Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Over the Lips and Down the Cape: Indie Film Making and a Regime of Counterfeit Communists

Whoops, I think this might
be the wrong cape...
I don't believe in fate; I believe in the Internet.  So when some random dude messaged me on Twitter asking me to review some micro-budget indie film, I felt a strange compulsion to follow that path no matter where it might lead.  I was slightly relieved that the whole thing didn't turn out to be some kind of clandestine campaign to proliferate some variety of softcore amateur porn in a bid to "make it big" as they say in the industry.  While the democratization of information enabled by the digital age is (mostly) a marvel to behold, I think the world has more than its fair share of pasty white middle-aged meatbags from the basement of some old farmhouse in Iowa sharing their particular brand of love with webcam quality images etched forever onto the retinas and brains of a (mostly) unsuspecting audience.

So, of course, my first instinct--as is the case with most people--was to completely abandon my beliefs at the first sign of even the slightest inconvenience. I replied with an enthusiastically noncommittal answer of course, the Twitter equivalent of a one-night stand, a linguistic "quickie" like the ones we give to homeless people begging for change or the apologies celebrities give the rest of us. I wouldn't qualify myself as an asshole of epic proportions, but it definitely did occur to me to agree to watch this budding young director's work and then fucking ignore him for the rest of my natural life. I guess I would say I'm more of an asshole of modest aspirations.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Interview With the Devil: Exit Wounds In the Torso of Democracy

Ever since 9/11, the common fallback cultural hyperbole in the Western world has been the facilitation of the victory of terrorism.

"If you don't fuck that hot blonde and her sister, you are literally letting the terrorists win."

"Every time you refer to a Freedom Fry as a French Fry, then the terrorists have already won."

"Sweetheart, if you don't brush your teeth before you go to bed, then you're basically a terrorist and you're supporting their bloody reign of terror against everything that is good and pure about Democracy.  Now, go say goodnight to your mother before I ship you off to Guantanamo Bay."

It seems absurd to think that anybody outside of a small group of key players in the military-industrial complex (or, of course, any person or group wishing to perpetrate bloody acts of carnage against other human beings) could have any discernible impact on terrorism one way or the other.