You were named after the dog!?

"70 percent of all archaeology takes place in a library - research, and reading..."

I'm going to take a moment to talk about the Indiana Jones movies, and maybe not so much the movies themselves as to why I love the whole concept so damn much. One of the reasons I placed so much value into going to University when I was younger was because I loved Indiana Jones (guess who wanted to be an archaeologist/paleontologist when he grew up? C'mon, guess). So many action heroes are just thugs with biceps (especially nowadays) it's refreshing and a depressing rarity to find an action hero that isn't pandering to a big dumb audience - one that, in fact, has a doctorate and teaches at a small-time university. Neither was this small piece of characterization a gimmick (as any characterization so often is). Indiana's higher education lent him a certain worldliness and open-mindedness (alongside masculine heroics) that if there was any Hollywood action-oriented role model you may want your kids to emulate in the slightest, there are much worst out there.

Maybe I'm reaching here. 

Thematically, the movies - the franchise - came out as pulp. It was, however, pulp of a very specific strain. There's tons of pulp; pulp fantasy (see Conan), pulp noire (see Sam Spade), pulp sci-fi (see Attack of the Fifty-Foot... whatever!), and Uma Thurman. Indiana Jones followed suit behind the kind of pulpy goodness shoveled into our faces by Doc Savage and Alan Quartermain and Benton Quest; deconstructed in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and satirized in The Venture Bros. Blending Archaeology with High Adventure and dungeon-crawling by replacing broadswords and shields with whips and revolvers. There was historical fictionalizing, set-pieces done up like real-world castles and ruins, and plots rooted into religion to ground them in our modern age. My principle issue with The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (and don't expect a good, in-depth analysis) is that the whole fucking theme is wrong. We have a movie with an old Indiana in the 1950s, post-World War II, and the options of where the story could go are limitless with a little creativity. Sure, the Last Crusade should have (for all intents and purposes) been curtains to the series, what with the good doctor drinking from the Cup of Eternal Youth and riding off into the sunset with his father and friends (I'm sorry - you haven't seen the Indiana Jones movies? What is wrong with you?). But they're just movies, let's make another one and have some fun - that's what speculative fiction is all about, right?

I'm going to avoid analyzing, and I'm also going to avoid slinging more mud on the grave of George Lucas' credibility. Yes, the inclusion of aliens was his idea. Yes, most of his ideas are bad. Yes, the only reason he was thought to have good ideas is because technological limitations and studio interference tempered his creativity to a razor sharpness. 

There was so much un-tapped potential in dealing with the Soviet Union and post-WW2 Indy and wealth of unexplored archaeological plot-devices. The Spear of Loginus, the Terracota warriors of Red China? 

There a CGI fight scene for you, Lucas you fat assh-*

What about sets somewhere in friggin Russia or Instanbul, Islamic religious artefacts? What about Sputnik? That would be leaning dangerously close to the James Bond pulp, but still - what about Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine? 

What I'm getting at here is there's a difference between religion and folklore in the same way James Frazer illustrated there's a difference between magic, religion and science in the evolutionary cycle of human civilization. One is slightly more credible than the other, and religion is second only to science. Aliens and UFOs and friggin Roswell are American folklore, and the whole Mayan thing is too unpopular and bizarre and clumsy to work. This defeats two inherent and formulaic concepts integral to the Indiana franchise; its credibility and its exotic setting. The first seems kind of eye-brow raising, but if the good doctor's adventures can be treated as fiction-fantasy-whatever, they can certainly be treated as hard rather than soft - using actual historical reference material for their plots, actual cities and citing religious mythology as their plot devices. This in addition to Indiana's grit as a character (his non-superhero superheroism); in that he can be hurt, is fallible, makes mistakes, loses his temper; lend the series a benefit-of-the-doubt sort of credibility. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with its lame UFOs and CGI monkeys becomes Yet Another National Treasure Movie. 

To speak to the latter; crucial to the Jones story is an exotic setting in which it must take place. North America is boring. The world is so much more interesting. It's a childish message, sure, but it consistently got its point across in the old trilogy as the time spent on North American shores was more often than not limited to a few expository scenes. Bringing North American folklore into the plot deviates from the formula which is a crucial component of the franchise. Bringing politics to the mix also denigrates that flawless wordly character Indiana embodies. I loved Temple of Doom. I've been to the Third-World and I appreciated the depiction of the small village in fictional India (I emphasize the fictional country of India which exists for no other purposes than to have an adventure and is loosely based off the actual country of India**). I love the eyball soup scene - I love how Indiana so casually eats his meal and discusses politics with the Maharajah while Willie loses her mind in the culture shock and acts grossed out and immature; it adds to that intelligent worldliness I keep going on about. It's an exotic location! 

Enough of Indiana Jones has seeped into, say, Dungeons & Dragons and the entire dungeon-crawling industry, too. The traps, the temples, the mine-cart rides... 

I think the whole point of this article was so I could write about how much I love Indiana Jones. Seriously, read the quotes page at imdb and tell me that's not good writing. 

*Lucas' original ideas for the Indiana Jones movies involved subterranean dinosaur Lost World and were so far removed from what clearly worked in Raiders it becomes questionable as to what point executives continued trusting him with script ideas

**The word "racist" is thrown around so much about shlock like Temple of Doom it gets on my nerves. Who is taking these movies so seriously? It's pulp fiction! If you find yourself under the impression that this is an accurate depiction of the Hindu people and that they eat monkey brains in India it's because you don't know any better, and you should. 

Swiftly goes the sword-play

"I will succeed to your throne — but what good is that? What good is anything?"

— Valgard

Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword is a rarity in popular speculative fiction in that it is one of the few works not influenced by Tolkien. Published in 1954, it hit the market around the same time as The Fellowship of the Ring and offers a very alternate lens through-which to view its genre.

While Tolkien dealt heavily in establishing an English mythology fashioned after its Norse counter-parts, Anderson deals heavily in Norse mythology; grimly so. The Broken Sword is soaked with blood and loss and tragedy and all the while lays under the shadow of the great doom which so perpetually hangs over the Norse cosmos.

I'll admit I wasn't exactly bucking at the fence to read this book; my perception of Tolkien and pre-Tolkien fantasy is of that rather Victorian, academic prose which stutters across the page with an almost audible clattering of type-keys. It's an unfair generalization; Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet both came out of that era, but hey, Tolkien's prose doesn't exactly leap off the page - at least not to me. The novel opens with a weighty nod to the great Scandinavian Eddas - "There was a man called Orm the Strong, a son of Ketil Asmundsson who was a great landsman in the north of Jutland. The folk of Ketil had dwelt in Himmerland as long as men remembered, and were mighty landowners. The wife of Ketil was Asgerd, who was a leman child of Ragnar Hairybreeks. Thus Orm came of good stock, but as he was the fifth living son of his father there could be no large inheritance for him..." And from there it quickly blisters the page and finger as the plot picks up.

Poul Anderson writes with that same frantic energy that Robert E. Howard and Jack London and Fritz Lieber and the pulp authors seem to embody. The Broken Sword is stripped of superfluous materials, energetic and economic. Clocking in and just around 300 pages it takes the reader from the iron-aired coasts of Jutland to deep, English forests, to the wintry wastes of Trollheim and the fae beauty of Alfheim and faery and finally on a doomed quest deep into the icy hell of Jotunheim, Giant Land at the end of the world, and back. Anderson strikes from this sorcerous tapestry larger-than-life heroes and villains and damsels and everything in between. The two pivotal characters are Skafloc Elf-Foster and Valgard Berserker. The former is the son of Orm the Strong, stolen from home at birth by Imric, earl of England's elfs to be fostered and raised as a weapon; the latter the hybrid changeling left in his wake. Both characters develop deeply over the course of the narrative and both are suitably deformed by Fate and forces far greater than the mortal and immortal powers operating on earth.

Valgard is born with Skafloc's likeness, but bereft of empathic reflex and human sensibilities. He is cast adrift from his heritage; soulless and doomed to a death without afterlife. His descent into villainy is merely a reflex action, vengeance in accordance with Norse conceptualizations of honour upon the forces which brought him into the world so twisted. Skafloc seems at first blessed but quickly is cast in a similar light. Both are manipulated by witches, elfs, trolls, Aesir and Jotun. Like the mythic heroic figures of the actual Sagas they struggle fruitlessly against their destinies, often their principles sink them even deeper to their doom.

I absolutely devoured this book - occasionally without chewing, as I am wont to do - I will have to re-read at some point and savour some of Anderson's spectacular prose a little more deliberately. There are so many brilliantly pioneered concepts here it's difficult for me to begin talking about them. The concept of faery - that it co-exists almost inter-dimensionally with Earth, invisible save to those with witch-sight - that the bluffs and knolls, mountain faces, or crag-ridden fells of the European countryside could reveal themselves to be prismatic Aelfheim kingdoms in just the right light... the elves, similar and yet drastically different from Tolkien's, more like their mythological counter-parts, lithe and alien - trolls are here splendidly horrific.

I'm going to digress momentarily here by stating that the female characters are handled with excellence unexpected from a work written in the 1950s, and when love is introduced into the narrative it is as believable and tragic as can be expected. The Broken Sword can be seen as a kind of fractured bildungsroman in its own way, with its human characters becoming adult and less vulnerable than their childhood selves through layered tragedies and missteps until they are barely recognizable from those to which we were introduced in the early chapters.

Great heroes perform great deeds, exalt in victories and suffer defeat; there is a frantic war between all beings of faerie, from Chinese demons who can only move in straight lines to more Euro-familiar dryads and Greco-Roman fauns. Neil Gaiman's American Gods must have picked up aspects of this, and Moorcock's doomed hero Elric seems far less unique and interesting in the shadow of the novel which influenced him. There is also high adventure of a thrilling sort - I don't want this appraisal of the book to come as a doomy, gloomy, ponderous shamble into unearthly tombs. When Skafloc sets out in a long-boat alongside the Irish sea-god Mananan to seek out the frozen bluffs of Jotunheim beyond world's end and find the blinded Giant who can re-forge the broken blade with spells and fire, my hair was standing on end. Poul Anderson is at his best when he's writing no holds barred Heroic fantasy and this is probably one of the better examples I've picked up and put down.

It takes a certain amount of skill to write such dismal subject matter but move the plot along so fantastically as to have your reader grin broadly the whole way. It's a testament to the fact that stories need not be morally uplifting to be uplifting at all. Stories need to be true to their characters. If things don't or do work out in the end, it should be because the characters' flaws are taken into account. It's what allows a reader to sympathize and emotionally invest in the narrative.

I now interrupt this review to explain to you how the ending of Predators (2010) is a perfect example of how to fail in this regard.

Spoiler alert.

As the movie (which wasn't at all that bad) came to a close, I expected it  (contentedly) to end like so: Adrian Brody's asshole character takes off on his own in an attempt to escape the planet, while leaving the more noble IDF-chick to defend the wounded Topher Grace. Brody's character has been an amoral, selfish mercenary throughout, and in terms of his character arc this really should have been the last straw pushing him past the moral event horizon. At this point, Brody should have been killed horribly (either shot out of the sky while taking off, or caught, or eaten by some loose plot thread; or whatever). The IDF-chick should either have then died defending Topher Grace, or survived and as the credits rolled looked up at the falling parachutes signifying another hunting season and another trial.

Why?

Because it is not enough to make moral choices under the pretext that everything will turn out alright; moral choices are made because they are morally right. By refusing to abandon Topher Grace, the IDF-chick deviates from the course of self-preservation and becomes heroic. Brody cements himself as a irredeemable coward and his future ceases to matter. What kind of guidance do young audiences get out of a plot-line like this? That you can be as much of a selfish scumbag as you want your whole life so long as you perform one good act at its curtain call? In the theatric ending, Topher Grace is revealed to be a serial killer and in true soppy, pedantic Hollywood fashion Adrian Brody comes back guns-blazing in a fit of out-of-character guilt directed by a moral compass that never existed to save her. I'm not going to delve much deeper into my discomfort with Christian notions of redemption and morality. After Phillip Zimbardo conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 he began studying the psychological roots of 'evil' and heroism and concluded true heroism as a deviation, the moral equivalent of swimming against the current, sort of echoing the old 'men who do nothing' adage. The video can be found here. In Greek mythology heroes are punished for their crimes - Heracles must seek penance for the murder of his wife and son; he is not redeemed on any other account. I think it is a far nobler concept.

But what matters here is characterization, I'll stop digressing. In any case, I really should be writing a paper right now. Ta!

80s Film Noire

"You give me a time, and a place; I give you a five minute window."

The Man With No Name concept pioneered by Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa has been emulated, paid homage too, brought to strange new places and ripped off so frequently it has become a rarity to see the concept done right. I watched Drive fueled by heavy recommendation from friends and peers and in all honesty came pretty late to the show. 2011 was set a-rave by reviews of the movie and I can't quite remember what stopped me from checking it out earlier. If you're a fan of Michael Mann and the reserved, intense, drawn out fashion in which he infuses his work then Drive is a movie you shouldn't miss.

There isn't a single lackluster performance throughout and all of them revolve around the sobering gravity in which Ryan Gosling plays the driver. He is reserved and soft-spoken enough to give the impression of emotional handicap - any hint of joy breaks through his face like the sun through an overcast sky, such is the rarity. He exhibits none of the invincible characteristics of most action heroes; actually his success can be accredited to a ruthless professional attitude synchronized with vast emotional detachment. This is a movie that will only allow you to smile when it's the kind of smile that hurts. The plot unrolls with the unstoppable weight of a Greek tragedy - like the original cut of Mel Gibson's Payback - wherein every character could potentially save themselves but their natures and principles and circumstance only ensnare them deeper. Gosling is exceptionally skilled behind the wheel - the film opens with him coolly driving the escape vehicle for a heist, and evading the police not so much through a quick-cut high-intensity action sequence but by a maintenance of calm under pressure, great ingenuity, and the ruthless adherence to a sort of code or principle his profession demands. Very much like the samurai of Kurosawa's Yojimbo. The opening sequence establishes the mood and then the plot elements are introduced. The emotional triangle (I don't want to say "love" triangle because it seems to coarse a term) is established between Gosling, a young single mother and her child, and the estranged father soon-to-be released from prison.

Nicolas Winding Refn (director) is a master of showing and not telling. An intelligent audience will draw their own conclusions as to why a professional such as Gosling's character would allow themselves to be drawn into the complications of other people's lives. This is what makes Drive so god-damn compelling. The relationship with Irene (Carey Mulligan) which nevers gets off the ground, the implied guilt which compels him to unselfishly help her husband... you could say that the film almost languishes on these details but it draws you in so deep the next time violence and action occurs it seems almost an intrusion by comparison.

I'm going to take a minute here to minutely digress from Drive and speak on the presentation of violence in cinema. I mentioned before in my other blog that I often find myself obsessing over the realistic portrayal of violence in media; this is most likely because of my intimate exposure to actual violence across the pond. Stylistic liberties notwithstanding (and even then, there is a line between stylistic violence done right - 300 - and done wrong - Kick Ass) I often despise the way in which violence is thrown in our faces. There is nothing cool about it, and I'm a professional in terms of its application. There are dark, biological compulsions within us that drive us towards the violent resolution of conflict and as a First World Nation it should be our prerogative to seek alternate resolutions or use the controlled application of violence (military intervention) as a last resort. When violence does break out it's often short, nasty, unexpected, brutal, and traumatic. Anyone who's ever witnessed a street fight would do well to analyse the reactions of bystanders - stunned, mortified, shaken - if you're not too entranced by the spectacle itself. Alluring and toxic, like most dangerous things in our world. When Martin Scorsese presents violence, he often does so within two precedents; that violence is an inevitable part of everyday human experience, and that is shocking and traumatic. Take the department store fight scene from The Departed; Di Caprio's character brutally assaults two Italian gangsters with unapologetic brutality. The scene ends with Di Caprio gouging one of the men with a coat-rack while pop music plays in the background. Just another day in Boston, the music suggests. 

In Drive I don't think there was a single violent act that wasn't discomforting or shocking; and this is largely due to Refn's masterful use of pacing. The long pauses in between action sequences and the emotional depth and complexity these sequences have draw us so deep into the moods and interactions and motivations and curiosities and dramas of the characters that we are shaken out of our stupor when someone is say, stabbed viciously in the eye with a fork and then repeatedly stabbed in the neck with a kitchen knife. Gosling gets out of fights and kills the way an animal escapes and fights in the wild. He rarely pulls a punch because his life and the lives of others are at stakes. That being said, when he staggers away covered in blood we aren't pumping our fists or laughing; we are thrilled and sobered by the intensity of the scene. 

Drive is a fantastic movie, but don't expect to leave the theater or your couch with particularly uplifted spirits afterwards. The film is 80s homage and film-noire at its best and most unexpected; everything from the lighting, costumes, and To Live and Die in L. A-style credits font screams style. With its sparse dialogue and lack of exposition, the narrative is largely told through the shadows of its characters and their actions rather than directly and is stronger because of it. In the blog I write with Cam I recently explored the various ways in which villainy is outright perceived in fiction. I failed to touch upon another way, in that there is no villain, merely antagonists; in Drive there is not a single unsympathetic character, only characters whose nature may upset our sensibilities. The villains are only villains in that they act against our protagonists and their successes and failures only provoke sadness at the circumstantial nihilism that sets the stage. 

Before I step out I will mention that the movie also has a brilliant soundtrack and if we're going to talk about the mood Drive establishes, what more do I really need to say?

  

Oh, Crooked Warden

"Thieves prosper. The rich remember."

I'm not enthusiastic enough to say that the Gentlemen Bastard novels are great works in the genre of fantasy literature, but they are certainly a blast to read. The prose is very neat and descriptive and immediately accessible. I picked up The Lies of Locke Lamora on a bit of a whim (a small grain of sand had been planted by either hearsay or a glanced-at review), and found myself reticent to begin the first book. The story takes a little bit of a kick to get moving in the case of both novels, and likewise both novels hit a sort of phase line whereby the gravitas of the plots become inescapable. Though I inched through the first hundred pages or so, I ferociously gorged myself on the meat of it through til the end.

Both books are worth a sit down and a read. Red Seas takes a while to get going, but when it does - when the book takes to the high-seas, reading it occupied my every waking moment. The finales tend to, in a logical tradition, come down like stacks of cards around our protagonists' heads.

I'm worried that the series is going to grow to big for its skin. I like this whimsical tale about thieves and rogues and pirates, not as well put together a bildungsroman as Rothfuss' Kingkiller but endearing nonetheless. There enormous morale and ethical conundrums as to the motivations of the characters, conflicting largely with the period - but hey, it's fantasy, and that can be fun enough. If Lynch is to be commended for anything, it is the elaborate world he is creating - one city at a time, blending together artifice and alchemy so damn near anything is possible. The city of Camorr, specifically, still looms like a monolith in my imagination - with its crystalline cat-walks and glass bridges and canals. Part of me wants to suggest that, aesthetically, some of the Bastard books may borrow from Final Fantasy. Who's to say.

Resurrection

"It always makes me feel a bit melancholy. Grand old war ship. being ignominiously haunted away to scrap... The inevitability of time, don't you think?"

Few things feel so good as stepping out of a movie theater with the same sort of satisfaction you might feel after a great steak dinner. The official apology for Quantum of Solace has finally arrived. Skyfall is thrilling where it is required to be thrilling, twists where you don't expect it to twist (or bends in another direction), and draws out a hearty laugh or two in the process. It is the Dark Knight of Bond films - both hard-hitting, and graceful. When the audience laughs it is not at the expense of the script's dignity - it is because the script has shone us wit deserved of a Bond picture, without slapstick or pandering. The action boils and moves forward, kinetic and relentless, without becoming obtuse. The dialogue is sharp and to the point - when the movie threads on 007's back-story, it threads delicately so as not to turn up anything unnecessary. Even the facts surrounding our enigmatic protagonist's past are handled with the utilitarian caution as might an actual Intelligence Agency.

And beneath all that, the newest addition to the Bond legacy manages to be charming. Where Casino Royale de-constructed and broke apart conventions that had been staples of the Bond franchise for so long it was hard to remember an MI6 without them, Skyfall manages to embrace those conventions while simultaneously re-inventing them. Even the opening sequence (though, in this small detail, overshadowed by Casino Royale's) caters back to Bond tradition - that blur of action offering a sample of what's to come, and not so clumsily as Quantum's shakily edited and quickly forgotten car-chase-shootout. The stakes are set immediately, the audience is engaged, and when Bond falls into the water and the film breaks into a new anthem for the agent, the tone has been set.

Part of me wants to nit-pick at something - my nature demands it - but I left that theater smiling 

and all I can do is encourage everyone to pay for a ticket-stub, cram popcorn into your face, and watch the bloody movie. The action is high-octane, dictated by both character and environment while still being grounded in reality; the plot is gripping with a marvelous villain, physically deformed (as a good Bond villain should be) and mentally unstable; and there are just enough light-hearted moments so as to not weigh the audience down. Not to mention a few clever, tongue-in-cheek jibes as the franchise itself, which will warm the heart of any fan.


"James Bond will return!", the credits roll. We can only hope he does with as much eloquence.

You'll find your late husband is not unknown in these woods...

"No longer can be conduct ourselves as rats. We know too much."

I had to take a step forward here and state for the record that this movie, and this probably isn't news, is awesome. Everything from the aesthetic - that gnarled, deformed perspective on everyday surroundings - to the characters, all spectacularly articulate. For instance, there is no "comic-relief" character to Secret of NIMH, only Jeremy the magpie. But he is not "comic-relief" as contemporary children's schlock has come to understand it - he is amusing through virtue of his personality. He doesn't spout off one-liners. Aunty Shrew comes a close second.

I think Mrs. Brisby is the most definite example of bravery in an animated protagonist. The film at no point shirks from showing that she is afraid - dead afraid - of her surroundings (a hostile universe which makes little time for little mice and their mice families), and yet for her children she creeps forward into the Great Owl's hollow - nudges further into the rose-bush amidst a kaleidoscope of strange anomalies - volunteers to drug Dragon the cat, if only to uphold the example set by her late husband.

And visually, the film is astounding. What other example can you give me of something so common-place as an Owl being twisted into something so terrifying? His nest is like something out of Dungeons & Dragons, but not out of the ordinary, it is a matter of perspective and scale. Where a moth can cause such a racket and distress as a bat would to a human being, a spider the equivalent of a wolf. Cobwebs, and the clattering of small rodent bones to mark this great beast for its predatory nature. What a reserved, detached god it seems - taking the time to consult with this little mouse, whom he does not eat only because it isn't dark. 

There is something else to be said for the unsung stories of Johnathan and Aegis, as well. The latter being a cantakerous old one-legged geezer, we would never assume that he was the rodent equivalent of an Arthurian knight before Mrs. Brisby knew them. The way Nicodemus speaks of them reminds me of the way Obi-Wan Kenobi spoke of his relationship with and the fate of Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars, where the mystery itself is more engaging than the actual story.

I won't bother talking about the animation - because no amount of 3-D or CG I think can stand up against the colours, atmosphere, and magic of Secret of NIMH and come out the winner. The movie is a monument of its time. 

Late Night Blog Post

Walking an old beat here - having spent an embarrassingly prolonged portion of my day procrastinating, I find myself in a fit of stubbornness working out in a park near my Sandy Hill apartment at an ungodly hour of the night (caught an old couple making out under a streetlight on the way back - they were adorably bashful about the incident) and now find myself unable to sleep. Part of this stems from one of those creative epiphanies which often strike me as I meander through those creative low-points when considering my fantasy world. I was sitting on the porcelain throne and cracked open David Day's A-Z of Tolkien, a deliciously antiquated old Middle-Earth compendium grotesquely illustrated in bold, black ink. The sketches are the stuff of nightmares and fantastic, Scandinavian dreams. In any case, from now until my limbs realize how weary they are I'm furiously going to type out a ramblings' worth of considerations.

When I think of Middle-Earth, there are two worlds which come to mind. The Hobbit was one of the first books I read as a pre-teen, before Peter Jackson's re-imagining and before contemporary popular culture had slapped a new coat of paint on an old series of cultural icons. The edition of The Hobbit I read was a gold-bound Bible of a tome cob-webbed with emerald-colored Elvish script and whose yellowed pages were lined with gold-paint the way those old King James' are in the drawers of hotel bedside tables (hence the reference). The book itself slipped out of a kind of stiff sheath. It was a marvelous thing - it looked and felt like a spell-book in my hand, so weathered and ancient (it was given to me by my grandparents and was probably one of the earliest published editions) that it read - to my juvenile mind - like an authentic history of ancient Britain. It seems bizarre and almost self-serving to say I believed Hobbits existed (or had once existed) when I read that book, but then again I also waited up all night for an owl to cordially invite me to attend Hogwarts' School of Witchcraft and Wizardry on my eleventh birthday despite better judgement. Kids are impressionable. I have been accused of being a very practical man but in hindsight my household growing up was... well, pretty magical. My mom and dad went out of their way to make us believe in Santa Claus and my dad terrorized us into our beds on Christmas morning with a misshapen magical Christmas potato which he claimed would turned into some kind of Troll if we crept downstairs before my parents got out of bed.

Yeah that last one seems really fucked up, but I am shitting you not.

In Pitchfork's Chrono Trigger Retrospective he claims that 16-bit pixel art acted as a kind of visual poetry in the medium - that the constraints of the graphics gave the worlds we were interpreting almost more depth and realism than the gorgeous vistas and landscapes of, say, The Witcher 2. Part of this probably owes more to the impressionable nature of youth, but the same way the horror genre works best when there is no monster behind the door (and no zipper to give it away) I think the fantasy genre works best when its aesthetics are skewed through a lens of bizarre surrealism.

I know it seems like I'm digressing here but when I speak of Middle-Earth existing as two worlds I am differentiating between the artwork of its earliest inception and, say, the Hollywood franchise in which it exists now. Disclaimer - I am in no way criticizing Jackson's portrayal of Tolkien's universe, the man had his own vision. I am merely making an observation. Look at the weirdness of The Neverending Story and and note the similarities between its and the super deformed early Hobbit-artwork. Flipping through A-Z of Tolkien I am amazed at the violently stark contrast between earlier interpretations of Tolkien staples and their nowaday mainstream.

But there something to be said for that - something rustic and authentic about the deformity of Tolkien's personal cartography and marginal doodling. The same way Goblinoid's Labyrinth Lord sings an ode to Gygax's flimsy Creature Compendium.

When Charles Darwin explored the Galapagos he drew sketches of the new animal life he discovered there. When the Great Explorers plundered the fertile depths of the Americas, they drew their own maps. And when Tolkien drew his first map of the Shire, there wasn't a doubt in your mind that it was somewhere between Sussex and Brighton (or had been, long ago). 

Above are some of Ian Miller's interpretations of Tolkien creations, from Ents to a dragon that looks more at home in Brian Lumley's nightmares. I picked up a book once, never read it, a bad case of judging one by its cover, which had a grotesque menagerie of orcish monsters - all with deformed, oversized heads that were equal parts bird and equal parts Komodo dragon, adorned with Mordorian armour and weaponry storming the gates of some Medieval castle - that blew my mind with the horrible notion of how terrifying these abberations would be in real-life - mouths large enough to gobble a man like a leg of chicken. Like the Wild Things. Crazy, alien creatures.

Anyway, moving on - the Foreword to Day's A-Z is really what got me going earlier. I was not unaware of this fact, but it lit my brain like a halogen lantern either way. When Tolkien created Middle-Earth, he was driven by a need to create a mythology that he felt Britain sorely lacked. This may even contribute to why The Hobbit felt so damn authentic at first read. I have a book, The Stoneholding, written by a pair of Canadian authors who sought to do a similar thing with our nations geography (and I believe J. V. Jones, and hell, every fantasy author has attempted to do - think of Stephen King's Dark Tower series and why The Good, The Bad & The Ugly had such a stormy influence). So why not me? Instead of attempting to establish a moppish series of European provinces battling for political supremacy... why not establish a fantasy period-piece set to replicate the Colonization of the Americas? Why not have my Black & Green Jackets act as a mercenary rogues gallery of hunter-trackers in a largely unexplored land? Why not have elves - only draw strongly from Native American and Scandinavian Poetic Edda to morph a kind of unique elemental progenitor race of my own? Dwarves? Ents? When I dabbled (a while ago) into Inuit mythology the notion that an entire ethnic sub-culture lived in fear of the ghosts (or anima) of living things seeking horrible vengeance against them for mistreatment romanced me insensible. Why not have a race of elfish aborigines worship a god that is essentially the entire arctic circle? No, not worship. Fear. The "white", an elemental Zeus or Gaia of their own pantheon, as indifferent and ruthless as Howard's Crom of the cruel god of Afghan religion. I could likewise turn East, in select tales, and flesh out Kaja-Rang and his armour of dragon's teeth, and of the colonist Europeans and their own pantheons...

Getting a little big for my britches here, but I think I'll be cooling the embers into something workable in due time. The language of magic will still be pre-eminent, and the Fae, although now I have a whole other series of perspective which would warp its surreal landscape - the way Alan Moore's Immateria is warped by the collective consciousness of the human race in his Promethea series (if you haven't read it, fucking read it).

A whimsical blend of sword and sorcery, and flintlock rifles - of the Metis-like Tenes and the war between nations fought in overseas theatres... it makes for a rather tasty concept, no?

Melkor/Morgoth of Middle-Earth, mind you, is cemented in badassness as the Father of Monsters in Tolkien's mythos. he is to faux-British mythology what Typhon and the Titans were to Ancient Greece. Reading this nifty little encyclopedia I am learning just how bad a mother he is, and how many terrible monsters he wrought into creation from flame and shadow. There is something primordial about the concept of a spider-god as terrible as Ungoliant living in the dark of the American jungles in this new, unplundered territory that I think i may put into use. A kind of horrid goliath, as much as a spider as a dragon, a monster, so guttonous it would eat itself. I seethe with possibility!

I owe in no small fashion my overarching motivation to do this to my current employment as a Researcher for the War of 1812 by the Ottawa Arts Commission. I genuinely do enjoy trolling journal archives for primary-source evidence of older time periods, and the early 19th and latter 18th Centuries are just of seriousness coolness to me. My Modern Brit Lit class has me studying the proverbial works on Empire by Kipling, Orwell and Conrad, and fucking seafaring tales of Victorian derring-do and ivory poaching have given me a boner for Alan Quatermain and his imperialist ilk. Ho, boy!

Anyways, as predicted my eyes are getting heavy and my full-body cardio routine has taken its enormous toll on my constitution. I'm going to leave on an administrative note and state that I plan on segregating my blog-writing into multiple blogs; one I think I will dedicate to fitness, in that I plan to at some point within the next few months, attempt to cycle through every WOD in the crossfit WOD-book by category and chart the results; another, I will dedicate to my fantasy; another, I will dedicate to the creation of my Camerons-in-Afghanistan collection of narratives; and finally, this one as a kind of reviews and ramblings pertaining to writing and possibly schoolwork in general. I think blogging has become a pre-eminent medium in the literary world and overlooking it as an instrument of notoriety... may be unwise. 

I leave you with a sexy, sexy, heavy groove by Tame Impala from their new album Lonerism. For some reason I imagine chicks shakin-ass to that beat and it boils my blood with lust. 

The Darkness Comes!

'Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they had all gone out on that stream, bearing the swords, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire.' - Joseph Conrad

Figure it's about time I start talking about the Souls games. The franchise which started with Demons' Souls has as of late reached what may be its pinnacle, and, to me, alot of it comes down to subtext, theming, and minimalism.

Some retro-activists in the tabletop gaming community (most notably those folks at Goblinoid) have been rattling the fences in adhering to the age old rule - keeping it fucking simple. The problem (as paraphrased by me) lies with too many people seeking to add epic scope to their fantasy worlds, drowning themselves in details and world-building, and possibly overlooking the whole point of escapism in general. In example, the absurd complexity of the Star Wars universe is entirely fan-generated. The original three movies were minimalistic and to the point. What exact role Jedi had played in the 'Clone Wars', and what role they played in general, became a subject of fanfiction and eventually - ironically - became cannon. But if you were to take only the three original films as valid source material... the entire Expanded Universe falls apart. The same can be said of the D&D empire, with its rules and regulations and mythos, which - though encouraging players to generate their own content - burden creativity with the wealth of pre-existing dogma, simultaneously making the game as accessible to just any Joe Blow off the street. If anybody can DM, then what makes a good DM?

The plot and scope of Dark Souls is barely explainable. You play a faceless adventurer. What you learn about the world, you learn by playing the game and actively seeking out that information. What little you do learn has birthed an online community of theorists attempting to make plot-ends meet. What you do know is this - you are a torch-bearer, in a dark, dark world.

In Dark Souls, you light bonfires - which act as way-points and rest areas. The further you progress through the game, the more light you have brought into the world, all the while being manipulated by primordial deities. You absorb information, and choose your path, as ambiguous a decision as it may be - and even the consequences have no event horizon between right and wrong. It is an open-world, whose magnificent vistas and bizarre landscapes beg to be explored - your quest is only restricted by its ruthless difficulty.

This game is hard. You will die. It markets itself as being hard. It has no qualms about its difficulty, seeking to fire the nostalgia of the Nintendo-core and provide an experience much removed from the contemporary mainstream. You stand alone against monstrous beings of exaggerated ferociousness, will stand in awe at the scope of them while furiously attempting to survive their onslaughts. You travel in a world made-up of dungeons, without refuge, one more perilous and beautiful than the last.

When Robert E. Howard wrote his stories, when Fritz Lieber and Arthur C. Clarke and Burroughs penned their pulp adventures - those adventures which D&D is based off of - there was no time for world-building or character mapping, only the furious maelstrom of creation, of putting pen to paper. Star Wars, three of the greatest films ever created, never bothered to answer questions about its world - only presented it to you for the sole purpose of telling a great story. I think the worship of J. R. R. Tolkien has grown too big for its own boots. Its created a market, in the fantasy genres, that look away from stories to sell worlds. Earthsea was once a single novella about some wizard fighting a dragon. 

I think there is something to learn in minimalism.

Anyway, I've accrued and have been reading (inside and outside school) several novels deems Works on Empire, notably The Man Who Would Be King, Heart of Darkness, and Orwell's Burmese Days (the latter being spectacularly written). There's something romantic (in a misguided sort of way I suppose) to me about British Imperialism. Maybe it's because I'm a Canadian soldier and haven't shaken entirely free of traditional sentimentality. I know I'm not the only one who occasionally sees the world in that light. Looking back to pulp fiction and British Colonialism in general, some parallels can easily be drawn between the concept of 'points of light'(that civilizations exists only as isolated outposts bearing torch against great tides of chaos and darkness) and the spread of Empire to the savage 'third-world' of the 18-19th Century. 

Hm.

  

Luminous beams are we...

"Inside a titanic hollow tree we approached a solitary grave & a badass ghost showed up to sing us a mad rhyme."

- The Scythian

Well, it's been a while since the last few updates. In that time I have crammed a great deal of books and media down my throat, as ever is tradition. I am flipping through Tides of War, another Pressfield narrative, whilst simultaneously rereading my beloved Afghan Campaign. Pressfield has this wacky ability to step into antiquity with a pair of Nikes - his prose and dialogue reverberate with the elegance of their respective eras but is chopped up and mucked down with slang and vulgarities to make it accessible to the modern reader. When Pressfield writes about a Macedonian phalanx it takes everything in your power not to reach up and make sure your not wearing a konos yourself. It gives me a taste of the verbiage I want to use if I write my own dusty memoirs.

The benefits of being an English student usually reside in the exposure you get to new, exotic, experimental, or even classical literature you might have overlooked. This year isn't the case for me, as I'm currently swamped with compulsory-credit courses suffocating me with pre-1700 Western literature and have been forced to look elsewhere for inspiration. I do, mercifully, have a Modern Brit course, so for every Kubla Kahn I get to read The Waste Land or a In A Station of the Metro. Tanith Lee's Red As Blood, a collection of grim fairy-tale re-writes, ticks back and forth between the marginally interesting and the creatively profound (although none come close to Gaiman's Snow, Glass, Apples). Picked up Hadleman's The Forever War, finally - finally - a book I've been after for years, a book I confused with The Last Starfighter because I suppose on some subconscious level I'm retarded and should be writing on a circle of paper. It is as spectacular as Starship Troopers was on first reading, ahead of its time and still relevant today as a metaphor for post-war blues. The time dilation and relativistic physics and hard sci-fi are all bells and whistles for the depth of the themes, and they mesh together stupendously.



Moving away from the military and historical fiction to fantasy, I finally got together the rest of Marvel's The Gunslinger, and it was a great experience. Maybe I'm the only one who's noticed the significant difference between contemporary King and the coke-addled, alcoholic wreck who first penned 'The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.' on sheefs of green paper, but the graphic novels illustrated by Jae Lee have brought new life to the fantasy series I fell in love with and that had since gone yellowed around the edges like an old photograph. King's weird "if it please ya" way of scripting is still prominent (so much less economic than "Life for yer crop"), but Lee brings visually to the Dark Tower universe what King's blistering prose did in the first four volumes - when he was discovering as much about his world as we all were. I also finished Lankhmar Vol. 2, Swords Against Death, a collection of Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. Nothing like a little High Adventure to set one's literary perspectives straight. I spend night hours hammering away at the worlds of men and magic I've drummed up, stoking the details like metal in a forge. It's nice to read and put a book down thinking "I should just write a fucking story man, talking books and kingdoms of clouds, whatever man". Another break of fresh air with Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away, a dark fantasy yarn about a fellowship of dying warlocks (and one dead, but somehow still living mage who only exists as a talking skull where magic is plentiful) trying to restore magic to the world by bringing the moon down from the sky. In a world where magic is as finite as fossil fuel, and when the wells dry up - castles start falling from the sky, dragons start disappearing, and the sword-wielding hordes start howling at gates unopposed. An almost unimaginative depiction of magic which becomes charming and fresh in its simplicity. Drawing the natural magic out from cloud formations to fly over mountain-ranges... excellent stuff. Actually, going back to simplicity's sake - watched The Neverending Story in all of its 1980s goodness for the first time since I was capable of critical thought. What a bleak, Scandinavian child's fantasy, where the world of Fantasia is being broken up by the Nothing and dying from the inside out, where characters go off on nihilistic tangents and heroes drown in bogs brought low by their own sorrow... somehow the idea of a horse dying of sadness is upsetting. A colourful cast of characters beset by horrors, the rock giant so tormented by guilt at his own weakness in face of global catastrophe he sits on his hands and lets the Nothing take him... and the Gmork, the Wolf, the avatar of a child's fear, who exists only as a foil to the forces of good and who takes on a fitting lupine form as man's oldest adversary.

Robert E. Howard's Conan, a book in leather-binding and gold-lettering and heavy and ponderous as a Catholic bible still sits on my shelf. To read through it all will be an undertaking, but at some point I will make that journey. Speaking of journeys (and the sword and sorcery genre), I finally ended my woeful errand at the climax of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, whisking the rainbow-loathing Scythian through the mountain land of the Caucausus to the lofty heights of Mingi Taw. What a fucking experience this game is; audio-visual, tongue-in-cheek, genre-crossing beauty. Jim Guthrie's soundtrack does for the RPG what Heavy Metal did for animated films, a prog-rock dark fantasy adventure game that is becoming a social-networking obsession and keeps playing you even after you've finished playing it. The moving back and forth between waking and dream, guided by the compass of the moon cycle and your sworcerous songs has does quite a bit for my own imagination. I talked (in other blogs) about navigation Night by Winter into the Fae, while nurturing the growth of my own cosmos. The waking world and the world of magic severed from each other, not neatly either but like two pieces of buttered toast being forcibly pulled apart - taking clots of the other's dimensional fabric with it in places, birthing some twisted landscapes. The death throes of a slain god digging out subterranean underworlds stained and warped with the stink of its magic. A party of rogues stepping up a mystic mountain path to the clouds, to Olympus, abandoned. Some grim imagery there, bro. Grim and fantastic.


"Scythia, Cimmeria, Assyria & Persia - these are all kingdoms of men. Mingi Taw is The Kingdom of the Cloud."

The issue I currently face with my own writing (at least in terms of my fantasy stories), is that I have a world and characters but quite a bit of the latter. Too many to reasonably mash together. And I just need to accept this and start decided which stories I want which characters to star in. Which chain of short stories. The rogues gallery of the Black & Green Jackets, the intrepid highlanders of the Winged-Isles, a mercenary band of fortune-seekers left adrift after a decade of warfare trying to make their own in a dark country. Robin Hood's merry men meet Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, flintlock pistols and magic crystals, monsters hunters for the buck. I sympathize with the characters on a personal level and their world comes alive to me - Tuck, the amputee alchemist and physick; Alain-a-dayle, songwriter and swordsman (these two tend to foil each other); Black Tom, a ponderous rifleman and wizard; Robb Scarlett, a savage bowman and fusilier; Tam Two-Trees, a blue-bearded lusty strongman; and Six-Penny John, a rogue favored by the gods of chance and game. Their stories at war and at home, midst political turmoil and outlawry in trying economic times. And where to? Hired by a dragon to slay another, perhaps - the worm eating through the apple of the world perched over the frozen god-graveyard of Non.





And the other cast; the mute swordsman who wields a wooden cane, who knows the name of steel and can break and bend it with a word; the dauntless half-fae girl whose voices brings heroes together; the bawling sailor whose songs bring storms; the boy who paints spells into being out of thin air; the Methuselah whose word is God; the red-haired Lleu walking between two worlds...

These who would climb a mountain floating over the earth and walk the shattered streets of city, built for gods, and slay their ghosts.

I can bind this shit together, yo.

Below are enclosed the words of Yoda - because Empire is one of the greatest examples of storytelling in humanity's history and it should be consulted if one is seriously expected to write stories. On that note, I'm reading Fraser's The Golden Bough, Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces and his Occidental and Oriental Mythology. I will let you know what I think. Out.




“Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.”

- Yoda

"I give the fruit jar a swat with my Stetson and a hundred phosphorescent dots of light explode up into the night sky, winking like muzzle flashes in a treeline, a hundred Alabama lightning bugs, alive and free, and glowing, like sparks from a fire."
- Gustav Hasford

Basically an addendum to my last post - it needs to be made understood that The Short-Timers and The Phantom Blooper are like two sides to a thematic coin. Both sides represent humanity in its natural states - killing and living, respectively - and both books are just as beautiful to read. The story of both novels has reached a black crescendo by the time we re-meet Joker in Khe Sanh, bullying New Guys into staying alive and throwing corpses into the wire around their little sandbagged compound just to bear fangs at the jungle and fate which is closing in around from all sides. The second book comes in three parts, just as the first, although where The Short-Timers deals in indoctrination, glamour, and truth, The Phantom Blooper deals in rot, re-birth, and then both. It stabs cruelly at the American state-of-mind and brings up the same familiar questions even know. Soldiers as I've come to know them only have on true religion and it's a rebel kind of hate for peace - not that dream of peace, mind you, just the kind of animal that seems to thrive in it, and the attitudes it brews up, and the complacency. People are born to fight but our kind of peace seems to revoke and deny that, sliding a manhole cover over the instincts genetically inherent to us and letting them mutate in the sewer. Anti-war and Pro-war are both words that mean nothing. There's stupid people, smart people, and then there are soldiers. 

Philosophy aside, the prose is brilliant and alive with colour. Everything is told in broad, visceral strokes and the drama unfolds in your head in shades of red and green and black where necessary, like the pages of a graphic novel massaged into your head. 

"I stomp my foot and the rat retreats into a shadow.
In the light of the flare my bros in the Lusthog Squad of Delta One-Five look like pale lizards. My bros look up at me with lizard eyes. No slack. I gave them the finger. Their lizard eyes click back to their poker cards.
From his new strategic position, the Viet Cong rat stares back to assert his principles.


The illumination flare trembles, freezes Khe Sanh into a faded daguerreotype. Look at all the junk of modern war spilled across our dusty citadel, look at how bearded grunts hang on while the world spins and gravity cheats, look at the concrete bones of an old French outpost (patrolled at night by the ghosts of dead Legionnaires and by the Mongol horsemen of Genghis Khan)--see how the broken walls of the outpost are like rotting teeth, look out beyond our wire at a thousand acres of blasted moonscape, feel the cold hard terror and the calm of it."

- Hasford

Why haven't you read these books?

Taking a Page out of Gus Hasford's Book

“Guns tell the truth. Guns never say, "I'm only kidding." War is ugly because the truth can be ugly and war is very sincere.”

- Gustav Hasford


I figured I'd write-up a quick update. It is my intention to update this blog frequently enough to not let it die. I'm going to do this by quickly covering the books I've been reading, those I can remember. I've bought so many books it's going to be difficult to remember the multitudes I've gone through in the last few months. Gustav Hasford stole so many books over the years he cruised through the literary world he ended up doing jail time. I may be afflicted by the same irrepressible urge to collect books, to the point where I swear I'll make myself bankrupt picking up dog-eared paperbacks from the dime-aisles. I love Hasford's writing - it comes from the gut and has a heartbeat and is black and oppressive. He paints a picture of war that is real in the same way shadows cast at oblique angles are real - bigger and more monstrous but still there and still honest. I'm talking about The Short-Timers and The Phantom Blooper, specifically. Ugly books, beautiful in their ugliness.


I tore apart Last of the Amazons, another of Steven Pressfield's operatic Classical-Age ballets a few months ago. Once again, written in his frenetic, visceral prose, a red canvas made up of the violent brush-strokes of paragraphs catapulting the story forward. And what a tale, adventure, romance, Heroic. Also read The Hunter by Richard Stark, a blistering novel about crime and revenge more recognizable as Mel Gibson's Payback: Director's Cut. Tim O'Brian's The Things They Carried and If I Die in a Combat Zone a tore through as well, brilliantly written, and Stephen King's On Writing I re-read. I'm reading Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch right now, another crime novel (Jackie Brown on the silver screen). Also L. A Confidential and American Tabloid by the esteemed James Ellroy. A man who tells stories in sentences that make better punctuation marks, like foliages stripped down to the bark. The man doesn't write, he whittles, it's crazy.


I expect I'll start writing soon - I'm two weeks from the end of this damn Leadership course. All that's left is the Defensive portion, that part of warfare essentially unchanged since the First World War. Trenches, OverHead Protection, rivetting, wire, mines. Direct and command. I'm enjoying the core components of the course, leading the working elements of Patrolling, Urban Patrolling/Assaulting, and the theory which just looks good on a resume.


I have stories brewed up. And waiting.

Your Head a-Splode!

There's something to be said for a band that sounds nothing like anything else out there. It raises them up where other shortcomings might drag them down - Disturbed, for example, in their genre have an absolutely unique sound.

I'm here to talk about A Place to Bury Strangers, specifically their album Exploding Head. Yeah, yeah, welcome to last year, whatever. APTBS is one of those bands who sound nothing like anything else out there - further to that, they are outstanding and should be checked out immediately.

Their sound is like surf-rock played at the bottom of an elevator shaft - the riffs grate and twang like steel reeds and bring to mind visions of beaches of brass shavings, where waves of mercury lap the shore and all the surfers wear respirators.

The album roars to life with It is Nothing, the guitar starting up like a motor and the vocals a broken, echoing lament. It clocks into my personal favorite track - In Your Heart - a track sure to boil your blood an spread through your body like ink in water. The rhythm-guitar crashes back and forth like echoes in an abandoned hospital. It shakes you down at high velocity, it makes you run, man. Keep Slipping Away amps down the tempo and makes me feel like I'm sitting in a Tiki bar on some Venusian shore. Just alien brilliance. It takes noise-rock to a new level.

Just lend an ear and fly into space.

Really.

Savage!

I'm going to take a minute to talk about Savages, Oliver Stone's latest. When it comes to Stone, I recognize competence and occasionally brilliance and will doll out credit where due. I loved Platoon and I loved Born on the Fourth of July, despised Natural Born Killers and half mixed feelings towards Alexander.




Savages is a hell of a ride, though. I remember seeing the trailer and thought little of it - just another shitty revenge movie, good director or no. A friend of mine suggested we go see it - he'd read the book and knew the source material enough to give it a chance, and we agreed. What I found watching the movie was a splendid exercise in subtlety. You wouldn't think it, from the gore splattered framework of the trailer and the big-name actors headbutting each other for screen time, but the movie is constructed to the minute detail and what I'm going to attempt to illustrate here is what I think worked, and what I think Stone was trying to do.




I learned a long time ago to dismiss the whole book-film relationship and weigh them one against the other on some kind of scale. Film and literature are two completely different narratives. They are two completely different ways in which to convey story, plot, theme, message, and tripping one over the other is going to be like trying to run with your Sperrys tied together. If anything, O's blustering narration throughout the film accentuates just how grating it is to read a movie over watching one. Ridley Scott stripped the narration from Blade Runner for a reason - it was fucking retarded. What Stanley Kubrick did with The Shining was take the bare-bones story of a horror novel and make it a visual experience that conveyed all those feelings of unease and morale bankruptcy frame-by-frame.




The first thing the viewer might notice about Savages is that the protagonists are a bunch of fake fucking morons who are impossible to like. O is about as mature and intelligent as a parking meter and everything she says is stupider than the last, like trying to get a conversation from a stoned High School beauty-queen. I don't even remember the names of the two men she's banging. One if an absolute pastiche of every ex-military protagonist every created - he borrows from so many stereotypes he isn't so much a character as a walking kaleidoscope of cliches. Every now and then some real characterization shines through, like pearls through muck or silt - you get the sense the only thing he really enjoys is killing and mayhem and high-stress. You get the sense he really doesn't give a shit about O, either, other than that he feels he should give a shit (and that her lips look just as good around her bong as they do around his dick). He doesn't really care about [insert name] either, but enjoys taking him under his wing all the same. Especially when the killing starts. It's like he's a Bigger Brother, only finger-painting with blood and cordite. In a way, he's like Tommy Lee Jones in Rolling Thunder. Oliver Stone served two combat tours in Vietnam, and has a very good grasp of military characters - of traumatic stress, of their motivations, of all that. Every time our character (John?) talks about Iraq he talks as if his dialogue was written by every hoagie-eating, ignorant, fat McDonald's Monopoly-playing dipshit who's ever slapped a cowboy hat across his knee, and then edited by the first batch of University students protesting their increased tuition rates to discuss moral ambiguity. It's cardboard, but there's a reason for it to be cardboard. The other of the two men is a "Buddhist", "cares for people", "wants to help the unfortunates", all while selling weed. The man's head is so big I'm surprised it can fit up his own ass. I'm digressing, here - the three protagonists have about as much collective depth as a gasoline puddle in a supermarket parking lot.




The villains, however, the Cartel hooligans, the Mexican Cartel Queen, the crooked FBI agents... all of them have superb dialogue, are excellent actors, deliver where it counts... they make this movie. Thematically, the films begins to work -as the audience (an intelligent audience, anyway) begins to side with the villains. We basically cheer when O gets kidnapped because quite frankly, she's an idiot and deserves to be kidnapped. We cheer the way audiences cheer for Jason when he slashes up college kids in the abandoned campground. The "savage" nature of the movie begins to reveal itself, like the first flakes of ringworm. We might as well be watching gladiators hack each other apart on the sand.




I'm not going to delve into the characterization of the villains, Salma Hayek and Del Toro as always deliver, as does Travolta. The protagonists make stupid decisions and get lucky with a few good ones. The Buddhist starts killing people and John is happier than a pig in shit that he can share his favorite hobby with his best friend. The masks worn throughout the movie are strangely familiar to Army of Two, yet another modern videogame glamorizing amoral, private military contractees running around killing foreigners for no reason other than to do it in bullet-time. I'm going to refrain from spoiling the movie, although halfway-through the viewer can flesh out the finale himself. The film ends, and then ends again. It ends the way Oliver Stone would have ended it, most likely, it ends the way things peter out in the book, no less. But that can't be the real ending! It isn't a happy ending!




I don't think Oliver Stone ever forgave American audiences for their reception of Alexander, and who would? American audiences are retarded. It's why George Lucas is still making money. Stone uses Savages as a means to show those audiences just what he thinks of them, and the result is very entertaining. Thematically, the line between good and bad guys blurs very meticulously until at the finale - who cares who wins? Although the unlike-ability of the protagonists may tip the scales. All in all, good flick.

Sweet Rejection

"Dear Cap, 

Thank you for submitting "Phone Call" to The Walrus. Unfortunately, at this time we do not see a place for it in the magazine.

Thank you for your interest in The Walrus, and best of luck publishing your work elsewhere.

Regards,

The Editorial Staff"

That, ladies and gentlemen, would be the contents of my very first rejection letter. From Walrus Fiction. The story in question is a brief window into an average evening for me while in Kandahar, focusing on an uncomfortable phone call made to a significant other. For those of you who've seen Jarhead (and if you haven't, take the time) you may make the parable to that god-awful scene where he attempts to talk to his High School sweetheart on the phone. I always turn my mind back to Taxi Driver, to how Scorsese pans the camera away from Travis Bickle as he talks to last night's date on a pay-phone. There is no agony like that disconnected from personal contact, and something about the disembodying nature of a telephone call can be, in my mind, the hardest ten-minutes of a lifetime with nothing but your voice and awkward silences to fill the void (not to mention incriminating ambient noises).

Anyways, I finally feel like a real writer! Oh, boy!

I remember more than anything thumbing through Stephen King's earlier novels, where his poor and downtrodden characters made ends meet however they could in the midsts of supernatural situations. Specifically the Torrance family in The Shining (my favourite parts of that book being the first 100 pages or so), and King's frequent forewords, after-words, arguments, 'letters from the author', or the body of On Writing, specifically those making reference to his early days as a writer - a long-haired hippie-punk determined to re-write Lord of the Rings and nailing his rejection notices to the wall above his bed. I think largely due to King I've romanticized the struggle of working-class, poor student, artistic types (allowing, perhaps, for my comfort level therein). It may shed light on why I'm almost overjoyed to received a rejection letter. Then again, I've never been comfortable with praise above constructive-criticism. 

"Phone Call" isn't particularly the kind of story that ends on a positive note. Even reading it again (and, alas, editing) makes me want to bare my teeth, smoking old angers out from behind my gums to strike sparks against the air. I'm very comfortable with hurt and angst, and anger - they broil out of that oven-hot period of my life and bring back those kinds of memories. I have happier things to write about now, but it's less simple to find the words. Dark moods, moral blacks, they can be comforting in that way darkness can both be comforting and terrible. Ideally, I would like to post the excerpts and short stories I drum up on a separate page. Hopefully I can figure out how to use Blogger effectively! Within the next few days I plan to write a review for A Place to Bury Strangers' album Exploding Head, and some more books - among them John Vaillant's The Tiger and perhaps some James Clavelle. 

"I will beg my way into your garden,

just to break my way out when it rains"

-John Mayer