Of Dead Mice and Men

It was a massacre.

And it was one of my own design.

I had been left to my own devices, somehow.  Sent on an expedition to replenish the pantry.  My mission was to acquire the necessary foodstuffs to keep the family going for one more week.  So, of course, my first stop was to the hardware store.  Lowe's.  There was a line that needed to be drawn, and the time had come that I could no longer ignore past transgressions.  Accounts would be made.  Payments made in full.  Balance restored.  That was the way it had to be. It wasn't for sport; I took no pleasure in it.  It was a grim responsibility.

"Where do the mice go after you catch them?" she asks, eyes wide.

My children were both looking up at me, their faces the very definition of childlike wonder.  They knew only curiosity.  They didn't know where it might lead or that they might not like where it took them.  They knew only that they must follow wherever it beckoned.  That is the Childhood Creed that we are eventually all guilty of breaking.  Payment made in full...

Standing with one hand on the garage door and the other holding a knotted plastic Walmart shopping back to keep its contents sealed, "Outside.  I set them--they go outside."

"Can I see?"  My son this time.  Looking down into his eyes, his face, life, how can I tell him that I am a dealer of death?  How can I explain my grizzly business?  Convince them the monster is really still a man?

Amazing Spider-Balls 2: The Quest For More Cash

a·maz·ing
adjective

• causing great surprise or wonder; astonishing.
• e.g., "an amazing number of people attended the community orgy"

informal

• startlingly impressive.
• e.g., "she takes the most amazing dumps"

synonyms: astonishing, astounding, surprising, stunning, staggering, shocking, startling, stupefying, breathtaking

Putting the word "amazing" in the title of, well, anything will inevitably invite a certain level of criticism based on the incredibly high bar of quality that you set for yourself.  Indeed, it is a descriptor that should be used sparingly lest it lose its impact.  And you had better make goddamn sure that any product bearing that moniker can--if not live up to--then at least aspire to such a lofty ideal, a paradigm of excellence.  
The seemingly premature rebooting of the Spider-Man franchise back in 2012 was met by many through a wearily skeptical lens, and it could effectively be argued that this was rightfully so.  By now, the licensing issues surrounding major comic book properties have come so much to the forefront of public consciousness that they have become practically taken for granted.  It's become part of our core understanding of the movie industry that Sony has to make a Spider-Man film every couple of years in order to maintain the movie rights.  Come hell or high water and sometimes in total disregard to standards of quality or basic human dignity.

The first movie in the culturally unnecessary yet legally required rebooted series was solid, but THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN retread a lot of the same ground from Sam Raimi's wall-crawling trilogy and didn't do too much in the way of innovation or trailblazing.  Were it not for the charisma of the leads, Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, much of the otherwise middle-of-the-road script might have fallen flat.  It was also super frustrating watching them tiptoe around and have Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) say, "With great power comes great responsibility," without actually literally saying, "With great power comes great responsibility."

The Avengers: The Next Generation

For the past several weeks, fanboys and girls, a variety of geeks, and corporate execs and their usual trains of cronies at both Warner Bros. and Disney have been involved in a strange sort of cultural orgy after several (sort of) major developments in the ever-expanding genre of comic book movies.

With an almost orgasmic glee, Disney and Marvel released their upcoming superhero movies up to the third and fourth Avengers films, spanning all the way until 2019.  No to be outdone, Warner Bros. and DC announced their slate of superhero films to be released until 2020, well after the predicted time period where we'd have self-tying laces on our shoes, miniature hair dryers in our jackets, floating boards of moulded plastic, and an entire new legal industry based on the unforeseen (but undoubtedly substantial) liability issues involved in the widespread proliferation of flying automobiles. Assuming we all survive the onslaught of Skynet and various murderous cyborgs (not to mention the latest TERMINATOR sequel, which will be an ordeal in and of itself), audiences will be "treated" to a literal slew of superhero films, an onslaught in its own right.

Good News Everyone! Feed The Voices in Your Head Now Available in Archaic Book Form

Of all the blogs that have ever existed, Feed the Voices in Your Head can certainly said to be one of them.  Born during the hazy, half-remembered, alcohol-steeped days of my time served in a medium security academic institution (where I learned the hard way to keep tight guard of my scholarly corn hole), Feed the Voices started out as a casual and non-confrontational way to self-publish vast quantities of random writings without having to worry about dealing with the traditional authoritative literary vanguard.  With a complete disregard for traditional writing styles or the medium of blogging, I headed out into the No-Man's Land of the Internet, blissfully unaware of where I might be headed or by what means I might get there. I knew only that I wanted to write, editing and quality control be damned.

In what can only be described as a stunning turn of events, my seven-odd years of blogging have not garnered me the greatness that has not been thrust on so many before me. I'm not sure what my expectations had been back in the tumultuous spring and summer months of 2008 when I began my misadventures in cyberland, which is clearly evident from my early body of work.  I’ve tried to structure my blog thematically around movies as well as, to a lesser degree, other forms of entertainment (TV, music, video games, etc.).  Eventually, a mandate seemed to form out of the online mists, and I began to write with the somewhat clearer purpose of situating whatever cultural artifacts came into the view of my distorted crosshairs within some kind of relevant social context while trying to maintain some sort of my trademark Sarcastic Wit^TM.

Whether I have achieved that goal to any significant degree is a matter of debate (or not); however, I feel like in the past several years I have made substantial progress in my goal of fucking a stranger in the ass becoming a “legitimate” writer, if only in my own mind.  In keeping with that overall goal, I recently undertook a (significant from my point of view) project to put together a compilation of my writings and publish them in book form.

That book is now officially available over at Amazon.

A Bullitt to the Brain and Other High Octane Tales

BULLITT is one of those classic films that never seemed to reach the heights attained by other classic films but remains an unquestionable staple for any serious collection.  It’s unique in that, by no stretch of the imagination, would it be considered a “great” film in the traditional sense but has reached iconic status based (mostly), from what I can tell, on two essential components of its mythology: the now-famous car chase scene and Steve McQueen's legacy for being fucking cool.  In the grand scheme of things, it's hard to refute the validity of these two points.

The film itself is fairly boring, though I'm not sure whether it felt that way due to the temporal disparity between the time the film was made and the generation of moviegoers to which I was birthed (leaving my mother with a hideous scar as a result of the limited surgical knowledge of the 1980s and the vast amount of cocaine it was later discovered to be in the doctor's system) or whether it was intentional on the part of the filmmakers, who were trying to deliver that slow burn that noirs are notorious for.  I know that the general aesthetic for movies has changed a great deal over the last half century, and movies from the '50s and '60s seem much less kinetic by today's standards, and, as a result, I have been unable to engage with several otherwise great films without the need for mind-altering substances of various varieties (Roughly ...two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls... etc.).        

The Merits of Metal Versus Bone and the Ethics of Time Travel According to Old, Bald, Wise Men

Watching X-MEN DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, it suddenly dawned on me how all of the X-Men would have been court-marshalled and/or Vulcan neck-pinched into a goddamned coma for the temporal mission that lay at the heart of the movie. This may seem like a particularly geeky thing to say (or if you are unfamiliar with either cultural reference, like complete honkey jibber-jabber), but it actually represents a useful dichotomy when considering the moral implications of the movie, moral ponderings--of course--being the primary consideration for shelling out one’s money to see a blockbuster comic book movie. Well, that and attractive young actresses wearing nothing but blue paint and some (in)conveniently placed prosthetics/skintight blue body suits.

While the thematic core of the series has always remained constant with respect to the competing tensions of discrimination and exploitation of segments of the population based on genetic/cultural differences and a hopeful vision of peaceful cohabitation and cooperation (and fucking women with blue skin whose dermal hues are not the result of becoming recently deceased due to (totally accidental according to the official coroner’s report) asphyxiation), DAYS OF FUTURE PAST also ventured into the philosophical quagmire of time travel as an added bonus. 

Prepare to Be Truly Haunted.. Are You a Double D Cup Half Full Kind of Person?

This Halloween...

Nothing can prepare you...

When everything you know is wrong.  When everything you believe is a lie.  When you don't know who you can trust.  Not even yourself.  Experience the supernatural terror when one man's world becomes a nightmare.  But this is one nightmare you don't wake up from.  From the creators of every single tired quote unquote horror movie from the past twenty years and and the people who keep regurgitating genre tropes so sickeningly familiar and overused that you feel like sticking a shotgun in your mouth just to escape the inanity, comes the most genuinely terrifying movie you will likely, possible, probably, maybe not experience this Halloween season:

Ghost Tits...

Second Star to the Right and Straight on 'Till Robin Williams

In many ways, Robin Williams was a man who defied definition.  There are few people in any arena who could lay legitimate claim to the title of Unique, but if there were any more deserving of the title than Williams, none come to mind at present.    Perhaps that was one of the reasons that on August 11, 2014, I found myself sitting in my cubicle at work having to hold back tears; with the death of Robin Williams it seemed that the world had lost something truly irreplaceable.

Though almost invariably associated with comedy, for me Robin Williams always stood for his more dramatic (or at least non-comedic) work, i.e., AWAKENINGS, GOOD WILL HUNTING, THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, THE FISHER KING, INSOMNIA, ONE HOUR PHOTO, WHAT DREAMS MAY COME, DEAD POETS SOCIETY, etc.  He was one of those few who was able to so completely transcend the boundaries we set.  Williams was one of only a handful of people, along with other greats like Bill Murray or Steve Martin, who could successfully cross--seemingly at will--the dreaded No Man's Land that separated genres.

This Town Deserves a Better Class of Celebrity... Apologetica Celebritatus

Apology accepted, Kanye.

There is a lot to be made of our relationship with the concept of celebrity. In a lot of ways, this
relationship has become a cultural barometer, and the current forecast is slightly hazy with a seventy percent chance of bullshit.

In a recent example of the current climate, one Jason Biggs (you know, the pie-fucker), was slammed by a bunch of… bored assholes (I guess?) for a comment he made on Twitter about the recent Malaysia airlines crashes and/or acts of aggression. The first reaction for many people was probably the obligatory jokes about Biggs’ current level of popularity in comparison to the AMERICAN PIE days, followed by jokes about various articles of food that he’s probably fucking these days, followed by making up culinary-inspired titles of porn movies in which Jason Biggs could conceivably star (PIGS IN A BLANKET, PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME, DONUT HOLES, DONUT HOLES 2: BOSTON CREAM, TEA BAGGIN') followed by resurfacing memories of Shannon Elizabeth topless, followed by a hurried, late-night Internet search for her playboy spread when you’re sure the wife and kids are soundly asleep, followed by a relaxing 3 a.m. shit, followed by a few episodes of Breaking Bad, followed by calling in sick for work, and finally followed by--for some people--righteous indignation.

AssassiNation: Tales of Consumerism, Souls Ablaze

I awoke to the sound of the World grinding her teeth.  It was a low rumble: sand and rocks rubbing unevenly together against a smooth surface: the crunch of dry, old bones under the feet of some monstrous predator.  I was at the roof of the Earth, in a house that was and wasn't mine; I lived in a State of Flux, and every second threatened to crumble around me.

I was hungry.  But not for food. 

The rumbling was getting closer.  Soon I was enveloped in it.  Wrapped in it, like a deep-fried pogo at the state fair in the sweltering heat of July.  There was no cooling off.  Not at times like these.  Even my piss was like a stream of scalding hot magma, hissing as it hit the stagnant waters of the mine-but-not-mine toilet.  The air shimmered around me.  I couldn't swallow.  Couldn't think.

I was hungry.  This time, for food.

Captain Crunch.  That was all I could think.  I hated that shit, and I doubted we had any in the house, but I checked anyway as the sanity was slowly being ground to a fine powder in the red-hot cauldron of my skull.  What the fuck is this?  Who bought Captain Crunch on my watch?  Who brought it into my house, right under my nose?  Who would stock my cupboards with this junk?  The same people who would stalk the ferris wheel.