Now We Are Sick

My Wife is recovering. I am in the thick of it. I seem incapable of doing anything rigorous, like synopsizing cartoons I mildly enjoyed six years ago.

However I have written a story I'm proud of. I'm trying to get feedback on it prior to shopping it around, but this is oddly difficult. Most people I know are too busy or perhaps too shy about dropping criticism on my work. I found a message board devoted to connecting aspiring writers with other aspiring writers for mutual criticism, but I haven't connected with any fellow New Weird stylists; I'm playing bop, while most of them want techno or metal or something. Not that I object to them liking whatever they like; just that I'm not finding many fellow travelers.

So if you'd like to read and respond to a fantasy short story, drop me a line in the comments and I'll send it to you. I'm particularly concerned with making sure it make sense, given that it's a fantasy.

Blablathon Episode 8

Christmas episode. Has about as much heft as the phrase "Christmas episode" suggests. Lots of monochromatic snow imagery, lots of Christmas kitsch imagery, all of which I'm an easy mark for. Dropped hints about who has a crush on whom; empty-calorie human interest subplottery. Herogirl's kid sister drops some hints about how Herogirl once bought a Christmas gift for a boy she loved but she never gave it to him. Later, it's cold and Heroboy doesn't have any mittens, so Herogirl gives Heroboy some mittens. HMMMM.

Also Ponytail Scientist Guy finds a big pretty crystal stuck in the wings of the Rahxe-Robot and doesn't stop to consider that it might be dangerous. Nope, he just puts it on a necklace and gives it to Blonde Scientist Lady. No one notices when it begins growing, as a spooky phantom Mu Pilot (all the Mu monsters have human pilots operating them be remote control) appears in the window behind her, watching, waiting...

In the second act all the pretty snow turns into freezing imagery as a wintry Mu grows from the crystal necklace and absorbs Blond Scientist Lady in its ice, with funky visual stylings. Heroboy in his Rahxephon tries to save her; he can't hit the Mu because BSL is a human shield. Mu freezes Rahxephon with wintry ice magic as BSL gives a manic monologue about how unloved she is and how cold (geddit?) Heroboy is. And she weeps blood.

Then Yellow-Ribbon Mysterious Girl manifests inside the Rahxephon and gives Heroboy a little cuddle, which warms him up and thaws the ice. Hot sphere of sun shimmers behind Rahxephon as it whips up a force sword somehow and carves BSL out of her Mu. Day saved. By cuddles. My kind of Deus Ex.

Coda: Christmas party. Herogirl's kid sister notices Heroboy's gloves and mentions that they're the gift Herogirl bought for her long lost love. HMMMMM.

Blahblahthon Episode 7

Once my Brother and I were sitting around watching Akira when my Dad strolled through the room, just in time for the bit where Tetsuo, the out-of-control mutant boy, starts growing at an explosive rate, like a time-lapse tumor, and accidentally squashes the girl he loves, in gruesome explicit colorful animation. Dad said "What kind of mind thinks up this stuff?" I guess the answer is: a mind that had two atomic bombs dropped on its cities. And now Japan gets even more apocalyptic death, disease and dread.

All of which is worth bearing in mind as I finally get around to Episode 7 of Rahxephon.

This episode starts with Heroboy entering his big goofy giant robot through some kind of magic portal in the mission control room. The portal is a little pyramid with a picture of an Angel (I guess; it's a human with wings, anyway) and Heroboy just walks through the wall. His head passes through the angel's Barbie-doll crotch, because animators are bored. Then there's lots of vulvaesque additional portal for him to travel through, because animators are lonely.

Pony-tailed scientist guy and blond scientist woman run some kind of benign experiments on the boy in the 'bot while flirty-flirting. Uh-oh, here comes the evil albino guy, who knows Ponytail Guy somehow! Let's hope no love triangles develop, else Blondie might start driving too fast and squealing her tires (spoiler).

Also that Reporter suspects the Government just might be hiding a Giant Robot. And there's a colors-of-Bennington team of fighter jet pilots joining the Let's-Fight-Mu-Monsters gang.

In Act Two our hero in his Bot and the fighter jet team have to fight a robot on stilts. For a while all we see are stilts rising into the clouds, which is pretty neat imagery, then the good guys rise above the clouds and the robot hits them with fire and ice and lightning and lasers and bananas and I lost track. Squad resents running backup for a boy, goes in for the kill despite orders to hang back and cover Heroboy. Mu almost kills them.

Heroboy saves the day via the power of remembering the folks back home and getting all determined to protect them, just like in WWII movies.

Afterwards the Fighter jet team leader (a buxom Cowgirl, cuz animators are in show biz) gets dressed down by Haruka, the woman who brought Heroboy from Tokyo Pooptrumpet (I know, it never gets old!) and just might have the spoiler warning hots for him. Haruka softens the blow by saying oh yeah thanks for fighting and all.

Reporter dude sniffs that Heroboy just might be piloting a secret giant robot, and asks Heroboy why he fights. Heroboy responds that it makes him feel connected to something bigger than himself. I used to think that was just the kind of thing screenwriters like to put into characters' mouths for some reason; today I understand, which is why I write blogposts about last decades' anime. Makes me part of something grander and more important than myself: old cartoons.

Quon, the red-braid Mystery Girl, wakes up after the Mu fight, magically knows about the fight, and announces to the air that Heroboy shouldn't fight. Instead he should Tune Himself To The Song. People say things like that in Anime.

Prog Slog

I've been too busy vomiting on airplanes to keep up this blog or call people on their birthdays (Four barf bags and two garbage bags. Really. I used to be able to take a plane. Wuhoppen?) But fear not, I'm going to get back to that Rahxephon recap you've all been waiting for. First I have to talk about MC Hammer's "Can't Touch This" video.





I don't think I ever actually watched this back when the song was unavoidable, but for some reason Laurie showed it to me last week and I've been pondering it, probably more than whoever directed it did. Now that I've watched the thing it's obvious to me that MC Hammer wasn't a rapper so much as a dancer with a hip-hop inflected patter. Apparently it was that silly baggy-pants dance that caught Laurie's eye back when she was fond of wacky entertainments like this:






But as fun as that is, let's stay focused on Hammer. Notice that the "Can't Touch This" video's full of beautiful dancing women of various ethnicities. At several points Hammer does a little gag about watching the women and not being able to decide between them. Then in the final shot he starts dancing with the whit

est looking girl we've seen in the video, a blond in some kind of schoolgirl outfit. I think interracial relationships just might save humanity; by extension I certainly have zero problem with a black man dancing with a white woman, and if the shot were in the middle of the video somewhere I wouldn't have anything to say about it. But placing this essentially modular shot at the end of the video suggests a narrative Hammer probably never intended; faced with a bunch of tantalizing black and Latin women, he chooses a blond honky schoolgirl. What kind of message does that send? White girls are the most desirable women? No wonder White America elected him White America's Favorite Rapper, a position held in tandem with Vanilla Ice.

Anyway, I tried to extend the old school rap video watching party with one of my favorites, Egyptian Lover:







Laurie was unimpressed. I love that shot of his Dad making time with mature, plus-sized women. Inspiring. And terrible mummies make everything better.

#

So today I listened to a really long podcast (Rogue's Gallery) devoted to prog-rock, the kind of thing that used to be called Art Rock by fans and Pomp Rock by foes. I call it The Stuff I Listened To In High School.

Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, King Crimson, Van der Graaf Generator... say what you will about them, but at their best they didn't sound like anyone else. No one listened to Yes and thought "Yet another band that combines symphonic song structures, Easter Sunday organ solos, and Les Paul-inflected guitar stylings." Nobody listened to Emerson, Lake and Palmer and said "Of all the militantly atheistic bands that play Bartok-flavored synthesizer flatulence noises, which one am I listening to?" King Crimson not only sounded like no one else, it didn't even sound like itself; founder Robert Fripp continually replenished the band through the magic of firing everybody.

Modern bands that position themselves as carriers of the Prog torch, though, seem to start with the question: "Which familiar band should we sound exactly like: Styx, Kansas or Whitesnake?" None of which fit my definition of Prog, although Kansas's fancy-pants boogie and portentious lyrics make them ringers. Styx also has a Prog-influenced emphasis on fancy interplay, high harmony vocals, virtuosity and SF/Fantasy concepts, but they are disqualified for sucking. If Prog bands must be derivative, why don't they at least copy actual Prog bands? I feel like I ordered baklava and got a baggie full of crumbling Oreos.

Another question modern Prog bands seem to ask: "Should we get 12-year-old Goth girls to write our lyrics, or 12-year-old Goth boys? Hmm, decisions decisions." Not to slur 12-year-old Goths; just that their poetic stylings shouldn't be coming out of grown-up mouths. If I had cash enough and time I'd buy a few Norton anthologies and lob them at Prog bandleaders. Please, guys and girls, write lyrics that couldn't have been whipped up by Instant Lyric Generators.

In the Seventies, it seems, Prog and Heavy Metal were seen as diametrically opposed. (I'm going on hearsay with this: my age was in the single digits at the time.) Prog was by and for Eloi, while Metal was by and for Morlocks. Then Punk came along and revealed just how closely related Prog and Metal were. They shared a fussiness and conceptual goofiness that Punk could only jeer. So current Metal and Prog seem to cling to one another for support. They blend the bombastic in-your-face heaviness of Metal with the maximum-arpeggios-per-square-inch fretboard knitting and precision ADD drumming of Prog.

From a quick online not-paying-any-money survey of the situation, there are some rewarding post-Seventies Prog acts out there. I'm indebted to the book Rocking the Classics by Edward Macan for tipping me to most of these.

(Something goes wonky with the formatting past this point. I'm learning not to care.)

• There's a Swedish or something band called Anglagard that, from the online samples I've investigated, made instrumental music that sounded exactly like Yes during its early Seventies peak. They were doing this in the early Nineties, when I was yearning for Yes to make that kind of music; at the time Yes could only make music that sounded like a bunch of guys who hated each other and were only back together for the money. If only I'd known about Anglagard.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

• Apparent fan favorite Marillion is supposedly a Prog band, but I don't hear it. They sound like a really good adult pop act, though. I wonder why they aren't VH1 faves. Does VH1 still exist? Anyway, the first stuff I heard from them sounded like Mandy Patinkin's Nyquil-fueled tribute to Elton John, but deeper listening showed some kind of real adult sensibility, with life experience and earned wisdom, seems to be encased within this prettiness; if this isn't Prog, it's probably better.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

• Ozric Tentacles. Jam band flirts with House. Fortunately they seemed to have recorded about five hundred albums: look for the corny Shroom art. That's how you'll know.
  
  
  

• Edhels. French. The 17 year old Aaron within thinks this is pretty fab. A dulcet, delicate quality that defines what I loved about Yes's best efforts.
  
  

• Djam Karat. Another smart (D)jam band. Forty years earlier they would have called themselves Carrot Jam. Lead guitarist looks like he knows what 3D20 means. Racially integrated, which matters more than it maybe should to this guilty white liberal. Anyway, really fun nerd-testosterone stuff.
  
• • 
    
    
    Hermetic Science, the band of Edward Macan himself. He was too modest to mention it in his book. This video quality matches the professionalism of the Yes concert video I had on videotape in high school. I dunno why a band that favors vibraphones over electric guitars is relegated to performing in what looks to be a hotel room.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
  
  
  After mentioning instant lyric generators I decided to see if there were any. Yes. I composed the following wonderfuless with it. The lousy formatting is the Generator's, not mine, and It, not me, swiped from Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb. Please note that Verse 2 is structured more like a chorus than the first verse.
  
  
  
  Public Restroom
  
  Verse One:
  Smells bad
  And the whole world is driving you mad
  my leg
  But you may feel a little sick.Can you stand up?
  
  Chorus:
  public restroom
  There was lightning in your arms and then the
  vomiting in a garbage bag
  Me and some guys from school
  
  Verse Two:
  public restroom
  Is there anybody in there?
  where's my money
  Is there anybody in there?
  
  Chorus Two:
  public restroom
  Is there anybody in there?
  vomiting in a garbage bag
  Bound to win a prize
  
  Chorus to Fade
  
  Eat it, Leonard Cohen, there's a new boy in town.

Blahblahthon Episode 6

This is happening. I am going to rewatch and subsequently remark upon Rahxephon, a giant robot anime that I haven’t watched in years, even if it kills me (with boredom (or alcohol poisoning)). Sadly I can’t find the first disk of this series, so I’m starting with episode six, making things even more confusing than they would be anyway.

The basic plot is more or less identical to every giant robot show I’ve seen; a teen boy has to pilot a big robot (here called The Rahxephon) and use it to fight mysterious alien robots (here called the Mu) on behalf of a paramilitary organization. In this episode he tells his supervisors that he won’t fight anymore. Why? Maybe I’d know if I’d reviewed the previous episodes; he doesn’t articulate his reasons here. I suspect the real reason is that the show creators wanted him to be a less annoying version of Shinji, the protagonist of Neon Genesis Evangelion, the popular and influential giant robot show on which Rahxephon is nakedly modeled. Shinji spent a lot of time refusing to fight, and many fans found him annoying (how do I know this? Because I spent way too much time on anime message boards when I should have been going outside, dating, etc). I suspect the disconnect between fans and Shinji stemmed from fans’ desire to have a vicarious heroic experience; a hero who overdoes the “refusing the call” routine doesn’t contribute to the triumphalist vibe. So anyway, Heroboy in Rahxephon emulates Shinji, but replaces realistic adolescent stridency with bland unexplained insistence. Which makes him more suitable for conventional self-insertion and less suitable for fine-grained examination of maturational struggle.

There’s also a bunch of fooferall about military maneuvers that I couldn’t be bothered to follow since it was all delivered in exposition (there’s a reporter covering the paramilitary org who exists entirely to provide such exposition, and will turn out to be an undercover general for some reason oops spoiler warning).

Also in this episode (only) there’s a team member named Kim who keeps privately dwelling on the trauma of having her parents killed by Mu when they first inexplicably attacked earth; she wants revenge on them. She has a pensive conversation with Heroboy about it; he also has reason to be bitter about the Mu because:

Heroboy’s backstory! Years ago the Mu surrounded his city, Tokyo, with a pocket dimension forcefield mammerjammer that makes time run differently (like Lost Island oops spoiler warning) and keeps Tokyoians unknowingly separated from the world outside; an enforced urban provincialism. In the early episodes the exterior war-with-the-Mu irrupts into his seemingly ordinary existence, and he gets expelled from that comfortable quiet life into A Time Of War. With Giant Robots. Also the force field around Tokyo looks like Jupiter, so people refer to Tokyo plus force field as Tokyo Jupiter. As I recorded notes on each episode I started referring to Tokyo Jupiter as Tokyo Pooptrumpet, because at 2 in the morning that is hilarious.

Are you following all this? Tough. Anyway, Heroboy tells Kim that despite all the evil the Mu have done, he doesn’t want revenge. This adjusts her attitude so she stops wanting revenge. She thanks Heroboy. And pretty much disappears from the show. One nice grace note: their pensive conversation takes place on a big concrete rooftop with the sun going down, and whoever colored it got the tone of sunset reflecting off concrete just right; reminds me of college days somehow.

The basic outline of every episode is: Act One, lots of talky stuff; Act Two, Mu Attack. The Rahxephon (Heroboy’s robot, remember) looks like the dorkiest toy robot from 70s Japan ever, which I used to think was an aesthetic lapse. Now, though, I see the point; Japanese viewers see it and intuitively know this is the herobot, since it looks like every herobot in every robot show ever. The Mu look like postmodern sculpture; beautiful but enigmatic.

In this episode The Mu has two strategies: smash into your robot like a wrecking ball, and make you sink into some magical drowning dimension. Happily, if you’re Heroboy, your robot comes equipped with a Mysterious Girl (Mysterious Girls were all the rage in robot anime at the time) with a big yellow scarf who appears out of nowhere and sings, thereby breaking the spell. Then when the Mu smashes into you again it will smash into a bazillion pieces and you’ll be fine. Thanx, Deus Ex Machina girl (named Mishima, like the suicidal novelist)!

That’s Episode Six. Pray for me.

A Life in the Sinny-Maw, Poot the Final

I was an extra in a feature-length movie a friend directed. It was a tumultuous production about which a sequel to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls could be written, but not by me. I had fun.

* * *

The last video project I've been involved in was a short written, directed and composed by Marc. Yes, composed; he was a composition student, and for a project he decided to do a soundtrack, and make the movie for which he'd write the soundtrack.





I'm terribly fond of this. Marc shares my love for Birmingham, and it shows.

Marc asked me to be in this immediately after the final performance of a play. Later an actress in the play asked me "Why wasn't I invited to be in this movie?"

"It's a gay porno," I said.

Pause.

"I was in a lesbian porno," she said.

Pause.

"I was kidding," I said.

Pause.

"I wasn't," she said.

A Life in the Sinny-Maw, Poot the Second

I was an extra in a corny comedy film a well-to-do young man wrote, directed and produced. I've written about it before, and can only add that this rather ambitious and expensive production (shot on 35 MM film instead of video, for which the filmmaker paid out of pocket!) doesn't seem to be available in any form. Not on Youtube, nuthin. Years later the filmmaker called me and asked if I'd volunteer to appear in his latest, lower-budgeted film, which would be an angry satire of all the local films that won more acclaim that his. I was to appear in a spoof of arty films. I'd wear a diaper and boxing gloves, and box with another grown man in a diaper. I made some excuse about having to clean my apartment, which anyone who ever saw my apartment knows was a lie. Don't ask fat guys to take their shirts off unless you know they're comfortable with it.

Later I got involved in Sidewalk Scramble, this being the "Make a short film in 48 hours" competition. My friend Deb roped me into the Scramble team "Special Needs Offenders of Televideo", a local group of bored youth with prosumer video equipment.

Anyway, I went to the initial writers' meeting and was disappointed Deb didn't show up. I was stuck with two young men and a handful of givens. Givens are things one is given by the Scramble operators, to make sure you didn't spend five months making the film you're passing off as a 48 hour production. Things like a hat that needs to appear, certain lines of dialogue, a sunrise. If you turn your film in without these elements, you don't make the cut. If you incorporate these elements in a clever way, you get points with the judges. I was very excited about the Givens, because as an occasional improviser I was excited by the challenge of weaving a fresh story out of such elements; they were pegs to weave the thread around, and I liked to see what kinds of patterns we could weave. I immediately crafted an improv-style rough-draft narrative that I thought deserved, at the least, a big gold star. The guys shrugged. So we went to the team leader's house.

His DVD shelf consisted entirely of movies you could find at Wal-Mart, and I just about left upon seeing that. I'm no snob about such things, and I like Ghostbusters as much as anybody, but I do think aspiring filmmakers should cast their nets a little wider. Then he offered us food. I was glad; I was hungry. The food was Hot Pockets. I was sad. I said No Thank You. This pretty much set the tone for the rest of our collaboration.

The next day I accidentally on purpose got lost on the way to the filming, but drove around a bunch in an effort to persuade myself I had actually made an effort. A deliberately futile effort seemed ethically superior to just staying home. Nowadays, thanks to my high-functioning Wife's example, I would either show up and do what I'd committed to do, or just call in sick like a real man.

I missed the screening, but friends assured me the short was even more dire than I'd expected. The responsible parties put their every bowel movement on Youtube, yet they haven't posted this Sidewalk Scramble effort, so go figure.

P. S. Deb went on to become a fixture on the local theatrical scene and got to do some work she was proud of.