Sunday, July 3, 2005

Old God, New gods Today the Gay Pride parade rounded on the Santa Fe Plaza to launch a full day of celebration and dancing. 'Gay Pride Week' celebrates the 'outing' of the gay revolution at the Stonewall Bar in New York City more than half a century ago. It's become an annual celebration of everything about being 'different' in American culture. As one part of who we are appears to descend into an ever darkening morass of group paranoia driven by Apocalyptic despair disguised as religion the rest of us continue to emerge, as we've been emerging since the end of World War II. (How well I remember the dark and sleazy underworld that yawned beneath the fearful realm of conformity in the fifties and sixties). I recently answered a Zogby Survey over the Internet and one of the questions was which state I would vote out of America if we were all on the show "Survivor." This was a hard question. I've been to almost every state and experienced both darkness and virtue in most. Certainly there are states that I came away with little good feeling for. I thought of Nebraska, where I waited once half day for a ride until a cop made me stand even farther off the road. I remember Lincoln as a half abandoned ghost town in the summer, most of it's businesses boarded up, nothing inviting me to linger. Of course there's Texas, whom we of New Mexico love to hate because it's right next door, and everyone else loves to hate because it's so brazenly absconded with our national identity. For better or worse, we've all become Texans in the eyes of the world, so it would be difficult to cast that state off the island. I thought of Oklahoma, whose extreme politics, desolate pastures, feedlots and dumb church fed intolerance stretches endlessly between Colorado and the edges of the east. Fresh in my mind however is Kansas. I've got no particular fix on Kansas, but the Reverend Phelps of Kansas and his Westwood Church congregation, numbering mostly his own cursed offspring came to Santa Fe to picket it's churches and city hall because the citizens rose up collectively and expressed sympathy and support for a gay man who was beaten by thugs for being gay. In the Reverend's interpretation of scripture God hates 'Fags' and will send to hell anyone who tolerates their presence. I wonder if hell resembles Kansas, which certainly goes to the top of my "Survivor" elimination list. Reverend Phelps and his church and extended family reside in Topeka. According to a Gallup Poll one-third of Americans believe that the Bible is literally true. Every word and outraged rant muttered by every psychotic prophet and interpreted by every self-defined Christian demagogue through the ages, from Emperor Constantine to Jerry Falwell is proclaimed by somebody as 'God's truth' for all of the ages, at least until it has been struck down and overturned by some massive revolt or war that can drag on for decades. To believe that any religious text or metaphorical guidebook which has been cut, edited and severely homogenized repeatedly over the centuries to accommodate the fluctuating political viewpoints of a succession of political church hierarchies crosses the boundaries of the delusional. On the other hand, what does one expect from people who invest their future in televised images of conformity provided courtesy of multinational corporations and the neighborhood Walmart (much to the delight of Chinese accountants). A good dose of religion may be healthy, but not if we get stuck in the traps of literalism. Spiritual texts should be guidebooks and not a substitute for our own quest. What we see too often in the world of televised evangelism is the cynical manipulation of people's need for meaning by demagogues who provide ready made explanations for everything, and whose larger agendas are more political than spiritual. Coming on top of a PEW International Global Attitudes poll (http://people-press.org/) that found the United States rated less favorably than China by EVERY major country in the world except India and Poland, last week's incident with Senator Dick Durbin illustrates how far America has fallen. In case you didn't catch it, Durbin read into the Congressional Record several FBI accounts of the extreme torture techniques being employed in the depraved penal underworld at Guantanamo, then commented that the descriptions sounded like practices employed in Nazi or Soviet prisons of the past. Immediately the Republican distraction machine turned all guns upon his statement, focusing public outrage upon the comparison of us with the 'bad guys' and this successfully diverted attention away from the apparent reality of our government's officially sanctioned torture of prisoners. In the wake of the uproar Durbin fell all over himself to apologize for his remarks, even though their content was never really challenged. The upshot of all of this is that torture is now in effect an officially approved activity by the United States citizenry, and the criticism of it's use is viewed as unpatriotic. How far my country has fallen. Why did Durbin apologize? I think it's a symptom of the fact that America is still managed by guilt. What makes Americans feel most guilty is not the commission of atrocious acts, but acting in some way that offends the Great Father On High. God the Father is represented and worshipped most vocally by the Republican Party which has become nothing other than a surrogate religious institution, but with the full cooperation of the so-called opposition. At the seat of our government rewards are distributed to the faithful and punishments and threats directed at anyone who questions the absolute authority of the white men in charge. When Carl Rove gloats that 'conservatives' responded more appropriately to 9/11 by preparing for war while 'liberals' presumed that we should try and understand our enemies, we clearly see the great divide between two world views. Rove's view, in my opinion is in decline, because the world can't accommodate it much longer. The other has by necessity begun it's rise to power. In religious terms the war we are fighting in America is between the old patriarchal god of war and domination and a newly resurrected spirit of nurture and yes, understanding. For at least 2000 years these two archetypes have been in pitched battle and we are now seeing one of the great turnings of the tide. (Yes, this story can be told in Christian terms, but I prefer a more universal vocabulary.) What indications are there that the tide is turning? Well, it appears that the old God is cornered. His priesthood has gathered in a tight beleaguered circle around the leader of a single nation, young and powerful, but gullible and entranced by its own apparent strength. While the rest of the world stands horrified at the spectacle of arrogance overtaking innocence, Americans are more and more confused and bewildered as they begin to awake from their long sleep, only to find that the world has gotten away from them. We will win because we are clever. We've had to be clever in order to survive so many centuries of cruelty and insanity. We are the shamans, the artists, the musicians. The world already dances to our tunes. The old god's last and best hope is that he can generate enough animosity between his various factions and faiths that people will continue to fear the 'others' and choose to live in a perpetual state of siege. In order to accomplish that he has to control the images through which the world is now mediated. Two things have made that impossible. First of all, the threat of atomic war inspired those in power to develop a communication system that would enable complex defense systems to continue running, even when large parts of the network were destroyed, by routing the flow of information around any obstructions or interruptions. This was called the Internet, and it was originally built to link large defense computers with university mainframes. What no one predicted at the time was the development and wide dissemination of small and independent personal computers and their subsequent access to the network. The confluence of these two developments birthed the explosive development of a global brain of exponentially increasing complexity, uncontrolled and uncontrollable by the vast centralized global structures out of which it was developed. The creation has outstripped its' creators and we are now a culture that has collectively entered unknown territory. The old world lumbers inexorably toward more monolithic and centralized concentrations of power, because in the old model power equals control, and absolute control implies absolute power. Big fish are devoured by even bigger ones as the artifacts of an older culture of communities are consumed by faceless corporate greed; radio and television stations are absorbed by communication conglomerates, manufacturers by global corporations, whole villages of retailers by enormous chain stores. The new world is born out of a chaos of complexity. The model of strength in this dimension isn't based on control but on connections and flexibility. LIke blooms of algae it's influence spreads like a thin membrane to cover the landscape, generating completely novel forms and configurations of community and influence. There is no centralized node of power, instead the power shifts with our collective attention. In every realm of endeavor we see the new model challenging the old, whether in war, like the multi-headed insurgency in Iraq, or in the dissemination of information, like the blogger's challenge to conventional media, or in the distribution of energy, where the centralized high security risk nuclear option faces the myriad and decentralized grid of solar and wind power. The voices of the old god have become shrill and accusing, his actions more and more predictable, more and more repetitious, his strategies brittle and attitudes inflexible, his enemies legion. While the myth of the 'Chosen' only embraces the true believers, the circle of believers comes increasingly under siege. The hollow rhetoric about 'freedom' masks the thinnest pretense of tolerance. As paranoia grows our tolerance for 'difference' becomes more and more illusionary and fewer and fewer people are acceptable to the circle of the 'elect.' Even those who, in their ignorance and fear support the status quo begin to perceive glimmers of truth that penetrate the makeshift shelter of deception. When that happens the gig is up. In a world so much in need of change only the different can make a real difference. IN teh face of overwhelming change the centers of power begin to loose their hold. A midterm election is coming, the war in Iraq is a disaster, and the opposition is getting more and more confident. A long slide has started, even earlier than many of us hoped. It will be a real pleasure to see the fall. Meanwhile, we dance in the Plaza and in the streets all over this country and all over the world. We will dance to be different. We will dance the world into a state of love and acceptance of reality. Then we will begin to address the situations that threaten us all; war, poverty, disease, pollution, corruption and all of the real problems that we must face collectively in this century. We will work for peace and harmony. We will dance the god of vengeance to sleep. 9:30:55 AM    comment []

Mask of anger, mask of grief The therapist told me that anger was a 'masking' emotion, that is, an action orientated feeling that generally masks something deeper and unresolved. This in response to my telling her that the one emotion I identified most with was anger. For virtually all of this life that I remember, anger has been my closest companion; anger born of grief. Grief comes from death, of people and things that are important, the death of dreams and possibilities. The targets for my anger are anything outside of the real feeling inside of me, people, things, politics, even war itself. When I look out into the world there is no shortage of targets. My current favorites are Republicans, God and Stupid White People. Republicans totally deserve it. God is an easy target, since I can just make something up and then throw stones at it. Stupid White People are mostly good fun, since they are probably too stupid to even notice they're being attacked. It's kind of like always being at war with something, as long as the feelings that drive this rage aren't resolved. The other day I spoke of the war outside and tried to incite a war with Christians. Actually I don't believe that my war is with Christians. More accurately, Christians are at war with themselves, just as America in general is at war with itself and the world. I don't need to add to all of this struggle. Christians have actually been very good to me. They even helped me through recent events, which were among the hardest times of my life. It was wonderful to see Christians acting like Christians. My trouble is with those they've allowed to represent them in the media. When I turned a corner the other day my long building passions got triggered by the latest Terri Schiavo thing. I let myself be fooled again into thinking that the projections I see and hear everyday about what Christians believe and who they are reflect something other than a small but powerful faction whose allegiance is not to the spirit but to political power. I've gotta say, I haven't witnessed anything so debased and ugly and fueled by downright unbelievable ignorance, arrogance and cynicism since the Clinton persecutions. Feelings I'd been holding under wraps for months spilled out in a piece that gave voice to some of my rawest reactions. I can't really afford a personal therapist these days so this list is my therapy. If I can somehow take the anger and shape it into something in words and then put it out there I can see it more clearly for what it is and what it may feel like to other people. In the process maybe I can cop to some of the deeper currents that are fueling it. The real "War" is the one inside of myself, between the truth and the things that I want to deny. So this is the process. I feel, I write, I temper and revise. I'm kind of starting from scratch these days, after a long hiatus, finding my footing again. It'll take me a while to get attuned once again to a constructive rhythm and really be ready to add something constructive to the conversation. Please bear with me. I can always use your help. 9:29:48 AM    comment []

War "- History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." - James Joyce, Ulysses Well, here we are, on "Bloom's Day" June 16th, when groups of Joyce devotees all over the world gather and read the master's work out loud. Once again we realize that James Joyce is to modern English literature what Jimi Hendrix was for the guitar. History - His Story goes on unabated, and we who are weary of hearing it have to cover our ears and wait for all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth to end. Our own prayer is that we can get on with another story, one about human beings and life on this planet, not some patriarchal fantasy about guilt and woe and sacrifice. (God's really bad weekend given for our sins.) We still have to put up with Terry Schaivo's idiot parents and their brain-dead lawyers. Jeb Bush has instigated another investigation of Schaivo's husband to find out why he misjudged the time when he found his wife collapsed in the hallway at five in the morning (or so). People wonder why when I hear the word Christian these days the first word that comes to mind is 'cynical hypocrites.' How long must we put up with Jeb and Pat and Jerry and that Dobbins creep from Colorado Springs as we count up the mounting casualties of their endless wars to determine why Jesus AIN'T the boss of the world. Incidentally, For all of you Terri Schaivo fans, check out http://www.amandaegge.com/schiavo.htm. I'm back to business after a spring of near chaos and personal tragedy. During this time I've only had time and energy to pay cursory attention to events in the big wide world (sort of like applying triage to a wound while shells are passing back and forth over the trenches). Somewhere in there I saw the new Star Wars movie. The film finally leaves the Old Republic behind, it having been taken over by a zealot who worships power (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more). Lucas ushers out the age of the Old Jedi Order and sets up the period of revolutionary resistance that stretches those 20 lost years between Episode III and Episode I. We are back on track with lawless scoundrels like Han Solo who was our favorite character in the first place. See the film "Serenity" this fall for a new model of resistance in the context of galaxies and empires (more on this later). We aim to misbehave. Yes, I greet you once again from the belly of America's "Empire on the cheap," in this city of spacers, dreamers and magicians located right across the plain from our nation's bomb factory at Los Alamos. A recent survey conducted across America by CNN rated Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly as America's 'top journalists,' over real reporters like Bob Woodward. Meanwhile the Republican press, including Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Sean Hannity and others who SHOULD be strapped to the floor and tortured until they cry are laying upon one Senator, Dick Durbin, with the temerity to read an FBI description of American prisoner torture at Guantanamo into the Congressional Record. I like what I read on the Daily KOS the other day: Apparently, the Republicans who dominate the party today, on the radio, online, and in the halls of Congress, think that the only good American is a Stalinist, a Nazi, a fascist, or any other brand of totalitarian thug who beats the crap out of innocents because he can, because we're Amurrikans, God damn it, and if we want to throw you in jail for an eternity, with no lawyer and no charges, and torture you until your head explodes and you go absolutely insane, that's our right because, well, because FUCK YOU. That's the thinking and the mantra of today's brand of Republicans who run the party and run the right-wing noise machine. The law is irrelevant, the norms of humanity are irrelevant. With God on our side - well, the Baptist fundamentalist God on our side, thank you - they can do no wrong. - John Aravosis on The Daily KOS Blog It turns out that maintaining and enforcing the Empire not only isn't it 'cheap' but we aren't very good at it. Meanwhile the whole process results in tearing apart our own nation as it reels through successive stages of denial. When American soldiers fight wars only on foreign soil the people in the field start to have such a different take on reality from the fat complacent citizen at home that eventually they just say, "Fuck it," and go back to the private sector. 9:29:08 AM    comment []

Catharsis In Wallace Shawn's recently published single issue magazine, Final Edition (Seven Stories Press), columnist Jonathan Schell speaks about comic books. Specifically he recounts the horrible results of reality beginning to replicate fantasy in American culture, like the plot of a 'bad' comic book. I can't say what his standards of good' or 'bad' are in the case of comic books, but his basic point is that warriors like Osama bin Laden have understood that to resist the might of the United States one must pursue psychological or symbolic rather than military objectives. The unfortunate effect of this follows when America takes the lead of terrorists and proceeds to divide the world into 'us and them' warring camps, thus contributing to the wholesale degradation of civilization's higher values of dialogue and diplomacy. "What was damaged was not only the quality of political discussion and decision-making but something that might be called the dignity of the real. Surely Our reaction suited bin Laden well. He had no power to "change everything" unless the government of the United States agreed...President Bush seemed to accept bin Laden's invitation to enter the world of an apocalyptic comic book." American culture certainly resembles an 'apocalyptic comic book.' Perhaps it always has, from the founding of a 'New Jeruselum' to the excesses of 'Manifest Destiny' to Pat Robertson's pronouncements and the films of the Wachowski brothers and The Terminator. Certainly the events we see as news are packaged like a constant running battle between the forces of good and evil. The 24 hour news cycle, depending on marketing a continuous parade of spectacle guarantees that we see the world as constantly on the brink. The past couple of weeks have been all about death and dying. Tragedy in my own life closely followed by tragedies exploited by public demagoguery, and then the constant news media spectacle of mass grieving for the Pope have made it particularly difficult to move beyond the threshold of pain and guilt toward seeing things clearly. 2000 years of Christian civilization brings us the parallel agendas of Tom Delay and John Paul. Protestants and Catholics pretend they know what's good for the world while they take turns standing in the way of progress. At least one of them prayed for peace and the well-being of the poor, while the "bug man" only uses his faith to mask his own personal corruption. (sigh) I'm gonna take Doc Frankenstein at least to the end of the current issue - #2. Who knows if issue #3 will ever come out. Perhaps the story just came along to give someone like me a chance to vicariously vent a little. As we live so much of our conscious lives in a world of symbols it's been cathartic to see so many outrageous counter-symbols trotted out in bright visual format by the Brothers W.. It makes me feel - punkish - again, like when the Sex Pistols ranted "God Save the Queen, She ain't no human being!" Maybe I'm not quite ready to meet the "third way" that Gurdjieff told us about, which can resolve life's opposing tendencies and take me beyond the realm of 'good and evil.' Until I do it feels good to indulge a little, if only to release some long simmering anger. _______________________ The Wachowski Brother's "Doc Frankenstein", part 6, 'Catharsis' Synopsis: Frankenstein, having become a modern defender of the weak, is betrayed to an army of Christian zealots, who attack him and his friends at their refuge in the desert. ________________ A grim looking Doc Frankenstein, his blue and almost grinning face embraced by the shadows of the plane's cockpit. Frankenstein: "This is Blue Steel One, ready for launch." Monica's voice from the Control Room: "Negative, Blue Steel. They're swarming outside the bay doors. It's like they know you're there." Frankenstein: "Well let's not keep our guests waiting." "Doc?" Frankenstein: "Use the anti-aircraft to throw up an umbrella, open the doors and I'll do the rest." "There are too many." Frankenstein: "You can do it Monica. I've seen you play Halo.* (*a currently popular sci-fi video game.) "This isn't a game." (A line commonly spoken by control room commanders in popular sci-fi video games.) Frankenstein: "No. This is our home, and if we don't get this plane in the air, they will destroy it." Monica: "Give me manual control of GTA cannons 8 to 12 and stand by to launch." Frankenstein: "That's my girl." The sleek dark blue form of Frankenstein's jet fighter is swathed in swirling clouds of oxygen as it raises up to the dock level. The sky outside of the fortress is filled with hundreds of missiles and explosions and planes that are dodging both while launching their own arsenals in response. We look vertically up the walls of the tower as the blue fighter is launched toward the onslaught of enemy planes and missiles. Frankenstein; "Blue Steel one is airborne!" The dark blue jet plunges into the center of the enemy formation and while some planes dodge to the right and left, others are targeted by missiles launched from under the fighter's wings, and they explode in midair. Monica: "Give 'em hell, hero." Frankenstein: "No. Not Hell." Guns fire from either side of the cockpit. "Hell would be too good for them." Two more enemy jets are torn apart by the blasts. "This time it will be different" A full page spread depicts Frankenstein's obviously superior aircraft making short work of a number of enemy jets over the walls and towers of his domain. "This time...will be the last." Monica; "Doc, we've got trouble! They're deploying troops into the residential compound!" Frankenstein's jet curves back around toward the center of the fortress. An enormous troop carrier hovers below on the ground between two rows of buildings. The blue jet dives toward the action. "I see them." Underneath the troop carrier with it's prominent cross and sword insignia people in civilian dress are fleeing in all directions as hundreds of soldiers descend on ropes while clouds of tear gas rise from ground level. A soldier shouts, "You can run but you can't hide from God's will, you freaks!" A close-up of one of the soldiers rappelling down the climbing rope, his back covered with cross and sword armored vest. He looks off to the side, "What the hell..." Frankenstein's blue jet passes under the troop carrier, snagging the lines of a score of hapless soldiers, flinging them in all directions in the air. Frankenstein voice-over: "After two centuries of fighting these people, I have learned one thing." His maneuver having destabilized the cargo carrier, it tilts and one wing crashes into the ground while one of it's hovercraft engines explodes into flame. "The only good zealot..." The blue jet flies away from this encounter, jets on his tail colliding with the tangled bodies of soldiers still flying through the air. "...is a dead zealot." _______________ Go get 'em Frank! To be continued... _______________ * narrative based on "Doc Frankenstein" by the Wachowski Brothers, Burlyman Entertainment, #2, 2005. 9:28:21 AM    comment []

Onward Christians! "In a time of darkness the eye begins to see." - Theodore Roethke "It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. "The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, and continued a long time traversing my bedchamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep." "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley __________________________ At around the age of 17 I left the circle of those who honored dogma and made a decision to find out for myself the truth or untruth of faith and what powers laid out the present and future of our lives. >From that moment on my own faith or lack of it was truly in the hands of God, rather than those of men. I use the plural noun "men" in this instance because virtually all of the dogmas currently leading the world are inventions of some 'man', incorporating the patriarchal fear of women or queers or infidels, erected like a fortress by which the power of particular men is maintained. Perhaps my own decision after all was the product of some particular dysfunction or personal weakness, like an irrational resistance to authority, or the reaction to some repressed memory of youth. Maybe it's the same impulse that led me to leave college in the early 70's to search for something more 'relevant', and has led me to my present status of having no house, no insurance and very little to call possessions, other than an older than middle aged automobile and this not yet quite obsolete computer, along with books and a few boxes of notebooks and a few pieces of portable furniture. I travelled on my own into direct experiences of things and powers very much larger than myself, which I've hesitated to give names to. I've witnessed the strength of believing, the triumph of common will and spirit. I've watched my life unfold in a narrative that, for my satisfaction, makes some kind of sense behind the chaos. Meanwhile I watch the institutions that I once abandoned struggling with themselves all around me. They've never provided me sufficient reasons to reconsider my alienation. On the contrary, these days the churches cry out for the blood of punishment and retribution and justify the most horrible tortures done in in the name of their holy wars, while the suffering of a helpless woman and her dysfunctional family are made use of to drive an array of political agendas. If I were to be given a word association test in these days "christian" would automatically summon the appellation "hypocrite", and "patroit" the word "coward." No, the wall-to-wall news cycle coverage of the death of the world's leading patriarch doesn't change my feelings one bit. At the same time that I'm forced to witness grotesque spectacles of religious hysteria, the realities of the spirit gather closely around me. The personal choice a person makes to willingly end this life is as real as getting up in the morning. When someone intimate and close makes such a choice, the narrow territory that stretches from one's own depression and the edge of the precipice grows very present and real. I certainly can't judge such a choice, but I know that in those moments between choice and act the spirit speaks to a person as clearly as it ever can. In those moments the whole battle between faith and reason is resolved like a mathematical equation, uncompromising in its resolution. We who stay behind struggle to solve the equation in our own unique ways, or we abandon the struggle to higher authorities. All of the wars in the world are only excuses we use collectively to avoid facing the question for ourselves. _________________________ Doc Frankenstein, part 5, 'Onward Christian Soldiers' Synopsis: Doc Frankenstein, our old familiar 'monster' has become a super hero and fighter for justice in the modern age. Having just saved the U.S. President from a real monster, the hero retires to his fortress of solitude in the desert, only to be faced with a ruthless attack by an army of Christian zealots equipped with missiles, bombers and automatic weapons. ______________________ The face and hands of Doc Frankenstein appear behind the stock of a very large weapon that he carefully lifts from its mounting. We hear his thoughts: "This time it will be different. It must be." Now we see in his memories a room filled with blood. Through a gaping hole in one smashed wall and another shattered window a group of armed friars, wearing brown hooded cassocks and wielding pistols and rifles bearing the sign of the cross and wooden stakes shaped like crucifixes attack Frankenstein from all sides. They pierce his torso and arms with the crosses as he crushes their faces and bodies with wildly flailing fists. Bodies of the already slain litter the floor. "Since I was created, it has always been the "men of God" who have sought my destruction with the most vehemence. Three times they have attacked me like this, attacked me with everything they had. And each time they did more than hurt me. They destroyed the only thing I ever wanted in this world. Three times, they have destroyed my home." "1865. I lived inside my first love; an epicyclical, steam-powered locomotive, which I had designed. It was the first place I ever felt safe, until their attack. I was on my way to Washington to offer my service to President Lincoln. They made sure I never made it." A high trestle bridge collapses in flame, a locomotive explodes in massive violence as it crosses over. The ragged form of Doc Frankenstein is propelled upward out of the burning wreckage. "I did not relate their attack to my destination, until one of the survivors confessed. The Bible mandated slavery, he said. To be against slavery was to be against God. Three days later Lincoln was shot. Still, I did not fully understand my foe until nearly sixty years later." The dimly lit interior of a nightclub. As patrons flee at the rear or cower on the floor, a squad of priests in the black garments of their office with crucifixes hanging from their necks, carry blazing submachine guns in their arms. Doc Frankenstein, standing on a stage at the front of the club is knocked backwards as a hail of bullets pierces his dark tuxedo and his body beneath it. "1925. I made my second fortune during Prohibition. The abandon with which people lived inside the speakeasy taught me more about being human than all the works of the great philosophers. I was comfortable there and I got careless. I had offered to fly Clarence Darrow to Tennessee to defend John Scopes for teaching evolution. I had forgotten the nature of my enemy. Forgotten the hate that they pass like an heirloom from one generation to the next..." His body riddled with bloody holes and pierced with an axe used to break apart casks of illicit whiskey, Frankenstein brutally dispatches this army of the Lord. Oddly, a small group of chorus girls almost nonchalantly looks on while drinking champagne at the bar. "...Forgotten the ignorance they defend as if it were their divine right. Time had intoxicated me and lulled me into their trap. I may be immortal, but I still feel pain, and during the four agonizing weeks it took to dig all the lead out of my flesh, i vowed that I would never make that same mistake again." Frankenstein, dressed in a white coat, defends himself against another army of zealots in the middle of a wrecked laboratory. This time the army is dressed in plainclothes, like street gangsta's, wielding guns, butcher knives, and the cross shaped stakes now made of metal. They've crashed through the walls with a Cadillac, dark tinted windows marked with the cross, smashed headlong into a concrete stanchion. "1972. In an interview with 'Hustler' Magazine I applauded the Roe versus Wade decision and added that I hoped to end many of the problems associated with the case with the male contraception pill that I had been developing. By then I knew my enemies and was ready for them. Yet, despite my preparedness, they did it again, destroying the home it had taken me years to build." Doc Frankenstein, body again pierced with bullets and knives and steel crosses stands in the flaming ruins of his laboratory. We return to the present, where he walks, with the gun slung over his shoulder, toward a futuristic looking fighter jet, mounted for launch. "This time it will be different. This time, thousands of people, each of them an outcast, condemned and persecuted for their difference, came here searching, as I have sought, for a place in this world, until together we built this one. This time, it is not just my home. It is our home. And i will go back to my graves before I let any one take it from us." To be continued... _______________ * narrative based on "Doc Frankenstein" by the Wachowski Brothers, Burlyman Entertainment, #2, 2005. ______________ A few comments: I have to correct an assumption I made in the last episode. Obviously the woman in Frankenstein's fortress couldn't be the original little eskimo girl that he rescued more than a century past. I would wager nevertheless that she's a descendent. In defining the 'villain' in this story as religious zealotry, the Wachowski's define their hero to be the defender of a tradition of reason and scientific inquiry. The poles in this struggle, faith and reason, are the engines that have driven the philosophy and evolution of Western civilization. The quote I chose from Mary Shelley's book expresses the deep ambivalence felt more acutely in a previous century, during the rise of the natural sciences, which had only begun to unravel the hidden secrets of creation previously assumed to be part of the sacred precinct of a jealous God. As we see all around us, the conflict born of our self doubt, in the face of the perceived divine, has once more become the justification of world conflict. It appears that the Wachowski's have a particular bone to pick with the Catholics. Maybe it has something to do with a Polish-Catholic upbringing. We know that they are very much into smashing and manipulating popular and personal icons, but I would have given the zealots a markedly more Protestant cast. However, given all of the orchestrated mourning directed toward a very conservative pope by George Bush and the news media and all, maybe the brothers choosing to target the symbols of the oldest established "Church" makes sense after all. Either way, the vision of Doc Frankenstein making mincemeat of a bunch of christian nut cases gives me a great deal of pleasure in these days of rising religious based fascism. 9:27:45 AM    comment []

Serials We acquire values in the same way that we acquire language...through immersion. Surrounded by words, events and images our world is shaped by the particular language and particular perceptual environment through which we move. We adapt these perceptions and interpretations of the world as our own and generally we carry them throughout our lives, reluctant to allow into our perceptual field anything that contradicts what we already 'know.' It's generally easier for us to learn a new language than to adapt to a new value system, because values are the product of what we have felt as much as what we have observed or thought about. What can alter our values in midstream? An event? A teaching? A book? A movie? The challenge is to see ourselves in a new way, from a different point of view. The way that society changes is through the stories we tell. Once upon a time the stories were told out loud and the act of telling and listening and of remembering was in itself the act of celebrating and perpetuating the community. With the printing press came the act of individual interpretation of texts and the wars between different 'schools' of thought. Thought itself became an individual activity apart from participation in the rituals of the group. With the invention of photography a new mirror gave us the illusion of objectivity and with the rise of the image came the onslaught of social engineering. With movies we got a '90 minute' version of reality, where all things follow their predictable and reassuring arc and we are delivered back to the world of our own expectations by the arrival of the last frame. If we learn anything, or are changed by anything in this revolution of reels it's chiefly by shock, and the lesson rarely penetrates very deeply past the raising of the lights and the rolling of the credits. In the early years when cinema was the weekly fare of people trapped in the collapse of the Depression the serial entered the world of cinema, as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers fought the glorious fight against evil. As a form of literature advanced by the likes of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain through the medium of the printed journal, the episodic unveiling of an imaginative world left readers hanging and wishing for more. It brought the novel to the public in a way that made it an ongoing matter of conversation and made authors into meastros of popular sentiment. The movies brought us like our cliff hanging heroes into new worlds of possibility and imagination. Then we got television. The series. We can invent alternate worlds and fill them with characters and take them through situations as complex as situations that unfold in our consensual reality. This mirror held up to culture has depth that approaches immersion, and the tongue and cheek promotional clips on HBO about ongoing conversations around the water cooler reflect the total saturation and interpenetration of art and life, of the virtual and the real, that uniquely and increasingly characterizes our time. The virtual and real worlds are now part of a seamless web in which signal and response can no longer be clearly sorted one from the other. What characterizes the two worlds? One is arranged in hierarchies of moral certainty, like a well regulated machine advancing resolutely toward progress and apocalypse. The destination is fixed and predictable, like the formula that governs a novel or the 90 minute Hollywood feature. The new world carries little certainty, characterized instead by connection and complexity. Instead of simple and predictable exposition, crises and denouement, we encounter constantly shifting textures and emerging themes. Solutions lead us to unforeseen consequences, unexpected characters reveal unanticipated situations and plot lines peel away toward uncertain conclusions. We perceive the new world as a shifting fabric of sensory input, where what is written is relative and always subject to erasure or alteration. In the new world we are forced to arrange our own meanings, arrive at our own conclusions, and then we feed it all back as evolutionary stimulus for a continually mutating cultural organism. The woman who appears on the cover of our local newspaper today, arms outstretched in grief for the passing of Terri Schaivo, expresses a deeper inner grief for her loss of orientation, the lack of moral authority in a world collapsing all around. For those who invest so much in hierarchies of interpretation, be they political or religious, I can have little sympathy, for these are the ones used as tools by forces outside of themselves, and they aren't crying so much for Terri, as for the strange loss of their own souls. ____________________ This brings me back to the Wachowski's, who in this episode introduce the antithesis to what has gone before. As in the Matrix, where they explored the irreconcilable tensions between body, mind and spirit, in Doc Frankenstein they dramatize the battle between science and religion. My sense is that, as in the Matrix, a synthesis, if only temporary, will eventually be discovered. Until then, the philosophical speculation along with the tension and the mayhem, is likely to be spectacular. ____________________ Doc Frankenstein, part 4, 'Crusade' A page arranged around a Crusader's broadsword, with red-gold hilt, poised vertically with the point downward. On the top - right of the hilt, the weathered face of a man praying in shadows: "Lord, our father, we pray to you for the same courage that you gave your son, our savior, when he journeyed as these men must journey, into the desert to battle Satan." To the left of the hilt an armored and gloved hand with forefinger wrapped around the trigger of a large automatic combat rifle. A wooden cross dangles from red rosary beads wrapped around the rifle and through the trigger guard: "We ask you for teh strength to smite our enemy and--" On the bottom along the right of the blade, an army of modern infantry soldiers advances beneath the rear engines of a row of large cargo jets, with the symbol of the upright cross and sword boldly imprinted on their tails: "--the will to at long last purify the world of the profanity, preserving as is our sacred charge the sanctity of your truth." To the left we see from below that the man praying is a Cardinal of the Church, with the robes and red cap of office and a large jeweled crucifix hanging at his waist. Over his head, across a bright clouded sky a flight of hundreds of aircraft flies in formation toward battle: "Thy will be done." A tall and silent fortress, with high walls surrounding a formidable looking towered structure stands lonely and contained in the midst of a barren desert landscape. A single road leads from the massive gate out into the emptiness. Two voices are speaking somewhere near the top of the tower. "Hello tall, blue and handsome." "Hello Monica." "Are you ready for your hero's welcome." "That depends on what kind of hero's welcome." We see a cavernous interior room, with ceilings and balconies held up by thick pillars with golden lightning bolts painted on them. in the foreground is a tall, dark and buxom beauty, wearing high heels and a short , tight and provocative red dress. She fondles a long braid of exquisite black hair over one shoulder. "Well it was a tradition of the ancient Greeks to bathe their heroes in scented water before rubbing them down with warm oil." She sidles up to Frankenstein, who towers over her, looking down. We see that her dress has no back above the waist. Frankenstein: "I think they did the same thing to their fish." Monica: "If that doesn't work for you then how about a little kiss?" Close up kiss. We see up close that the woman has native American features. In fact, i will wager that this is the little girl rescued by Doc Frankenstein in a previous episode (#2 - "The Yeti"), all growed up. She kisses Frankenstein on the lips and steps back. Monica: "Welcome home, hero." Frankenstein: "There are a lot of people out there who would take umbrage at the use of that word." We see them in long shot, two figures dwarfed by the vast room with its paneled windows looking out over the desert. A desk and chair sit in the middle of the floor. Apparently this is Doc Frankenstein's office. Monica: "I don't care. You are a hero. You have saved so many, built a home for people who had none. You make dreams come true." Frankenstein: "I wish it were that simple." Monica: 'It is. You made my dreams come true. All of them but one." Frankenstein: "Monica, I thought we agreed--" Frankenstein reacts to something he senses outside of their conversation: "--Did you hear that?" Monica: "Frankie, relax. You just saved the President. No one is coming after you--" C-R-A-S-H-!-!-!-!-! A Cruise missile comes through one of the enormous windows, the cross and sword symbol painted on its tip and its sides. As shards of glass explode across the room Frankenstein leaps and grasps the missile just in front of the flame coming out of the rear..."Mmph!" As his boots make a deep furrow in the floor he pivots in a circle, throwing the missile back upon its course..."Urrr--" The missile blasts its way back out the window through which it entered... ...it spirals up around and around... ...toward the approaching aircraft from which it was apparently launched... The exploding plane is seen through the cockpit of another fighter craft. We hear the battle chatter... "Angel Leader, this is Gabriel Two--" We look at the reflective visors of a pilot's helmet, the cross and sword symbol reflected over each eye..."Gabriel One has gone to Big Daddy!' "Stay Tight Gabriel Two, you'll get your chance." We pull way back and see the awesome sight of a sky filled with aircraft, mostly fighter-bombers, heavily decked out with armaments, while cargo and personnel carriers fly below them over the rocky terrain. Every aircraft carries distinctive markings of cross and sword. "But before we can taste the succor of the Lord's heaven, let's show these freaks his hell!" "Holy Cleanse formation!" Monica stands before the shattered window, the sky at her back dotted with hundreds of incoming planes. "Why were there no alarms?" Frankenstein kneels in the foreground, holding one injured arm. "I don't know! Get to the Command Center! Seal off all population levels! Hurry!" A group of people in lab coats gaze out another window at the site of hundreds of incoming missiles. Hundred of people are fleeing across an immense interior courtyard while a huge explosion collapses a structure behind them. More people are fleeing. More missiles. More explosions. A sheltered interior space, where many people are assembled in a somewhat orderly fashion. Monica enters the Control Center. A man with glasses and clipboard turns to her and reports: "D-Level is hit! Evac transport is heavily damaged!" We see a lot of people waiting on suspended balconies, waiting for the okay to board a row of personnel shuttles poised in front of recessed hatches below the Control Room area. Suddenly the whole row of shuttles explodes in a fury of flame and destruction. Monica shouts into the intercom: "We are under attack on all fronts sir!" Someone screams: 'This ain't no attack--" We look down at the complex from high above, watching the descent of bombers as they launch their weapons at the buildings below. There are explosions everywhere. "--This is War." To be continued... _______________ * narrative based on "Doc Frankenstein" by the Wachowski Brothers, Burlyman Entertainment, #1, 2004. 9:27:00 AM    comment []

Radio. [base "]Right at the time of the Depression, when the economic capital of the world was shifting from stodgy London to New York[base ']s Gotham City and America was about to take on the dark and twisted mental powers of European philosophy turned into German Fascism, the comic book heroes of Superman and Flash Gordon appeared and began to play out for the imaginations of the children of a new scientific world, the return of the gods and the demons of the prescientific world[sigma] [sigma]We Americans, who are so intent on creating a culture of technological materialism, cannot take in esoteric lore directly; it has to find another way in, and so comic books, science fiction and movies are the back door.[per thou] - William Irwin Thompson, [base "]Coming Into Being[per thou] Marshall McLuhan referred to radio as the 'tribal drum,' a medium both pervasive and personal, functioning as an echo chamber between the listener and society. We listen and we feel a part of something. I belong to the 'tribe' of public radio while the Clear Channel crowds in the big cities with their ever present background of sound and music and talk and message, are manipulated and rewarded with a feeling that they belong. As long as I've been alive people have surrounded themselves with sound, manufactured and broadcast to hold them, shape their thoughts and consumer habits, and reel them in. The broadcast systems are a part of the industrial model, as is all conventional media before the time of the 'universal digital entertainment device' known as the modern personal computer. We pick up the paper and turn on the radio, or we curl up in front of the corporate feed on our favorite channels. While radio made us feel involved with one another television makes us passive and numb to the world. The 'beam' of central casting is held in fewer and fewer hands, all threatened by the prospect of losing control and thus, profits. As radio brought us the mass insanity of World War Two, television gave us the revulsion of Vietnam and then the spectacular and mysteriously bloodless video game illusions of the first and second Gulf Wars. Television appeared to be the perfect tool of social order as foretold by Orwell and Bradbury, until it became an extension of the computer. The personal computer, hooked into the Internet, brings all of the previous forms together in a manner that can only bring about anarchy in the context of the old forms of audio, video and print. As the content of every new form of media is the form that went before, the content of digital communication is television, radio and newspaper all rolled into one. The medium itself, however, is of an entirely different nature, carrying elements of all that goes before while transforming and threatening the old order in ways that the old systems can only perceive as anarchy. When I got my first Apple computer in 1984 the potentials of the digital revolution were only beginning to be realized. With a 300 baud modem (insanely slow by todays standards - but quite adequate for communicating text over telephone lines) I was able to join a quickly expanding network that had been seeded as the private realm of specialists and researchers but was quickly growing to include a worldwide mosaic of fellow travelers and geek revolutionaries discovering a powerful means for traveling anywhere instantly over the existing network of telecommunication that covered the earth. At first the medium was restricted to plain text (ASCII - American Standard Code for Information Interchange), and it was like passing notes in some semi-secret club of conspirators and magicians. Pretty soon there were ongoing discussions and forums and virtual communities of common interest, and it felt like taking part in a tribal circle. passing the talking stick from post to post. Sort of like letter writing but more intimate; like conversation but more formal, almost ritualistic in the way the text scrolls in sequence down the screen. Then came the graphic interface of the World Wide Web and the rarified wilderness became a crowded mall, and gradually all that was digital was absorbed or replicated as the worlds of radio and television and movies merge into that massive universe of signals. Yet, the medium is essentially different than all of the media it channels. Different in the way that we respond to it and in the way it changes us. It's tactile in some sense, like an expanding fabric that alters with our touch and the touch of every one who participates. To participate is to become an organelle in this enormous and endless body, with no center and no constant shape other than the shape of the earth and the shape we wish to give it at any given time. The freedom it gives us to create what we perceive is breathtaking, and the dangers are infinite. Yet, here in this wilderness one can sense the awakening angel of change. The revolutions and upheavals brought about in the age of radio and television were only a prelude to what's here and what's coming. The body of old is descending into rough chaos while the new body is being born. Doc Frankenstein, part 3, 'Gunslinger' What has gone before: The hero has made it to our modern world, where strong elements of distrust or even hatred are brewing. He recalls the past, when he took refuge in the arctic north, living in alienation until one day destroying a great beast who threatens a small child. _________________________ The large blue man hands the rescued child to a happy and grateful eskimo family. Wide smiles are breaking out everywhere as she is embraced in the arms of her mother. Frankenstein voice over: "They believed her dead. For the first time in my life I experienced real human gratitude. All humans, like all monsters, we're not the same." The blue man, wrapped in skins, walks away from the waving villagers and their gathering of igloos. His gaze is inward cast, with the beginning of what could almost be a look of incredulous satisfaction crossing his face. "Once more I began to wonder if there was somewhere I could fit into this world. If there were a people I could call family or a place I could call home." Frankenstein walks alone across the silent snows into the glowing mists of an arctic morning. "Thus like so many others before me, I set out for a land where it was said a man might forget his past and begin again. A new country where it was preached that all men were created equal." "America" We see a two page spread of the old west, filled with violence and chaos. A small army of horsemen ride from beneath a a gathering of tall boulders across a rocky desert landscape toward a lone figure that flails and kills in the foreground. A wagon is overturned and there are mangled bodies everywhere. In the center of the tableau, Frankenstein, dressed in jeans and boots and bandana, body riddled with bullet holes, fires a rifle at a passing rider, whose stomach explodes in bloody gore. The monster's right arm is raised high, crushing the body of a bearded man in one hand's grasp. He stands upon the broken bodies of torn and fallen enemies. Others advance firing pistols and rifles, soon to be swept away in his fury. "Land of the free and home of the Winchester repeating rifle. I believed that I had found a calling, a purpose. I had become the long arm of the law and I served justice for an average price of two bucks a head." The blue man stands in front of the Sheriff's office, a portly and satisfied looking white jowled gentleman leaning against a porch support in the background. Frankesnstein places a wad of cash in a cloth bag standing upon a tangle of ropes that have pulled up two wagons loaded over their brims with corpses. "I believed that I was doing a good thing, ridding the world of 'bad men'. But I, like these newly formed United States, was still very young." A young tow headed boy stares at a corpse in one of the wagons. Boy: "Pa? Pa?!" Frankenstein, walking past, notices the boy weeping before the body of his father. Boy: "Why Pa? Why?" We see Frankenstein's downward gaze. Voice over: "I knew what the boy had lost and more importantly I knew in the end that it would cost much more than two bucks a head." We look into the deep set eyes. "But while bad men often pay for their crimes--" A close up of the boy's face torn by tears as he clutches the still and lifeless form. "--fathers rarely do." A campfire throws the huge shadow of a seated Frankenstein against the earth and a large overlooking boulder. "An instrument of justice should not feel. An instrument of justice responds as a hammer responds to a trigger--" A rifle fires in the foreground, the bullets hitting Frankenstein squarely and knocking him off his seat. "--mechanically, efficiently--" The blue man draws his pistol and fires into the shadows, hitting the person firing the rifle. It's the young boy. "--executing the letter of the law without sentimentality or remorse." The dead face of the boy whose body sprawls across the desert soil. "An instrument of justice should not shed tears." The hand places a large rock on the top of a heap of others. "My father saw no reason to give me complete tear ducts." The face of Frankenstein, deeply frowning, eyes cast down, torn by an inner sorrow. "So when I wept for the boy, my eyes remained dry." We pull back to see a vast landscape of pinnacles and canyons in a golden morning light. A river winds far below, the figure of Frankenstein stands on the flat and narrow top of a lone butte, the piled rocks of the boy's grave at his feet. "I had not left my arctic tomb to become some-thing. I had left to become some-one. But in trying to fit in I had become part of a world of absolutes, a world of black and whites, of good and bad, a world constructed of iron-clad truths and laws immutable as steel. Yet how does an eight foot tall, blue-skinned man, resurrected by a lightning bolt fit into such a world?" "It was then that I realized it would never be a matter of "fitting in" for me. If i wanted a place in this world I would have to carve one out. And once I did, I knew I would spend the rest of my life defending it." To be continued... _______________ * narrative based on "Doc Frankenstein" by the Wachowski Brothers, Burlyman Entertainment, #1, 2004. 9:26:11 AM    comment []

The Yeti Why Frankenstein? Why the Wachowski's? Why Comic Books? Anyone who really knows me knows that I've been a comic book freak at least since college. Since those early days when the whole comic world was divided between Marvel and DC I've been a Marvel kind of a guy. I like my characters to have real problems, I mean, like those related to being in the world as it appears to be. I never could relate to Superman, who was always so perfect and squeaky clean. Even after they tried to make him a bit more 'human' in the seventies I wasn't convinced. Yeah, finally Frank Miller came along and turned "Batman" into a real 'dark' knight and DC finally entered the world of neurosis populated by my favorites, like "Spiderman" and "The Hulk" and my all time number one, "Doctor Strange." Still, by the time DC caught on to the fact that super heroes didn't have to be always, well, 'super,' the Marvel universe had long been inhabited by characters who navigated realms of deep discontent. My favorite themes were time and inter-dimensional travel, best portrayed in "Doctor Strange" (Marvel) and "Aztec Ace" (Eclipse). "Aztec Ace" was brilliant but short lived, coming out of an independent label in the mid eighties, when Reagan made many of us want to get out of here to...anywhere. The Ace was an outlaw and a scientist whose headquarters were in ancient Mexico and who had a crush on an incarnation of Cleopatra that he met in a New York pawnshop in the forties. Doctor Strange was an explorer of inner realms, able to travel to the most bizarre spaces of mind and space. He was always slightly weird and slightly apart from his fellow humans, bridging as he did the gap between our dimension and the outer darkness. Even his long time girlfriend was from a universe outside of this one. Except for a bizarre period in the late 80's when Marvel tried to make him more relevant to a younger audience, he didn't have the usual exaggerated super hero musculature, and his costume was sort of archaic. His beat was the occult in all of its forms and he was more of an outsider than any character except maybe the Silver Surfer. When the series eventually faded with its aging audience sometime during the 90's I pretty much stopped paying attention to comics. These days, however, a new renaissance has brought Stephen Strange back, in a newly retold version of his origins, as an arrogant neurosurgeon who injures his hands in an accident and plunges into dark cynicism only to emerge as an apprentice and heir to the Sorcerer Supreme!! So far there have been four issues, and they're fantastic, owing not a little to the Wachowski brothers and their revelation of the Matrix and its 'reality' that lies behind our common consensus. In the modern version we see the confused and bitter doctor embarking on his fated quest, armed with everything our generations has learned of the spirit since Strange was originally introduced in those confused and unravelling times of the early sixties. Oh yes, we have since all moved well along into a postmodern universe where reality is shaped by perception, and in these shifting times I find the Doc more of a common comfort than ever. I'm happy to have the opportunity to introduce my 14 year old son to these 'strange' tales of a world unhinged. Nowadays in the dawning age of CGI special effects comic books are taking over an enormous segment of the movie industry, and are becoming more acceptable to the adult mainstream I suppose. Those of us who've been true believers across all these years know that comics hold that special quality of mirroring our inner worlds as we deal with the outer one. They are like vitamins of awareness boosted by endless imagination in a world of constant struggle. They take us into realms that are impossible and show us that even out there we can be human. Doc Frankenstein, part 2 Where we've been: Doc Frankenstein, who is the very same Frankenstein that stalks through that very famous book by Mary Shelley, has somehow entered the here and now, and narrowly saved the Presidential bacon from the fire of destruction by an enormous lizard monster constructed by somebody off-camera with the name of 'Yellow Sven.' The President, who strongly resembles our current president, stands in his control room looking somewhat conflicted, and somewhat less than grateful. Now, we will take a journey across the time that connects the original creation of Shelley's monster to these events of the present. __________________ Shot from above, a rather bulbous looking private jet, sporting no less than five engines on each wing, flies high above a landscape of desert river canyon. The voice of Frankenstein recounts recent events to someone over a radio frequency: "-- The enormous exposed brain was the Achilles heel after all--" Whoever the Doc is talking to replies: "They're calling you a hero. Hot-stuff here got all teary watching Jennings rabbit on about you standing between the symbols of civilization and the forces of destruction." We see the Doc in profile in the cockpit where he's piloting the plane. In front of him on the control console is a video screen. Frankenstein: "What about O'Reilly?" Voice: "Who cares what that A-Hole says--" On the screen is the image of a crusty bewhiskered cowboy type holding a shot glass in one hand, face obscured by the wide brim of a cowboy hat. Frankenstein: "I have told you Tex, this country is conservative because this country is afraid." Tex: "And I told you Doc, hot air from an asshole usually stinks." As Frankenstein gazes grimly and thoughtfully into a gorgeous sunset his narrative voice over from the previous episode continues: "Tomorrow the words "Menace" and "Monster" will be used as torches to guide the mob once more to my door. The uncertainty is not whether the mob is coming but rather how big and well equipped it will be this time." "I wonder if there can be an end to this cycle or whether the only peace possible will be found at the bottom of my grave." "Long ago I once looked for that peace..." We see a frozen arctic landscape with cracked expanses of ice and cold peaks thrusting up into the golden sky of a setting midnight sun. A lone figure casting a long shadow in the mid distance runs and leaps across the broken surface. "Fleeing my father's death I sought the only hope for comfort I imagined possible in the boreal embrace of arctic ice." We see the figure in close-up and realize that it's a small eskimo child, wrapped in a hooded cloak, face half in shadow, tightly braided hair pointing away from her look of stark terror. A large and long armed figure can be seen closing the distance in pursuit of the terrified fleeing youngster. "I built a tomb with frozen slabs of current that I cut with guilt and mortared with self-abnegation." Suddenly the surface of ice gives away and the girl plunges beneath the surface into a deep icy cavern. She raises her head and turns to stare upward, where she sees the pursuing creature silhouetted against the newly yawning gap from which she dropped. "Safely interred, I began a descent into the oblivion that I prayed would at last bring peace and quiet to my mind." The girl curls into a tight ball as the huge hunting Beast, mighty and frightful and covered in white fur, visage like a mad ape's with wide toothed mouth gaping below blood red eyes, arms extending massive palms and fingers tipped with long knifelike talons leaping down to tower over her, ready to destroy and devour utterly its prey. "But once more--" A blue hand suddenly reaches out and grabs one enormous furry wrist. The beast , distracted, casts its eyes to one side to contemplate what has interrupted its fury. "--life intervened." The blue hand, attached to a long arm, flings the beast against a wall of ice. The creature rises, enraged and fearful, contemplating the figure before it, clothed in skins, gazing calmly out of strange eyes in a skull made of assembled parts, hands curled into fists, standing between the hunter and its victim, whose small form looks on from the floor of the cave. "My father had created me and through his eyes I beheld myself and the world he had given me. All I ever saw through those eyes was a world of fear. Fear of death. Fear of difference, of responsibility and consequence. Fear of tomorrow. My father's fear had made me and orphaned me. It had driven me, hunted and haunted me." The beast leaps to destroy this new and unexpected enemy. The blue man raises his arms and grabs the creature by its upper limbs. "As the Yeti charged I knew that fear could finally kill me." The blue fingers clutch at the apelike face now filled with bewildered rage and fear. "I felt its power in my arms, the hunger on its breath." The beast is flung to the ground. "I knew it had nearly consumed me but after that day I believed--" The blue man pummels the creature into a bloody pulp, fragments of skull and jaw and gouts of gore spraying over the frozen earth. "--that I would never fear anything again." The blue man stands erect and still over the supine form of the dead creature. Behind him the young frightened girl looks on. "My father was dead. That day I realized that I did not have to live as he had." The blue man turns to look at the girl. "That day, life, once more, offered a second chance." ...to be continued. _________________ * narrative based on "Doc Frankenstein" by the Wachowski Brothers, Burlyman Entertainment, #1, 2004. 9:25:24 AM    comment []

Happy Easter Reverend Phelps! Since my best friend committed suicide several weeks ago I've been unable to find words that can express the way I feel. It's actually been pretty difficult from moment to moment to know what exactly that is. I go in and out of sadness, guilt, acceptance, anger. There's been many people to help me through all of this and I deeply appreciate the expressions of care and sympathy. Meanwhile the world gets on, and a nagging voice urges me to get on with it. Where to start? A hIgh school student commits mass murderer with a smile and a wave while American soldiers kill Italian reporters who don't like our war and Terri Schaivo starves to death on television (what a horrible fate for someone with an eating disorder - to have one's demon so exposed). The Christian Right grows more sullen and ugly by the minute, demanding a "culture of life" while actively promoting wars and executions. The pro-lifers demand that anyone who stands in their way be killed and the born again hope and pray for bloody retribution at the end of days. The pope totters on a window sill and Reverend Phelps of Topeka, Kansas threatens to bring his extended family to Santa Fe to carry signs outside of our "sodomite whorehouses disguised as churches" saying "Fags Are Going To Hell" because we expressed too loudly our compassion for those who are persecuted for who they are. America goes to hell and tries to drag the whole world down with it. But the world resists and so the wars continue. Maybe it's too soon. I have to grieve. It's better to spend the time in alternate worlds of comic books and television and movies. "Deadwood" and "The West Wing" and the new "Doctor Strange." I've been entertaining myself by catching up on two years of "The West Wing," which was the last television program I regularly watched before the creator quit and the scripts all went to hell. Seems that the show has finally found it's legs again as it runs an election for a new virtual president. It's Jimmy Smits (the Democrat) versus Alan Alda ( the Republican) with Martin Sheen looking on as the old man coach and referee marching off into his legacy. Every one of these characters are too good to be true, but it still gives me some encouragement to fantasize a country where politicians (even Republicans) can act with integrity. Anyway, I catch up by reading the blow-by-blow description of past episodes on the weekly http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/ website. We're not talking synopsis here, we're talking detailed shot by shot expositions (each one is 15- 17 pages long) with criticism, sarcasm, political rant and tangent discourse all freely thrown in. It's great fun and often better than watching the show. Anyway, in honor of Reverend Phelps and his evil brood, about to descend upon our fair city in these times of woe I decided I'd try my hand at a similar approach with a related form: the Comic Book. My feelings toward Mr. Phelps and our insane nation are captured quite accurately in a newly launched comic book title by the Wachowski Brothers, who brought us "The Matrix Trilogy" with all of it's tangents and spinoffs and who in the process introduced us to the pursuit and possibility of philosophical discourse in a digital century. Their comic is called: Doc Frankenstein Cover: The Man of Blue with corpse colored skin laced with stitches and bolts that hold together his rescued parts, standing in front of what looks like a mass of urban ruins nestling the enormous fanged and taloned body of some sort of gigantic fallen beast straight out of a Japanese horror flick. The Doc stands tall, with one arm balancing a repeater cannon slung over one shoulder and the other hefting a portable rocket launcher. A golden bolt of lightning on the shoulder of his torn shirt echoes a similar motif bracketing the comic's title. First shot: Long three-quarters overhead of the White House, it's windows aglow. Outside appears to be threatened by storm and the grounds are scattered with wreckage and trees with dead and blackened limbs. Voice over, with electric voice bubbles that suggest communications chatter: "My God! He's done it!" "The monster is down! Repeat--the monster is down!" "Which One?" Pull back to wide overhead shot of a giant lizard-like beast collapsed amidst a ruined cityscape crowded and snarled with smashed skyscrapers and the crumbling remains of government office buildings. Silhouetted against the beast, in the foreground, an oversized human figure dangles by one arm from a mangled and vaguely cross-shaped girder, the other arm hefting a large powered rifle of some kind, with a glowing power-pack dangling off his shoulder. "Yellow Sven's Behemouth!" The communications voice refers to the lizard-beast, whose brains are brightly arrayed along one smoking avenue. Cut to: Military Control Room. Low ceilings and walls covered in map displays above a long conference table while functionairies in uniform assume various positions around a burdened looking man in shirt sleeves. The man looks like George Bush. "It's dead as gun control!" An agent with FBI earphones passes a message to the man in shirt sleeves. "Thank the Good Lord Almighty!" G.W. exhales into the room. "Whatever you say Mr. President. But from what I saw the Good Lord didn't have anything to do with it. If anyone deserves our thanks..." A look of utter dismay bordering on fear distorts a close up of the president's face. On the opposite page, in full frontal, the title declares in inflated classic monster movie typeface, "...It's Frankenstein" We stare in medium close-up at the grim visage of the hanging figure, clothed in battle uniform, utility belt and holster slung around his waist, intense and concentrated frown on the clenched face. His visage is wreathed in light and shadow, as if both found it to be their natural home. The eyes penetrate all doubts as they peer with fierce intensity, underneath the stapled brow. Spatters of purplish blood cover his grey pants and buttoned overshirt. Smoke rises from the ruins all around him. A low voice unfolds itself in an undertone beneath a series of flashback images. "You think you know me." A somewhat medieval looking laboratory, suggesting a mess of dark obsessions. The shadowed edges and corners of the room are filled with debris of cast off experiments and interrupted processes, the fragments of a smashed container, the liquid and biologic contents spilled on the floor, body parts and dissected skeletons carelessly flung aside, bloody knives underneath corpses stripped of their skin, rats fighting for scraps of flesh, bottles filled with substances containing preserved creatures and organs, flasks of stoppered chemicals hanging in nets, a looming wall of books, a pair of living brains suspended in large laboratory jars, and in one brightly lit corner, a slanted table. On the table is the form of a human, arms in restraints stretched wide to either side, metal clamp over waist and groin. The body is held together with rude looking stitches and staples across legs and thighs and arms and torso. Over the face of this creature hovers a slim and intent looking man who severs a thread with a pair of surgical scissors. "My name is hermaneutic. It has become a meaning, a symbol, a tale. For some my name is a warning. For others it can mean anything from blasphemy to a joke. To hear my name is to know what happened that "dreary November night," to understand the moral created by my father as he manically stitched the rotting cadaver of the sacred to the everlasting dream of the profane." "Yet what you know, all you know, is the meaning of my father's life. He may have given me his name but his voice and these words are my own." "My name is Frankenstein." The human creature form is raised into the firey heavens on a table of crossed beams, and the lightning of a divine storm is channeled out of red skies and through the electrodes placed upon the body, and the creature, awake, appears to scream. "I am a cesarean inflicted upon the womb of reality. My eyes were opened and my voice was born of thunder." "My birth saw the deaths of your holiest of truths, I have been called everything from monster to messiah...and everything you know about me is about to change." ______________ * End of Part One of "Doc Frankenstein" by the Wachowski Brothers, Burlyman Entertainment, #1, 2004. 9:24:37 AM    comment []

Midnight on the Coast Highway I saw Hunter S. Thompson give a presentation once at Denver University. He came into the room carrying a plastic cooler filled with bottles of vodka and whisky and six packs of beer, all of which he proceeded to imbibe, along with several joints of marijuana, during the ensuing proceedings. We were there to see a legend, who had given voice to our own deep sense of collective betrayal, and he wasn't going to disappoint us. This was the public side of Hunter, the part of him that played to his own public image, which at that time was in the full curve of its ascendency. Writing is a solitary sport, sometimes agonizing and sometimes exhilarating, but always the product of a strange battle of voices that fight for attention in the solitary spaces of our inner life. We all hear those voices, and it's the writers who dedicate themselves to corralling them into some kind of comprehensible shape. The trick is to ride free on the ocean of thoughts, while staying focused on what it is you're trying to do or say. Thompson was a writer who could listen to those voices that live way out beyond the boundaries of radio chatter and then pierce the barrier of darkness we keep around us to avoid seeing exactly who we are. Hunter S. Thompson was an American writer who embodied in his prose the essence of what it means to be a patriot in a country that too often forgets itself. The following passage by Thompson is one of my favorite pieces of writing. It expresses for me the essence not only of a good run on a motorcycle, but what it means to dare the boundaries of what we know, and what it means to be a writer, both free and in complete control of the material. Most of all it expresses Hunter at his best. I've been known to read this out loud at parties. ___________________________________________ Midnight on the Coast Highway All of my life my heart has sought a thing I cannot name. - Remembered line from a long-forgotten poem Months later, when I rarely saw the Angels, I still had the legacy of the big machine - four hundred pounds of chrome and deep red noise to take out on the Coast Highway and cut loose at three in the morning, when all of the cops were lurking over on 101. My first crash had wrecked the bike completely and it took several months to have it rebuilt. After that I decided to ride it differently: I would stop pushing my luck on curves, always wear a helmet, and try to keep within range of the nearest speed limit...my insurance had already been cancelled and my drivers license was hanging by a thread. So it was always at night, like a werewolf, that I would take the thing out for an honest run down the coast. I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking to run only a few long curves to clear my head, but in a matter of minutes I'd be out at the beach with a sound of the engine in my ears, the surf booming up on the sea wall, and a fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz...not even a gas station in the whole seventy miles, the only public light along the way is an all-night diner down around Rockaway Beach. There was no helmet on those nights, no speed limit, and no cooling it down on the curves. The momentary freedom of the park was like the one unlucky drink that shoves a wavering alcoholic off the wagon. I would come out of the park near the soccer field and pause for a moment at the stop sign, wondering if I knew anyone parked over there on the midnight humping strip. Then into first gear, forgetting the cars and letting the beast wind out...thirty-five, forty-five...then into second and wailing through the light at Lincoln Way, not worried about green or red signals but only some other werewolf loony who might be pulling out, too slowly, to start his own run. Not many of these - and with three lanes on a wide curve, a bike coming hard has plenty of room to get around almost anything - then into third, the boomer gear, pushing seventy-five and the beginning of a windscream in the ears, a pressure on the eyeballs like diving into water off a high board. Bent forward, far back on the seat, and a rigid grip on the handlebars as the bike starts jumping and wavering in the wind. Taillights far up ahead coming closer, faster, and suddenly - zaaapppp - going past and leaning down for a curve near the zoo, where the road swings out to the sea. The dunes are flatter here, and on windy days sand blows across the highway, piling up in thick drifts as deadly as any oil slick...instant loss of control, a crashing, cartwheeling slide and maybe one of those two-inch notices in the paper the next day: "An unidentified motorcyclist was killed last night when he failed to negotiate a turn on highway 1." Indeed...but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there's no sound except wind. Screw it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes. But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right...and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it...howling through a turn to the right, and then to the left and down a long hill to Pacifica...letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge....The Edge....There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others - the living - are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions. - San Francisco, 1965 from: Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the death of the American dream, Gonzo Papers Vol. 3, by Hunter S. Thompson, Simon and Schuster, 1990. 9:23:13 AM    comment []