#gonzo? freak shit you just KNOW its freak shit

[fuckgrips]

i'd fuck a muppet

[lookwhatilost]

you've probably heard of 15 minute cities – basically, they're exactly what they sound like. a city or town where you can get everything you need within a 15 minute walk or bike ride. it's an urban planning idea to reduce congestion and over-reliance on cars and increase walkability and livability. the term was coined in 2016, but it isn't a new concept. like, jane jacobs was talking about walkable cities in the 1950s and 60s. but for some reason, the idea of 15 minute cities strikes some people as... fascist?

the backstory behind this is that in 2021, the oxfordshire county council in the uk announced that they would being trialing what they called a few "low traffic neighborhoods" in east oxford in 2022 to encourage walking and biking. and they way that they were going to do this would that they would be shutting down some of the roads to through traffic to make them safer for cyclists and pedestrians for a trial period, and take feed back from residents and other stakeholders. and this is key to understanding this whole thing: the leader of oxfordshire county council emphasized that the LTNs were a stepping stone towrads behavioral change in tackling the climate emergency and moving towards zero carbon transport.

so, they do this trial last year and there were some critics. like, for instance, some people argued that closing some roads just increased traffic on other roads because people would all be driving around. others argued that it wouldn't be accessible to people who walked, biked, etc. but apparently this wasn't a total failure because oxfordshire announced that they would be implementing 6 more LTNs that would feature traffic filters, which would require private cars to get permits to drive through. so people living in this area would basically get 100 permits a year for free to drive through the area, and people who lived somewhere else in oxfordshire could be eligible to get permits for them to drive through for up to 25 days a year.

these LTNs and 15 minute cities aren't entirely analogous, but they are related, and this has gotten confused. i think part of this is because LTN isn't as catchy as 15 minute cities, and this confusion seems to have started last november when some website called vision news published an article called "Oxfordshire County Council Pass Climate Lockdown 'trial' to Begin in 2024"

so, like, if you go to the vision news about page, it says that they were "created by a group of journalists, scientists, and businessmen in response to the increasingly bias and ideologically based journalism published by the BBC. " which would be, like, whatever on its own. but if you actually go to the home page, these are the headlines: "Tony Blair Launches New Push For Biometric Digital ID for all Citizens", "Rationing to Fix Climate Change Recommended by British Scientists", and "mRNA was Never Intended to “Stay in the Arm” According to CDC Website". i think we see what's going on here. right wing gonzo conspiracy stuff that's based on a true story and designed to make people hysterical. like, i don't care if mrna stays in my arm or goes to cabo for spring break, but if you're inclined to be freaked out by this kind of stuff, you read this as big brother shit. but the scientist recommending rationing for for climate change is a professor at leeds. who cares? but the ideological bent of this website is to see this all as duplicitous and terrifying.

this is what they have to say about 15 minute cities:

Oxfordshire County Council yesterday approved plans to lock residents into one of six zones to 'save the planet' from global warming. The latest stage in the '15 minute city' agenda is to place electronic gates on key roads in and out of the city, confining residents to their own neighbourhoods.

like, there are some parts of the world where this happens. the west bank is one of them. i can point these people over there if they'd like to protest it. i didn't know israel was doing that for climate change

Under the new scheme if residents want to leave their zone they will need permission from the Council who gets to decide who is worthy of freedom and who isn't. Under the new scheme residents will be allowed to leave their zone a maximum of 100 days per year, but in order to even gain this every resident will have to register their car details with the council who will then track their movements via smart cameras round the city.

i hate how with, like, anything involving climate change or sustainability, there's always a funhouse mirror version of it where people completely misunderstand the actual proposal. again, there's a nugget of truth. they will be using cameras to track cars, and if you don't have a permit and drive around on one of these six roads, you'll get a ticket. but the uk has been a bit of a police state with its closed circuit cameras. it's been that way since the 2000s. but it's also completely false that you'll won't be able to leave your zone or your neighborhood or that you'll need permission to travel! it's also confusing LTNs with 15 minute cities. the oxford council does have a long term development plan that incorporates 15 minute cities within it, and this article just kind of conflates the two.

but regardless, this article spreads, and more conspiracies get tacked onto it, and this results in a huge wave of harassment towards the members of the oxfordshire county council, and people start setting fire to the posts that block the road traffic in these trial zones, and this results in tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage, and the fear that these people seem to have is that this is more evidence of the great replacement, which is one document by one of those global NGOs that people have just freaked the fuck out about.

there's always been this strain in conservative thinking that's like "one world government oppressing us, environmentalists are going to do it" and it's all different versions of the same shit. but it was also a very bad idea for the world economic forum to call that "the great reset" but it's not a secret. it's on their website. now we have this whole conspiracy that a shady one world government is using covid and specifically lockdowns to oppress people. it's the same thing that you see online sometimes where people will act like global elites are going to take your hamburgers and force you to eat bugs. it's all under the common theme that elites want to remake the world around the rest of us, steamrolling our preferences, and forcing us to live in unnatural ways (although tbh eating bugs doesn't sound all that unnatural).

so to the people freaking out about the 15 minute cities, it's more proof to them that the government is coming for their preferences. and in this case, their preference is to be stuck in traffic for hours, i guess. and online, this manifested as people sincerely arguing that there's no benefit to having amenities nearby. like i saw someone on twitter very sincerely arguing that his kid's 45 minute commute to school is somehow A Good Thing. then jordan peterson is tweeting about it like "The idea that neighborhoods should be walkable is lovely. The idea that idiot tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fiat where you're "allowed" to drive is perhaps the worst imaginable perversion of that idea--and, make no mistake, it's part of a well-documented plan."

like! use some common sense! does jordan peterson think the white and yellow lines on the roads are just suggestions? idiot tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fiat where you're allowed to drive, and that's how it's always been. "it's part of a well-documented plan". yep. that's why it's called urban planning. it's not a conspiracy. it's an effort to make cities better for pedestrians.

and the other thing with this too is in new york, there's been talk about introducing a congestion tax. like, if you drive in lower manhattan, should you have to pay a congestion tax? there are some very strong classical economic arguments for why you should – it's to handle the externalities of traffic and pollution. but there might be reasons not to have congestion taxes, but if the people arguing against congestion taxes are crazy loons talking about one world government, we can never actually have that conversation and that's the problem with this.

there were protests about this whole thing pretty recently in oxfordshire, complete with a right wing greta thunberg. and from the outside, this all seems very stupid, right? like they're protesting cute puppies or free pizza. traffic sucks! who wouldn't want to be able to walk to work or a grocery store instead of getting in a car? but cars are convenient too, and it's all complicated. in the US, it's not uncommon to have to get in the car to go to a coffee shop, and that coffee shop will be a starbucks. it's stupid to think that having to take a different road to target is the first step on the way to the gulag.

but then you get into this weird zone where you dismiss all the criticism as conspiracy theorizing. a lot of people really aren't all that happy about the possibility of being fined for driving in the wrong place at the wrong time because they went through their allotted driving days in a year. if you implemented something like this in the US, it'd be much worse, because america has much more of a car culture. even if there are good policy justifications for this, and even if i personally think that more walkable cities will ultimately improve people's lives, it's a stick approach rather than a carrot approach. people generally respond better to incentives than they do to punishments. and because these are conservatives, they're already distrusting of the government anyway, any change is met with suspicion, because this is more proof that elites hate them and want them to suffer.

and beyond all the social backlash, there's always the very real possibility of unintended consequences. for instance, if the goal is to reduce carbon emissions, but you make people take longer routes to get to where they're going, they might walk, they might bike, or they might just get in their car anyway and burn more fossil fuels. some business owners in the trial zones were complaining that while the goal was to increase foot traffic in these areas, what it ended up doing is decreasing all traffic because people couldn't drive there. it was bad for business. it's still entirely possible that this is going to fail, but it's not communism, it's not fascism, it's not marxism, it's not the global reset. it's urban planning. and clearly cities need buy-in from residents before imposing mandates like this, but that's what trials are for. and this becoming this kind of culture war issue or international conspiracy theory is going to make it a lot harder for leaders to figure out what actually works and what doesn't. like, how do you continue this plan when people are issuing death threats to the county council?

[derl30]

ALTERED STATES REVIEW TIME!

OK, this tumblr is, today, a vehicle for me to review ALTERED STATES. And you (the one person who stumbled on this review two-hundred years from n- oh who am I kidding, when the aliens from A.I. who show up to thaw out Haley Joel Osment and the teddy bear who was the real hero of that movie find this) should be very excited about this. Because this movie is insane. And highly entertaining.

Yes, the movie poster looks like ass. If I told you this was a movie where William Hurt (not the William Hurt from that awful 90's Lost in Space remake, or the one who slept through an entire performance as Duke Leto in the Syfy miniseries of Dune. This is before the body snatchers got him) took ayahuasca and got in a isolation tank and it blew his mind so hard he started devolving into a neanderthal and creating dimensional portals and he couldn't stop because he was addicted to finding the truth of existence... Well you wouldn't get that from this poster, would you? So let's move on. Shall we?

The film opens in 1967 with William Hurt's character, psychopathologist Edward Jessup, already immersed in a sensory deprivation tank, whilst his colleague and “buddy” Bob Balaban (he's just Bob Balaban in everything I'm not giving you his character's name look it up yourself if it's bugging you so much) oversees.

Now, you may notice I put buddy in quotes. The reason for that is that Jessup is a self-obsessed ass who seemingly has no reason to be around other people unless he can expound to them one of his various monologues. Bob Balaban barely gets a word in edgewise throughout the entire film. Bob Balaban.

See, Jessup loves the sensory deprivation tank experience. Unsurprisingly, as it allows him to be completely alone with himself for hours.

Later, at perhaps the lamest party ever, a bunch of faculty are chilling out and listening to the Doors. Everyone we see is talking about Jessup. Why? Well, much as Jessup is obsessed with himself, everyone else seems to follow suit by being obsessed with him. One young woman, Emily, (Blair Brown) is introduced to him in this very shot below as he arrives at the party:

Notice how is framed in holy light? There is a closeup after, of him framed in blinding glowing light followed up with a zoom in on Emily's face, enraptured with this incredible dynamic man. So much so that the moment he tries to make a goddamn sandwich she starts grabbing his celery (get your mind out of the gutter) and flirting with him. Which for these two that means talking science, immediately. Talking more at each other than with each other. This is often the way with Paddy Chayefsky's scripts.

PAUSE

Paddy Chayefsky is doubtless one of the great American writers for the screen. He wrote Marty, The Hospital and Network (which is a fucking incredible piece of work). He got an Oscar for all three. He also wrote this movie (Altered States, remember? Good lord) and disowned it completely three weeks in to production. His scripts tend to have very intelligent, driven characters at the center, who monologue extensively at each other. These scripts are not attempting to sound naturalistic.

Ken Russell, however, directed the film. He, like Chayefsky, is top notch at what he does (Direct. I said he directed the film like a second ago, come on keep up). His films, like Women in Love, The Devils, (which was banned in several major countries upon release and has never been shown publicly in its full, uncut form (by the way it's a masterpiece)) the Who's Tommy, Gothic, and Lair of the White Worm are all fucking gonzo nuts. I mean like, when you gave this guy the reins, you were going to Overthetopsville and there will be no stops on this trip. And god bless! I love directors who GO for it!

You're getting the chance to make a movie. Stop hemming and hawing and hit me over the head with what you want to say! Film is a visual medium, USE IT!

I feel I might have made my feelings clear here. So, moving on...

Ken Russell and Paddy Chayefsky immediately started butting heads, right from the start. Chayefsky was a BIG deal, and he wanted control over the picture in a BIG way. Ken would listen to his suggestions on everything to lighting and set dressing, and politely tell him, “No.”, and continue being the director of the film. Chayefsky hated him pretty quickly.

He had much more control over films like The Hospital. Which, if you watch The Hospital, well, it shows. You've got great actors (George C. Scott, Dame Diana Rigg (Dame may be the greatest official title of all time)) saying great dialogue. But its just two very witty bitter people sort of expounding on topics and speaking at each other and suddenly admitting they are in love and discussing what drapes they will have to buy for their new home. It's utterly preposterous, and it doesn't work in the way Sidney Lumet got it to work in Network, by literally making one of the lead characters realize his life is turning into a ludicrous soap opera.

So of course Ken tried to humanize, naturalize, the dialogue sequences. And it works! The film feels more human than the Hospital or Network. Despite the fact that Jessup is literally becoming more and more inhuman throughout the film. One of the ways he does this is by having the character's eat, drink, and work on other things during the dialogue sequences. This is perfectly normal in film, it's called giving the actor “business” to do, during the scene. Chayefsky HATED this. “They are mumbling my precious dialogue! Chewing through it! Sucking it through a straw!” Sorry, Chayefsky buddy. It works for the picture. Chayefsky also felt the actors were too emotional with his dialogue. Right. See, they call that acting.

UNPAUSE

Which brings us back to the first meeting of Emily and Jessup at the party. They are eating during this important scene! I can just picture Chayefsky seeing this, and running to the studio brass to tattle and get Ken Russell fired (as he got Arthur Penn of Bonnie and Clyde fame fired before Ken Russell came on board).

Emily and Jessup are, true to Chayefsky form, extremely intelligent, driven people and hearing them discuss topics such as anthropology and schizophrenia is quite interesting. It's just that what is to come, film being a visual medium, will eclipse just about any dialogue, no matter how good, from our mind thingys.

The two give up on the science talk and go straight to banging on her couch. After, she asks what he was thinking about. His answer is priceless. “God. Jesus. Crucifixions.”

She smiles.

Bwahahaha! Oh Paddy Chayefsky, you sure know women.

He admits he used to have religious visions. She listens to him from the sweaty couch whilst he sits naked on the floor, and starts going on about his father's horrible death of cancer and his loss of faith. And he admits to her that he's a nut. Her response is to call him a fascinating bastard. I think Lucas may have taken notes for Padme and Anakin.

So naturally, they get married immediately.

But none of that matters because Jessup gets back in the sensory deprivation tank and has his first vision. A nightmare of his dying father and lost faith in christianity. It's pretty great, filled with foreboding hospital rooms, his father's face being covered in a burning Shroud of Turin, everything covered by horrible blood red clouds and then THIS FUCKING THING SHOWS UP AND ITS ALIVE AND WRIGGLING

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

excuse me...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

The many-eyed goat is slaughtered over a gold bible and suddenly Jessups screwing Emily again and we enter a blood vessel looking thing and the vision ends and he never mentions this again. Oh. Okay,

Emily continues on about what a nut Jessup is as they make marriage plans. Her monologue:

“You're an unmitigated madman. You don't have to tell me how weird you are. I know how weird you are. I'm the girl in your bed the past two months. Even sex is a mystical experience for you. You carry on like a flagellant... Which can be very nice, but I sometimes wonder if it's me that's being made love to. I feel like I'm being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God. (Emphasis mine)

"And you are a Faust-freak Eddie! You'd sell your soul to find the great truth. Well, human life doesn't have great truths. We're born in doubt. We spend our lives persuading ourselves we're alive. And one way we do that is we love each other, like I love you. I can't imagine living without you. So let's get married, and if it turns out to be a disaster, it'll be a disaster.”

It's a disaster.

As in, by the next scene. It starts off happy enough looking, they have kids and people are smiling. And hey, wow it's seven years later! But, well, see, whoops, they are getting a divorce. Well, not they. See, he is divorcing her because he considers the seven years with her a complete waste.

She still loves him, desperately. He doesn't give a shit about her or the kids. He tells Bob Balaban this, straight up. And then starts bugging him about deprivation tanks and Hinchi Indians in South America who have sacred mushrooms that can really fuck you up.

It's at this point you would like for Jessup to be hit by a Mack truck. But the movie continues on. By the way, this is one of the kids he doesn't give a crap about:

That's right. Drew Barrymore's first role is a kid that William Hurt doesn't give a shit about. Something that William Hurt would make a career out of with narcoleptic performances in Lost in Space and Syfy's Dune. So, Emily takes the kids to Africa for her anthropology work while Jessup goes to South America to go deeper into his own creepy mind.

The Hinchi Indians agree to allow him to participate in the drug ritual. They enter their holy cave.

This shot is beautiful. At this point the film becomes increasingly gorgeous. Ken Russell has started to go into overdrive, ladies and gentlemen. Buckle. Your. Seatbelts.

The Indians grab Jessup's hand and cut him, freaking him out. They pour his blood into the drug mixture. They begin to drink. Then he takes a sip. The intensity of the film here has quadrupled. The vision begins, fireworks going off all around him. He sees cave paintings of humans and komodo dragons and this:

The proper life he left behind with Emily. He's convulsing, sweating. The Indians are all around, masked. Snakes. He's laughing in pain. Energy spills from the void. A snake under the parasol strikes and begins to strangle him. He and Emily march toward a nuclear explosion as energy pours from the cut on his hand, becoming a lizard. From within a sandstorm, Emily watches him, naked. Jessup looks at her, entranced, as the soothing sands cover them both, slowly.

It's a beautiful sequence. A perfect film sequence. I can't overstate how strong the vision sequences are from this point forward. Great visual effects work and the madman mind of Ken Russell create something unforgettable, with it's own pace, independent from the rest of the film.

Jessup awakens with a komodo dragon laying before him, ripped to pieces. The Indians and the others all claim he killed it in rage. Jessup remembers nothing, takes samples of the drug to reproduce it, and goes back home.

Back home, Jessup keeps doing as much of the drug as he can and having Bob Balaban record results. They can't up the dosage any more so Jessup hops back in to the self deprivation tank to create a more extreme experience.

In his next session, Jessup states he is having a vision of early man, hunting a deer and killing it. Suddenly he states he is one of them, killing the deer. He begins to grunt like an animal. The two pull him out. He's incredibly pale, blood seeping out of his mouth. He can't speak, and has difficulty breathing. He insists they do an X-ray. It shows that there is a vocalizing lump in the front part of his throat. Jessup claims that his body had begun to revert to a simian state. The medical doctor agrees, stating the throat X-rays looks like that of a gorilla.

Luckily his throat returns to normal. So Jessup finishes up his day by having over a student of his and sleeping with her.

Our hero, people!

At this point we hardly feel sorry for him as his body suddenly begins to twist and bulge in the middle of the night, shifting in and out of neanderthal shapes. It's a horrific sequence, disturbing as hell. You certainly didn't expect the film to shift into body horror.

Jessup feels normal after a while. but sees visions of lava explosions, the birthing of the Earth all around him. Not a good sign.

He goes to pick up Emily from the airport the next day. She asks how he is doing.

“Oh, fine.”

Yeah right.

Emily has been told what Jessup has been doing and is worried, which of course pisses off Jessup even more. The guy is obviously obsessed with reaching the truth and root of existence, much as Emily surmised earlier, and we see he has no fear of even losing his own soul, again true to her word. The only thing that allows us to give a shit about him at this point is that Emily cares for him and she's decent people, okay?

So back Jessup goes into the tank with his ayahuasca or whatever it is. Alone. The tank door opens from the inside.

The hand that pushes it open is covered in thick hair. He's devolved.

Ape-Jessup escapes the tank room and chases a janitor around the building. Again, this scene is fucking freaky as hell. We can't get a good look at this screaming animal that was Jessup.

The janitor gets a guard to help and chases after him into the boiler room, where we finally get a good look at him when he assaults the security guard and escapes.

AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Ape-Jessup runs through the city at night, making his way to the zoo where he kills a antelope and eats it. The Ape-Jessup sequence goes on way too long, but is nonetheless unforgettable. The makeup is much more convincing than the above picture suggests, and whoever performed Ape-Jessup did an admirable job.

The cops find an unconscious Jessup in the zoo and bring him in. Emily picks him up and questions him. Jessup admits everything that he can remember. He also admits that he probably killed that security guard. And once again doesn't seem to give a shit. Prick. He calls it the most supremely satisfying time of his life.

Even Emily seems disgusted with him. But, she's also fascinated with what he's accomplished. As an anthropologist, his transformation fascinates her. And so, she agrees to help oversee his next session. Big mistake.

Before the big session Emily and Jessup romantically reconnect, and then into the climactic session we go!

Get your popcorn ready!

After a few hours in to the session, the video monitor shows Jessup begin to literally melt apart like goo, reverting to primordial ooze, the very beginning of existence. An attempt to open the isolation tank doors blasts everyone unconscious, as light and energy pour forth. Emily is the only one left. She sees Jessup's life energy pulse from within the tank.

Rain pours down around them. The pipes on the walls twist and turn like jelly. The ground is covered with a pool of swirling fog and energy. Emily advances toward the vortex of the tank.

In the emptiness of the beginning of everything, Emily seizes the energy before her and reconstitutes Jessup.

They take him home. While he sleeps, Emily rages over the fact that she loves such a insane bastard, and can't get over him. And, then, after Bob Balaban leaves, leaving Emily alone, Jessup wakes up.

He sweetly admits that the truth he learned was that there was no learnable truth, just unknowable horror, and all that's real is human experience. And he'll be a good boy from now on. Well too bad!

Because that horrible truth isn't done with him, and it's back to goo-Jessup! Emily tries to help him, grabbing him, but this in turn effects her, turning her into a shimmering lava form of herself. Both of them begin to self-destruct as Jessup, enraged, watching her in pain, struggles to retake his humanity, slamming himself into the wall, reforming himself through sheer will and physicality. He grabs her and brings her back, mirroring what she did for him during the final session. They embrace naked in the hallway. He finally admits, “I love you, Emily.”

Fade to credits.

Awww true love!

What can I say to sum up? Awesome 80's practical effects. Genius wacko go-for-it Ken Russell directing. Out of this world vision sequences. A awake and actually remarkable performance from William Hurt. An occasionally turgid but often fascinating script by the ever ornery Paddy Chayefsky. Whats not to like?

Well, the ending is a little rushed. The ape sequence goes on for a little too long and takes up perhaps too much of the films overall running time. The central love story is, well... a little hard to swallow, but hey, I guess there really is somebody out there for everyone. Even self-absorbed, deadbeat, cheating, sensory deprivation loving, ayahuasca dropping, Harvard teachers with a messiah complex!

And on that note, aliens from A.I. Artifical Intelligence, have a good day, and don't leave poor Teddy alone with no one to keep him company!

Sayonara!

[jtsodergren]

The Best of 2019

2019, what an exceptional year for movies! A great way to close out the shittiest decade! Here are the 50 best films I saw this year... click on the title to go to the IMDB page, and I’ll try to post a link to where you can see many of them. Also for the first time this year, I’m including MOM WARNINGS! My mom reads this list and sometimes actually watches these movies... so to save her some grief, sadness, or general concern for my psyche, there will be a NOT FOR MOMS!! warning where applicable... here we go!

50. STAR WARS - EPISODE IX: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER (Amazon)

People really hated this movie... I actually really liked it! Aside from the horses running around on the outside of spaceships (which makes no fucking sense... didn’t Leia get all space frozen exactly one movie ago??), it was a satisfying conclusion to a franchise I guess I don’t really care about as much as other people, so I was into it!

49. JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 - PARABELLUM (Amazon)

Quickly becoming one of the more well produced action franchises of all time. Probably two too many machine gun shootouts in this one for me (I get a little exhausted with gun violence), but the hand-to-hand stuff is brilliant and bloody and badass! Not to mention the deepening of the mythology and Halle Berry and her dogs. It’s a fun time, a welcome addition to the series, and I can’t wait for number 4.

48. QUEEN & SLIM (Amazon)

Billed as the black BONNIE AND CLYDE and from first time feature director Melina Matsoukas, this atmospheric tragedy is gorgeous to look at, delivers a pair of standout lead performances, and proves to have one of the more stressful final 30min of any of the films I saw this year, even if you know the inevitable conclusion is just around the corner.

47. UNDER THE SILVER LAKE (Amazon PRIME)

A wild Los Angeles noir story from the director of IT FOLLOWS. Plays like if David Lynch directed THE BIG LEBOWSKI, a weird, screwball whodunit. It’s a little long, and there are so many loose ends that seem to be thrown in just to fuck with the protagonist (and the audience), but it’s a really fun time and you’ll want to stay to the end to see it all play out. LA looks gorgeous too.

46. KNOCK DOWN THE HOUSE (Netflix)

Truly inspiring. Really shows how if you put your mind to something, believe in yourself and that you can make a difference, you can accomplish anything. Regardless of your political leanings, or how you feel about AOC personally, this is well worth your time and it has a great message for young people, especially those young women of color who might not think they can achieve great levels of success. It made me cry the happy tears.

45. LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (Amazon)

Best known for it’s remarkable 59min-3D final take, this hallucinatory journey through memory and dreams is mind-blowing and breathtaking. Hard not to leave this one feeling like you’ve been put though some kind of experiment that you don’t fully understand, but you’ll want to experience again. Highly recommended if you have access to 3D, or simply have some killer edibles and want to be thrown for a loop.

44. CLIMAX (Amazon PRIME)

NOT FOR MOMS!!

Speaking of being under the influence, holy shit is this film nuts! From Gaspar Noe, who if you’re aware of his work, you kind of already know what you’re in store for here. It’s been described as “FAME directed by the Marquis de Sade”... incredible dance sequences and audacious camerawork that slowly but surely devolves into hell. It’s a blast!

43. HAIL SATAN? (Hulu)

A fresh and funny documentary about a group of smartass Satanists exposing the hypocrisy amongst bible-thumping Christians who’d rather stomp their feet and be the loudest in the room than listen to anyone else’s perspective. Frustrating and entertaining in equal parts, this compulsively watchable film makes you want to scream at these Jesus freaks as much as you want to laugh along with the antics of these harmless, intelligent and organized troublemakers. An excellent time well spent.

42. FIRST LOVE (Amazon)

(Probably) NOT FOR MOMS!!

Director Takashi Miike’s yakuza action-comedy is the most accessible of his films I’ve seen (he’s now made more than 100 movies, which is insane), but that doesn’t mean it’s not a gonzo wild time at the movies. The violence is here in full force, but unlike AUDITION or ICHI THE KILLER, you don’t need a barf bag close by to enjoy it. It’s often hilarious and moves at a breakneck speed. Super fun!

41. THE DEAD DON’T DIE (Amazon PRIME)

Jim Jarmusch’s star-studded, droll zombie-comedy came and went from theaters without much fanfare, but provided me with plenty of laughs. It’s also the second of 3 Adam Driver vehicles to be on this year’s list. Bill Murray and Driver lead the way along with plenty familiar faces in cameos throughout (including the RZA in one of my favorite scene’s of the year). Classic Jarmusch... a meditation on death and mortality in his vintage style.

40. EL CAMINO: A BREAKING BAD MOVIE (Netflix)

Dude, Aaron Paul is a legit GREAT actor. Picks up right where the show left off, and I was on the edge of my seat and filled with anxiety just like I was during the best moments of the now classic series. It was good to hang out with my old friends again.

39. DOCTOR SLEEP (Amazon)

A box office flop due to poor promotion and a title people weren’t familiar with, this sequel to THE SHINING is based on the Stephen King book of the same name, which I read, and I can’t recommend it more. Great suspense, and fantastic performances from both Ewan McGregor and (especially) Rebecca Ferguson. It’s a dark and scary film that is a fun trip back to the Overlook Hotel... provided you wish to return there...

38. THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO (Amazon PRIME)

About 90min into this beautifully shot film I was ready to lock it in as a possible Top 5 contender. Then the bottom fell out for me the last quarter of the movie and lost my confidence. No bother, it’s still wonderful enough to find a spot on the list and carry my recommendation. Young men and women watching their city change before their eyes, and wondering what the concept of “home” really means is a real challenge facing many people here in the Bay Area. This film does a fantastic job conveying that, for most of the film anyway. 

37. THE PEANUT BUTTER FALCON (Amazon)

A bonafide crown-pleaser of a movie, and another example of the true talent Shia LeBeouf has and is capable of (more on him later). A young man with Down Syndrome escapes his assisted-living facility to track down his wrestling idol the Saltwater Redneck with the help of an outlaw and a social worker. Sweet, funny, and heartfelt... a feel good surprise.

36. A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD (Amazon)

I didn’t cry nearly as much as I did during the excellent documentary WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR from last year, but if you’re a Mr. Rogers fan, you’ll still shed a few during this heartwarming film. Tom Hanks does his thing, and even though this movie is guilty of borrowing a little too much from the previous doc, it’s still a great showcase for the truly selfless and beautiful force of nature that Fred Rogers was. Bring tissues anyway.

35. CARMINE STREET GUITARS (In Theaters Now)

A love letter to both New York City and the art, joy, and love that goes into honing and maintaining one’s craft. Meanwhile the looming doom of gentrification hovers over the proceedings, never letting you get fully enrapt in the sweetness that these artists (and their many famous customers) exude when talking about and playing their one-of-a-kind works of art. A stunning and lovely piece for musicians and talentless fans of music alike.

34. HOLIDAY (Amazon)

NOT FOR MOMS!!

A tough, cold film with nary a character to actively root for... until after about an hour of icy behavior comes (no pun intended) a scene so shocking in its graphic and disturbing nature, people left the theater without staying for the final resolution. First time director Isabella Eklof pulls off the bold and audacious maneuver, all while making it seem like she doesn’t care whether you like her characters (or her film) at all. It’s a very fine balancing act, executed to perfection. But be warned... it’s rough.

33. AVENGERS: ENDGAME (Disney+)

What can I say? You saw it. It’s good. A bunch of Supermans fly around and blow shit up. A satisfying end (until the next 20 films).

32. MIDSOMMAR (Amazon Prime)

NOT FOR MOMS!!

A disturbing slow burn of a gothic horror film. Characters do hallucinogens while ritualistic religious murders and tribal mating practices threaten to ruin everyones existence. Florence Pugh is phenomenal (more from her in a minute) in a very trying roll. Doesn’t pack quite the punch of the director’s last film, HEREDITARY, but it’s still well worth the watch. But yeah, it’s disturbing.

31. APOLLO 11 (Hulu)

A fascinating look at the first moon landing from rarely seen archival footage and audio. Seeing it on the IMAX screen was intense and exhilarating, unlike narrative pictures like the severely overrated FIRST MAN. This isn’t my favorite documentary of the year, but it is an absolute lock to win the Academy Award for Best Doc of 2019. It’s a must see, a must experience.

30. HIGH LIFE (Amazon PRIME)

NOT FOR MOMS!!

French auteur Claire Denis’ bizarre, erotic sci-fi mindfuck about isolation and humanity is not for everyone, but is a brilliant take on the genre, and is yet another showcase for Robert Pattinson, who is quietly becoming one of my favorite working actors. Juliette Binoche also is on fire here and has what one critic calls “the single greatest one-person sex scene in the history of cinema.” So it has that going for it.

29. TRIPLE FRONTIER (Netflix)

A fully loaded heist film with no real bad guy, but instead a group of recognizable badasses in a Netflix-released action thrill ride. There’s absolutely no reason this should’ve worked, or even been half as good as it is, but boy is it good! Compulsively watchable, and rewatchable. If this were on Showtime as much as DEN OF THIEVES is I’d have seen it 30 times by now. It’s one of the most pleasant surprises of the year.

28. 1917 (Amazon)

An unbelievable visual achievement from cinematographer Roger Deakins and director Sam Mendes. The story isn’t the greatest war story ever told (are there great war stories?), but it’s shot to look like one continuous long take, sustained for 2hrs. It’s really an unbelievable feat, but doesn’t come off as gimmicky or distracting. It’s intense, beautifully staged, and sad. A big screen spectacle. 

27. TOY STORY 4 (Amazon)

Woody and the gang are back, and the films continue to keep the dust from collecting. It’s still so much fun to hang out with this group of misfit toys. There was talk that after the incredible TOY STORY 3 this was just a money grab and was labeled unnecessary, but I found it to be a sweet, charming, and nostalgic trip I was glad I took.

26. HONEYLAND (Hulu)

My pick for documentary of the year comes from the mountains of Macedonia, where a woman named Hatidze lives with her dying mother making a living cultivating honey. When a family of shitheads moves into a shanty next door, what seems like a fix for her lonely existence becomes catastrophic as they disregard her teachings and threaten her livelihood. I was an emotional wreck throughout the experience and it goes without saying it’s a must-see. Gorgeous and heartbreaking.

25. LITTLE WOMEN (Amazon)

I have never read the book, nor seen any of the film adaptations, so I went in blind to this lovely film. Director Greta Gerwig follows up the phenomenal LADYBIRD with this Altman-esque rendition of the widely beloved literary classic. I found it exceptional in its execution and performances, including the previously mentioned Florence Pugh, who is a knockout. A wonderful addition to the ever-growing stable of Christmas films I look to enjoy during future Decembers.

24. GREENER GRASS (Hulu)

It’s as if Tim & Eric made BLUE VELVET. Bizarre, outrageous, gross, and a guaranteed future midnight movie favorite. My sides hurt. A satire skewering upper-middle class suburban soccer moms and dads alike. Babies are given away. A boy turns into a dog. Everyone has braces. There’s a creep on the loose. It’s wild and flat-out hilarious literally from start to finish. Almost too many jokes to keep up with. Watch it! Bring weed. 

23. RELAXER (Amazon)

NOT FOR MOMS!!

Speaking of gross, this film is disgusting, but in a good way. A satire about lazy consumerism and self-destruction. It’s a short hang, thankfully, but if you can stomach it to the end (remember, it’s nasty) you’ll be rewarded with not only a hilarious dark comedy, but also an unexpected haymaker of sadness you didn’t see coming. It’s a pretty impressive feat, and an overall success. But, yeah, it’s fucking gross. 

22. AD ASTRA (Amazon)

APOCALYPSE NOW in space starring Brad Pitt. If you need more information than that, I don’t really know what else to do for you. 

21. SLUT IN A GOOD WAY (Amazon PRIME)

(Probably) NOT FOR MOMS!!

A black-and-white raunchy French arthouse teen comedy that gives a middle finger to the double standard set by the equally raunchy teen-boys-will-be-boys genre. It’s so much fun, and honest, and the actors are such natural talents you forget the subject matter is at times shocking (only because of said double standard) and just go with it. I think it’s just wonderful. Seek it out!

20. US (HBO)

Jordan Peele’s excellent follow-up to GET OUT. Doppelganger home invasion terror with a killer twist. To describe more would be to risk giving something away. I’ll just say that Lupita Nyong’o is my pick to win her second Oscar, this time as Best Actress, here in a dual role. She’s incredible. If you haven’t seen it, try to go in blind, you’ll be rewarded.

19. THE FAREWELL (Amazon PRIME)

A heartfelt homecoming film about family, culture, and how the things we don’t say can be just as strong of a show of love as the things we do say. It’s sweet, tender, and bursting with personal flare and emotions from director Lulu Wang. Awkwafina also curbs her more manic and loud tendencies as a performer for more quiet, thoughtful, and somber choices. She’s phenomenal. 

18. KNIVES OUT (Amazon)

A clever ensemble whodunit that’s just as funny and smart as it is mysterious. Everyone across the board delivers as the assorted motley crew. The film rewards repeat viewings and Daniel Craig knocks it out of the park, stealing every scene he’s in, reminding us all what a fantastic actor he can be when he’s not sipping the Vespers. 

17. BOOKSMART (Hulu)

The female SUPERBAD is the elevator pitch, but this coming-of-age gem is really unlike any other example in the genre. They’re privileged, uber-smart, and have never partied. Yet they have the same neuroses as any other teen scared to death of what to do next or how to be normal. It’s also fucking hilarious. You wanna hang out with these girls and at the same time bury your head under the covers because you feel their pure terror/embarrassment. It’s a blast.

16. THE MUSTANG (Amazon)

Starring Matthias Schoenaerts, one of the finest actor’s working today, this understated and emotional drama about rehabilitation and redemption floored me upon first viewing. It is a gorgeous film. You’ve probably seen stories similar to this before, but rarely is one told with such compelling conviction. A borderline masterpiece. 

15. HONEY BOY (Amazon PRIME)

Remember a few years back we had the McConaissance, where everything Matthew McConaughey did was solid gold after years of middling bullshit? I’m calling it right now: Shia LaBeouf is about to have the same thing. He wrote the script and plays a version of his own father in a brutal version of his own fucked up childhood as an up-and-coming child actor. It’s heartbreaking and absolutely riveting. I’m hoping he gets an Oscar nod, but regardless I implore you to seek this film out, he’s incredible. 

14. MONOS (Hulu)

(Probably) NOT FOR MOMS!!

A bizarre, bewildering, chaotic, and unsettling film. Some of the most beautiful photography I saw on the big screen this year, yet some of the most surreal and disturbing imagery as well. It’s a militarized, Latin American LORD OF THE FLIES with commentary on tribal behavior and violence. It can be a tough sit, but boy is it beautiful. 

13. DOLEMITE IS MY NAME (Netflix)

What a wonderful, welcome surprise! Eddie Murphy in an awards caliber performance as Rudy Ray Moore, the multi-hyphenate performer who created the alter ego Dolemite, spawning a film franchise and many legendary comedy albums. It’s obviously hilarious, and a great behind-the-scenes biopic, but also shockingly sweet and heartfelt, even between all the cuss words. I even teared up a couple times. The 3rd best thing Netflix released this year (more on that in a minute).

12. JOKER (Amazon)

You already saw this.

11. THE IRISHMAN (Netflix)

It’s far too long. It could’ve done with being cut as a three part miniseries or special. There’s about 45min worth of scenes that are quintessential DVD bonus features (I’m looking at you Action Bronson), but goddamn if it’s not Scorsese doing his Scorsese thing. It’s a gangster film, but it’s also a meditation on aging and death. Pesci is incredible and Pacino steals the show. Sure, the de-aging thing is distracting, the curb stomping scene is embarrassing. But still, I mean... IT’S MARTIN SCORSESE!

10. PAIN AND GLORY (Amazon)

Pedro Almodovar’s most personal work to date, a tale about making art and the loneliness of love. If you are unfamiliar with his work, this is a great jumping off point. His movies can be challenging and dark, but this film has such joy and hope amongst the heartache. The final reveal, while not earth shattering on paper, is nonetheless so moving it left the screening I attended without a dry eye in the place. It is his best film yet. 

9. THE LIGHTHOUSE (Amazon)

From the director of THE WITCH comes another type of gothic horror, this time with the legendary Willem Dafoe and the (already mentioned) brilliant Robert Pattinson marooned on a lighthouse rock alone to drive each other completely insane. It’s hallucinatory, violent, disorienting, and flat-out brilliant. If it weren’t for another guy we’ll get to in a minute, Dafoe would be a lock for Best Supporting Actor here. It’s a slightly challenging film, with the period style mariner dialogue, but it’s just as funny as it is terrifying.

8. JOJO RABBIT (Amazon)

A beautiful, touching, funny, crowd-pleasing comedy about a little Nazi whose imaginary friend is Hitler. Yep, your read that correctly. There are about a million reasons this should absolutely not work. Yet, it’s one of the best theater going experiences I had this year. A must see... ESPECIALLY with Mom!

7. MARRIAGE STORY (Netflix)

The best written and acted film of the year, and the third Adam Driver vehicle to appear here. Sad but honest. Touching but brutal. It’s awkward and a bit of a bummer, but there’s such great work being done here, in front of and behind the camera. Noah Baumbach is a force of nature, and has yet to make a film I was even iffy about. He’s the real deal and this might be his masterpiece. 

6. WAVES (Amazon)

Speaking of auteurs, Trey Edward Shults is now 3/3 on features after the brilliant KRISHA and IT COMES AT NIGHT. Here he follows a middle-class black family, led by a domineering father, through a tragic moment in all of their lives. The first half deals with the son’s story, then abruptly switches to the daughter’s life post said event. It shouldn’t work, yet somehow manages to be one of the most emotionally affecting pieces of art I saw this year. The camera never stops moving, constantly swirling and whirling and you can’t help to be sucked up into it. It’s a beautiful tragedy.

5. LONG SHOT (HBO)

The biggest and most pleasant surprise of the year. An opposites-attract rom-com with more brains, bite, social commentary, and laughs than it has any right to have. Easily the most fun you’ll have with (almost) the whole family... there’s a lot of cum jokes. But don’t let the vulgarity dissuade you! It’s a total riot with just the right amount of sweetness to balance out the saltiness. I love love love this movie.

4. THE ART OF SELF-DEFENSE (Hulu)

What starts as a strange, dark comedy morphs into a FIGHT CLUB-esque thriller with allusions to disturbingly toxic masculinity and an offbeat take on what it takes to “be a man.” It is laugh-out-loud hilarious, and expertly made, while really having something to say, and it says it in a way I’ve never really seen before. It’s not surprising this didn’t get more attention, the characters are truly difficult to relate to, let alone root for, but as far as originality goes, you’d be hard pressed to find anything this year much better than this. 

3. UNCUT GEMS (Amazon)

(Probably) NOT FOR MOMS!!

The cinematic equivalent of being locked in the brain of a lunatic having a cocaine-fueled anxiety attack. If that sounds like fun (AND IT IS!!!) then this is the film for you! Oh, and Adam Sandler is going to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor. For real. It’s a chaotic, stress-filled masterpiece.

2. ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOOD (Amazon)

My favorite filmmaker’s 2nd best film. A personal story about the love of film during the late 60s, a time of dirty hippies and Charles Manson, as well as the passing of the torch from old Hollywood to the “golden age” of cinema. It’s a fairytale of sorts, with Tarantino’s trademark flare for spontaneous violence and mining multiple genres to make his most mature work since PULP FICTION. I’ve been rewarded with new takeaways upon each subsequent viewing, and my love and appreciation for it only grows and grows. Brad Pitt is a lock for Best Supporting Actor, he’s magnificent. It was always going to be my #1 with a bullet no matter what, because it’s just that great...

1. PARASITE (Amazon)

...but then Bong Joon-ho, the master of new Korean cinema unleashed PARASITE. Not only is it the best film of 2019, it’s one of the best films I have ever seen. Like EVER ever. He is in such astonishing control of his craft it’s hard not to sit back and marvel and the sheer skill on display. You can be laughing one moment and then recoiling in horror during the same breath. He’s using multiple genre tropes, incredible set design, pitch perfect acting/writing, and such exquisite planning you can’t possibly know what’s in store for you from one scene to the next. It is an absolute masterpiece and if it doesn’t sweep every category it’s nominated for at this year’s Oscars, it’ll be a travesty. If you have even a passing interest in film as an art form, the power it can wield, and the messages it can convey, you owe it to yourself to see this film. It’s perfect.

Well, there it is. Thanks for reading any part of this. Now go see PARASITE. I love you.

[dmydfilmreviews]

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

This one’s the ultimate example of them trusting their creatives. So Joss Whedon was like ‘there’s this guy James Gunn, he made a load of fake porn with Nathan Fillion and a superhero movie about a guy who kills people with hammers with that freak from The Office DON’T LOOK AT HIS TWEETS, how about you give him a billion dollars to make a movie about a bunch of people nobody’s ever heard of with nothing to do with the rest of our movies? Cast the guy from Parks and Rec, that show that nobody watches, paint all your most recognisable actors dumb colours to hide who they are or make them voice space raccoons and trees. Do whatever you want, have fun!’

 Fuck shit did they have fun. From the minute Peter Quill pops on his Walkman and starts singing into a space rat like it’s a karaoke machine it’s clear that this is something different; the same high-pop slick entertainment but shot through an even more singular voice than what had gone before. It’s arguable that the Avengers was the start of the MCU getting all auteurish (or as auteurish as it’s ever going to get being the most successful series in the world), but everything goes full gonzo here, with a load of weird crap that just wouldn’t have been possible back in the days of Iron Man. The Avenger’s success let Gunn take risks, while the fact that fuck all people had heard of the Guardians gave him a blank slate; these are all damaged fuck-ups desperate for a family, the scrappiest losers against the biggest threats this universe has yet seen. Plus in a blockbuster world otherwise full of grim assholes it’s fresh by being classic, funny and sweet, packed full of gorgeous warm visuals and clever twists on classic sci-fi.

 Plot wise it’s bitty, but it rolls along at a joyous whack, introducing myriad elements of a whole new galaxy pretty effortlessly. Gunn’s aided by some stellar retro-design work and a boost from his co-writer Nicole Perlman, who judging by the second one was responsible for all the stuff that keeps it chugging along as an enjoyable story.

 It’s all kind of Disney like actually. Classic Disney. Every actor kills it, building a crew you’d happily stand up and die with, and its secret weapon is that it has bags of heart; the bit with the Groot fireflies and his sacrifice for the rest of his pals is among the sweetest things the universe has ever done. Why am I even writing this? You know this movie. You love it. Nobody has to defend it like they have to DEFEND AGE OF ULTRON WITH THEIR DYING BREATH

[no-ns-en-si-ca-l]

Some Moments Leading up to This One • Christina Catherine Martinez

RATS

At some point the rats got out of control. Our parents purchased the rats from a guy who bred them in buckets of wood shavings in his garage. We surveyed the containers like they were windows full of puppies. The little pink and white things wriggling around in them were to be our pets. That they were bred to be food for larger pets belonging to families moving in more robust circles of economic activity did not occur us children. 

COPS

My father was mildly obsessed with cops, tried several times to become one—making circles on practice tests for the written exam, making circles on the dirt track of the Sherriff’s training academy behind our house—but there was always some clerical snafu or abstruse psychological red flag (one question they ask is whether or not you turn around to look at your waste before flushing the toilet. Apparently there is a wrong answer to this). On rainy days my brothers and I slurped ramen noodles and watched the police documentary series COPS on Fox 11. Matthew lived next door and was a couple years younger than me. His parents told him he was too young to watch the show, but he pleaded them into the odd compromise of watching the title sequence only, which succored him enough to stalk the neighborhood with a nerf gun singing the theme song, bad boys, bad boys, over and over under his breath. 

We were home schooled and Matthew was not. Every morning, around the time my mom began clearing up the breakfast dishes and herding us together to begin the day's work, I would see Matthew's little face inch past the living room window in his grandmother's big white Cadillac. I can’t remember if she lived with them or not, but she was always around, functioning as part chauffeur, part babysitter, and all around emotional punching bag for this supremely unhappy family (the entire second story of their house was added on as a private bedroom suite for mom). Every afternoon my brothers and I returned to the window just in time to see the white car pull up to their tight, golf-ready lawn and watch Matthew's backpack sail through the passenger-side window, followed shortly by Matthew himself. He yelled and spat and kicked papers and shit all over the lawn, without fail, every school day. It was such a treat. I credit this daily theater with planting the seed of skepticism in my attitude toward institutions, and I suppose by extension, to anyone in uniform.

Still, as committed members a religious suburban community, of some of my parents' closest friends were officers of the law. Not the slack-jawed, double-chinned avatars of male torpor, but sweet, boar-bristle ‘stached men with bright eyes and prematurely creased foreheads. The kind earned from continually raising brows at things children say. Especially children who don't go to regular school. Dad stopped trying to become a cop after noticing their off-duty penchant for K-Swiss sneakers and Hawaiian shirts. 

Eventually, between the hours of 12 and 6 am, between backseat blow jobs and furtive jam sessions, I would run into these men. A tense skein of trust evolved as they circled the perimeter of my adolescence; tapping the glass, raising their eyebrows, and waiving me home. I lived in cars, but I was no good at it. I wondered what separated me from the subjects on COPS, who also just wanted to hang out but invariably, somehow, ended up face down on the sidewalk. I asked Gonzo what his rules of thumb were for letting girls off with a warning. He was immune to crying and pleas of period emergencies, but once, upon pulling over a swerving vehicle and finding a woman covered in exploded burrito, he did let her go. Gonzo is a close family friend, and I was convinced that he was the greatest cop that ever lived. 

Years later I asked him why, at tender age of thirty five-ish, he left the po-po biz to become a teacher. He said he didn't like kind of person it was turning him into. 

PUBLIC SCHOOL

For a radical experiment in parenting, try this: take a feral child (who loves Jesus), strap it to a translucent purple backpack, and place it in a structured learning environment. Years later— 

APPLES

A lot of our games were about dying. The best, by far, was the night we tried to enact as many stock movie death scenes as possible without laughing. We were just hanging out. Someone was on the floor, and then Nadal starting noodling something sad on the piano, and then it kind of took off from there. We played a swan song for a gritty, browbeaten cop with a heart of gold (a peculiar trope, and, as I learned years later after experiencing the privilege of transatlantic flight, a particularly American one). We slipped through the hands of an action hero clinging helplessly to his buddy dangling off the edge of a cliff. Grenades crashed all around as Paul and I played out a lost cause on the battlefield. I cradled Paul's head in my arms, taking his shirt in a vice grip and screaming, “Don't you die on me soldier!" and then, for context, finessing a line about how he can't die, because he never taught me his secret gumbo recipe. Paul gasped for air, phantom blood filling his throat and mouth. It dribbled down his chin, sputtered off his lips and onto my shirt. Everyone clapped their hands over their mouths to keep from laughing. Just before his eyes rolled back in his head and his neck went limp, Paul pulled me close and whispered in a Cajun accent, "Don't forget the nutmeg,

mon ami....

" I brushed my fingertips over his eyes to close them. At this final touch, we could hold it no longer. Everyone burst laughing, crying, chugging beers, and yelling

ok, now me! me and you!

As the only girl, more than once I resorted to my privileged trope of peaceful cancer girlfriend. I'd stroke whoever's face very softly and whisper sweet platitudes about Finding New Love and how I Will Always Be With You. The beloveds raspberried in my face with laughter, and then we'd all drink some more. I died at least five times. We drank, the piano lolled on, we laughed until the laughter turned to honking chest rattles because we hadn't quit smoking yet. The roleplay kept going. In high school we'd made exclamations of love to one or more of one another. We filched wine and read e.e. cummings by candlelight, smoked weed and listened to records, made out in the McDonald’s PlayPlace, and screamed at one another in cars, breaking up and getting back together many times over. We heeded the tap on the glass and went home. We threatened to kill ourselves and harbored baroque fantasies about our funerals. Dying for fun at the crash house purged our maudlin adolescence and all its attendant delusions, suddenly petty in light of things like getting dressed for work and swinging a grocery basket in the crook of an arm and filling out apartment rental applications at Starbucks. An ironic bow at the threshold of adulthood, when all the quotidian necessities of independent living were briefly, intensely glamorous. We got oil changes and shopped for work clothes. We stopped buying Nat Sherman Fantasia's and got promoted to shift lead. We had people over for dinner and complained about our bosses. Then some of us got actual cancer, and some of us actually tried to kill ourselves, and once or twice we went blind, stabbing the roof of our mouth with the toothbrush, our girlfriends trying to pull rank on despair. 

We scatter. But we find each other. Years later, Landon and I are sitting in the Seinfeld restaurant in Harlem. I’m on my first work trip with the gallery. Landon entered Columbia University as a film major, and is about to leave with a degree in computer science. Upon learning the average post-graduation salaries for his respective choices, the change was swift. I show him my little stack of business cards with the word director printed under my name. He pays for the meal with an elegant slip of his own card. The last time we dined, it was at a Cheesecake Factory in Orange County. He wore sunglasses to mask the bandages over his eyes, and I wept into some kind of alcoholic milkshake called a Flying Gorilla. 

We pick at anonymous fried brown things and exchange tabs on where we all went. The food here is decent, except for the marinara sauce, which I suspect is with dishwater to make it last. We talked about all of the times we died and I ask, between bites of naked mozzarella stick, why he left the old crash house. 

“I just thought we could be grown-ups,” he said. 

I remembered the giant Patrick Nagel poster that crowned the faux-wood paneled living room, a crouching woman in pink thigh high boots, larger than life. 

“Mmmmm," I said. 

“And we just”—last time I visited the house she had grown a dick, a mustache, and a fist-sized hole near her shoulder—“like, we couldn’t do it,” he said. “We couldn’t have nice things or make a home.” 

“You should have taken out the wallpaper." 

“It was his mom’s." 

“I know," I said, "but that’s a lot of apples." 

MONEY

Money is an excellent balm, very near to forgiveness. I met John Wayne at a comedy show, and he quoted Austin Powers in bed, but the following week he was out of town on business, and it felt good to say “he’s out of town on business” in response to someone’s face screwing up about the yeah baby stuff. It generally worked, and I have no reason to believe John Wayne wasn’t his real name. 

MONEY

“Does the taco place take cards?”

“They charge seventy cents to use a card.”

“Alright then let’s swing by the Chase ATM on the way.”

“Are you for real?”

“Yes. What? Yes I’m for real.”

“You’re just going to spend the seventy cents you’ll save from using cash for the tacos on the extra gas it will take to swing by the ATM for the cash.”

“It’s on the way.”

“It’s so freaking hot right now.”

“It’s literally right on the way.”

“I can’t believe you can make these kinds of calculations after we’ve been sitting under a waterfall all day.”

“I’m stopping at the Chase ATM.”

“If you’re going to trap me in this hot car any longer in order to save seventy cents, then I’ve earned seventy cents worth of bitching for however long this ATM detour is delaying tacos.”

“I can’t believe you can make these kinds of calculations after we’ve been sitting under a waterfall all day.”

“We haven’t even moved in the last five minutes.”

“Fine. It’s worth seventy cents to not have to sit in this traffic or hear you bitch.”

“Do you think if we had universal basic income, Post-Internet art would still exist?”

….

“What?”

“I don’t know.” 

RATS

Oddly enough they fuck like rabbits. We brought home a brother and sister from the bucket guy, thinking they might respect their second chance at life by refraining from incest. Instead they multiplied, and we had to buy more cages to house all the pink little nubbies that kept popping out of the mama rat. Seizing upon this educational moment, our mother encouraged us to learn more about rats, and we observed the little nubbies at length, patiently waiting for them to grow into more comely beings. One day I noticed one of the nubbies lying still while the others inched around the cage with their little salamander limbs. I put him in my palm, and he was cold. I took him to my father, who was preparing his next sermon in the dining room. I had yet to attend public school, but I’d seen enough television to aesthetically forecast the kind of educational moment he might seize upon. 

“Dad,” I cooed, “this one died.” 

“Oh honey,” he said, taking the miniature creature in his hands, “He’s not dead… he’s just thirsty!” 

And with that, he dropped the dead baby rat into his glass of lemonade. 

I froze for a few seconds, then clapped my hands over my mouth to keep from laughing. 

That’s when I became a comedian.

[theraroth]

Death Awaits Us All (from 2016)

I wrote this around August 3-4 2016, for a lit blog that rejected it outright for its brutal honesty and horrific accuracy concerning what we were soon to see as the presidency of Donald (BAAAAARRRRRFFFF) Trump. Presented with minimal edits, I give you:

DEATH AWAITS US ALL...enjoy (or not, it’s your choice):

The rust monsters have sacked my brain. Writing anything creative is a near-impossible hateful sojourn through corridors of frustration. I was recently accosted by the corrosive evil of reorganizing a college level class in order to conform, at least in spirit, with the format of a dreadful textbook thrust upon me, like skin rot contracted from an outhouse in a leper colony. There’s no task as phony and unfulfilling and soulless as revising lecture notes. You can feel your creative juices drying up like a sun-blasted desert oasis. There goes another part of me I can never recapture. Pandora’s Box fits into the analogy somehow, but I am unable to weave it into the narrative adequately so I instead rely on brutal confessions of academically induced impotence, if there is such a condition, and if not let me self-diagnose as Patient Zero for a heretofore undiscovered malady.

Where was I?

Somewhere, out in the desert watching heatwaves rise up from boiling sands…painting a picture with a broken brush is no mean feat, but I think I have risen to the challenge. Rise…risen. Nope, still hopelessly ossified and amberized. I coined that word, I believe. Or I’d like to believe I coined it.

Pointless!

So I’ll conjure a point from nowhere: I was rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country, his last published work before succumbing to a head injury at the gruffly tender age of 84 (it was his opinion that old farts like himself had “just gotten here,” so he was therefore little more than a pup, and who am I to contradict a master?). The book, a glib examination of George W. Bush’s America, has aged more rapidly than Vonnegut’s cantankerous literary turns, hobbled in part by the limited scope of the subject, but in spite of that limitation, it ventures into less dated territory or at a minimum more open territory free of political intrigues anchored to that desolate era, and one of these vistas for free range thoughts was in the author’s note at the end in which Kurt mentions that he had recently bonded in a friendly manner, not a love interest mind you, with Ralph Steadman, the artist indelibly linked to Hunter S. Thompson, the late gonzo journalist who, in the context of this aside, had recently taken his life in 2005. And where in the fuck, you ask and rightfully so, is all this digressive bullshit headed? It’s headed toward one of those strange coincidences which plant the idea that perhaps coincidence is a term of art humans created to dismiss the only tangible proof of a higher power manipulating the strings of the world, for I had just received in the mail a copy of Ralph Steadman’s The Joke’s Over, with a forward by, of all people, Kurt Vonnegut. So when I read the passage about Steadman and Vonnegut acquainting, a series of events whose connective tissues were dark to me suddenly coalesced into a definitive line of causality. Kurt met Ralph, Ralph wrote a book, Kurt wrote the forward for the book.

Isn’t it amazing that two people I have admired from afar somehow interacted out of the blue and “cross-pollinated,” so to speak? How does that shit happen? It’s a small world doesn’t do it justice. Nor does that hideously saccharine shit of a song do justice to my ears, real or the virtual stereo in my head that blares it as punishment for writing this, or possibly for writing, period, why-oh-why did I ever travel down that path? it yells at me in a chorus of squeaky castrati frantic to know the whereabouts of their balls…sorry boys, but, snip, snip, all gone but for the empty skin pouch.

If any of this makes sense, I apologize. It was never my intention to impart wisdom. There are more than enough shit-bird seers and visionary with all the answers in the world for a million lifetimes. So I guess one more can’t hurt or at the worst can’t inflict more harm than has already been inflicted. Death by a million papercuts…which cut was the killing stroke, the first or the last or one of the ones somewhere in the middle? Don’t answer that. Only a real asshole thinks he can answer the unanswerable.

Trump.

Balls, I’ve been tap dancing around the proverbial elephant in the room, tap dancing around heaping mounds of elephant shit so pervasive and voluminous I am drowning it in. We all are. Fuck. I need respite from the ugliness or I’ll goddamn well explode. And we can’t have that, can we?

But beware! If you speak of the devil, he shall come forth to heed your call. And in line with that warning, just as I was resigned to submerging and drowning in the muddy trenches of the Trump travesty, some blasted interloper knocked on the rustic steel door I rely on as a barrier between myself and the cruel world beyond. A wave of dread crept up my spine. Dusk time visitations never go well. Could be the authorities paying a call to impart bad news or some Jesus hustler at the end of his shift off-loading surplus pamphlets on the house closest to the tax dodge. God, I hate those fuckers. They have a habit of ignoring the NO SOLICITORS sign taped to the glass. Perhaps a large billboard broadcasting I EXTERMINATE FUCKING JESUS FREAKS might get their attention. When I opened, I came face to face with a fresh brand of trouble: the new neighbors were stopping by, not to say hi, how’s it hangin’? boy it sure is hot and whatnot, but to raise unholy hell (vs holy hell) about ground ivy, a common broadleaf, encroaching on their newly sodded lawn.

My inner cynic lives for these moments, affirmations that people are the real hell on Earth, as they clearly intended to start a territorial dispute over a goddamn plant native to every square mile of land in the world’s innumerable temperate zones, which, as far as they were concerned, excluded their yard. My only recourse? Consult the local ordinances online. Damn them straight to hell, I thought, for I’d sworn to on everything that is holy in the ecumenical sense that I would NEVER EVER consult the local ordinances, out of respect for the fact that I don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut about local ordinances or other petty nonsense crafted by bureaucrats with measuring sticks, prepared to issue citations for overgrown lawns or minute infringements of sacred lot lines. This is the kind of meaningless tripe that sucks your life down the fucking drain, pisses away the hours and scours your nerves to raw fucking bloody pulpy scum. So it was with utter disdain that I broke this promise to the Powers That Don’t Give a Fuck and combed the local ordinance site, state of the art for 2008, and tracked down the arcane passage detailing what manner of flora presented a nuisance to the neighborhood and would bring the wrath of the gods down upon my head, and lo and behold ground ivy was not among the offending species of plants.

But the neighbors more or less told me as much when it was mentioned in passing that they had consulted the ordinances and were at a loss to find a passage with the clout to enforce their milquetoast suburban pursuit of a simplified, unstable, monochromatic, aesthetically drab and understated ecosystem aching to wither and die if a fucking drop of acrid dog piss falls on its tender shoots. I’m not eager to engage in a death struggle over botanical differences. However, people have died for lesser causes.

Trump.

Darkness descends. Evil abounds. Feet itch. Is there no one who can save us? Okay, there’s Hillary. I have confidence in her ability to topple the tyrannical Trumpenstein “turd tornado” (tip of the cap to Ben Shapiro for helping fulfill my alliteration quota for the month). But I cannot shake the creeping doom. It skulks the hallways of my mind. I hear the thundering hoof beats of the Apocalypse fast approaching.  I see other horrifying apparitions that defy description. Lots of wriggling tentacles, gnarly horns shiny with the blood of the innocent, severed nipples—a bowl of them, sitting out like Halloween candy as demonic children (well, children) paw through them seeking the tastiest morsel of nipple flesh. Michael Phelps’s perfect swimmer-nipples figure into the picture, adding a certain glistering, chilling symmetry to an otherwise asymmetric tableau involving hell spawn hungry for nipples, and even more macabre, Halloween was EIGHT DAYS ago.

November 8th promises to be the premiere of a new mediocre, bound-to-disappoint horror flop from M. Night Shyamalan, THE TRUMPENING. Okay, that scared the shit of me. You see, a word I’m 99.9% sure I just made up was ALREADY IN MY GODDAMN SPELLCHECKER. Relax, damn it. There is a logical explanation. Right. Spellcheck for all capital letters, by default, is turned off, and I tend to eschew tinkering with default settings unless they really piss me off, which is harder than it seems. But ’tis the season for rampant, unchecked, unabated, relentless paranoia, and what concerns me most is that the second my new novella arrives on the scene in the fall, there won’t be anybody to buy it. Apocalyptic settings dampen book sales almost as much as the very concept of a book does. Past authors and critics have predicted the end of the novel as an art form, and they were wrong, but their inaccuracy was a matter of poor timing not poor judgment. It is dead, and we killed it, and I cannot envision a novella, even a competently written one with an occasional dash of brilliance, resurrecting the dust and bones of the theater of the imagination. We are adrift in the briny wastes of instant entertainment gratification, and never again shall we touch the shores of useless art made beautiful by intense admiration.

I only wax poetically against my own interests because I am congenitally unable to believe in karmic justice. Karmic injustices proliferate with the ease of ground ivy, and unlike a relatively innocuous plant they swallow everything in their path. Take the savagely unjust conviction of five boys (four African Americans and one Hispanic) railroaded in 1990 for raping, beating, and sodomizing a female jogger in Central Park. After languishing in prison for 6-13 years as sex offenders, exculpatory evidence exonerated The Five of any wrongdoing (a serial rapist serving life in prison confessed to the crime, which led to a round of DNA tests, and none of The Five’s DNA was extant at the crime scene). And who shelled out an estimated $85,000 for full page ads in all four major New York newspapers urging the reinstatement of the death penalty, citing the Central Park assault as just cause and inflaming prejudice against the defendants before the case had been tried?

Trump.

Karma is officially deader than Vaudeville, deader than Caesar, deader than analogies in the “deader than” form. For a “law and order” candidate, Trump has a penchant for viewing mob rule as a functional arm of the Constitution. Deferring to the wisdom of “2nd Amendment people” to prevent Hillary from appointing judges belongs to the white-lighting-fueled ruminations of Tennessee moonshiners vigilant and on the eye for “revenuers” and “guvment men” and cannot be tolerated as just a bit of harmless bluster on the campaign trail, even if the candidate in question is a bloviating armchair politician with the discipline of a baboon wildly masturbating between salvos of shit-flinging.

I could go on and on about the other five billion instances in which Trump comported himself with the aplomb of a one-legged, one-armed, one-eyed lemur performing open heart surgery with a broken whiskey bottle. But when for the love of Zod does it fucking come to a satisfactory conclusion?

November 8th.

I hope?

No, hope doesn’t factor into it. Or faith. Or other invisible forces of the universe. It all teeters on the electorate getting off its asses and voting for Hillary. Every stay at home vote is a vote for Trump. Every vote for Lexus-liberal, vaccine-doubter Jill Stein is a vote for Trump. Every disgruntled Millennial write-in vote for Bernie Sanders is a vote for Trump. But it’s possible every vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Hillary. Libertarians exist in a kind of pseudo-Republican limbo populated with potheads who bawl for small guvment between bong hits. Trump’s xenophobic, bigoted rhetoric loses its shine once the pot haze clears a skosh and it dawns on them that their dealer, Raul, is a Cuban/Mexican cross-dresser with a lapsed green card, and their backup plan, Timmy the Titwillow, is a gay bartender at a nightclub six blocks from the Pulse massacre.

Never underestimate the influence of self-interest in the electorate. Or for that matter self-deceit.

For as long as Trump is in the race he has a chance of winning, however remote, and we could be living the last fruitful days before a literal madman takes control of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. If things should take a turn for the worst on Election Day, our only chance for a temporary reprieve from utter annihilation is to pray that that twisted septuagenarian imbecile can come to some kind of arrangement with Ivanka to stick his thrombosis-savaged pecker insider her every Sunday on an onyx altar carved in the image of the Great Old Ones. But given the obviously degenerated state of his body, it’s doubtful even an overdose of boner pills could conjure anything remotely resembling an erection, perhaps a tiny bubble filled with pus and blood and shattered pieces of dick vein floating around in the mucosal soup.

But I kid our future overlord. All in good fun and jest. Lucky for me, the dark, dank confines of a North Dakota gulag are a rich source of inspiration. Besides, I could use a change of setting. A place where I can write the last and greatest Great American novel before the steepening decline of the written word smashes into history’s wall. And upon that wall there is inscribed but a single word:

TRUMP

For the record: damn, was I spot on to worry! And I nailed the culprits of this fucking nightmare, less the Russian collusion, Who could have seen that coming, besides

HILLARY?

Right?