Bushido: Way of the Broke Guy

Originally run on 12 April 2010.


Bushido: Way of the Broke Guy
Working Five (+) Years Towards a Degree That Doesn't Get You Anywhere

A lot of things have been going down in my life lately, some good, some bad, some confusing. As a young man more or less locked away in his parents’ attic for twenty hours a day these things haven’t so much made me feel uneasy or jealous as they have highlighted the fact that, other than writing up saucy opinion pieces and watching Blade Runner on a loop, I’m not doing a whole lot with my life.

There’s an old saying, “Youth is wasted on the young,” which was probably first said by some horrible, old cunt, but it raises a good point. I’ve been tossing away months of these golden years doing nothing truly productive. Meanwhile, outside the wire of the Kislingbury compound, my friends are off getting married and being accepted to graduate school at USC, and I cannot get work as a dishwasher. It’s discouraging.

This started, like all disappointments, with applying for a job. Or trying to apply for one. I say “trying,” because the way people receive and reply applications nowadays is akin to flying a spaceship into a black hole or shouting down a garbage chute. It makes you feel stupid and you’ve got no idea if it’s working or not.

There was quite a number of jobs open at the restaurant, everything from the CEO to the disabled guy who hangs out in the bathroom and gives you a towel. I figured, hey, I’m at least as quick-witted as most slow people I know, I am a shoe-in for this job. I was wrong, so very wrong. Despite a follow up to a well named gentleman and seventh-graders command of the English language, I received no reply. I guess I was in that perfect sweet spot between being over-qualified for many jobs and under-qualified for the rest that employment experts call “Having a Bachelor’s in the Arts.”

The restaurant in question is Gyu-Kaku Japanese BBQ and it is going on my Enemies List, right between “God” and “Harrison, George” (two discs of B-sides and a jam session is not a triple album, George!). If it wasn’t for their $1.50 beers at happy hour, I’d firebomb the place. It’d probably get blamed on the shabu shabu grills that all the customers use, as well. The perfect crime.

Like anything in life, though, you’ve got to find something in it that you like, rather than waste your time complaining about what isn’t there. You’re always going to find things you’re lacking and, I don’t know about you, but I’m trying to get through season one of Deadwood and I simply do not have the time for that. So I decided to focus on jobs I am qualified for.

A brief overview of Craiglist’s LA chapter reveals that I’m perfect for quite a number of opportunities, most of which either involve managing blogs for law offices (I guess even the square community likes to post uncredited Terry Richardson photos on a tumblr) or picking up piles of dirt from somewhere near Sunland. There was also a job offer for a “courier,” which I’m fairly certain was just an offer to move weight across the San Gabriel Valley. I can’t say that I didn’t send the guy an e-mail, though.

The rest are mostly gay porn, but not the gay porn you’re thinking of, with the umbrellas and snappy musical numbers, this is the kind of gay porn that involves men having sex with each other. I mean, I guess I’ve done lots of things for money that I don’t like—cleaning, being kind to the elderly, and not stealing from the cash register spring to mind—but, I’m going to be honest with you, screwing a dude does very little for me. I don’t know how the ladies put up with that. On the plus side, it seems they’ll pay for your gas mileage. I put this in the “maybe” pile.

As far as the rest of the future goes, it’s really wide open, which is fairly terrifying. That’s the worst bit of it, the not knowing when things are going to get better, when they’re going to change, but at the same time, that’s also kind of the strange hope in all of this. I know things have to change, and when they do I’ll be there, waiting, because it’s not like I’ve got a job to fill the space.

Interview with Adam Carolla

Originally run on 1 March 2010 at the Union Weekly.

Adam Carolla: Sorry, I’m eating pie.

Union Weekly: No, that’s fine. When did you figure out that you were going to be doing a podcast?

AC: Well, I didn’t really figure it out, that was Donny. He figured it out. “You should do a podcast.” When I figured out that I was going off the radio, I just told him, I didn’t ask him, what do you think I should do? He just said, “You should do a podcast.” And I was like, “How does that work?” “You just talk into this microphone, and record and throw it up the next day on the internet and see what happens.”

I’ve always looked at it as talking for free. It’s one of those things that you do. I guess it’s sort of like a porn star. You fuck for free, then you get paid to fuck, but this really was free to me. I really just always felt glad to get paid to talk, but what’s a nice evening? You go out with one of your buddies, who you really like, who’s smart and interesting and articulate and this guy’s got a good sense of humor and you go out and you sit at a restaurant, have a few beers, and you talk and it’s an enjoyable evening. Obviously, you’re not paying the guy, so to me, it’s just kind of an enjoyable evening. I just thought, let’s just do it and let’s see what happens. I don’t know if we’re going to do it every night or what’s going to happen. And we started [the podcast], but then you kind of get this weird little burden.

I was watching one of those biographies on, I think, Ben and Jerry. They started this little shop in Vermont making ice cream and the next thing you know people start lining up, and now what are you going to do? You can’t shut down. You can’t go, “Aw, no more ice cream for you,” ’cause there’s a line waiting outside the store. At a certain point for us, it was like, “Well, people want to hear it,” and you come out with a show on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and you can’t have a bunch of people on Thursday going—“What the fuck? I thought they were going to give us a show.” So, you get listeners and you get fans, and you start to get this somewhere between a burden and [being] indebted to. Somewhere between owing someone money and having them save your life.

UW: “Yeah, alright, I’ll take it.”

AC: Yeah, I guess we should not disappoint people. So, we started doing it and the next thing you know, we blinked our eyes and a year went by.

UW: It seems like so much longer and I mean that in a good way.

AC: [Eating pie] Yeah. I think it’s because the technology is so new. Like a year ago, everyone wasn’t podcasting and every TV show didn’t have a podcast. Now, it’s like, Lost: The Podcast. There wasn’t any of that stuff. There was a couple of shows on, like—

UW: NPR.

AC: Yeah, stuff like that. A couple of car shows and Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me and now there’s a million of them.

UW: By the way, last night I blew through two red left turn arrows.

AC: Mmm. Thank you.

UW: No, thank you. It’s great!

AC: It’s brilliant, isn’t it?

UW: It’s the best. It’s such a good feeling.

AC: It’s liberating.

Read the rest at the Union Weekly!

Liber Daemonica

Originally run on Issue 6, Volume 66 on 8 March, 2010 in the Union Weekly.

Hey there, junior acolytes! So, you’ve decided to engage in the ancient and atavistic art of demon summoning? Well, you’ve come to the right place. The Union Weekly has been summoning entities from the abyss since before you were even a look of abject fear in your father’s eye. Demons can aid you in everything from cheating on your taxes to making that girl at the yogurt shop who gave you the wrong number on purpose to make you feel like an idiot pay! Whatever the case is, the sky is the limit! Unless God is actually up there, in which case, He’s gonna be pissed!


1. CHANGE YOUR LOOK!
The first move of a nascent practitioner of the dark arts is to change your look. Toss those polo shirts and clerical robes in the garbage, you won’t be needing them in the exciting tomorrow of devil worship! Grow a goatee! Get questionable tattoos on your neck! Drive a motorcycle! Wear lots of weird, vaguely oriental jewelry! Drink Miller High Life! Just as long as you look like a three-way collision between a Russian Orthodox priest, a post-apocalypitic biker, and a Morlock, you’re set to draw monsters from the underworld!


2. SELECT THE RIGHT LITERATURE!
Many beginning sorcerers go for the obvious books on the dark arts like the Necronomicon, the Chronicle of the Yellow King, or The Fountainhead, but you should stick to the more basic books at this point in your career. Instead of buying a book bound with human flesh and written with blood, just buy Diabolry for Dummies. It’ll teach you everything, from how to perform a séance to changing blood into delicious sherbet! You’ll make a few bucks talking to dead people, plus you’ll be the belle of the next black sabbath you go to!

3. CHOOSE THE RIGHT DEMON!
There’re literally thousands of monstrosities inhabiting the horrific reaches of the outer dark, so finding the right demon for you is direly important! You don’t want to be an anorexic, baby-blood addict who binds Nurgle, Lord of Gluttony and Decay to his service, do you? That would be wacky! Sitcom wacky!

For example, these two unholy celebrities would be a dream for a beginning summoner!

PAZUZU
One of the greatest, all-star demons in history. As the god of Isuzus and of unnecessary sequels. So, he’s not only responsible for derailing John Boorman’s career into the sad parody of itself that it once was, but he is also the patron anti-saint of affordable Asian automobiles. Good for him.


KTULU
Although assailed by copyright lawyers and anti-Semetic dwarves, Ktulu has really made a comeback in the latter half of the 20th century. As Lord of Death Metal and Harbinger of Uncooked Seafood, Ktulu is a major player in the lives of countless ugly teenagers and Nordic countries. He’s bigger than lingonberries!



4. CHOOSE THE RIGHT SACRIFICE!
Let’s face the facts: No demon wants a realm filled with crappy sacrifices. Like anything else in the universe, they want their homes to be full of really cool shit. So, instead of sacrificing your broke-ass Doberman with back problems, try sacrificing a puppy. Or a kitty. Maybe even a pot belly pig. The cuter the better. Try dressing up your sacrifice with a funny hat or an ironic t-shirt (our favorite is the duck saying “I’m the boss!”). So, remember, a little less blobfish and a little more hamsters with hats! Animal sacrifice is a lost art, so help bring it back by doing it right!


5. MAKE BIG BUCKS!
That should be enough to send you well on your way to becoming a rich and successful conjurer of incubi. Of course, there’s some obvious downsides to becoming a full-blown wizard, like having to listen to more black metal than you might like or having to move out of your mom’s house or being constantly burned by holy water (it is a bigger problem than you might believe). You also might lose your soul in an incident that may or may not involve music. But that’s piddly crap, really. Just as long as you can get those blood stains out of the carpet, the world is yours to shape! (Just as long as you have the right spells or some Simple Green.)

Comics Are No Good For No One

Originally run on Issue 6, Volume 66 of the Union Weekly on 8 March 2010.

Who reads comic anymore anyways?

Not me, that's for sure!

Featured on the 22 of February of 2010 in the Union Weekly.

Cinecult: The Proposition

Originally run on 30 November 2009 in the Union Weekly.

The Proposition (2005)

"Australia, what fresh hell is this?"

It’s probably telling that The Proposition is one of my favorite films, since it’s one of the most stark and depressing films that’s come out in the past decade. It’s also the single best western to come out since Unforgiven, which is strange considering the film was written and directed by Australians and takes place on the same continent. It is an unusual place for a setting, but like Sergio Leone’s comic book melodramas or Akira Kurosawa’s samurai-filled iterations, taking the western down under breathes life into the genre. It’s an odd choice, but it’s the kind of choice that keeps the western alive.

The director of the film is John Hillcoat, an Australian who recently released the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. He’s clearly a man who knows how to put together a good movie, but what elevates The Proposition above most other films is the screenplay written by musician-cum-novelist-cum-former-heroin-addict Nick Cave, who also handles the score with bandmate Warren Ellis (not to be confused with the comic writer of the same name). Cave, though an Australian exile living in England, has an excellent handle on the western and American writing, an influence that’s quite clear in both his lyrics and in his debut Southern gothic novel, And The Ass Saw an Angel.

The film takes place in the year 1880, back before Australian independence, racial tolerance, and dental hygiene. The Australia of The Proposition isn’t the place we laughed at in that one episode of The Simpsons. Instead of koalas and lame jokes about knives, this Australia is one that’s basically unknown to us and, as I understand it, unknown to even the Aussies. This land is a fly-filled hellhole rife with delusional government officials, psychopaths, wars with the natives, and miles and miles of dirt. If the entirety of the United Kingdom was shaken up, all of the loose pieces of trash and deritus would wind up in Hillcoat and Cave’s vision the Land Down Under. It’s in this topsy-turvy terminal that our protagonist, Irish immigrant Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) finds himself caught up.

The opening of the film is rather telling. It begins with the police ambushing Charlie and his youngest brother, Mike, at a brothel in the middle of the desert stocked solely with Chinese prostitutes. It’s a loud, brutal fight and ends with the two Burns brothers captured by police. But they aren’t executed or sent to prison. Instead, police Captain Morris Stanley (Ray Winstone) offers them a proposition: If Charlie Burns kills his eldest brother, Arthur who is “an abomination,” by Christmas Day, Stanley will let Charlie and his younger brother go free, absolved of all of their crimes. If not, Mike will be put to death for the crimes of the two older brothers. From there, the movie unspools into an anarchic, bloody race against time across the sun scorched wilderness of Australia.

The eponymous proposition is about as Biblical (or maybe Faustian) of a pact as could ever be made, but unlike the Bible, there’s no moral to be found, there’s no lesson to be learned, and nothing seems to occur according to any divine purpose. Things just happen and they’re incredibly ugly when they do. The world of The Proposition is deeply flawed and demonstrates just how messy things can be when humans try to do the right thing. It’s an interesting inversion on the typical representation of the western as the forces of good battle the forces of evil, and it’s what makes this movie more than just a simple piece of genre.

The film is also chock-full of wonderful acting, including a performance by one of my favorite character actors of all time: John Hurt. Hurt plays Jellon Lamb, a verbose and sadistic bounty hunter, adventurer, and “man of no little education.” Hurt’s career has spanned about 50 years and he’s acted in projects ranging from fantastic fare like Hellboy and Alien to more serious dramas such as Midnight Express and The Elephant Man, as well as the other great western of the past two decades, Dead Man. With all of these films in mind, I’d be hard-pressed to find a movie where he’s more engaging than here. He’s creepy, threatening, and hilarious all wrapped into one man.

Now, while he is my favorite actor in the film, he’s really a part of a much larger ensemble of great actors. There’s the beautiful Emily Watson (Punch Drunk Love; Synecdoche, New York), as the delicate, but frustrated wife of Captain Stanley, as well as David Wenham (Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, 300) as the wonderfully named Eden Fletcher, the dandiest authoritarian that ever drifted into the Victorian Outback. Danny Huston (son of the great actor/director John Huston) is also great as the villainous older brother, Arthur, who is as vicious and frightening as he is charming, a difficult combination to pull off and is entirely appropriate for this film.

It’s a shame to know that The Proposition’s unrelenting grimness will keep a lot of people from seeing it and just as many from finishing it. Their loss, I suppose, because despite the film’s bleak treatment of humanity (and of Australia), there’s still a beauty to be found in all this. Hillcoat’s film shows that as wicked as we might become, there’s still redemption to be had, if only we can find it. There’s plenty more to be sussed out of the film, but if there’s anything more significant, I’d be hard-pressed to find it.

An Op-Ed by Marion “Cobra” Cobra Cobretti

Originally run on 16 November 2009 for the Union Weekly's spoof issue, The Grunion.



It’s Not Easy Being a One Man Army
by Marion “Cobra” Cobra Cobretti

I know that whenever people see me in my ’55 Mercury, my slicked back hair, mirrored aviators, vanity plates, and my devil-may-care attitude, they think, “Oh, there’s a guy who I wish I could be. Thank the stars above that he’s out there cleaning the garbage off our streets. I wish I could be him, or, failing that, his on-again-off-again lover.”

Well, citizen, I’m here to tell you that being a one-man war against crime isn’t as easy as it looks.

A lot of pencil-pushing nerdlingers at Internal Affairs try to tell me that using explosive-tipped, armor piercing bullets in a mall to shoot a shop-lifter is incredibly dangerous, but I’ll tell you what’s more dangerous: Not shooting a shop-lifter in a crowded mall with bullets made to kill full grown elephants. That shop-lifter could have been Charles Manson or an NVA spy. I bet you feel stupid now, don’t you?

My chief is always getting on my case too, with a lot of nit-picking about “beating the mayor’s nephew with a tire iron” and “setting fire to the Reagan library.” What would he know about good police work? How was I to know that the low-life was picking up his grandmother from a retirement home. He was parked in a loading zone and that’s breaking the law. He should have had more respect for the statutes and amendments that make up this fine country, and nothing gets me more angry than punks with no respect. Except litter.

Not too long ago a serial killer was terrorizing Los Angeles, silently killing old folks in their sleep without leaving a trace of evidence. The morgue said it was a case of “natural deaths,” but you know what I say, I say that there’s nothing natural about death. And I have a PhD from the School of Hard Knocks, so yeah, I think I know a thing or medical science, so scramble that, you bunch of eggheads.

After about two days of investigating and twelve million dollars in damage, I finally solved the case. As it turns out it was a cult of Satanist biker communists. As I always say, “When in doubt, it’s a cult of Satanist biker communists.” That’s rule number two of the Cobra Playbook. Rule number one is “Always bring a toothbrush,” because proper hygiene is always a must.

What keeps me on the straight and narrow is my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s right, scum suckers, the king Cobra believes in a power higher than himself. “But Cobra,” you say from behind your plates of chili and your cum stained pants, “Religion is for the weak.” No! You’re weak, dirtbag! Nothing is more badass than God. He killed tons of Egyptians, one of the hardest groups of people on Earth to kill. He also made tigers, muscle cars, and me, the Cobra.

So the next time you see me throwing hand grenades from the back of a moving truck at black market pornographers, just remember that dealing out justice isn’t as glamorous as it looks.

LIBER MONSTERICUM

Originally run on 26 October 2009 for the Union Weekly.

LIBER MONSTERICUM
A People’s History of Monster Slaying

I want all of you to grab the nearest history book. Do it. You got one? Good. Now throw it out the window. Just toss that fucker. Why am telling you do to this? Well, it’s because your standard “history” books completely ignore large swathes of our past—the rad parts, mostly. Namely, the hidden history of man’s struggles with the wicked abominations that God deigned to put on this earth. Now, without further ado, here are four of our history’s greatest monster slayers.


SIEGFRIED
Dragon Slayer, Treasure Hunter, Cautionary Tale
WEAPON OF CHOICE
Spears, knives, and stabbing weapons.
HUNTING GROUNDS
The fetid hollows and squabbling city-states that were medieval Germany.
MOST FAMOUS KILL
Fafnir the Dragon, Bavarian banker.
MORTAL WEAKNESS
Gold! And lots of it!
FALLOUT
Cursed to be sung about for hours at a time by husky Italian women and proto-Nazis.


SAINT PATRICK
Catholic Missionary, Crypto-Limey, Saint of Binge Drinking
WEAPON OF CHOICE
The word of God, harsh language.
HUNTING GROUNDS
Ireland or as it was known at the time “Snake-soaked Hell-Bog.”
MOST FAMOUS KILL
Cúchulainn, a midget he mistook for a leprechaun.
MORTAL WEAKNESS
His love of God, whiskey.
FALLOUT
Every year his deeds are celebrated by hooligans vomiting on Cinco de Mayo.


PETER WASHINGTON
Zombie Killer, SWAT Team Member, Not a Ghostbuster
WEAPON OF CHOICE
M16A1 assault rifle, friendship.
HUNTING GROUNDS
Shopping malls, anywhere people hang out.
MOST FAMOUS KILL
Roger, his best friend. Stone. Cold.
MORTAL WEAKNESS
Has a tendency to shoot his friends.
FALLOUT
Despite murdering every single one of his friends, he’s still ultimately doomed. DOOMED.


LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD
Little Girl, Wolf Murderer, Hiking Enthusiast
WEAPON OF CHOICE
Gumption, spunkiness, dry-cool wit.
HUNTING GROUNDS
Where old people sleep (but not libraries).
MOST FAMOUS KILL
Her grandma (that turned out to be a wolf).
MORTAL WEAKNESS
Completely incapable of distinguishing a wolf from a grandma.
FALLOUT
Nothing. Children are immune to the harshness of the real world.


534 While most of the Nordic countries were busy stealing the entirety of Europe from their lazy neighbors, Beowulf was getting real shit done. After arriving in Denmark he slays the beasty Grendel by ripping off the monster’s arm and beating him to death with it, leading to the single most metal thing to happen at that point in history. This also lead to any girl’s name starting with a “G” to look that much uglier.


1572 Japanese warlord and inventor of karaoke, Oda Nobunaga, destroys the last of the oni (or “ogre” for you baka-gaijin) through a combination of mirrors, windchimes, and crooked bridges. As it turns out oni are really, really bad at doing anything besides messing up how a room “flows.”


1882 German philosopher and syphilis enthusiast Friedrich Wilhelm “Willy” Nietzsche accidentally kills the Judeo-Christian diety YHWH (known as the “King of All Monsters”) with his declaration “God is dead.” His demise is highly exaggerated, the creator of the universe returned three days later with the proclamation, “Nope.” Having been proven a liar, Nietzsche is doomed to be quoted by obnoxious college students for all eternity.


1947 In an ironic twist fit for a pulp novel, former führer Adolf Hitler’s frozen head is eaten by a member of his secret Nazi zombie army somewhere. Good night, sweet prince.


SPECIAL INTERNET BONUS Here is a mummy.

A Very Special Halloween Comic

Originally run on 26 October 2009 for the Comics page of the Union Weekly.

Also Sprach Herzog

Originally run on 19 October 2009 for the Entertainment page.

Also Sprach Herzog: Fitzcarraldo, Being a Hornet, and Why School is a Waste of Time

The first Werner Herzog movie I ever saw was his documentary on the doomed naturalist Timothy Treadwell in the documentary Grizzly Man. I saw it on a lark with one of my friends and when I walked out, I walked out as a slightly different person. I didn’t know that documentaries could be this engaging, that there was people this crazy walking the earth, and that brooding German lecturing on the chaos inherent in nature made for good movies. Since then Herzog has become one of my favorite directors, so when I heard that there was a screening of his magnum opus Fitzcarraldo, followed up by a question and answer session with the director himself at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, I jumped on the opportunity (after hunting up the nine dollars for admission). Watching what might be his best film, Fitzcarraldo, and listening to him speak, reaffirmed all of the reasons why I dig Herzog so goddamn much.

The production of Fitzcarraldo is probably every bit as legendary as the film itself (which is about an opera enthusiast, played by Klaus Kinski, who dreams up a scheme to move a steam ship up a mountain). It’s frought with disasters both man-made—such as the original lead actor leaving production half-way through the shoot—and those made by nature— such as a woodcutter who after being bitten in the foot by a snake, cut off his appendage with a chainsaw to keep the venom from spreading to the rest of his body. What results from all of this turmoil is a work of art that was entirely worth it. Even though parts of it are somewhat clunky (like the English dubbing) and the clearing of the woods and use of indigenous workers is morally questionable, it shines past all of this. Even the guy breathing through a tube two rows behind me couldn’t dim the experience. It also didn’t hurt that I was watching this movie for the first time on the big screen—the way the Lord Jesus Christ intended us to watch movies.

The real treat came after the movie concluded, when Herzog spoke about the film. He’s always a man worth listening to. Though he did repeat a few stories I’ve read enough times to feel like he’s told me himself (such as the story of an Indian chief asking him for permission to kill Klaus Kinski, Fitzcarraldo’s lead actor), he touched on a lot of subjects, such as how he believes that our society is “starving for discourse” or that, despite the trouble surrounding Fitzcarraldo, he said that “Any idiot could do it.” I think my favorite quote came when he talked about cinema vérité. He said that he didn’t want to be a fly on the wall,” observing a subject in its natural habitat, but rather, he wanted to be “the hornet that stings.”

Then Herzog capped off the evening by saying something that my parents have been saying for years, which is that my education is a waste of time. This comment came after the second fan of the night asked a question regarding parallels between his other South-American-adventure-film-on-a-river, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, and Fitzcarraldo. He blew off the question, probably half out of being tired of hearing the comparison for nearly thirty years, and mostly because he sees academia as an organization that “vivisects poetry” and that the people who pick apart films like this are “completely without human pathos.” Big talk for someone who stole a camera from the Munich Film School.

I have to disagree with Herzog’s blanket statement of film scholarship being bankrupt, but there’s a tinge of truth in his words. We don’t take in a work of art to tear it apart and poke at the insides, we do it to experience something outside of our normal lives. They show us something more delicate Herzog himself describes as the “ecstatic truth.” This is what film is supposed to do, and Herzog succeeds in this with Fitzcarraldo—even if movie dorks keep on asking him the same stupid film school questions over and over again.

So, while the questions weren’t quite up to snuff and my choice to go to college was assaulted by one of my heroes, I still had a full, worth-while evening because I didn’t feel like I wasted my time, because none of that junk can ever be as magnificent as seeing a ship sail up a mountain on the big screen. Werner Herzog is a guy that we could all probably learn something from. He’s a man driven to tell stories, no matter the hardship. Filmmaking is his vocation he lives up to every ounce of that potential.

Image stolen from Vice Magazine many moons ago.

Omelettes: It's What's For Brunch

Originally run on 19 October 2009 for the glorious Comics page!

Li'l EXPLOSION!!!

Originally run on 12 October 2009 for the Literature page.

Send this comic back to hell!

Originally run on 12 October 2009 for the Comics page of the Union Weekly!

Tasteful Comics About the Concept of Death

Originally run on 5 October 2009 for the Comics page.

Cinecult: The Thin Red Line

Originally published on the Entertainment page on 28 September 2009.

If you’ve never heard the name Terrance Malick before, there’s probably a good reason. In the past forty years, directors like Clint Eastwood and Francis Ford Coppola, have been involved in dozens of movies, while Malick has only directed a grand total of four. Despite this, among critics and terminal film nerds (like myself), he’s regarded as one of the great auteurs of the age. His films Badlands and Days of Heaven are regarded as some of the best films ever made. Considering this pedigree, if you watch The Thin Red Line, it shouldn’t be hard to understand why he’s so well respected despite his slow gestation time.

The Thin Red Line, despite being nominated for Best Picture has since fallen by the way side. There’s some pretty good reasons for this. First off, this slow-paced, but elegant war film had the misfortune of coming out the same year as one of the biggest action movies of all time: Steven Spielburg’s Saving Private Ryan. Secondly, and probably more importantly, it’s a sprawling, self-indulgent mess. It’s often plodding and it’s covered in scars from being cut and re-cut (and despite this it’s still probably too long). It also doesn’t have one main character—or even a handful of main characters-- that the audience can hold on to. The James Jones novel that the movie is based off of has the same massive cast of characters, but at least the book gives names to the people in it. Roger Ebert describes the movie as “hallucinatory” and that’s about as good of a one word summation of this film as there could be. As we should all know, hallucinations aren’t for everybody.

Despite the rough spots in the movie, there’s still plenty of beauty to be gleaned from this film. The Thin Red Line follows one of the bloodiest battles in American history, which takes place on the South Pacific island of Guadalcanal. Malick pays just as much attention to the horrors of war as he does the beauty that these battles take place in, and that alone makes this movie an interesting anomolly in the genre.

The dialogue is also fairly wonderful. Admittedly, most of it has no place in a war film (Would a character being shot at really consider the morality of nature? Probably not.), but it can’t be denied that, in and of itself, the writing is beautiful. That’s what most of the film is like and that’s what makes me love it so much. It isn’t quite a visceral war film and it isn’t quite a poem. It doesn’t do either of these things perfectly, but the failure that results is probably more interesting than most movies.

The Thin Red Line isn’t all poetry, though. The action scenes are among the best I’ve ever seen. Unlike the rest of the film, which moves with the swiftness of dream, the action scenes are as tightly plotted and assembled. Combat has a frightening weight that few other movies ever seem to execute. Part of this is because the Japanese aren’t just enemy soldiers, they’re ghosts. They slink out of the forest without a sound, kill something and leave just as quietly. In Saving Private Ryan, the Germans were something we could understand, they were in tanks or behind machine guns. In this case, the enemy is a mystery. How are these men supposed to defeat the enemy if he’s nothing more than a muzzle flash two hundred yards away?

The Thin Red Line isn’t for everyone. As I’ve said, it isn’t perfect and it’s probably the one of the spottiest movies that I would consider “great.” But in between the rough spots are some truly beautiful pieces of film making. If only for these quiet moment Malick’s movie is worth giving a shot. Plus, the loud ones are pretty goddamn good, too.

Image via Google. As usual.

Artist Profile on Charles Addams

Originally run on the Culture page of the Union Weekly on 28 September 2009.

Charles Addams is a spectacular weirdo, the kind of weirdo we should all emulate ourselves after. Besides being an accomplished cartoonist, he also collected antique crossbows, used a little girl’s tombstone as a coffee table, and would conduct interviews with journalists while wearing a full suit of armor. While the majority of his antics were more than likely a persona he used to impress the public and whatever journalist that happened to be interviewing him. This bizarre aura makes perfect sense though, since he is the guy who came up with the Addams Family.

Besides spawning two live action series, a cartoon show, and two feature films, the Addams Family were featured in single panel cartoons that Charles drew for the New Yorker. His cartoons weren’t all of the family, the rest were one-shot jokes that looked not unlike a version of The Far Side written by Edgar Allen Poe.

Addams’ art is also featured on the cover of Ray Bradbury’s 2001 short story collection From The Dust Returned, a novel which features any equally strange, gothic family called the Elliots (the two men previously worked together, but eventually went their separate ways). Unfortunately, most of his work seems to be in various phases of being out of print, I can’t imagine having a childhood without pawing through books filled with his drawings. Then again, my dad did buy the house we live in because it looked like the Addams Family manor.

What might be the most interesting aspect of the comics is that they’re a looking glass into the past. The ‘40’s and ‘50’s is a time we usually associate with conservatism, xenophobia, and generally being no fun at all, but Charles Addams stands against this stereotype. He shows us that the past that was just as interested in bare breasts, shrunken heads, suicide, and psychopathic children as we are. Or at least I am.

If you’re a fan of cartoon art, laughter (and who isn’t? Jerks, probably), or if you want some sort of indie-goth credibility, the collections of his work are well worth hunting down. Charles Addams is an artist everyone should know about, because he’s the kind of weirdo we could all learn something from.

Art via Charles Addams, clearly.

Cover of the Union Weekly!

Originally run on 28 September 2009. Colors by Clay Cooper.

Tales of Poltroonage

Originally run on 21 September 2009 for the Comics page.

Hey! There's art here too!

Thirsty, Thirstier, and Thirstiest

Originally run on 21 September 2009 for the Entertainment page.

More art found here!

Matrimony and Baby Making

Originally run on 21 September 2009 for the Opinions page.

Matrimony and Baby Making:
Why People Under 30 Shouldn't Get Married

I’ve noticed a recent, horrifying trend on the Facebooks and rumor-mills surrounding high school acquaintances of mine. I’ve noticed that far too many of them are getting married and having kids. It’s awful. I’m twenty-two and I’d like to consider myself fairly level-headed and I can’t even begin to comprehend marital vows or spawning a brood. I don’t get it any more than I get quantum physics or the mad scrawlings of a homeless man, written with his own filth. In every single case of these people getting married, their decisions seem to have two causes in common: Stupidity or religiosity. Or both.

I’m not here to harangue religion, though, that’s hardly any fun. I’m fairly certain that God doesn’t want any part in these marriages. He created the moon, the sky, and the seas, so why would he want to lower His batting average with marriages that are as certain to end with arbitration as it is certain that Oedipus is going to get ruddy with his mom? Maybe He’s just got a better sense of humor than I do. He did create the platypus. And the manatee. And the Irish. It’s a distinct possibility.

The best example of someone who shouldn’t get married at this age is a fellow I went to high school with. His name was Chaz and he could easily be described as a guy that looked and acted like someone named Chaz. There was never a more perfect Chaz than this one. He had the kind of effulgent demeanor that caused many people to ask him if he was high. He never was, which was almost worse, because if you’re stoned, you can sober up, but there’s no amount of time that can keep you from being a desert of personality.

When we heard that he was expecting, my friends and I laughed it off as an insane rumor, drummed up by a sick mind. There was no way fate was cruel enough to let someone as un-ideal for parenthood like Chaz have a baby, much less the twins he was rumored to be expecting. I wouldn’t be comfortable letting a guy named Chaz hold my baby, much less actually have one. Well, as it turns out, he married the gal he knocked up and they’re on Facebook. The once funny rumor is now a chilling testament to human mistakes online.

I think there’s a few more guys from my high school class with bastards running around, but they’ve at least got the good taste to obscure any progeny they accidentally made. You’ve got to cover that up, brick it up in a wall, and burn the evidence, too. It’s one thing to ruin your life by not knowing proper pull-out procedures, but it’s quite another to dress your mistakes up and take portraits of them at Sears.

Children. Marriage. Ugh. No thanks, I’ve got shit to do this decade. Marriage and having babies can wait. Or it can at least wait until I’ve got my own and I stop caring about what people from my high school do with their lives

On Death

Originally run on 9 September 2009 for the Opinions page.

On Death: Not a Fan
How Loss Teaches Us What We Should Already Know

Death, I’m realizing, is the worst. It tears people up inside, it ruins their days, and it’s a complete mystery. Death, like most important things, can’t be understood until you actually experience it yourself. Even for the living, there’s no amount of prep work or training that can make sense of it. I’ve come to this conclusion, because last Thursday, my uncle died.

I can make a good omelette and I can out-score my parents in a game of Jeopardy, but when it comes to something as basically important as sending my cousins a condolence e-mail, I’m entirely out of my depth. This matters like so few things do. If I can’t write more than a couple of sentences to comfort someone how am I ever going to deal when death strikes closer or harder? The things the matter most in life, I seem to be least equipped for.

The past hasn’t prepared me for this situation, because I’ve never been so close to a death like this one. When my grandparents passed, it didn’t exactly come as a shock. My grandmother on my mom’s side was the first to die, but I was so young it barely even registered. She died in her sleep and, as I learned by hearing it over and over again in the weeks after, “That’s the way to go.”

When her husband died, it wasn’t exactly a horrific shock. He went out as most people only dream of. He was 92, sharp as a tack, he had a girlfriend, he traveled the world, and wasn’t haunted by any dark secrets. He was a good man who was survived by nine children and who knows how many grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Even the manner of his death could almost be considered gentle. He didn’t contract some disease that sucked him dry and robbed him of his mind like Alzheimer’s did my dad’s mother. When he died, he pulled his car in front of his house, put it in park, and died. The engine was still running when his neighbors found him. My grandpa on my dad’s side was even less of a shock: He died years before I was even born.

It wasn’t that way this time. We knew he was sick for a long time, but I didn’t know he had been this sick. He was only 63 years old, two years younger than my dad, a far cry from 92. The man who was married to my mom’s twin, who fathered three of my favorite cousins, who we watched Old School with at Thanksgiving is just gone. He’s gone and the most profound thing I can come up with is “You must feel like hell.”

I guess the most disconcerting thing about this is there’s no changing it. If you’re sick, you can get better. If your car breaks down, you fix it. If you’re in debt, you get a job. There’s a solution for all of these things, but not for death. With death, that’s it. There’s no solving this problem and that’s probably the scariest part of it. Not only is someone you love gone forever, but we’re suddenly made aware of our own mortality like no other event can make us. We can’t do anything except remember the good times we had with the departed. Thankfully, in this case are plenty. Of course that lesson, someone else taught me.

World's a Mess

Originally run on 9 September 2009 on the News page.

In Soviet Russia He Who Controls the Past Controls You!

Last week was the 70th Anniversary of the invasion of Poland by German forces and the start of the second world war. Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev , never one to miss an opportunity to look like a villain from a John Milius movie, made a claim that Joseph “Uncle Joe” Stalin had nothing to do with the start of WWII.

While we’re certainly thankful to Stalin for throwing millions and millions of under trained, under armed peasants at the Nazi menace, we also recognize that he was a complete heel. Besides killing twenty-million of his own people via starvation, work camps, or executions in his spare time, he also secretly signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler that would allow the two of them to dissect Poland and a handful of other nations without harassment from the other.

Considering Russia’s history of mysteriously executing journalists who report on the government, crime, and big business (which are basically one and the same in the Big Freezy, as the locals call it) it’s a pretty disconcerting for an elected official to unapologetically deny the nature of reality. Also, even if Mr Medvedev is correct about “saving Europe,” the USSR also didn’t spend a lot of time after the war debating whether or not they should crush half of it under their boot heel for fifty years.

MERCENARY HOOOOOUSE!!!

Last week an independent watchdog group exposed private contractors working for a company called Armor Corp for hazing employees and other activities that one might describes as “lascivious.” But don’t just take the watchdog’s word for it, there’s a bunch of photos of these jerks. One is of a Mr. Clean looking guard wearing nothing but a lei and half-of a coconut pounding away at a mysterious red cup that probably isn’t full of buttermilk and guards eating potato chops out of each others’ asscracks (there has also been accusations of doing shots out of said asscracks). Oh, and also there was something about procuring hookers.

When you compare the stupid, confusingly homoerotic antics of the Frat Boys of Mercenary House to other private military corporations like Xe (formerly known as Blackwater International formerly known as SPECTRE) which has been accused of multiple counts of murder by the Iraqi government and sports connections to various right-wing and Christian supremacists organizations, the embassy guards’ actions seem, well tame.

All in all, they’re really just harmless pranksters (remember that time they accidentally killed that horse in the dean’s office?), harmless pranksters that makes us look like assholes in front of a country that’s only eight years away from stoning women to death for wearing blue jeans. So while ArmorCorp’s actions might have been careless, insensitive, and irresponsible, they don’t seem to have done anything more wrong than being dumber than hell in front of a camera and I’m sure more than a few of you can sympathize.

Image by Boris Vladmirski.

A Political Comic for All!

Originally run on 31 August 2009.

More art can be found here.

Cinecult: Miller's Crossing

Originally run on 31 August 2009.

The Coen brothers have been around for almost twenty-five years in the movie business, something that even as a fan, I can’t quite get my mind around. Twenty-five years. That’s practically an institution. They’ve written, directed, produced, and edited some great films in that span of time, from the award winning No Country For Old Men to the cult comedy, Raising Arizona. Over the years though, some of their movies have been overlooked. Just about everyone (at least everyone reading this paper) has seen The Big Lebowski and they they’ve at least heard of Fargo, but because they’ve been around for so long and produced such note-worthy films occasionally one of their movies will be fall between the cracks. Miller’s Crossing is one of those movies.

The Coen brothers’ films have always been about pining for the past. If it isn’t in the actual plot (like No Country For Old Men, which revolves around the sentiment that things aren’t what they used to be), then it’s in the style of the film (like with The Hudsucker Proxy, which is a throwback to the screwball comedies of the 1950’s). Miller’s Crossing is no exception, it’s a 1920’s gangster picture in the tradition of Howard Hawkes. If you don’t know or care who that is, I can assure you that it’s a movie chock full of punch throwing, double-crosses, and quaint accents of the quality that our modern, law-abiding society lacks. It’s also got some of the sharpest written dialogue that the two brothers have put to screen. It also doesn’t hurt that Miller’s Crossing has one of the best scenes of submachine-gunning in all of cinema history.

The actors are also worthy of the script, as well. From Gabriel Bryne (Satan from End of Days) as Tom, as the wise-cracking advisor of the Irish mob to Albert Finney as the distinguished, if impetuous Irish mob boss, the cast is dead-on perfect for their roles. Even John Turturro, who is at his most rat-like as a grifter, is still a guy you want to get out of this movie in one piece (almost). Admittedly, you wouldn’t want to hang out with any of these characters, but they’re exciting to watch.

Miller’s Crossing, despite being a movie about masculinity and crime, is also one of their most emotional movies. The last shot of the movie feels like being hit with a Mack truck three or four times. It’s devastating. Where characters like Scarface don’t have to live with their terrible decisions, Tom and his friends do. Even though, in the end, everyone gets what they want or what they deserve, nobody is any better off for it. You want all of the characters to be do make the right choices because they’re interesting, intelligent people, but they can’t ever be anything but miserable because then they’d stop being the person you fell in love with for ninety minutes.

The future is looking pretty bright for the brothers. They’ve got a low-key comedy coming out called A Serious Man and, even better, a new adaptation of the brutal western, True Grit, which I am preemptively declaring as my new favorite Coen brothers film. The past shows that they’ve always been top-notch filmmakers and Miller’s Crossing stands up as one of their best. Not bad for a third feature.

Image via the Googles.

College is Miserable and So Are You!

Originally run on 31 August 2009.

College is Miserable and So Are You!

I’ve got some bad news for you: You’re screwed. You decided to go to college and it’s going to be awful. I’m not alone in this belief, either. There’s plenty of people I know who had dismal experiences in their first year of college and after a brief perusal of the internet, I’ve found that about 30% of students drop out in their first two semesters. This should be enough proof that the first year of college is probably going to be the worst one. You’ll also learn quickly that all the terrible things you tried to leave behind you will haunt you like that kid you accidentally killed on that camping trip.

Obviously certain choices are simply out of your hands (especially if you’re on the parental dole or on a scholarship or something), but being happy, or at least avoiding misery, is something that is entirely up to you. So if things start going south, you have no one to blame but yourself. Now you’re legally an adult you can’t blame others for the mess you’re in. Unless you’re some kind of a criminal genius. You’re going to Long Beach, though, so I kind of doubt it.

I do have some good news for you: Right now you can start avoiding the traps that have snared so many others.

Welcome to the Beach.

The full article can be found here at the Union Weekly!

Special thanks to our Editor in Chief Joe Bryant for insisting that there be no touch-ups to his photo. He is a man who adheres to journalistic realism. We should all have so much integrity.

Time Comic Time!

Originally run on 11 May 2009.

More art can be found here.

KLOS Internship Material!

This last semester (that's the Fall of '09 to be specific), I worked for Citadel Broadcasting, which, as I understand "the trade" owns our local classic rock station 95.5 KLOS.

Here are the following lists that I wrote up for them over the course of my internship:
* "Top Ten Scariest Movies"
* "Top 10 Serial Killers" (which was an article succesful enough to be syndicated across multiple Citadel stations nation wide. Also: I did not write the final entry on that list. That was the doing of someone else)
* "Bad Christmas Movies"

It also bears noting that even though they went bankrupt less than a week after I left there, I assure you, I had NOTHING to do with it.

I did steal a Sharpie pen with Tom Lykis' logo on it, though, and I refuse to feel guilty about that. You'll take this pen from my cold, dead hangs, Citadel Broadcasting.

Comic Time!

Time for a comic!
Originally run on 4 May 2009.

More art found here.

Cinecult: Princess Mononoke

Originally run on 11 May 2009. Image by Google, clearly.

Japanese anime is a mixed bag, and for the most part it sits on the side of Japanese culture that’s full of methamphetamines and tentacle rape. There’s a lot of hay in that pile and very few needles. Cowboy Bebop is one of them, Ghost in the Shell is one of them, and the work of Studio Ghibli is one of them. Studio Ghibli is run by Hayao Miyazaki, the “Walt Disney of Japan.” In the past thirty years, he’s consistently produced and directed some of the best animation the island has to offer. The crown jewel of the studio is Princess Mononoke, which it’s safe to say is not only one of the best animated movies ever made, but it might just be one of the best films ever made.

The story of Princess Mononoke follows an exiled prince named Ashitaka (voiced by Billy Crudup in the dubbed version) who, after saving his village from a demon, contracts the same curse that drove the monster insane and, in time, will kill him as well. From there he encounters all of the shortcomings of the outside world: Samurai bandits, famine, disease, and human greed, incarnated in the form of Lady Eboshi (voiced by Minnie Driver) of Iron Town, a weapons manufacturer who will not stop until the entire forest is clear of the ancient gods that rule it. He also encounters the princess which gives the film its name (voiced by Claire Danes), who was raised by wolves and will stop at nothing to put an end to Lady Eboshi.

There’s a lot of room for Princess Mononoke to be a heavy-handed story about environmentalism, but Miyazaki doesn’t take the easy way out. Instead of casting judgment, he fleshes out his characters better than many live action films. At first appearance, Lady Eboshi comes off as callous and ignorant, but as the plot progresses it’s revealed that her ironworks contribute more to the world than burnt earth. Even the titular character isn’t guided by morally pure reasons, and is just as capable of savagery as her nemesis is.

At its core, Princess Mononoke is a fantasy adventure (without all the lame elf bullshit) and the top-notch animation makes the action sequences as well executed as the plot. It’s safe to say that Princess Mononoke has the single raddest use of a bow and arrow in film. The understated voice work of the English version doesn’t suffer from the problems that many dubbed animes are afflicted with. The dubbing goes hand-in-hand with the top-notch translation by the venerable Neil Gaiman (The Sandman). Princess Mononoke is the perfect example of why across the board hatred of a medium is stupid, because the only thing you’re succeeding in doing is keeping amazing films like this away from you.

The Thin Red Line

Originally run on 4 May 2009. Illustration by me.

A Review of The Thin Red Line by James Jones.

As war nerd, it was only a matter of time before I began to chew my way through the great American literature on World War II, and with that one of the most critically acclaimed novels to come out of that war: The Thin Red Line. Written by James Jones (who also penned From Here to Eternity) in 1962, the novel follows a hapless band of soldiers in C-For-Charlie as they attempt to clear Guadalcanal, the bloodiest island in the Pacific, of the Imperial Japanese forces. The book was later adapted twice into film, once in 1968 and a second time in 1998. From what I can tell, the second film contains the best passages of the book, without the immense amount of chaff that makes up Jones' novel.

This isn't a criticism of the book, exactly—it's unfair to compare one medium to the other-- but what works for the film is that it's much better paced. Jones' novel is a rambling affair with no obvious rhyme or reason. Presumably, this is Jones' point since in war there's no clear objectives, romanticism, or selfless courage— there's only trying to get through the day. In this way Jones has made a unique war novel, one that is completely detached from the popular myths of the Greatest Generation.

The soldiers of The Thin Red Line aren't John Waynes or Audie Murphys, they're frightened mortals who cuss, retreat, develop pointless grudges, and, occasionally try to have sex with each other. While Jones manages to avoid the sentimentality of WWII, he also makes every person, place, and thing in his book completely unlikable.

The story lacks a central narrator and the reader isn't chained to a single character. What this results in is a story without a spine. It doesn't have distinguishable characters; it doesn't have set pieces, or even character development (unless one gets shot). The Thin Red Line is so generalized that it's almost reductive. The reader isn't given enough time with any character to properly care about him and when he does learn something about a soldier he finds that he isn't just flawed, but the character is a downright, miserable bastard. With the exception of Sergeant Welsh (who reads like he fell out of Catch 22) there's little to be interested in, or to sympathize with. Jones might be trying to make a point about the loss of individuality that occurs in the military, but I'll be damned if I care.

The style is primarily expressed through the viewpoints of about a dozen or so different soldiers. The author never indicates when he shifts from one character's perspective or another, either. Even though this unanchored narrative is what causes most of The Thin Red Line's problems, it's also the most interesting thing about the book. As readers we're left to figure out if these men are liars, crazy, or actually bothering to tell the truth. Jones is one of a select few writers that can shift between several dozen characters' narratives and make it appear seamless. Note to aspiring writers: Steal from this man.

Interesting literary techniques aside, as a novel, it falls short. There is no story, there's just drudgery, and a lot of descriptions of terrain that I can't make any sense out of. The Thin Red Line is a well-constructed book that I'm glad I got out of the way, but there isn't much I can give a shit about in its 500 pages. If it came down to it, I'd rather watch the movie again and spend the rest of my day napping in peace.

The Limits of Control

Originally run on 4 May 2009. Image by Google.

The Limits of Control is the latest from the patron saint of independent films, Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, Broken Flowers), and watches like a throw-back to a Jean-Pierre Melville movie if he was really into Zen Buddhism. As with Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes and to a lesser extent Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, The Limits of Control follows an episodic structure, and has no real central plot. The plot is secondary to the characters that inhabit this world. The focus of the film is on a nameless, suit wearing gun-for-hire (who doesn't carry a gun) played by Isaach de Bankolé (the good African guy in this season's 24 and the ice cream man in Ghost Dog). The camera follows him as he travels from Spanish city to Spanish city, encountering various contacts who give him a coded message, along with a dose of unsolicited philosophical monologues.

Bankolé has the most screen time of the film, but it also includes roles from Tilda Swinton (Burn After Reading, Michael Clayton), Hiam Abbass (the mom from The Visitor), Gael García Bernal (Babel, The Science of Sleep), and the magnanimous John Hurt (who I would watch in absolutely anything). The movie also includes a beautiful actress by the name of Paz de la Huerta, who serves as a compromised version of the film noir sexpot. It's worth noting that she's naked for most of her scenes, and that she also has the only asymmetrical breasts I've ever seen in a movie (maybe the only ones in cinematic history). In a way, her lop-sided breasts serve as a metaphor for the structure of the film—they're compelling, but there's something slightly off that you can't quite put a name to immediately. The Limits of Control isn't bad, but it's very clearly different than most movies about stone-cold, international assassins.

There's a point where a film stops being mysterious and starts being obtuse. It's hard to tell which side The Limits of Control rests on. The plot isn't sparse, it's nearly threadbare, and this isn't helped by the Lone Man's stoicism. There's a brief glimpse at what the film might have been when Bill Murray briefly appears towards the finale. His appearance is wry and funny and carries a lot more energy than the previous hour and a half did. The scene also highlights what the rest of the film was lacking: Bill Murray being an unrepentant asshole. The characters that inhabit this world or their crazy theories are interesting, but they're spaced so far apart that they barely exist as anything more than overheard conversations at a coffee shop.

I know it's barely even May, but it's probably safe to say that The Limits of Control is going to be the coolest film in theaters this year. And much like cool people, Jarmusch's film is an enigma. It's unapproachable and, since it knows it's cool, doesn't feel the need to prove or explain anything. It can simply subsist off of the knowledge that it is cooler than most of the people on Earth, or, you know, filmgoers. Which is fine. Jim Jarmusch is a man who knows exactly what he's doing. He that isn't afraid of making challenging films, but with that said, he also probably knows that his movies aren't for everyone.

Bookvalache

Originally run on 28 April 2009 for the Literature page.

Cinecult: Aguirre: The Wrath of God

Originally run on 28 April 2009. Image via Google.

Aguirre: The Wrath of God was the sixth film directed by German auteur Werner Herzog and despite thirty years and three dozen more films, it might be his best. Aguirre could be seen as a thesis statement for the entirety of Herzog’s career, it’s the story about a single man driven to insanity and destruction by his power of will. What results is that despite its brooding, art-house posturing, Aguiree still manages to be a captivating adventure story.

The film begins in the Andes Mountains with the conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro’s quest for El Dorado, the legendary city of gold. After running short on supplies, manpower and morale, Pizarro sends one of his lieutenants, Pedro de Ursúa, along with an unbalanced soldier, Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), to try and scout the Amazon river. The foray into the Amazon is doomed from the start, and as time goes on the crew begins to succumb to the rigors of the Amazon forest. The axis of their demise isn’t the vicious, unseen natives, but rather, their comrade Aguirre, whose ambition eventually strips away his humanity.

Klaus Kinski is to Werner Herzog as Toshiro Mifune is to Akira Kurosawa, or as Ben Affleck is to Kevin Smith, I guess. Kinski is suited perfectly as the megalomaniacal conquistador, because like the character, he’s as bat-shit insane as the man he plays. The thespian’s raging tantrums are the things of legend (and the subject of at least two documentaries). His capriciousness eventually led to him threaten to leave the production, forcing Herzog (allegedly) to pull a gun on the star to keep him from departing (Herzog claims that this account is false—he claims that he only threatened to have Kinski shot and that he never pulled a piece himself). Wherever the truth lies, the actor isn’t in any position to judge, having shot the finger off of a crewmember during one of his tirades. Oddly enough, the two men worked together on another four movies, resulting in some of their most memorable work, Aguirre being the crown jewel of these endeavors.

Kinski aside, the story of Aguirre’s production was as plagued as that other great river-based epic, Apocalypse Now. The movie was shot on location in South America on a scant $370,000 budget and with a camera stolen from the University of Munich. On the DVD’s director commentary, Herzog details his trials on set with his signature brooding Teutonic monotone, and delivers one of the more edifying special features that I can recall (just You Tube his opinions on nature or the interview with Mark Kermode where he gets shot and carries on as though nothing happened).

Werner Herzog has been criticized for plenty of things, such as letting his obsessions get the better of him (not unlike many of his subjects in his fiction and non-fiction films), but he can never be accused of being a boring filmmaker. He is one of the great names of art house cinema and belongs alongside other artsy luminaries such as Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch (who produced the German’s latest film). Aguirre is the perfect example of the raw enthusiasm that he has for creating films. For those who aren’t familiar with the more esoteric side of cinema, Aguirre: The Wrath of God is a great place to start.