat the ass out of a woman with no compunction whatsoever. That's called "Getting Your Groove On." Does the music sound as sweet on a dusty record? Well, once you've blown it off, it does. I can't verify the smell thing, by the way. Considering the stench of carbon monoxide and Axe cologne, it might be a close race with a thousand years ago.

I was trying to think of why I've had such a hard time finishing projects in recent times. I mean, a real apathy like when you know you have to wipe out the bathtub. I was trying to figure out why I'm writing. Writing anything. These days, any coffee-cake hair mom can sit at a computer and knock out an article or novel. It's not like back when people had to scribble on paper with blocky lead pencils then transcribe their own f*cked up handwriting, or sit at a manual typewriter in a crappy room full of cigarette smoke ramming those keys down. God forbid you have to break out the carbon paper. Jack Kerouac used paper rolls he fed into the typewriter which allowed him to keep typing non-stop with the manuscript coiling up on the floor like a snake. F*ck hitting SAVE before you lose a day's work. His work was a real thing at his feet.

So to figure out writing, and you're not a poet with his index finger up his ass, you have to figure you're writing for an audience. The audience can be like one in a movie theatre. Or it can be your wife. Or your College Preparatory English teacher in high school. Or the faceless masses you imagine lining up with your novel or book in hand, who hand it to you facing themselves but upside-down for you, so you have to turn the book around to sign it, and this is the 40,000th time you've had to do that, and you've become annoyed that you have to small talk with a reader who can't even hand you a book turned around right, to make your life easier.

This faceless reader asks, "Where do you get your ideas?"

And all I can think is, "I fundamentally hate that question you just asked. Because you know where I get my ideas. I steal them from more brilliant people, dumb them down so I can understand them, put a title to it and get some limited thinker like yourself to wonder how I came up with it. I must be a genius! And I don't like your face."

Everyone should admit they steal. It's the most sincere form of love. The originality stems from how to display that love of those ideas--not your own ideas, because everything is played out sorry to tell you--so that everyone who reads your book understands your love. The only true love story is between a writer and his inspirations. That's a fact.

Coming back to Audience, I realized that I really started writing because I was influenced by Stephen King, first, and then writers like Harlan Ellison. I wanted their approval, their respect, just as King had earned from Ellison. The brotherhood of the writer is Freemasonry. You want to be entertained from within, and keep the riffraff out. King may be the most down-to-earth writer who ever lived, a family man with a sharp sense of humor and natural story-telling ability. Ellison, in contrast, is the fiery lone wolf in the forest banging models in Hollywood in the 1960s. One man was beloved by millions of readers. The other received death threats on a regular basis while working for the Los Angeles Free Press. Nobody wanted to kill Stephen King because they hated him, like they hated Ellison. No, the schizoids wanted to kill Stephen King because they loved him too much.

I think people in general are a harsh disease. Too much of them is doom. I'd sign books under duress, but I wouldn't belittle people for loving the work. As long as they can distinguish between the work and my humanity. Because I'm not looking for friends. Readers, yes.

But I mostly have to admit I just want to read or hear somewhere, even in a blurb, that Harlan Ellison said my novels were like getting mauled by a half-bear, half-orca that smelled like Raquel Welch after a good workout. He's saying he loves my work, and I loved his work, and by god that's good recycling right there.

Three For Thursday: Burly Dames

Three for Thursday! Burly Dames!

Hardman and Parker and the Green Goliath

I can say with authority that I hate every Marvel comic produced today except ATLAS, which is hands-down my favorite ongoing series.

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2010/07/it-may-not-be-official-but-parker-and-hardman-are-the-new-hulk-team/

Gabriel Hardman is a "new" favorite artist of mine. He's done nothing but impress since he began with short jabs on filler-type material for ATLAS, graduated to the main artist, and handled the Hulk in a very old-school way during writer Jeff Parker's Avengers crossover. I never thought Hardman's Hulk would ever be the kind of Hulk the awful Suits at Marvel would gravitate toward. I can only assume that hot-ticket Parker convinced somebody up at the top of Hardman's acumen.

And now, I can say I'm actually excited about who's working on probably my favorite Marvel character ever. As you can see by Hardman's sketch, instead of drawing the Hulk like a steroidal psychopath, he goes back to the Kirby roots of density as the core of strength. This actually looks like the Hulk to me.

So I guess the fact is, in this world, if you live long enough, something good is bound to happen. And I thought the return of the 3D Man was great. This is balls-deep news, folks.

Three for Thursday! Burly Dames!

Three for Thursday: Burly Dames

Angie Dickinson doesn't count as part of the three. She's the spearhead.

Comic book covers, pulp magazine covers, movie posters, ads, photography, who doesn't love a dame? We're lucky that the men of yesterday captured them with such aplomb.

Burly Living: Six Projects DC Comics Needs Working On

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2010/06/six-by-6-by-sixth-gun-cullen-bunns-six-nostalgic-dream-projects/#more-47120

Above is a question to a current comic book professional about the Six Nostalgic Projects he'd undertake in comics if given a free hand.

Because I always love an excuse to write about what I want to write, in much the same manner, I'll follow suit. My projects, in order of basic import and improbability of ever having the opportunity:

Dr. Occult: http://www.toonopedia.com/droccult.htm

Read the above for Don Markstein's great summation. This character was created by the dudes who created Superman. That right there is worth looking into. He carries around a mystic talisman, has a cool hat, his two fists, and probably an ex-wife or two somewhere.

Like most great characters, "Dr. Occult" is just that. He hasn't a secret identity. He's a supernatural private eye. He's the first supernatural investigator, and we've had no shortage of those over the years, peaking with Kolchak "the Night Stalker" for 1970s television and bastardized by "The X-Files" later. Still, I'd jump all over an ongoing series using a two-fisted PI who can kick ass in the real world and on the astral plane as well. Kind of like Doctor Strange, but without the suave. A 1930s PI character fighting microscopic demons, bleeding heart social workers, Neanderthal undead, and at one point trapped on Dinosaur Island, you'll love Dr. Occult. Plus he allows for the inclusion of other obscure characters like Prince Ra-Man and the G.I. Robot. Trust me.

Space Ranger:  for one thing, he was designed in the 1950s by the great Bob Brown, an artist who is criminally unknown today. For another, he's almost predominantly yellow in space-age cool, meaning he could dust off a Green Lantern with no trouble. He's a tough outer space dude who uses all kinds of slick 1950s-type weapons and his dukes to fix little red wagons. The way I think about him, he's cooler than most science fiction heroes since he's a regular joe who has to depend on his science to survive. He also has his own shapeshifter Girl Friday, who is like Maya on the 1970s "Space 1999" show who could become a variety of cool animals and alien creatures. Figuring too that Ultraa the Ultra-Alien will be heavily featured, and the stories basically as Harlan Ellison would have written them, and I think Space Ranger is full on frontal awesome.

Metamorpho the Element Man: the first time I knew about this character, I was a kid who had bought a two-sided 45 rpm record with one side a Plastic Man adventure "The Invasion of the Plastic Men" and on the other Metamorpho versus "Fumo the Fire Giant." I don't care how you slice it, I never forgot Rex Mason, the Element Man, saying, "Oh Yeah?Here. Try this...Cobalt Fist! Unf!"

Rex is another tragic hero. He was an Indiana Jones type cursed by an alien artifact buried in an Eygptian tomb, transformed into a being made up of the known elements. Needless to say, the resultant bad complexion and odd fact of not being human any more was really unfortunate. As such, Rex uses acerbic humor and his own good nature to combat freakish depression. He's been kicking around comics since the 1960s, mostly as a member of other superhero teams. I've simply always loved Rex Mason, and I think he would work really well in a "buddy comic" instead. Like the old POWER MAN AND IRON FIST comic or CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE FALCON.

The best partner? Read below.

Wildcat: Ted Grant, the ex-heavyweight boxing champion of the world who got framed for murder and became a costumed hero, is simply one of the great characters ever. He's the epitome of the Burly Man, he's non-PC, he's arrogant and he's misogynist. He's also an "old guy", somewhere in his 50s. He's trained Batman on boxing. He's knocked out a young Muhammed Ali. He has a motorcycle with a giant cat face on the front of it. He was cool in the 1940s and he's cool now.

The problem with Wildcat over the years is that he's been written "old." He's a retired superhero with tenure. Any story that Ted Grant is involved in invariably involves boxing. I realize every hero needs a schtick, but Wildcat can do much more. If you figure Ted will probably be a drinking hunk who punches first and never asks questions, you'll have it right. Just because he's in his 50s doesn't mean he can't bring it. Charles Bronson was 55 years old when he made HARD TIMES.

Anyway, WILDCAT AND THE ELEMENT MAN sounds like a television pilot from the 1970s, starring George Peppard and Darren McGavin. Which is as it should be. This counts as one project here, just so you know.

SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE/ "Golden Age" Sandman: Wesley Dodds is an amateur detective who looks like Mr. Limpet (below) and battles crime by sneaking around and knocking criminals right the f*ck out with a sleeping gas gun.

He's another hero from the 1940s, but I'm interested in bringing him into the modern era. Much as I'd like to leave him in the 1930s, Wesley simply merits the cool of being a different kind of vigilante in our world. His insulated intellect, his gas-mask covered features, his gloved fists, indicate how Wesley is removed from society while obsessed with what is infecting it: human evil, victimization, rape, torture, murder. The Sandman finds those responsible and his sleeping gas causes all kinds of freaky hallucinations that just don't go away overnight. You can be assured, if Wesley blasts you, you're never going to sleep without nightmares again. Which is probably one of the most hardcore punishments out there, isn't it? Imagine it. Imagine the psychological impact. Who wouldn't kill themselves to escape the mists of the Sandman?

The Doom Patrol:  the first time a superhero team was ever killed outright in their own comic, it was the 1960s and writer Arnold Drake and artist Bruno Primiani decided to end it all for the Fabulous Freaks. Ever since, the team, revitalized from death after almost four decades, has seen its good days and bad. Mostly though, it's been a tribute to the weirdness of the original series and the unfortunate need to keep the DP smothered in bizarreness that has been both a strength and weakness for the comic.

The best DP stories work when the living brain trapped in a robot body, the woman who can shrink to ant-size or grow to King Kong-size, and the man who has a radiation being inside of him and is cursed as a walking atomic pile, and their weird enemies are all contrasted against the mundane. They fight an alien invasion in a gas station, defend a nursery school from giant ferrets, they solve a murder mystery in a full baseball stadium. To me, and I'm just saying, I belive the Doom Patrol to be the greatest example of pure iconic story-telling, because there's no limit to where they can go or what they can do.

Hawkman: there may be no character more intriging to so many, who feel the urge to change everything about him until he is universally reviled and is quickly shunted off to cancellation. Or, worse, having Hawkgirl replace him in his own comic.

Carter Hall is an archaologist who may or may not be reincarnated throughout the ages. He has memories of past lives and he is skilled at ancient weaponry, like cestus and the all-mighty mace. To me, trying too hard to fit all of Hawkman's history into his character is stupid. He's a guy who uses a hawk avatar and knows how to beat ass with weapons people have never seen before.

If it's me, I put Carter Hall into some kind of strange Dinosaur Island type place where he's constantly fighting six-armed burning gorillas and invaders from other dimensions. Essentially, Hawkman would gather up some local color and turn into the Herculoids (above.)

If that doesn't seem cool, I just don't know what would.

Note: All "Microheroes" property of their respective creators. I do love some Microheroes, man.