Avenge This, You Bastards... Snakes In The Grass and Wings On Heads. A Very Colourful Coalition of the Willing

Eons ago in the primordial goop from whence all life on this planet eventually sprang forth, among all the wonderful possibilities of human potential, the seeds of all human triumph and tragedy, the spark of what would ultimately become the totality of human culture and innovation there existed the raw genetic components that guided us unwaveringly down a predestined path, woven together, it seemed, by the Fates themselves, that would inevitably lead to the creation of a little movie called THE AVENGERS.  It wasn't by random chance.  It was genetically predetermined, written in the very essence of our being, from the time when our ancestors huddled around campfires trying to fight off boredom by not getting mauled to death by saber-toothed tigers and inventing time-honoured traditions like the keg stand and the blowjob.  Through all of this, it always remained our destiny to cultivate a society that would allow the making of THE AVENGERS.  It is truly a monument to the soaring heights of the human spirit that this blockbuster among blockbusters has helped nudge us slightly higher on our progression towards our rightful place in the heavens.

The executives over at Marvel and Disney must be shitting their collective pants in collective jubilation right now over the fat stacks of cash that THE AVENGERS has been printing for the past couple of months.  I believe with worldwide intake it now stands as the number three all time cash factory after AVATAR and TITANIC, though it's possible before this whole crazy ride is over THE AVENGERS might just barrel right past them in a blaze of special effects, witty banter, and Robert Downey Jr.'s superbly styled facial hair.  In a way, this type of financial savagery offers a certain kind of legitimacy that (somewhat ironically) money can't buy.  For fanboys and girls the world over, this is a grand political statement on par with that guy in Tiananmen Square standing in front of the tank, if the guy was wearing a mechanical suit of power armour with energy blasters and holding a giant bag of cash and surrounded by a gaggle of fawning Dutch prostitutes.

Experimental With a Tail Grab

Last weekend I was sitting around unwinding after a long day at work using an ancient relaxation technique used by wise Tibetan monks living high in the Himalayan mountains who, forsaking all earthly possessions to achieve spiritual enlightenment, developed a method to achieve oneness with the universe and transcend the boundaries between the corporeal and the ethereal otherwise known as getting shitfaced.  Ahhhh, that smooth, smooth, alcohol goes down easy.  Gin, gin, gin, ginny gin gin.  But anyway, all of the sudden through the haze I heard the ring of the doorbell rattling around my skull.  As I stumbled towards the front door I heard the dull ruble of thunder and I realized I had drifted far from the eye of the storm.  There was an ominous feeling of impending doom as I opened the door, and I know now that I should have followed by gut instinct and barricaded all entrances and readied myself with my latest batch of homemade TNT.

I unlocked the door and eased it open when suddenly a gust of wind stole it from my hand and slammed it wide open to reveal Ryebone silhouetted by an appropriately timed blast of lightning.

"Wassssssssuuuuuuuuuuuuuppp?!?" Ryebone screamed into my face.

I wasn't sure how, but he had somehow tracked me down despite my having moved to a different city and changed my name.  I briefly considered beating him to death with a hammer I kept near the door for just such an occasion, dismembering the corpse in my bathtub with a skill saw then disposing of the body parts in a barrel full of lye in an abandoned warehouse across town.  But it was getting late, and my brain was shredded from the cocktail of chemicals I had been ingesting that night.  Instead, I dropped the hammer to the ground and mumbled something like "Don't trust the Doritos," then retreated back up the stairs and into my head.

My wife, upon hearing Rybone's scream like some demented, 90's catch phrase spewing banchee, had left the living room to lock up any valuables, ensure there were working fire extinguishers close at hand, and hide any and all materials that might be used to fashion a shiv.  Ryebone jaunted into the living room and shoved his hand in my face.

"Talk to the hand, bitch."

"Your hand smells like shit," was all I could think to say because his hand did, indeed, smell like shit.

"Yeah, my asshole was itchy," he informed me before sticking his hand back down his jeans.  "So, whose dick do I have to kick to get some hookers in here?  Also, where do you usually bury your dead hookers?"

I immediately realized that Ryebone's presence all but guaranteed the kind of bad trip you're more likely to find in the lawless wilds of Tijuana or Shanghai where after a night of drunken debauchery your odds of waking up in some random hotel with a splitting headache, a mean hangover, and a pair of thoroughly soiled underwear were about equal to ending up in some fascist prison with the kind of vicious scum you've only ever read about in fine publications like the Disemboweler and Savage Anal Rapist Quarterly and never being heard from by the civilized world ever again.  I had to act fast if I wanted to maintain even the slightest chance of staying in Darwin's good books.

"There's beer in the fridge," I fumbled hoping to buy some time.

As he went to get himself a beverage I hurriedly searched through the couch cushions for the remote and began feverishly sorting through the library on Netflix.  I needed something, anything to distract the beast and ensure that no more of my internal organs ended up on the Chinese black market.

"Hey man, later we should try this choking thing all the teenagers are doing.  I heard that shit really gets you high.  It's da bomb yo!"

Oh my god!  Fine something quickly, you desperate swine.

"... all that AND a bag of chips."

"Wait!" I practically shouted, my forehead and back drenched in panic sweat.  "Wait, I, uh, think I, well, there's a movie we should, you know, could watch, before we embark on the, uh, you know, potentially suicidal behaviour..."

"What the fuck ya got for me, dog?"

"Just, uh grab a seat.  Over there.  On the couch.  Across the room."

"Whatever," he squeezed out alongside a foul-smelling belch that smelled like rancid ranch salad dressing.  Luckily, Netflix delivers nothing but the bare bones, so I didn't have to sweat through any trailers wondering if he Ryebone might lose interest and involve me in his twisted brand of chaos.

"Where's those Doritos at?"

"I'll grab them," I said as I stumbled to the kitchen.  I went to the cupboard, then remembered that in an earlier attempt to open the bag, it had burst sending the orange powder-dusted triangular chips flying all over the room.  I had subsequently swept them up, so I grabbed a handful out of the trash can, threw them in a bowl and delivered them to Ryebone just as the movie title came on screen: THE EXPERIMENT.

"Fuck these are good Doritos."

"Nothing but the best," I said before cranking the volume hoping to discourage or drown out any more of his demented ravings.

I vaguely remember hearing something about THE EXPERIMENT some time ago, never mind how long exactly.  The basic premise was that a bunch of random volunteers signed up for a two week long psychological experiment in exchange for a some kind of momentary reimbursement.  Upon arriving at an isolated compound the group was broken up into two groups to simulate a prison environment.  Some of the volunteers were designated as guards and some were designated as prisoners.  To ensure full participation they were told that if any one person left, then all of their payments would be forfeit.  There was to be no violence.  The "guards" had to maintain order while ensuring that the "prisoners" got fed and had some exercise and whatnot.

"... OK, but what happened to your pants?"

Of course, what seems like a simple experiment quickly spirals out of control and in a matter of just five days the whole thing goes to shit, the "prisoners" riot, and the whole scenario is stopped before both groups rip each other to bloody shreds.  While parts (read: most) of the movie was very exaggerated, the basic premise was actually based on a real psychological study, the Standford prison experiment, which actually took place in the basement of the university and involved students.  Although there was not a riot in the "real-life" version, it still only managed to last for five days of its originally planned two week schedule due to the "guards" becoming overly aggressive and violent and the "prisoners" suffering from psychological meltdowns.

THE EXPERIMENT, while certainly not a masterpiece, presented an intriguing scenario and was just good enough to hold my attention, although believability was certainly strained to the point of breaking several times.  What kept it together was a short running time and the talents of Adrien Brody as Travis, one of the "prisoners," and Forrest Whitaker as Barris, one of the "guards."  There's also a bunch of other people you'll probably recognize from stuff, as well as Maggie Grace who appears at the beginning and the end as Brody's love interest.  I'd like to get Lost with her... Wait, where was I?

"Why would the smoke monster want me
to take off my shirt?"

Ah yes, THE EXPERIMENT.  While not exactly a deftly handled examination of the intricacies of the human experience, the movie does attempt to address some interesting concepts.  I'll boil it all down to basically two things the movie dealt with.

The first major theme of THE EXPERIMENT was the concept of socialization and the tendency of people to follow the most readily available cultural scripts depending on the specifics of their particular social position.  That is, the "guards," who were put into a position of extreme authority, began abusing that authority by continually testing how far they could go before the experiment was stopped and escalating their disciplinary measures through increasingly violent and depraved means (The old philosophical conundrum: is peeing on people technically considered violence?). The "prisoners," on the other hand, began to feel disempowered and emasculated and dealt with it by alternately succumbing to bouts of depression and dejection and trying to fight for some lingering shreds of human decency through varying degrees of defiance.  I suppose the purpose of the experiment (both in the movie and in the "real world") was to shed some light on the psychological effects that the standard Western prison system has on its occupants, both law abiding and otherwise, and that the institution itself might be an aggravating factor in some of the negative aspects of prison life.

In the larger scheme of things, though, what the experiment in THE EXPERIMENT demonstrated was the tendency we all have to live up to perceived societal expectations associated with a specific role.  A simplistic interpretation might be that if you're treated like a piece of shit, you're more likely to behave accordingly.  I am a big proponent of Free Will (at least in some capacity), however we cannot deny the effects of socialization, and so how we perceive the various social roles we occupy is of the utmost importance.  It shines light on the fact that identity is not something inherent, but rather a construction based on the interpretation of the experiences we have.  That is not to say we can ever escape the social scripts we follow, but at the very least if we are aware that our identities are constructed both by the people around us, society as a whole, and by ourselves then we become more cognisant of those forces and we can, at least to some degree, choose the social scripts we follow and take a a more active role in the construction of our own identities and become more aware of the choices we make and why we make them and hopefully make better ones.

The other related theme is related to the old axiom that absolute power corrupts absolutely.  What THE EXPERIMENT shows is both how powerful and how fragile social expectations can be.  The "guards" take quite a while to switch into full douchebag mode.  They are only held in check as long as they are (only five fucking days, which is rather frightening) by societal expectations of decent, moral behavior.  It is only the lack of continual reinforcement and fear of repercussion or reprisal from a perceived authority figure that eventually allows them to succumb to their base urges.

Which leads me to the second thing that really caught my eye in THE EXPERIMENT, which was the red light.  The "guards" had a red warning light in their office that would light up if the doctors running the experiment saw something (through a series of video cameras) that violated the rules they had been given or placed one or more of the participants of the experiment in physical danger.  So after a situation which bordered what they thought was unacceptable behaviour in the experiment the "guards" would gather around and wait for the light to go off, and as things began escalating and the light continued to stay dim, they forgot about the light and started doing things their way.  I don't know if it was intended by the filmmakers, but the simple image of the unpowered light on the wall was the most poignant and insightful part of the whole movie.

What the red light represented was authority, or rather the archetype of authority which is manifested culturally in many ways but perhaps most significantly in the concept of a deity or deities.  Basically, the red light represented God.  The participants of the study were told that if they violated any of the commandments, then the light would blink, and they would be punished by not receiving their monetary reward.  I think this interpretation is pretty clearly founded.  The light in the movie was positioned high up on the wall so the "guards" had to look up to wait for Its message.  I mean, the religious subtext was so clear that they might as well have gotten a bunch of candles and kept vigil and then fucked a bunch of young boys.  But I mean, it was the perfect representation of both God and organized religion.  God is a red light that never turns on.

Ironically, though, this red light offers more tangible and meaningful interaction than the traditional God or gods that people tend to worship.  It reminded me a lot of the "God booths" in THX 1138 (one of George Lucas' forgotten gems) where people like Robert Duval would go to have a chat with their electronic deity who would spout off random, preprogrammed responses from It's databanks.  This, of course, was supposed to represent a disconnected and uncaring authority, but, again ironically, this God computer interface was more interactive and offered more feedback than the God that people worship today.  The gods in both THE EXPERIMENT and THX 1138 are more tangible and significant than any that people actually worship today because the gods in these movies A) Actually exist and B) Have the ability, or at least the potential, to give their worshipers feedback because of A).

The red light also represents what I like to call the Santa Clause effect (for more see here) where people tend to behave according to social conventions of propriety and decency when they fear that any violations of these rules will result in reprisal from some authority figure.  Basically, it's only illegal if you get caught.  Which, incidently, was Ryebone's personal motto.

So one movie and thirteen beers later Ryebone was passed out on the couch and I had gotten through one of his visits without severe bodily injury and property damage under $1000. (He later ended up standing on the front lawn naked, screaming something about "the goddamn Doritos" and smashing most of my dinnerware on the driveway.  Still, a small price to pay.  I consider myself to have gotten off lucky.)  He was later arrested and I spent most of the next week ducking his calls asking me for bail money.  Anyway, THE EXPERIMENT exists in that strange amorphous zone of not being a cinematic masterpiece but still being  entertaining enough for me to want to add it to my Blu-Ray collection.  It was a pretty tight, unique little film, and it left me with the same kind of feeling as HOSTAGE, which also wasn't great, but which I still really enjoyed for some reason and felt the need to shell out cash for.  Final verdict: THE EXPERIMENT gets a 6.5/10 = One Shaved Urine Soaked Prisoner's Head

Also, because I can:

"So, are you sure Jack said the only way to get off the island is to have sex with you?"

        

A Dark Place in the Woods and the Temptation Towards Oblivion. Cabins, and Scientists, and Zombies, Oh My!

Let me be perfectly clear right off the bat; I am not in any way a fan of Joss Whedon.  I don't understand how he built up such a hardcore cult following with shit like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly.  Yeah, I know from his IMDB page that he did some writing work for the original TOY STORY (along with five other dudes), and he did ingrain Sarah Michelle Gellar as a sex symbol in the brains of an entire generation of geeks, and he's tried his damnedest to give Nathan Fillion some much deserved work and recognition over the years which is pretty cool.  But for the most part everything he's done has been shit and in my mind his popularity among fanboys defies all logic.  His main claim to fame in my mind is the hypnotic effect that his shitty TV show Buffy, and the totally, totally unnecessary spin-off Angel, seem to have over the intellectually unstable and weak-willed.  For me, understanding why people enjoy Whedon's work is like trying to understand the inner workings of the mind of a serial killer, or the logic behind the decision of any politician who ever lived (hint: there isn't any).  I know he's done a bunch of other stuff, but I'm not inclined to go near the it, not even with a twenty two and a half foot pole (I don't know, it was supposed to be a Grinch reference, but I can't remember the actual lyric).  I'll tell you what, Whedon: consider this an open invitation to suck my six and a half inch pole.

Actually, before I watched THE CABIN IN THE WOODS I wouldn't even have let Joss Whedon suck my dick if he paid me to.  And his nothing to do with any kind of homophobic hang-ups.  I simply wouldn't have wanted his mediocre lips wrapped around my shaft or his completely sub-par tongue tickling my balls.  His second-rate-dialogue-spewing mouth could never have kept me hard long enough to blow my load all over his pasty, white face and scraggly ginger beard.  And even now I'd be a little hesitant because Whedon was one of the two writers of THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, so I have yet to enjoy anything he's actually directed (looking like THE AVENGERS might bump Whedon up to full dick-sucking duties, but only time will tell).  Unlike Whedon's deluded disciples I went to see THE CABIN IN THE WOODS not because of his involvement but in spite of it and only because I was in a small town with a shitty record when it came to new release variety and LOCKOUT wasn't playing yet.  And I have to say, I actually enjoyed THE CABIN IN THE WOODS.  Don't let it go to your patchwork-bearded face, Whedon.  Redemption isn't a statistical anomaly.  Time will tell whether THE CABIN IN THE WOODS is a sign of better days to come or a blip on the metaphysical radar.

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS really worked for me on two levels.  The first was the "twist" on the horror genre that the media kept hinting at.  The genre twisting to which they were referring was the fact that this movie was a satire of the horror genre.  I believe the quote from Whedon was that it was a "loving hate letter" to modern horror movies.  Whether or not I misquoted him here or not, the statement is an eloquent way to sum up the movie as vaguely as possible.  Unlike some stupid shit like the SCARY MOVIE franchise which is just... I mean... is there a word in the English language to describe how terribly awful and soul-sucking those movies actually are?  The only thing the DVDs that the SCARY MOVIE franchise were distributed on are good for is wiping your ass after a massive diarrhea, and even then they'd probably break into shards of broken plastic that would shred your asshole causing massive internal and external bleeding.  Yet those kind of potentially life-threatening injuries are still infinitely more entertaining than any entry into the franchise.

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS did what the cock smokers in charge of the SCARY MOVIE chain could only dream of doing if their heads contained brains instead of donkey spooge and the rotting carcasses of dead dreams.  No, this movie was able to deconstruct, analyse, interpret, and provide intelligent commentary on all of the horror stereotypes and archetypes that plague the modern horror flick.  Not only that, but it's able to do this all while still being an entertaining horror film in and of itself which was the second of the two levels I mentioned on which THE CABIN IN THE WOODS worked for me.  I really felt that I almost got two movies for the price of one, because of the structure of the narrative and the framing device used.

The movie opens with Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford (you'll fucking recognize these dudes when you see them, trust me) as a couple of dudes or scientists or something gearing up for some big project at the facility/company they work at.  For the astute movie goer who saw a bunch of spoiler-ish trailers with giant holodeck style walls it might be assumed that these guys are pulling some strings, and that movie goer would be correct, though thankfully the movie will turn out to be a lot smarter than that movie goer will have given it credit for and the larger context cannot be entirely deduced and is a welcome surprise.  Jenkins and Whitford steal the show in a lot of respects and bring the right mix of humour and pathos to a couple of middle-management types who are going through the routines and trying to get through the daily grind while at the same time witnessing (and, I suppose, inflicting) some pretty grizzly shit.

The movie then shifts gears and we get introduced  to the usual gang of teenage idiots (some of them extremely hot) who tend to populate horror flicks.  They're all getting ready for (get ready for it) a weekend trip to a creepy cabin in a secluded section of wilderness somewhere in the United States of Generica.  Right from the get go the audience is let in on the fact that the whole thing is a set up with concealed agents and cameras keeping tabs on the gang of youngsters.  As for the kids themselves, the only ones I recognized right off the bat were Chris Hemsworth (of THOR fame, though this movie was actually made several years ago) and Jesse Williams who chicks and their browbeaten husbands and boyfriends will recognize from Grey's Anatomy.  Kristen Connolly, Anna Hutchison, and Fran Kranz (actually a dude) I didn't recognize, though Hutchison (pictured left) was smokin' hot and Krantz does a great turn as the token stoner of the group.  It must be noted that this movie depicts one of the coolest and most multifunctional bongs ever depicted on screen.  Overall the cast was great and seemed to have an onscreen chemistry and played well off (and on) each other.

The real fun of the film, though, comes from THE CABIN IN THE WOODS examination and deconstruction of all of the horror cliches that plague today's (supposedly) scary movies.  The five teens represent five horror archetypes -the whore, the athlete, the scholar, the fool, and the virgin- and when they fail to live up to these roles they are manipulated by Jenkins' and Whitford's characters from behind the scenes.  One of my favourite little jabs was the use of drugs pumped into the cabin to disorient the teens and get them to split up at a key moment after they wisely decide to stick together after they are besieged by a "zombie redneck torture family."  They also pump in some pheromones and help set the mood to elicit the requisite horror film nudity.  Later when Connolly's "virgin" character is on the run from the zombie terror she's holding a knife she drops it after it delivers a small electric shock (the old why-the-fuck-didn't-you-take-the-weapon-with-you conundrum). The surprisingly clever rhetorical trick used here is the reversal of using rational explanations to explain away otherwise irrational behaviour.

There's also a bunch of nods to other films in the genre.  The cabin that the group goes to looks so much like the one from THE EVIL DEAD that I'm pretty sure I saw a couple frames where they forgot to digitally remove Ash from the scene.  Later the zombie attackers themselves (the Buckners) are reminiscent of the deadites, though they also kind of reminded me of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE as well, what with the disturbed family and all.  When Marty (Kranz) and Dana (Connolly) make their escape to the facility where all the nightmare creatures are kept (held by some mysterious magic?) and the subsequent slaughter that ensues once they are all released contains references to almost every horror film ever made.  There's the standard ones like werewolves, ghosts, and vampires and giant snakes and whatnot.  Then there's a killer clown (IT), saw blade head guy (HELLRAISER), doll mask murderers (THE STRANGERS), twin girls (THE SHINING), some crazy little girl with a giant mouth filled with razor sharp teeth instead of a face (???????), a merman (CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON), and a classroom of Japanese girls dealing with an evil spirit (THE GRUDGE, THE RING (or the originals JU-ON and RINGU)).  The last one, the Japanese girls fighting (and winning, proving that characters in North American horror films are often less effectual than thirteen-year-old girls), is extremely important as it is shown to the audience via a live video feed from Japan and ties in the the framed narrative of the movie.

The whole idea is that there are these beings called The Ancient Ones that need to be appeased by human sacrifice or else they'll rise and destroy the world.  This is a clever idea for several reasons.  First, there is the blending of archaic, ancient, tribal, primal horrors and rituals with the modern socio-industrial complex.  There's a sense of the uncanny by blending the ancient and the modern.  Secondly, there's the idea of ritualized and institutionalized killing (I'll leave you to draw your own cultural parallels) which seems a lot more horrific than some lone nut or even a legion of the undead or demon from the bowels of hell.  There's something intensely disturbing about being tormented by an unfeeling, uncaring, corporate, industrial machine because that's the kind of nightmare you don't wake up from or escape.  Zombies and demons and chainsaw-wielding maniacs can be defeated or maybe escaped from, but how do you run from a social institution you are complicit in and where everybody except you is in on the conspiracy?  (Coincidentally, that's also the reason the presidency of George W. Bush was so terrifying.) 

The conceit of the film is that every year the human race has to make a human sacrifice in order to appease these Ancient Ones and that this has presumably been going on since the dawn of human history.  There are also some very specific guidelines.  First, the group of sacrificees have to willingly choose to proceed with the ritual despite being warned by this creepy dude who works as a gas station attendant also known as The Harbinger.  The sexy teens then have to choose the method of their own sacrifice (via a series of objects in the basement of the cabin... kinda curious what would have been summoned if one of them can found a cursed dildo... death by snoo-snoo!) and not only that bu they also have to die in a certain order.  This really fucked with me, the idea that we choose our own destruction.  For me, this wasn't just a commentary on horror films, but a general commentary about the nature of humanity itself.  We are our own worst enemy and we seem determined to proceed down whatever paths we want to follow despite all evidence that it will lead to some seriously fucked up shit (like that one time you answered that classified add looking for the third member of a threesome and showed up to find two chicks but they were both wearing strap-on dildos and you end up with a sore ass, the taste of molded rubber and a bunch of strange feelings you've never felt before...) kind of like a a more complex version of the old "you are your own worst enemy" shit.

If THE CABIN IN THE WOODS was indeed intended as a "loving hate letter" to the horror film genre, then I think that for once there was a strong correlation between intent and result.  The film is at once an homage to and entry into the horror movie genre.  It is also a sarcastic critique that filmmakers so rigidly and dogmatically follow the cliches of the genre that it must be for a higher purpose, like, to save the world from total annihilation.  So, we have to endure the same old garbage film after film because the Fate of the Entire World depends upon it.  Why else would filmmakers keep pumping out the same tired shit year after year, right?  It's a stunning indictment of the modern horror flick which has become a victim of its own cliches and de-evolved into the realm of torture porn rather than genuinely intelligent explorations of the darkest parts of our collective psyches.  For that, I'm willing to give THE CABIN IN THE WOODS a solid 8.5/10 = One Merman Head Chowing Down On the Collective Intestines of Mankind.  I'm far from being sold on Joss Whedon's shit, but I'm also not one to not enjoy something to prove a point.  So grudgingly I'll have to admit that Whedon has won this round, but I'm hoping that in the future my hate will definitely be proven right.    

(Just as a quick postscript, THE CABIN IN THE WOODS was also one of the best pro weed smokin' flicks I've ever seen what with prolonged use of the ganja counteracted the drugs that the dudes in the facility were using to fuck with the minds of the five teens.  In this case marijuana literally freed the dude's mind.  Fuckin' A.  Fuckin' A.)


  

    

Shades of Grey in the Beard of Awesomeness... When is a Wolf Not a Wolf?

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Why I Hate Bill Clinton

I got inside her oval office

I know this may seem as relevant as it is timely, but you can't time when the mysteries of the universe are revealed to you through a drug-induced stupor after an opium bender in Hong Kong with a body building ex-cabinet minister from Croatia with one testicle.  It happens when it's meant to happen.  I'm not sure why, but the other day I was having grunge flashbacks of the 90's and all of the sudden an image of the Clint-meister popped into my head followed swiftly by waves of anger then rage.  It took me a couple minutes to figure out what the hell was happening to me, then I realized it was some kind of repressed emotions brought on by some acute trauma.  I also realized it was in some way tied to an intense hatred directed at the former US president.

I don't know what exactly triggered memories of everybody's favourite (living) ex-president/ladies man, but the more I thought about it the more the pieces started falling into place.  I didn't hate Clinton for his policies.  I didn't hate Clinton because of his affair with Monica Lewinski (but seriously, you have your choice of ANY woman in the free world, and that's the pick of the litter in your eyes?).  I didn't even hate him because he lied about his presidential indiscretions.  In fact, I hated him for the exact opposite reason.  I hated him because he stopped lying.

The problem with Bill Clinton is that he betrayed the Brotherhood of Liars and made it harder for liars the world over -your truly included- to ply their trade.  If Bill Clinton -a world leader and one of the most powerful and influential men in the world- could be broken and admit to lying, then what chance did the rest of us had?  That fucker brought down so much heat on the rest of us that even thinking about him now I can feel my balls sweating profusely.

For those of you uninitiated in the art form of lying -and, used properly, it can be elevated to an art form- allow me this brief (if somewhat distasteful) moment of honesty to explain to you the fundamentals of truly effective lying.  Most people are amateur liars.  Everybody lies.  It's a simple fact.  We lie to each other and to ourselves for all kinds of different reasons ("Does this dress make me look gay?"  "Of course not, Adam."), but most people do it as a habit and not as a rule.  There are socially acceptable forms of lying that we engage in all the time (i.e. Santa Clause, telling your kid she's good at everything, tipping etc.), but most people don't really go above and beyond the call of duty or when really pressed stupidly blurt out the truth, or just can't lie for shit when the pressure is on.

But the really great liars will lie consciously, and sometimes for no good reason.  Well, no good reason to the untrained observer.  One reason for continual lying is to keep in practice.  The other reason to pepper everyday life with pointless lies is wear people down always keeping them on their toes until they're so confused they don't which way is up and will be open to believing almost anything.  (If you think it doesn't work, just take a look at the success Republicans have had with subverting Obama's universal health care initiative with lies of such ridiculous magnitude that it seems like a great deal of Americans seem to be actively trying to be fooled.)  The point is that in order to lie effectively people can't tell the difference whether you're lying or not.

The tricky part then becomes be able to successfully fake sincerity and exude the aura of honesty.  This is not as hard as it sounds, though it does require a great deal of practice and dedication.  And that leads us to one of the fundamental aspects of truly effective lying.  The best liars are the best because they aren't lying.  The key to effective lying is not to lie at all; you simply have to believe everything you say as you're saying it (or for as long as you need to until whatever situation you got yourself into blows over).  That's the thing that people don't understand.  The greatest lies aren't really lies at all.  Because truth is relative to the perception of the individual, then as long as one person believes the lie (including the liar himself) then it is not really a lie at all.

Bill Clinton had the first fundamental down cold.  That's not why I hate him.  The reason I hate Clinton is that he failed to adhere to the second fundamental of lying.  The second fundamental has to do with people challenging your lie, or providing incontrovertible "proof" that you are, in fact, lying (i.e. the words you are saying contradict the hard evidence).  This is often referred to by people in the business as "being in the hot seat."  Yet even in the face of (key word here) seemingly incontrovertible proof, all hope is not lost thanks to the second fundamental of lying which has three very simple rules:
1) Deny.
2) Deny.
3) Deny.    

That's what Clinton never understood and what separates the truly exceptional from the amateurs.  Truly effective lying requires complete and total dedication.  That's where Clinton fucked it up for the rest of us.  The moment he admitted that he had lied, that he lost faith in his own lie -his own reality that he had created- was the moment he lost all power.  If you ever admit that you were lying, you destroy the power of the lie.  You destroy the appearance of credibility and integrity that you have built up with your audience that is necessary to manipulate and control them, which is, of course, the ultimate purpose of lying.  When you backpedal or try to recant or re-clarify your original story, then the whole damn thing falls apart.  You simply cannot maintain even the slightest shred of integrity if you vary from your original lie in the least bit.  Even if people believe they have you dead to rights they can still muster up a grudging kind of respect for the iron will of a man or woman who will stick to their original story even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.  The moment you give up any ground you look like a fucking little kid who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.  Pathetic.

When Clinton admitted he had been lying when he denied the affair with Lewinski he opened the floodgates.  If a bunch of hacks from FOX News could break the will of the President of the United States of America (no affiliation with the (questionably) popular band from the 90s) then what the hell kind of chance did the rest of us have?  All of the sudden ball busters came out of the woodwork and started beating liars into submission, questioning everything, applying their reason and logic unrelentingly.  Cynicism is the natural enemy of the liar.  Cynics question everything and take nothing at face value.  Do you realize how difficult it is to try and get people to believe anything in a social climate like that?  In the wake of Clinton's bullshit, people began actively seeking out lies and the liars they belonged to, hunting us down almost to extinction just like the Jedi.  And like the Jedi liars had to use their own brand of mind tricks to wear people back down, whittle away all the cynicism, and suspicion, and self-righteousness to get to that delicious, creamy middle of apathy and confusion that's like pay dirt for the liar.  

And that's why I hate Bill Clinton.  He was a fucking amateur and made the rest of us look bad.  He was the worst kind of liar; the kind without the backbone enough to endure the hot seat.  If you're going to lie, do it with integrity.  Do it with respect.  If you're going to lie, then lie honestly.  When Clinton admitted to the lie, what he ultimately admitted to was the only unconscionable form of lying: self-deception.  The cardinal rule of lying, in order to lie to others effectively, you must be completely, brutally honest with yourself.  Also, as per the first fundamental of lying, you have to believe what you're saying is absolutely true.  When Bill Clinton admitted he was lying to us, he admitted he was lying to himself as well.  The reality he had created in his own mind he exposed as bogus.  It's a house of cards.  If you expose one part of your reality as a lie, then where does it stop?  How many of your personal truths can be revealed as lies before your whole goddamn world collapses around you (metaphysically speaking)?  Bill Clinton's shitty lying revealed the very real danger and hidden fear of amateur and expert liars alike, that when you stop believing your own story you stop believing in yourself.  I hate Bill Clinton because he represents the possibility that my own house of cards might one day be brought toppling down.  I hate Bill Clinton for reminding me of my own nagging self-doubt and for exposing my own vulnerability.  I hate Bill Clinton not because he exposed the error of our ways, but for the implication that our way was error-filled at all.  If I can't even choose the lies I believe in, then what the hell can I do?      

In the Ring: Warrior VS The Fighter

What the hell is a "Rocky?"

ROCKY has undoubtedly come to be perceived in popular culture as the archetypal boxing movie.  In fact whenever anybody mentions the words "boxing" and "movie" in the same sentence he is usually directly or indirectly conjuring up associations with ROCKY in his audience, unless of course the sentence is something like "I was pounding her pussy like a one-legged Argentinian and a shaved gorilla in three foot boxing ring and filming the whole thing so I could post the movie on YouTube in time for her birthday."  But otherwise, you're probably in some way referencing ROCKY and/or comparing another boxing film to ROCKY.

This is complicated and confusing and unhelpful for several reasons.  First, while ROCKY was a great film and a film that I thoroughly enjoy, it was not strictly speaking the best boxing film ever made.  While that title is fairly arbitrary, I think that it could be reasonably argued in a court of law that RAGING BULL was a superior movie in almost every conceivable way.  RAGING BULL is a more complexly layered, better acted, better filmed character study than ROCKY could ever hope to be.  Unlike RAGING BULL, ROCKY also contains some of the most ridiculously choreographed fights ever to appear on film (except, of course, for its five totally unnecessary yet completely entertaining sequels).  Anybody who a) watches boxing or MMA or any martial art that contains striking b) who has ever been in a fight themselves or c) knows the slightest about basic concepts of physics will immediately recognize that the fighting style employed by both Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed is completely ridiculous (people in the fighting world would refer to it as "stupid") and in the real world would lead to one of the quickest and least interesting fights in all of history.

I'm talking of course about the tendency of boxers in the ROCKYverse not to defend themselves or block any shots at all, especially to their heads.  I know part of the whole mythology of Rocky is that he has an iron jaw and can take all kinds of punishment, yadda, yadda, yadda, but every once in a while the total absurdity of simply letting another full-grown, testosterone-filled human being hit you in the head without trying to defend yourself or dodge in the slightest kind of slaps you upside the head.  I don't care how tough you are, there is not a man or woman alive on the planet, no matter how tough his or her jaw was, would not either go down or start to feel his/her legs buckle after five or six completely unguarded shots to the old cranium.  This kind of illogical approach to fighting is even more apparent in the even more absurd fight at the end of ROCKY V when Rocky and Tommy Gunn when they have a bare knuckle brawl employing the exact same strategy of pure offence with absolutely no sign of even thinking about defence.  OK, even if I conceded that in the ring with boxing gloves employing Rocky's No-Block school of fighting the toughest fighter in the history of the world might last at the most one round, maybe two or three if he was one tough motherfucker, but in a back alley pounding each other bare handed this style will get you knocked out in seconds.  You can't just keep moving forward with your chin stuck out.  Being hit with a bare fist packs a lot more wallop than getting pounded with a set of gloves.  Believe me, I know, I've experienced both and bare hands inflict a lot more damage per blow. (That's what she said.)  Especially if you come up on somebody's chin, at the very least his legs are going to start to give way.

Even with all that said, I still love watching ROCKY and get pumped every single time I see it and all that shit that I just went on about doesn't really matter at all or really take anything away from the movie or its sequels.

This kind of (in a very roundabout way) leads me to the second reason why comparisons to ROCKY as the archetypal boxing movie are generally confusing and unhelpful.  As an example I will use my example of comparing ROCKY to RAGING BULL.  While I did this to emphasize a point, the comparison is fairly useless because ROCKY and RAGING BULL are two very different types of movies.  While both employ the boxing world as a backdrop to explore the lives of the protagonists, I think the similarities really end there.  RAGING BULL is an intense, some might say brooding, film about a very flawed protagonist with a great gift who squandered his personal relationships fucked up his life and hit rock bottom.  ROCKY is naively hopeful tale of a nobody given a shot at greatness, succeeding only in winning a personal, moral victory.  ROCKY is less about boxing and more about the narrative of the perseverent underdog.  And that's where the problem comes when comparing all boxing movies to ROCKY.

All boxing movies are not all boxing movies.  People wrongly compare them in the simplest of terms ie. that the protagonist is somehow engaged in the sport of boxing.  This is a very weak comparison.  You can't reasonably compare on any fundamental level movies like ROCKY and THE BOXER or ROCKY and MILLION DOLLAR BABY.  Or at least you can't try to evaluate them within the archetypal framework of ROCKY.  ROCKY is not a narrative about boxing, it's a narrative about the underdog.  Now for fairly obvious narrative reasons the rhetoric of the underdog lends itself especially well to the boxing movie genre, but really the main archetype that Rocky Balboa represents is not The Ultimate Warrior but The Unlikely, Well-Deserved Victor.  In this way ROCKY has more in common genetically with narratives about  any person or group who was not favoured to win a particular competition but who overcomes the odds and is able to transcend what everybody thought was important, always by proving some form of superior character (ie. courage, perseverence, etc.) and earning respect from the people who had previously scorned him, and only sometimes is this accomplished by actually succeeding in the given field.  In this way ROCKY has more in common with COOL RUNNINGS or A FEW GOOD MEN or even GATTACA than with RAGING BULL.

This brings me to something I've been wanting to get off my chest for a while.  I need to explain one of the core piss-offs of the underdog narratives, one of its central tropes, the conceptualization that at the same time as it almost completely destroys the willing suspension of disbelief and the enjoyability of the narrative is also at least in some small way necessary to its function.  What I'm referring to is the characterization of the champion in the underdog narrative.

You see, in order for there to be a narrative that centers around the Underdog as the protagonist this by necessity means that there needs to be a Champion established as the antagonist.  The Champion is of utmost importance in the underdog narrative because this antagonist represents the ultimate obstacle that stands between the underdog and his victory.  In order for this to work on an emotional level, the Champion must be everything the Underdog is not.  The Champion has to be the absolute best at whatever it is he does, and not just the best but he has to be considered as virtually unbeatable by everybody else in the world of that particular narrative.  If the Underdog must be portrayed as down on his luck, depressed, and full of potential then the Champion is shown to be on top of the world, self-fulfilled and fully realized in his potential, so much so that he borders on becoming deified; the Underdog is a mere mortal but the Champion is virtually a god.  Part of what makes the underdog narrative so compelling is the fact that the apparently invincible can still be defeated by the vincible.  The longer the shot for the Underdog to become successful the greater the emotional payoff for the audience when he triumphs over the Champion (or so conventional wisdom holds).  

The most important characteristic that divides the Underdog and the Champion, and where the whole thing really falls apart for me is humility.  The Underdog is almost always portrayed as the humble, hard-working everyman in contrast to the Champion who almost always comes across as a pompous, arrogant, proud asshole who has come to believe in his own press and his own invincibility.  The Champion is almost universally demonized and turned into some inhuman creature to be slain by the tragic Greek hero.  In contrast to the Underdog, the defining characteristic that defines the Champion is hubris, again the theory goes something like the more of an arrogant dickhead the Champion is the greater the emotional payoff for the audience when he is beaten by the Underdog (or so conventional wisdom holds).

But to me this seems like a very ineffective narrative device.  Not only does it turn (what should be) a central character in the narrative into a one-dimensional archetypal cardboard cutout, it almost completely negates the victory of the Underdog himself.  Following the logic of the underdog narrative it goes something like this:

1) The Champion must be a total asshat
2) The Underdog triumphs over the Champion
3) The Underdog becomes the new Champion and since the Champion is always a douchebag,
4) The Underdog becomes the new Asshole and you -the audience- have just spent the last two hours cheering for an asshole.

When the realization hits you that by emotionally siding with the Underdog what you were really cheering for wasn't the Underdog becoming a Champion, but for his (eventual) transformation into a totally despicable, reprehensible human being who bites the ears off his opponents, rapes random women or runs an illegal dog-fighting ring.  You were silently cheering for evil to ultimately triumph.  And that's always why secretly you always wanted Luke to turn to the dark side at the end of RETURN OF THE JEDI.  It's also the fundamental flaw with the underdog narrative.

But why?  Why does the Champion have to be an arrogant, undefeatable prick and an unconscionable bastard?  Why can't filmmakers (or writers) tell a story that fleshes out the characters on both sides of a competition?  Why can't I feel sympathy for "the villain"?  It worked in STAR WARS.  Is it supposed to be some kind of ironic reversal?  Is the Champion supposed to learn humility and then become a better person?  Is his fall supposed to be some kind of philosophical, humanizing triumph?  Is he really the character, then, that we should have been cheering for all along?

I don't know, it's just bugs me that we're intrinsically supposed to agree with the whole Fuck the Guy on Top paradigm.  Apparently, if you're successful you are by necessity an asshole?  Have all champions since the beginning of time all really been assholes?  Yeah, fuck you Abraham Lincoln.

So what the hell was the point of all this again?  Oh yeah, THE FIGHTER and WARRIOR.  You have to think of these two movies out of the context of ROCKY.  Or at least, partially.  The common thread amongst these movies isn't the boxing (or MMA fighting -which is increasingly supplanting boxing in the modern Hollywood fighting narrative-  in the case of WARRIOR); it's the narrative of the underdog.  But that's about where the similarity between these movies ends.

Let's go through a brief blow by blow of THE FIGHTER and WARRIOR, and then I'll tell you why they're both fucking awesome.  The big thing to keep in mind is that, ultimately, these are stories about the relationships between brothers.  In both movies the fighting is a storytelling device to explore the relationship between two grown men who couldn't legally fuck each other even if they wanted to (Not saying that they would want to, I was just making a statement about the authority of the government to decide who you can and cannot fuck or even marry.  Think about it.).  They're both giant sausage/love fests, except instead of sitting around talking about their emotions, and crying on each other's shoulders, and having naked pillow fights, and eating ice cream, and crying some more, and maybe even making out a little... Sorry, where was I  Oh yeah, the pairs of brothers portrayed in THE FIGHTER and WARRIOR work out their problems like real men: by pummeling something with their bare fists.  Preferably something living, and preferably something with a face.

Fighting is a great metaphor for the tumultuous storm of emotions raging inside a testosterone-packed man because it's not really a metaphor at all; physical violence is the default and only mode men have of dealing with their emotions.  See, the way men deal with emotions (read: the right way) is to bottle them all way down inside, drown them in alcohol, until you get to that comfortably numb rut known as Day to Day Life.  Then when some shit disturbs the balance, all of those emotions come flooding out like if somebody released an emotional dam, and then those manly emotions manifest themselves in violence.  If nobody is around then that violence will be wasted on inanimate objects like TVs, dishwashers, priceless Ming vases, family heirlooms of various varieties, and/or the family car.  While it certainly is satisfying to watch your TV explode into a thousand, sparkling shards in the middle of your driveway, it's still not as good as it gets.  No, the ultimate satisfaction comes if there is another red-blooded male around, especially if he is the one who caused you to lose your shit in the first place, or just some asshole you don't like (read: 90% of the population).  It's infinitely more satisfying watching the face of your opponent explode as you ram your bruised and broken knuckles repeatedly into his skull and having to wring out your blood-stained clothes afterwards.  It's a lot more satisfying asserting your dominance over something that can fight back (but also who is preferably slightly more out of shape than you).  If you're a chick this may sound horrible, but this is the proper way for normally adjusted human males to settle disputes with each other.  Anything else would be uncivilized (10 bonus points for anybody who can tell me what the hell that's from.).

THE FIGHTER, starring Christian Bale, follows the "true" story of world famous boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and his older brother Dicky Eklund (Bale) as Micky overcomes adversity and becomes the world middle weight (or light heavy, I can't fucking remember) boxing champion and fucks Amy Adams along the way.  Micky has to contend not only with getting out from under his older brother's shadow (whose boxing claim to fame consisted of once knocking down (but not out) Sugar Ray Leonard), but also his white trash family, especially his domineering mother/manager who keeps making disastrous, short-sighted decisions.  On top of that is Dicky's crack problem, which winds both he and Micky in trouble with the law.  When watching THE FIGHTER I suddenly realized how much I hate white people.  Micky's family is depicted as about as white trash as you can get, and one of the main complaints I had about the movie were that Micky's six or seven sisters were so white trash that they became caricatures as opposed to characters and derailed the tone of the movie.

WARRIOR stars Tom "Bane" Hardy and Joel "Uncle Owen" Edgerton as two estranged brothers with a penchant for mixed martial arts.  Hardy plays Tommy, the badass younger ex-marine with anger management issues and Edgerton portrays Brendan the ex-MMA fighter turned high school math teacher struggling to pay the medical bills for his rarely-seen yet critically-ill daughter and occasionally fucking Jennifer Morrison.  Nick Nolte gives perhaps the performance of his lifetime as the father of these two brothers, a reformed alcoholic trying desperately to make up for the sins of his past and reconcile with his estranged sons whose only common ground is their dislike of him.  Once again, another example of how fucked up white folks are.  Basically the premise of the movie that causes shit to come to a head is the Spartan MMA tournament funded by some rich white guy to "find out who the toughest guy in the world is."  Even if all you've seen is the movie posters, you're almost certain that the finale will involve the two brothers, each fighting for his own noble cause.

So how great are these movies?  Pretty fucking.  Both THE FIGHTER and WARRIOR deliver on so many levels:

1) Talent: THE FIGHTER brings us Christian Bale, Mark Wahlberg, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo (for which she one an Oscar, for whatever that's worth these days) while WARRIOR shares with the world Joel Edgerton, Tom Hardy, Nick Nolte and Jennifer Morrison.  Everybody wins.

2) THE FIGHTER has the hotness of Amy Adams and the see through bra and WARRIOR has the hotness of Jennifer Morrison and her great ass in a pair of perfectly fit underwear (you know the scene I mean).  Everybody wins (but especially straight men and lesbians).  (I had no idea when she was on House how hot Morrison actually was.)

3) THE FIGHTER and WARRIOR both had a great story with a lot of touching and/or emotional moments that really engaged the audience.

4) THE FIGHTER and WARRIOR both bring on the action when necessary and even though you're pretty sure what the outcomes of the big fights in both films are going to be, you're still emotionally invested enough to give a shit.

5)  THE FIGHTER and WARRIOR both really nail the emotionally poignant take on brother-brother relationship, and the key demographic for both movies is made pretty clear from the get-go.  If you're a dude with a brother these movies will probably be more emotionally accessible to you, but they're well written enough that the themes will be engaging enough for viewers of all ages and persuasions.  As both sets of brothers exercise their demons it's pretty hard not to be moved (especially in WARRIOR when Tommy finally taps out to love.  You just been SPOILED!)

6)  Most importantly to our previous discussion of all the underdog narrative from before is that not only can THE FIGHTER and WARRIOR not be effectively compared directly to other boxing/fighting movies, but they also resist the underdog trope that is at the heart of ROCKY and all of his thrilling sequels.  Both movies are ostensibly about underdog characters in some way, but that's not really the focus.  Neither THE FIGHTER or WARRIOR is a "new ROCKY", and that's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing.  It's just  a thing.

As I've already pointed out (and will continue to point out) both of these movies are really about reconciling familial relationships, especially those of the brotherly persuasion.  THE FIGHTER is not really an underdog story because the main character Micky Ward doesn't really fit the criteria.  As outlined above the underdog cannot start off as an asshole, but Ward is definitely portrayed as kind of a dickhead.  He's this white trash boxer with a kid he barely sees (or references after the first twenty minutes of the movie) who consistently gets drawn into his family's shit.  Ward is portrayed fairly sympathetically, but in the movie he consistently makes bad decisions, and the final fight between Micky and Shea Neary is less about the face off between the fighters in the ring and more about Ward unleashing all of his pent up emotional shit between him and his brother on the opponent.  The significant thing isn't the win; it's the fact that the two brothers were able to reconcile and work together.

WARRIOR came the closest I've ever seen to solving my Underdog/Champion conundrum by getting the audience emotionally invested in both fighters in the final showdown.  (Plus there's the visceral enjoyment of watching grown men beating the shit out of each other on film.)  Because you get to follow both of the characters who make it to the final showdown you become emotionally invested in both of them, even though there's a slight imbalance and you're kind of given clues as to who to cheer for.  Still, I think the film wouldn't have been emotionally any less poignant or significant had the fight gone the other way.  The point is WARRIOR is not really an underdog narrative because the final fight is a fight between two supposed underdogs, which means that there were no sub-canine proclivities whatsoever.

One way they do compare to ROCKY is that they are both awesome.  I don't know if it's just because I'm getting older and set in my ways, but ROCKY still edges them out slightly, but only slightly.  There's a certain tendency in movies these days to wink at the audience, but not expertly like Kevin Smith did in JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK.  Either way, both THE FIGHTER and WARRIOR quickly found a place in my heart and my collection and I'd highly recommend watching either of them over and over again for a week straight, just because.  I give THE FIGHTER and WARRIOR both a 9/10 = Two Highly Trained Athletes Beating Each Other Senseless For The Amusement of Lesser Men

Past the Brink... Arbitrary Milestones, Body Modification and Soft Core Paranoia in the Time of Chicken Wing. Chances of Redemption Thoroughly Squandered

It was raining like a bastard.

I'm not sure exactly how it is a bastard would manifest himself meteorologically, but if he could he would most definitely have been the rain that was coming down around me on the evening of December 30th, 2011.  It wasn't a particularly heavy downpour, but it was doing its best to bring down the curtain early.  The problem wasn't really the rain.  The problem was that the rain was mixing with the snow to fill the streets with a sloppy, slushy, frozen mixture that seemed somehow able to completely ignore the waterproof label that was clearly visible on my boots.

Son of a bitch.

The alcohol flowing freely through my veins helped with the frozen wet sensation seeping into my feet and a vague sense of impotence.  Trudging through that sludge in the street it felt as though the universe had prematurely ejaculated all over our little blue planet and I was just one of a couple billion helpless sperm that were not going on to fertilize anything or create anything.  I was just part of some wasted biological matter left over after a (short but) good time and then swiftly deposited on a wet blue tissue then rolled up and tossed away into the vastness of space.

December 30th, 2011.  It was the date of my 30th birthday and it was shaping up to be as satisfyingly disappointing as I'd secretly hoped it would be all along.  We love to feel like shit.  I wasn't at the big birthday party I had been planning to throw for myself, my Big 30th On the 30th, a mystical intersection of numbers that I had tried (somewhat unsuccessfully) to imbue with some sense of meaning or significance.  Due to circumstances not entirely beyond my control I had moved to another city far away from most family and friends to go back to school thereby effectively putting the kibosh on any type of party mobilization.  I had managed to round up a couple familiar faces to help me over the brink.  Ryebone and my brother Matthew had made their way down  to whatever city in the Western hemisphere that I may currently be living in.  Instead of partying and drinking all day I had to watch my two kids because my wife had started a new job and was at the bottom of the shitheap and really she couldn't afford to turn down any shifts.  Instead of ordering my traditional birthday wings from The Moose I was dragging my feet through four inches of semi-frozen slush in the street going over to Montana's for some generic (yet surprisingly satisfying) chain restaurant stock staples.  At least I was on my way to getting genuinely and dangerously shitfaced.

I reached up to scratch my left arm then quickly stopped mindful of the potential implications.

Rewind two days.  The 28th of December.  I was standing nervously in the entrance of a local tattoo parlour trying to figure out if the artists had figured out that I was a phony and were secretly plotting to take me out back and beat me with socks full of quarters and bags of Valencia oranges.  There was one particularly large tattooist who obviously worked out ate a lot of protein and had a fairly high pain threshold evidenced by the sheer volume of tattoos running down his arms and and circling his skull.

I was following through on a year-long plan to commemorate my thirty years on this strange planet with a permanent mark on my dermal layer.  I'm not sure exactly when or where I had hatched this plan, or why I felt it was a particularly effective monument to the three decades I had wasted loitering around this foggy blue sphere to have some stranger use a needle to force ink deep under my skin into some kind of personally significant image.  Especially when my wife's impulse was to buy me the Kinect, which would have fed my video game obsession and probably (read: definitely) cost considerably less.  There had always been talk about "What would you get if you got a tattoo?" followed by girlish manly giggling as my friends and I threw out increasingly ridiculous ideas and sizes for tattoos (though nothing we could imagine could ever match the glory that is Dragon Dick).  I had always shied away from the idea because it seemed that so many people around me -the hip and the square alike- had tattoos that the originality that I had always associated with having a tattoo seemed diluted somehow like the sitcom or a soft drink from McDonalds left out overnight so all the ice melts but you drink it anyway because you're hung over.  Even though I was a consumer whore who wholly embraced brand loyalty, lived for the high (and inevitable guilt) that invariably came from making a purchase, and embraced Wal-Mart with open arms and erect dick, my first instinct was still to embrace and value counter-culture, some ubiquitous force working against "the man."  What counter-culture represented wasn't wholly rebellious, but really a type of elitism where you could count yourself a member of a community (if only in the barest sense) through the knowledge of a certain set of cultural parameters to which a large majority of the population was oblivious.  In conversations with friends and strangers you could identify fellow cult members through certain key words or phrases, like a secret verbal  handshake, a cipher of Masonic proportions and implications, unlock the door and enter a secret clubhouse whose access was restricted to those "in the know."

I was wrong on two counts.  First, those truly involved in the "tattoo culture" differed a great deal from the band of yuppies, aging hipsters, university students looking to get the obligatory tramp stamp, fat balding men in mid-mid-life-crisis, and bored house wives looking for a taste of "the wild side" on which they had previously failed to walk.  Culture -and sub-culture- was not some monolithic construction, but rather a spectrum that ranged from the hard-core to the tourist.  Unfortunately, in this instance I was closer to the tourist end of the spectrum, and I felt it acutely as I tend to.  Even though it seemed that there was a wave of people branded with various bullshit like the now-cliched Chinese characters that seemed ready to crash down upon me, simply "having a tattoo" in no way, shape or form automatically qualified one for entrance into tattoo culture.  It was the same reason that owning a motorcycle and wearing a leather jacket branded with the Hell's Angels logo didn't automatically qualify one for entry into the Hell's Angels.  Even though my mission parameters involved getting a tattoo and everybody who worked there was really friendly I could tell that I was in no danger of becoming one of the Elite in this particular circle.

Second, while I wasn't exactly being offered the keys to a certain cultural kingdom, neither was I being completely excluded.  One of the factors that had previously kept me from considering a tattoo was the fact that so many people I knew had them.  I was somehow worried about being "unoriginal" whatever that meant.   It was impossible to be truly original in the sense that we tend to think about it.  Most people aren't original.  Most people don't create new things.  But getting a tattoo wouldn't make me unoriginal.  What weapon we did have was innovation.  I was only "unoriginal" in the conventional sense if I was somehow defined by a single character trait or personal attribute.  We don't "invent" ourselves, we "innovate" an identity by collecting a unique combination of traits and attributes.  If I waited around to do something unique that nobody else in the world had ever conceived of before I would be waiting for a very long fucking time.  I couldn't deprive myself of something I wanted just because somebody else wanted it too.  It's fucking ridiculous.  The creed of the hipster was no way to lead a self-fulfilling life.

"Can I help you?"

"Yeah, I'm, uh, looking to get a tattoo."

"Well, you came to the right place."

The dude in front of me with the baseball cap, glasses and neatly trimmed beard greeted me with a smile.  My first instinct when deciding on a tattoo parlour was to follow word of mouth from people I knew.  I figured it would be the safest way to go.  But since I had moved to a new city and didn't know anybody who had been inked locally I had had to go the nerdy route and look up establishments online.  My second instinct was to go with the biggest place I could find.  I figured any institution that could sustain a staff of seven or eight artists indefinitely must have a descent health record.  I figured safety in numbers.  If I didn't know anybody's reputation personally then I'd go with the biggest.  Trust the beast.  Wal-Mart syndrome.  Somehow I was able to muddle my way through, showing him a picture of what I wanted, getting a quote on the price, going over health and safety questions and setting up an appointment for the next day.

Fast forward.

December 29, 2011.  I was lying in a comfortable chair in a muscle shirt fighting the urge to fall asleep while some dude I barely knew branded me permanently with an image of my choosing which you can check out right here:

For those of you uneducated swine who don't know what this means you can do your own fucking research on wikipedia all about gonzo (no, not the muppet).  The tattoo is cool, and is kind of annoying having to explain it to (almost) everybody I've shown it to so far, but in this way I have engaged with a very particular sort of elitism in a very particular sub-culture, and so have that particular satisfaction to enrich my life.  The reason for this having this particular symbol immortalized on my body is complex, but basically boils down to the fact that it was the calling card of Hunter S. Thompson who was the best of the best at what he did, which, incidentally, is also what I hope to do.

The procedure itself was actually much less painful than I had imagined and was done in about half of the originally estimated four hours (based upon a rough idea of the size I had tried to explain the day before).  The real bitch of it came in the days and weeks that followed when, sure enough, just as the dude at the tattoo place had predicted the area of skin that had been tattooified would feel like a really bad sunburn.  It was sensitive as hell, and two weeks have flown by, but during the first half of that fortnight my left arm hurt like a son of a bitch.

"Alright, boys, let's drink our balls off!"

It was Matthew's voice ringing around in my head.  Somewhere through the tense music and terrible sounds of virtual bodies being ripped apart by thousands of rounds of virtual ammunition that punctuated every game of Left 4 Dead I registered my brother's voice as I took another swig of the cold beer I cradled in my hand.

"Let's get stupid!"

He punctuated this by going right up to a witch and bitch slapping her resulting in his own swift demise.  Despite 48 hours of tutoring, Matthew still refused to sneak by any of the witches in Left 4 Dead, instead choosing the baffling strategy of voluntary massacre at the hands of that genetically modified she-bitch.  I'm not sure exactly why Matthew seemed intent to keep banging his head against the proverbial wall, but I'm sure it had something to do with the contrary nature we had both inherited: the more I advised against startling the witch, the more he seemed bound and determined to do just that.

"Eat shit and die you zombie bastards!"

Waiting for my wife to come home from work on the evening of my birthday Matthew, Ryebone and myself had taken to killing some zombies on Ye Olde Xbox and drinking heavily.  Luckily for us liquor and zombies don't mix, and as usual alcohol seemed to improve our skill at everything, although I had to physically restrain Ryebone when in a fit of drunken insanity he almost succeeded in lighting an improvised Molotov cocktail in my living room as he frantically screamed "I'm calling zombie bullshit!" and trying unsuccessfully to bite my nose off, his go to defence after recently watching the last half of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS over and over again every night for three months for no apparent reason.  In true (My Family Name Here) fashion, Matthew never missed a beat and was able to completely tune out the rest of the world and zone in completely on the TV screen totally oblivious to everyone and everything around him.

At last my wife got home just in time for us to abandon her and go out for a few more drinks and some sustenance.  Because my wife didn't get off work until 9 o'clock and because all three of us had already started drinking the plan was to walk over to Montana's Steakhouse which was literally a well-heaved stone's throw away.  I had also received some gift cards for Montana's for Christmas so it seemed like a sign.  A sign of what, I'm not exactly sure, but a sign nonetheless.

My 30th birthday dinner was OK, I guess.  We had appetizers which I can't recall.  My brother ordered the half chicken dinner, I got ribs and wings and Ryebone ordered what turned out to be one of the smallest pulled pork sandwiches I had ever seen this side of the children's menu which he still couldn't finish earning him the nickname "Kid's Meal" which I intend to remind him of every waking minute from now until the day he dies.  For dessert we tried the deep fried cheese cake which was fucking delicious but it filled me up past the brim and made the rest of my night fairly uncomfortable.  I was totally on the brink of puking the rest of the night thanks in large part to that cheesecake which kind of put a damper on the whole drinking thing when we got back to my place.

Through my drunken, sugar-induced haze I have vague recollections of Matthew playing chicken with a transport truck, Ryebone waving his genitals at passing traffic, and an effeminate Asian man dressed head to toe in leather offering to "make our night."  After racing home through the rain and slush we turned on the TV fully intent on picking up where we left off killing hordes of zombies.

Instead I fell asleep in the recliner in the living room while Ryebone and my brother debating the various practical applications of morning wood (I drifted off completely after Ryebone's suggestion of using it as a citrus juicer and a montage in my head of all the times I'd partaken of orange juice at his apartment and making a mental note to strangle him and his penis with barbed wire when I woke up).  All in all it was by all accounts -to use the parlance of our times- an epic fail.

I was turning 30 on the 30th.  It was supposed to mean something.  Right?  It had to.  There was supposed to be a light shining down from the heavens and strippers on raised platforms dancing to White Snake.  There was supposed to be a celebration.  It wasn't until afterwards that I realized that there was no significance.  Everything was arbitrary.  I didn't feel fundamentally any different at 30 than I did at 20 or 23 or 27.  All the goals I had set for myself to have accomplished by the age of 30 were equally as arbitrary.  Why the feeling of disappointment?  There was no accountability because who was there to be accountable to?  There was no greater Power, no order, no plan.

For a while I did feel disappointed.  There's something masochistically satisfying about an overwhelming sense of total failure.  For a while my 30th birthday threw into sharp relief all I had not accomplished.  Even the tattoo I had gotten was a reminder of (as yet) unrealized dreams, a standard of excellence that I was in no way near approaching.  Then gradually it came to me.  This thought that had been drifting around in the bottom of my subconscious and slowly made its way to the surface:

My Epiphany

There's something vaguely satisfying about the smell of shit.

I don't know why I hadn't seen it before.  In a sense I suppose I had.  It was the culmination of 30 years of experiences finally being unified with an overarching theme.  A unifying thread.  A nexus whereupon all points of time and space in the universe merged together for an instant to reveal some hidden truth.

Shit was life.

Even as I thought it I knew that it had occurred to me before, but never in a way tangible enough to be put into words.  Somehow, I had always known it.  There's something life-affirming about the smell of shit.  We don't want to admit it, but even as we're repulsed by it we are simultaneously intoxicated and drawn to it.  Shit is the great equalizer.  It is a constant, daily reminder of our mortal, animal nature.  It's a reminder of how close we are to the bottom no matter how far ahead we get, and conversely how things can always get worse.  

The smell of shit was real.  It was tangible.  It was the essence of Humanity.  We took in, we consumed, and we produced nothing of lasting value or worth.  But unlike humanity shit was unpretentious; it was, simply, what it was.  It didn't try to make more of itself.  We kept trying to elevate our selves, our lives, to some higher meaning or plateau, to make everything as Un-shit-like as possible all the time.  The problem is when we try to elevate everything in essence we lower everything.  By trying to make nothing shit we had made everything shit.

We need the shit.  Without embracing that feeling of the mundane, the ordinary, the depressingly routine, without really feeling those lows we had, in effect, numbed ourselves to the highs.  And just like any junkie, we needed larger and larger highs.  I needed a large birthday party for my 30th because it had to mean something.

But for what?  I was trying to insert significance where deep down I truly understood that none existed.  I wanted my 30th birthday to mean something, to have some sort of relative significance that I could fathom and construct for it, and for a while my reach ran the very real risk of exceeding my grasp.  There was a failure that day.  The failure was mine.  And the failure was this: I had tried to be inspired by an arbitrary, constructed psychological artifact, the construction of which I felt no ownership of and hence placed no significance on while desperately wishing to believe in that very same significance.  In total disrespect to the Bard, I had not been true to myself.  I had wanted something that I only thought I wanted, and the depression came from not reaching goals that didn't even really exist in the first place.

I was the bastard son of a bastard son.  I was a castaway from the twin broken vessels Civilization and Culture, the construction of a construction.  I had lost what little sense of agency I had.  I looked back at my 20's and saw Unrealized Potential and failed dreams, but then the question suddenly popped into my head: By whose standard?  Who was this imaginary Bastard Father I was so desperate to impress?  And for what reason?  What was this Great Thing I was supposed to have accomplished by the age of 30?  And so what if I hadn't accomplished it?  Or if I had accomplished it and just didn't know?

It wasn't wrong to love misery; it was wrong to love misery for the wrong reasons.  I had let my lows become my highs instead of letting my lows accentuate my highs.  We need misery.  We need shit.  Not to wallow in, but to remind us of our condition in the universe.  The best moment of your life seems infinitely better when contrasted with the worst.  The smell of shit was an affirmation of life.

By my own standards my 30th birthday had been a disappointment.  Yet I still had fun.  Ryebone, my brother and I got drunk, had a few laughs, and nobody's organs were stolen and sold on the black market.  Just like the shuttle mission in APOLLO 13 my birthday had been a "successful failure."  There's something oddly compelling about failing on a scale more massive than most people would ever succeed on.  And if that was to be my legacy in the years to come, I could think of far worse and little better.  If the goal was failure on an epic level then the potential for success was nearly infinite.  Failure was the new immortality.

The king is dead.

Long live the king.