#20 -- Muse's "Black Holes & Revelations" Reviewed | * * * *

"It makes you question your own ability to kick ass, then gives you all the tools you need to strut across the peak of Olympus Mons like you don't give a shit that you can't breathe methane or carbon dioxide. Go forth and #SLAM_DANCE!"

Human imagination is a horrifying thing. This album's cover features a bunch of REM-looking motherfuckers sitting on Mars drinking tea. Calmly. Something in the artists' lives inspired them (imagining the electrical whirring of the human mind) to make the music that inspired the album, that inspired the cover, that inspired us to listen to the music that made us imagine a Acropolis-themed nightclub housed on a space-zeppelin's lower deck orbiting Mars' second moon, Phobos. 

Musically, this was our Star Wars moment, our Lord of the Rings moment. It yells through an ancient yelling-tube crafted from a series of interlaced woolly mammoth tusks: "There is hope in the universe, even for the dust." The soaring optimism on track 2, the shredding bass/guitar intro on track 7, the teeth-gritting that becomes the first and only moment a man has head-banging to trumpet music on track 11. The entire album puts you in your place. It makes you question your own ability to kick ass, then gives you all the tools you need to strut across the peak of Olympus Mons like you don't give a shit that you can't breathe methane or carbon dioxide. Go forth and #SLAM_DANCE! 

The album, Black Holes & Revelations by Muse, is so violent in its love and in its hatred. It sees the good that is taken by the bad things, making the love downright Byronic and the hate paranoid. Just like real life, actually. Black Holes & Revelations is the collision of space-faring gunslingers riding into battle against a Machiavellian motherfucker with no face and a Brazilian lilt. It begins with track 1, 'Take a Bow,' which isn't a track 1 in the way that, say, 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' is, because 'Take a Bow' has actual words. Tonally, it's a stage-setter, but musically, it's a bookend. You know, bookends, those heavy, pretty things that keep your books standing up? You need two of them, and 'Take a Bow' props up the beginning of the album, giving you a tall ledge to jump off of head-first. 'Take a Bow' welcomes you into a world bigger than all of us, then asks you if you'd be okay with breathing through a bamboo shoot under a murky pond while somebody you don't know shows you photographs of light bulbs. Chunky, prophetic space-rock and rolling drumbeats present us with a galaxy of corrupted emotions to chose from. Somebody is to blame for these transgressions and we're going into fucking space to find our answers. 

Ever been water-skiing? You should, water sports, lake games, things like that, they're all fun. Track 2 is 'Starlight,' an emotionally-simple but technically demanding song, and it's basically the sensation of drinking upper-middle-class malt-liquor while water-skiing. It's a comforting, rapid heartbeat that makes you smile without any worry of offending somebody's parents. It's PG-13. It's Live Free or Die Hard. There are explosions and a calm offer to join what's about to happen. Just don't fade away, alright? We might travel far and we might forget the people that we love if we aren't careful. So, just, please, promise not to fade away. This will be dangerous. Okay? Good. Because shit is about to get heavy. Ever played the greased watermelon game? It's a lake game. You should, it's innocent fun (really! (REALLY!! (it's just retrieving a buttered watermelon from the bottom of a lake.))). But it's slippery, and it's tough to hang onto, and for no good reason, you want to grip it and eat it. Enter track 3. 

'Supermassive Black Hole' is the heaviest hunk of spiky-sticky gravity ever to knock us upside the head. It'll make you stub your toe. It draws blood. It's a dance party on a dying sun when you first arrive. This is the theme-song to every dark-haired girl that's ever ignored you. Two things are happening on this track. First, you are powerless, because the lyrics are secretly about what a pussy you are, and why that dark-haired girl could probably level you with her eyes or with the laser-blade she keeps in. . . wherever. Secondly, however, you don't care, and you'll rock out anyway. 

Now, 'Map of the Problematique' is a tragic moment in an alley behind a very nice restaurant. Your stomach is full of expensive food and there's this beautiful catharsis that you think is on the other end of booting it all up, but you really want to ride it out to tell people you beat food poisoning. Your legs feel like noodles. The song makes you vibrate for a good reason. It couldn't have possibly gone this badly, but it did, and now a lonely light is making your grime-caked thoughts so real and immediate. As a sequel to 'Supermassive Black Hole,' it's clear that the "you are powerless" suggestion from the earlier track conquered the "you don't care" declaration. Inside the Sonic Vortex -- which was designed by a misguided alien race whose name you can't pronounce with a human tongue, and is built to remove meat from skeleton -- and between you and your destination, there are a trillion-trillion images that you can't cope with. The bridge on this track is an F-22 Raptor attack, the time compression that you wanted to think wasn't there is in fact there. Drive Angry is a movie starring Nicholas Cage -- 'Map of the Poblematique' has a solo that makes you Yell AWESOME!

Fresh off of your Ice Cream Sandwich Guitar Solo Skydive on the last song, you're dumped into the same despair-choked wasteland where Roger Waters probably hung out back in the late 1970's. There might be no coming back from this misery. 

Defeated, we move to 'Solider's Poem,' and the beginning of the passionate reflection. We mourn the lost. All the women in this town are shockingly beautiful but each and every one was left at the altar. Nobody will tell you why! The one-ton melancholyphant in the room is that there's a tone of self-pity to the vocals, which is hardly righteous. It's proof that Muse is capable of more intimate sadness and not just shouty-pouty glamorous loneliness. There's just a few things that need to be said, most notably: you won't get your way in life, it's possible nobody will remember you, and you probably did die back there in the Sonic Vortex. Which means your Ice Cream Sandwich Guitar Solo Skydive probably didn't happen. You're dead now. You'll never play greased watermelon again.

'Invincible,' track 6, resurrects the dead! We want it to be played at sunset at the start of the third act of a movie where our hero has just defeated and eaten an anthropomorphic lion demi-god (directed by Tarsem Singh). Be reassured that no matter the medium -- music, book, movie -- nobody dies in sci-fi. There are ghosts in the guitar, and those ghosts can play sitar. From here, we realize that we're stronger outside of hatred and although there is a thrumming marching snare, the people marching aren't in unison. They aren't marching at all, these souls are straight-up walking out of hell in street clothes, revived by the call that as one, against the threat that's bigger than all of us, we aren't helpless. This is the revelation. We went inside the black hole, and at first, there was no way to fight it, it was too big, too complex, but during the struggle, it's revealed that nothing is all-powerful. We're fighters, not lovers.

'Assassin.' Track 7 is called 'Assassin.' It. Kicks. Ass. This is a song that makes you want to sprint, makes you want to dodge bullets, makes you want to hip-check a child into the boards -- 'Assassin' is a song that makes shrooming and then Tweet-casting the Götterdämmerung cycle from Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen seem like a good idea. It is a hard-shelled taco filled with cheese and crystal methamphetamine, eaten in fast motion while Bruce Lee reads aloud the final controntation between Snape and Dumbledore from Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince. Suddenly, we're going to war! There are no more dance parties, no more lost loves, we've learned that despite finding strength in each other, things are going to get harder before they get easier. The vocals don't have many words -- they're elongated, elegantly matched to the gunfire bass-line. Now is the time for action. Now is the time for throwing stars!

But how? Throwing stars are impracticable! 'Exo-Politics' comes next and we realize that although we have identified our enemy as a tangible entity, he is exceedingly complex. New-found optimism gives way to a series of frightening heart attacks, each more encrushening (not a word) than the last -- things might not be as they seem. There are the steady drums in the background and a more carefully-thinking guitar in the foreground, contemplating options as calmly as one can, given the conspiratorial diorama we're in the midst of. They're here for our minds, a terrifying notion. So what can we do? We can wait. We have to blend in, take our time, focus hard, and strike when the time is right. 

Things return to something more acoustic and personal on the next track. 'City of Delusion' is a collapsing world. Who was the mad genius that built a sand-castle inside a snow-fort? What will happen when there's nothing left to believe in? Can we trust anybody? Can we trust ourselves? It's entirely possible, lyrics asking if we should just tear these walls down with any justification, that there is no escape at this point. Even when we know our enemy, even when we have hope, there's the chance that we are lying to ourselves. All bets are off -- at this point, just buy an antique Triumph and don't bother with any insurance, because if (when!) you wreck it, your bones and brains will resemble electric eels. Perhaps we're just desperate for something better than sitting around and waiting to die. But that's just a slow-motion version of the same death! A gunslinging trumpet sounds across the battlefield and the world's foundation shakes. Reality has been broken and there's no telling what might be left when the shaking is over. Will we be justified? Will we be saved? Will have been right about you all along? 

It's the mythic dark in 'Hoodoo,' the second to last (canonically) song. Night and the world have certainly fallen. It isn't entirely dark but not entirely better, and there's a somber, far-off suggestion that we should rebuild. Is it an idea or a person we've dragged out of the rubble and are mourning over? Then the piano kicks in, the funeral dirge joins it, and we watch the invincible souls leave the crumbling world that we attempted to save. You think about the party you'd like to throw next weekend, but then remember that everybody's dead from a disease called: World-Imploded. It's sad, because it should've been us. It shouldn't have been you, and for that, we're sorry. A twangy guitar punctuates every final apology, thoughtfully twirling in a human way in the back of our heads. It's too late. 

Years pass. The sun has risen and fallen and risen again. Out of the ash come the 'Knights of Cydonia.' The baddest fucking song in existence. It is the same sound that the fire-GEARZZZ make when God activates his Jurassic dinosaur-making machine. The drums are the pounding hoof-beats of King Midas' 5-legged Steampunk War-Chimera. He's holding onto what's golden. This ruined world remains and we'll carry on, fighting, protecting what's left, hearts heavy, yes, but never giving up and never giving in. The trumpet returns, sounding the arrival of a new age of tragic cyber-heroes, flawed, white-hot Cosmobots and red-hot cowgirls that ride mecha-steeds in recline-saddle because they can. It's introspective and rapid in its approach to the apocalypse. 'Knights of Cydonia' sends a message back in time as a warning. Watch for the Fool-King, he will attempt to ruin us all! You go back, we'll hold them off here, going down fighting for our survival! Streaking across deserts, riding into battle, there is no force, no defeat, nothing that can stop the continual rise of good against evil. The guitar is a Great Wall of Sound, wonders one through seventy of the NEO-ANCIENT world, and it creates a gravity-well stronger than any bookend. 

The scariest thing imaginable is something that you personally imagine. Black Holes & Revelations is just like you imagined it.

* * * *

(out of 4)

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#19 -- The Stonecutter

"The view was always the same, it was mostly just the colors that changed, really. It was always the same temperature, the same water, the same sky, the same sounds -- only the color changed." 

As time went by, the world began to rebuild itself around him. Things were quiet. He didn't feel the blood in his ears at first. It was his lips splitting open. That was how it began.

The Stonecutter's skiff drifted on through the doldrums and the leviathan still kept quiet.

The doldrums draped across his horizon, sometimes blue, mostly green and purple or something in between. The water was crystal, and every night, once the clouds were drawn out of sight, the doldrums became a lone sphere expanding into, and past, the stars. It was a sight that made the Stonecutter sick at first, but as the days passed, he felt himself becoming more accustomed to it. He didn't want to. To him, he felt acclimation to this place meant he was being separated from the place he'd left.

He wondered where he was. He focused hard and he could picture a face that he sort of recognized. There was the memory but when he grasped for the tool that would make it real and correct, the skiff wobbled, making him exhale, the doldrums coming back into view. It was just as quiet here. He looked around. He had a bucket in the skiff with him. He also had long pole that had a blunt point on one end and an oversized claw hammer on the other.

His skin started sucking closer to his bones. The clothes still fit him, yes -- the warm coat, the boots whose soles had small ruberized cactus spines, and the yellow necktie -- but his body felt a bit lighter. Easy winds pushed him around nowadays. It was a bleached-out, paralyzed feeling. He imagined he'd be buoyant if he fell into the water, like petrified wood. A few bits of moisture tinged his fingers when he let his hand fall close to the surface, yet he somehow, in a moment of clarity, made sure not to touch the water. There had to be an important reason for that, his instincts had flashed through his body so quickly, commanding him not to touch the water, no matter what. The doldrums were talking to the parts of him that he couldn't control. It would help him survive. The doldrums wanted him here, alive, for some reason, that was crystal clear, keeping him away from clear thoughts and separating him from reality. They wanted him out of where he had been and did not want him to get to where he was going and it had done well so far. It was against him. That very thought set him off so badly into an emotional, choking fit that he started to thrash violently in the little boat. It rocked with no rhythm, hog-tying his anger that wouldn't shake off, once almost capsizing, he curled into himself, grasping for calm, for something solid, only to be shaken back to the dark night waters by the waves beating on the edge of the skiff.

It wouldn't let him look away, wouldn't let him shut his eyes. It was keeping him here in the sleepless darkness with the sea of stars. This damn diamond net.

The sun was going to come up soon. The stars gave way, the waves had gone black. Orange becoming yellow becoming green becoming blue made the line between water and sky vivid again, a sight that made the Stonecutter willingly sit up straight in the skiff, staring at the horizon's meniscus.

He steadied himself now. He breathed out, slowly, then inhaled, and breathed out again even slower for a long, long time. As the light climbed, it made a narrow path of gold from one end of his vision to the other. It rolled over the skiff and he had to squint or stop looking at it. He did neither though. His eyeballs teared, he saw spots, and faced away, over the side into the water.

The black and blue bubbles still fogged his vision, and he loosened his tie so he could breathe easier and cough. After a few minutes of semi-blindness, he slapped at the water in defiance, rubbing some in his eyes. The Stonecutter lay face-down in the skiff for a whole day, making himself smell the brine that had bonded with the hull. If he needed to, he reminded himself that he could suck some flavor out of the wood again to keep from feeling crazy. By night, he just wanted the morning to grow faster, thinking that the force out there in the doldrums might sleep during the day and he could finally rest under the sun’s warmth. He held his breath. He lay still. The inevitable light blanketed him, sinking him down under a soft weight. The skiff's pressed hard on his ribs, making him spit a sort of recognizable bile. It hurt, but he was indifferent now, turning over onto his back, conceding defeat.

He resigned that not much would happen. Days passed with no sleep. The view was always the same, it was mostly just the colors that changed, really. It was always the same temperature, the same water, the same sky, the same sounds -- only the color changed.

His ear was pressed against the hull. The vibration came first. He inhaled, pushed his ear harder, and held his breath. Then came the impact. A thud, like a medium-sized stone plunking into a well, but this song was being sung in reverse. He didn't move because he felt another vibration before the second impact hit the skiff, a little bit bigger, yet airy. The third one was the lightest but he didn't hear it, already sitting up. Three fish, and soon a fourth and fifth, floated to the surface. They bumped off of each other, off of his tiny craft, and the smaller ones were even bounced by the air bubbles starting to form. After a minute, he could count fifteen or twenty dead fish, and after two minutes, he couldn't keep track of them all.

He took one that looked easy to grip, sliced its belly with the claw hammer -- gutting it rather quickly -- and picked a bit of meat out from between the finer bones. It was raw and very salty. He cupped a hand into the water, and managed a small drink. He swished it in his mouth, feeling it soften his tongue. Then he swallowed it. The skiff shook a little when he coughed before he smiled. The water was fresh and it was clean, but otherwise, it was not particularly tasty. It had a combustible, oily tang to it, but he thought that might just be the fish meat’s aftertaste. It was the fact that the fish had been warm when he ate it that worried him, as if it had been cooking, simmering itself alive in the water. He sucked on the skiff's wood and then spat as much flavor out of his mouth as he could.

The dead fish's eyes popped out when he squeezed it. "Well, this is certainly different," he said, throwing it as far as he could. He looked away from the sun where the last bits of night had just now faded. The dead fish stopped coming to the surface. Then, three long, full breaths later, he held himself still, and the bubbles stopped too. "Weird different."

A gigantic cloud took form and it was white but thick, blocking half the horizon. The leviathan! It has found him. It had never lost him.

It was moving close, and he could tell it was not being blown by the wind because there was a breeze nipping his neck and his eyes kept dry. The gigantic cloud didn't roll the way most clouds did, and should, he thought. "Nope, that's different," he said, sort of repeating himself, sort of forgetting he’d said. "Nope, that’s different. Just more different." White and gigantic against blue sky, the cloud made acres of the still, deep ocean. The hot ocean, running like hell, evacuating itself of its fish and air minutes earlier, looked like a hole had opened on the face of the doldrums. More wind itched his neck. He kept still and it went on itching. The breeze stopped suggesting and started demanding as he stood up tall, knees aching to keep balance in the skiff.

The cloud moved against the wind. The hole in the ocean was dragged along beneath it. Light spiked the water around its perimeter. The surface had become so still that the light could find its way right through it, kind of bonding with it, and when the wind cut out, he wanted to believe the water was so shallow here that he could see the ocean floor. But his knee buckled when the wind stopped and he fell on his back, undignified. More distance was closed between him and the gigantic, unbending cloud that moved against the wind. He refused to take his eyes off it. Because now he could hear it too.

It wasn't like soft wind, which you really feel just as much as you hear, and he wouldn't mistake it for a total absence of sound. There was noise. Two of the same thing rubbing against one another. Heat touching heat. Water touching water. Sand touching sand. Always in equal measure. What he saw should be louder and he was worried he wasn't hearing correctly. He wanted to lean closer to hear what it was saying. It was too big to be unheard or to be so damn quiet. At fifty feet away, he was sure it was there. The cloud wasn't making the sound and neither was the water. The noise was there -- in between. It pricked and popped pockets of air in his lungs, and he had to hold his breath. Everything inside him tightened. He gripped into himself but it was still there -- it was there and he could see the sound happening.

He might have shut off some senses to keep from going into shock because there wasn't another sound when he fell in. His face crawled with tiny water-krill and he panicked until he realized they were just bubbles. He held his breath again, reminding himself not to inhale water. Impossible! Don't, it's impossible! Air burped out, ribs creaking. The noise that the space between was making was too close now. He flipped the skiff and gasped when he lowered the vessel over his head. The bottom was close, so he could stand firmly on the nesting, knotted water plants, holding the little boat steady. Touch was there, his heart shook inside. Smell was gone, taste, of course, also.

Sense of sight was there, changing the overturned boat into a closing iris that shut before he shut his own eyes. Sound was here. He was close to a fire now. It was popping. A chemical reaction so sudden that it was resorting to violence, changing one element into another. He was inside the reaction. The noise was soft but he was inside it, and the rest of the Stonecutter was just curled, dead nerves burning off, winking out. His senses rubbed against each other until they were fuzzy, gray, and blended. That mess was cohesive in the half-second when he brushed against the center of the passing cloud.

The doldrums spun him. They were a beast's bowels, forcing him from one frothing pool to another. It was bright and the colors began to separate from each other. One became definite from the next.

He saw what it needed him to see.

Like a music box, it snapped shut. He coughed blood and seawater onto his chest, screaming into the sky. Each muscle in his body fought him. Paralysis locked his jaw shut and all of the small bones in his body disconnected from one another. He had to narrow his focus, he ordered himself! It could not really be like this, he had to have been wrong somewhere, he must have given an incorrect answer, not remembering it right, it could not, could not be like this. The back of his head fell off and he tried to press it into place. He blacked out. The paralysis followed him into the unconsciousness, settling down, making itself at home. There, the leviathan looked at him, looked at the space around them, and then --

"-- Tell me where you're from," it said. The leviathan's face tensed, dozens of bones clenching, cheeks jutting a little, eyes motionless, nostrils fluctuating. "Originally, where are you from? I know you, I've heard what people have said, but I want you to tell me. I've heard you're from the east, but others said you've lived in the west. I just want to know where you're from. So tell me, where are you from?" 

The leviathan was deliberate in each movement, flickering twitches present at all time, creeping into the Stonecutter's thoughts as he replied, "There's no reason for me to tell you that." 

"It's a harmless detail," the leviathan insisted right away. "Come on. How big of a deal is it? Don't be defensive about it. I won't care where you're from. Be the bigger individual, just tell me. Honestly, we're friends, you and I. We are. We're in the same business." 

"No we're not." 

"No we're not?" The leviathan was done faking exasperation. If ever, it was being dead serious now. "No, we're not in the same business, or no, we're not friends? I'm pretty sure we both do the same thing every day. Am I right? I think so. I know so, which means you're talking about the other thing. If we're not friends, then I don't have any reason to be nice to you. I've been nice so far. Now you're saying that you want to throw that away? Oh, my boy. What will they say? Knocking away an olive branch like this. You know how small the world is, how disingenuous it is to burn bridges. Always be careful, my boy. Be careful and promise me you will --"

-- he woke up, skipping grogginess, stepping straight into wide-open alertness. His body answered when his brain came calling, except his arm, which was numb. It was a no surprise that a coral shard was jutting from his bicep, striking him hard with fear that the paralysis, if even in a small quantity, yet remained. It had to be from when he had flipped the skiff, wasn't it? Alone, he assured himself (but who knew for sure?) that that was what he believed. Trembling, he moved his arm, willing himself, he tugged it. It took four tries to yank it out. The gratification of throwing it into the ocean wasn’t as emphatic as he'd hoped. It didn't bleed much though. He was lying on his back in the skiff, exhausted. There was still nothing to see, naturally.

"Still nothing to see, naturally," he laughed. "Oh. Wait."

And he snapped straight up. The air was clear, the sky was blue, painted with Cirrus clouds that calm winds pushed -- water was casual sea-green, thunking and thunking against the little wooden boat that kept him afloat. 

-- Doberman
on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#18 -- The Airport Is Your God Now

"The airport is a really slow time machine that forces you to pass through an alternate Mirror, Mirror version of Nazi-occupied Britain before letting you reach your destination."

Flaming fucking hellshit in a deflating life-raft, I hate the airport. Every moment is an internal dialog. It's all questions. It's all criticisms, complaints, seething judgments, and escapist fantasy. How can this be so slow? How can this person be on their phone while disassembling their bag for security? Why is a soda cheaper than a water? Why does this guy smell like fruit that my girlfriend's cat puked up onto the radiator? Where the fuck is my plane? Why are all the people working at the airport so apathetic? Always? Why hasn't the air-travel "'business" imploded into itself with all these inefficiencies and infinite requests to tolerate their dickish practices? Seriously, 9/11 was almost 10 years ago, that's not an excuse. Get your shit back together. It's getting worse, they're just finding ways to gouge and tithe us until holograms put them out of business.

I'm not going to rail this wrecked locomotive down your throat. Everybody can recite awful travel stories or 5-hour delays in Newark where you realized just how durable the baby changing tables are thanks to an experimental move devised by a Rutgers waterpolo girl. Bruised tail-bone stories are commonplace. No, in short, your rage against the airport can be summed up quite plainly: The airport is your church now. 

It's where you go to have all control over your modern fate surgically removed.

It's abundantly obvious. You hate going to the airport. You have to go around the holidays because of your familial obligations. You don't really understand the things being shouted at you but you loaf your way through it because it's tradition, and you have to, and don't want to be hassled. You go through the ingrained motions whenever you can, which is when you get a reprieve from the internal fury backlog that I've mentioned above. But it goes beyond that. There's. . . the fear. You can't be a dick at the airport, just like you can't be a dick at church. And not 2011 church, I mean old-school pre-Martin Luther church. I mean Spanish Inquisition upside-down flesh-flaying shit. I mean excommunication, can't fight The Man, airport jail for saying "Paul Greengrass," God is always watching fear. It's one of the only places that white Americans are still afraid of other white Americans. They know they have to watch what they say or they might have their windpipe collapsed as a result of an air marshal's knee hose-kinking their trachea. 

The airport is a really slow time machine that forces you to pass through an alternate Mirror, Mirror-dimension version of Nazi-occupied Britain before letting you reach your destination. Papers, lads. Keep calm and carry on, for Queen and Country.

Watch for un-manned pieces of baggage! Also, watch for heathens, please! Constant vigilance -- of yourself and of that guy with that red hat! Verily, that guy. . . I do not trust. Ladies and gentlemen, sit and wait, you will be delivered to your desired destination, thank you. We cannot explain directly why things are the way they are, why you must suffer, the Lord speaks in riddles so that our souls might grow to accept waiting in the goddamn JFK E-terminal. The music is unusual, and you only hear it at church, played on a type of piano that you only hear in this place. You kind of hum along as you sit there, waiting for whatever, sort of recognizing it for a few bars, but you don't know why. The people around you have camped out in their pews, drawing their families close, their kids already wearing unfitting clothes that now are way too small since last year, so they continually fidget in their flip flops and hand-me-down parkas with colors from the incorrect decade. At the airport, like at church, you stare at people. I imagine going to Puritan church was like going to the mall back in the day, where you would walk in and try to figure who's daughter had been knocked up by an Indian brave or a Catholic, which I assume was like their version of a black guy. Except instead of judging silently, they'd throw big stones at her and then crush her to death under bigger stones like in The Crucible.

(A quick side note -- frequent fliers are the real Catholics of the airport. They're in, they're out, they mumble with begrudging respect in Latin and in acronyms (SFO, LAX, JFK, BUR), pop a Xanax at the exec-communion bar, then coast straight through the remaining hours, ready to do it again next week when they have to go out to Round Rock to meet with the guys at Dell. You WASPs wish you were that accustomed to the noxious mixture of obliged, guilt-soaked indifference.)

There's a ton of people-watching at airports. You keep to yourself, but you're very self-aware at church, so your mind is always going, assuring yourself that it's almost over, or that at least you look better than that guy with the $400 stroller who probably couldn't find a bathroom at his parents' house without his iPhone. Fuck the iPhone. It's a slap in the face to anybody that got made fun of for using a Game Boy on the school bus growing up. You just know that lady teased her younger brother for getting really good at Tetris back in 1989. Did you three-star every level in Angry Birds yet? Oh, on both iPhone and iPad, you say? Swallow a knife! 

People grip their smartphones like holy relics at the airport -- their only conduit to what they call reality, but what a Man of the Cloth would call "hedonistic pleasures of the butt." Which is why the airport bans these kinds of electronic devices on planes themselves. You're in God's house now, motherfucker -- your St. Francis of Assisi Skull is not allowed! If the airport is the church, the plane itself is your motherfucking confessional booth. You're stripped of everything, laid bare, and asked to be alone with your thoughts, and maybe your dad's old copy of The Winter of Our Discontent (for some reason?) that he bought in 1962 when he got delayed at Idlewild on his way to DC. The airport has the power to do that, take all that you have, and you can't fight it or you'll be labeled a heretic and put on the no-fly list or something. Who really knows? You don't. You don't want to know what happens to people that Skype'd during a flight from Boston-Logan to Detroit-Ft. Wayne. I'll tell you what happens to them. They end up in Detroit, a.k.a. The Capitol Wastes from Fallout 3. Except instead of roving gangs of Super Mutants, it's just the Detroit Tigers back from Kansas City for a home game.

The boredom at airports is crippling and baffling. You have entire weekends at home where people ask you, "so you seriously did nothing all weekend?" And you answer, "yeah," quite honestly. You loafed around from 9:32am, read part of The New York Times online, but mostly just stared at mail you didn't want to open because it's either junk or bills you already paid on their website. Then you watched SportsCenter, decided not to weed the back patio, and played Nintendo Wii until 4:30pm when the Jets' game came on. How is sitting for 20 minutes at an airport actually not 20 minutes, but instead 2 metric-fucktons of murderous dead space that has descended upon your soul like a inter-dimensional bogart with extra crustacean claws wriggling from its maw, swallowing all light, all hope, and all time? How, I ask? Because you aren't alone with your boredom in church/airport. You're at a party with no ride home. You're suffering together, and somehow, unlike normally, when co-misery makes everything better -- which is why you never crash a wake without a wingman -- you have to sit, and wait, until you finally get too awkward, and at last acknowledge the dude staring at you with such unabashed indifference. His eyes speak to you and they say, "hey, man, this sucks, doesn't it? But hey, what're you gonna do? We're in God's house."

Do we live in a society where idleness is synonymous with failure? If you aren't miserable, you're doing it wrong. If you're doing it right, you're actually forgetting something really important you'd better check every inbox, mailbox, bill-pay, account, and fact-sheet to make sure you haven't forgotten NAOW! I feel that constantly. I think it's been ingrained into me since before I could walk. At the airport, we're given time. But we are stripped of the means to be productive. What a paradox.

At the airport, there's no room for punk-rock. No room for irony. No room for humor. No room for the sly. No room for will, or even for humanity. We all serve the desire to get the flying fuck out of these skin-wrinkling circumstances and on to somewhere that isn't church. Anybody that thinks outside of the Order of Airport Logic is possessed by the devil, an interloper that fights the tenuous system that has promised to bind us together.

-- Doberman (. . .has had enough of this)
on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#17 -- "The Alchemist" Reviewed | * * * *

"Something even better than value."

For a while, we were wondering what all the fuss was about with The Alchemist. We read it years ago, so the fact that these details come straight from memory are a testament to how sticky these concepts are for us. It's not that long of a book and it's written. . . poorly isn't the right word. "Simply," is the right word. It is "simply" written. It's a vivid vehicle for a concept, not a style.  

We don't mean that we went into it to see what all the fuss was about -- we mean we went into it looking for answers. About what precisely, we weren't sure. Our familiarity with alchemy is limited to Fullmetal Alchemist, a fantastic TV show. It's only 52 episodes, detailing the concepts of loss, value, exchange, and circularity, featuring the travels of two brothers across a weird, oddly-interpreted version of early-1930's Europe. Short version, the brothers' mother dies, their father is estranged, the brothers attempt to revive her with alchemy, a practice identified as science, but contains more than two-scoops of juicy mysticism too. The boys wrongly assume their mother's dead human body can be resurrected by transfusing the elemental components of a person -- hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, literal elements and such -- thus remaking her. "Transfusion" is the valuable word in the previous sentence.

Transfusion, in the alchemic sense, is taking something and turning it into something else of equal value. This time, "value" is the valuable word in the previous sentence. When you have something of value, what gives it that value? There are only two answers: "you" and "not-you."

See, what The Alchemist does is explain value, and it does so with grace and quickness. You are permitted to place value upon certain things, but not all things. That's just life. That's the way the world works. The boy in the book -- who we don't believe is ever really properly named, and fucking whatever if he is, it's not like people make puns about it that are pivotal to the plot -- has a herd of sheep at the start of the story. They have a tangible worth. He could sell them to buy a new book to read. He could use the book as a pillow while he travels. He could keep traveling happily if he's rested. He understands the value of the things he posses. He values his life, yet he hasn't learned to value his existence. 

His soul is short-sighted. A short-sighted soul is not as valuable to the world. The world wants every soul to be valuable, to be enriched and full of experience, which is part of the Gaia Theory we touched on during the Princess Mononoke review. As souls travel through the world, without realizing it, they are contributing to the growing strength of other souls. A moment very late in the book emphasizes this point, that we don't realize how far our actions reach. They don't just touch immediate lives, no, these actions can sometimes lie dormant for generations. A character remarks that there was once a man whose ancient poetry was lost for centuries, considered inferior to his brother's poetry at the time of its writing. Centuries later, that lost poetry was found, revered, and caused a revolution of goodness. This is an example of human energy's reach and how it can extend across the epochs. The universe wants human souls to grow strong and to win. A soul striding towards its destiny casts resonance onto others, which manifests in the form of "beginner's luck" -- that luck brings confidence and the confidence brings inspiration. That's how it works. That dose of beginner's luck will in turn propel that lucky soul in the direction of its own destiny, the correct direction marked by the appearance of omens. Understanding this Algorithm Of Spirits (we just made that up) is how a person grows. 

At first, the boy's understanding of the world is confined to his current contentment, his sheep, the books he loves and trades, and a girl he spoke to once with raven-black hair. Again, names are never really important. The boy is approaching her village and hopes to see her. When he is in the village, he is approached by a king disguised as a beggar. The king explains that the boy should go to the Pyramids and find the treasure buried there. Uh, okay. The boy is in Spain, the Pyramids are in Egypt. Fun fact, the boy doesn't understand just how far Egypt is. Roadtrip? 

Now the boy has to extend himself or wallow in complacency. That's a heavy moral for just a kid with a flock of sheep and a crush on a local girl. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't handle the advice very well (or does he?). 

What he grows to learn is that he can always go back. He will always know how to be a shepherd, so even when he is mugged and left on the wrong side of the Gibraltar a few pages later, he learns to handle his shit. He gets a job polishing glass ornaments for a man that doesn't like his own life all that much. What follows is the most thrilling vignette about polishing glass ornaments ever put to paper. The boy realizes he isn't going anywhere soon and his job is decent enough that he's at least sort of happy. While doing this, saving money, talking with the glass seller, he really gets to thinking. He thinks slowly about where he is, what he's learning, and focusing on the more immediate things in life. Weeks and months go by. His enthusiasm to speed up his return to his sheep makes him think outside the box, coming up with ideas on how to sell the glass ornaments better -- serving tea in them, selling them outdoors, drawing in patrons. This has the intended effect. 

He realizes that even though he can always go back to his sheep, he suddenly has a new skill he can always go back to in glass selling. What else might he learn if he takes another step? Who knew he could make so much good out of a seemingly bad situation. Take another step, boy. And what has he truly lost in spending time learning this skill? Time? Time that would've been spent on indifferent contentment herding sheep. Which experience would you prefer? If this time working with the glass seller had yielded no good returns, he could always go back to the sheep. But that isn't the case! No, this is getting exciting. 

Into the desert. Travel with the caravan. Onward to the Oasis. To Fatima. 

Fatima is love at first sight. Literally sight, not words. There is no getting to know you, no "meet-cute." The boy goes in for the kill because he knows all kinds of unusual weirdness and strange circumstances have brought him to this continent with these experiences with this band of men at this time in this state of mind and Beautiful Fatima was there right then. He tells her he loves her. Jesus, dude. What if she said no, or if she had a boyfriend? 

Well, logically, he can always go back to the raven-haired girl in Spain. But he's so fucking full of confidence, the boy is a human buzzsaw. #Winning. He just starts knowing shit is true. He's listening to the Soul of the World. He's able to resist fear with training, and if nothing else, isn't that a great lesson to be learned? He trusts instinct and he acts on it -- not lying to yourself, not being divided internally, we tell you, is an intense, liberating feeling. Things really start to get interesting. 

He meets the Alchemist and tells Fatima he has to keep looking for the treasure at the pyramids. Amazed, yet understanding of a man's need to grow, she tells him to go, knowing he'll come back because. . . because. . . he's the man at this point. In the best way possible, he's the man. He's tested, yes, he's betrayed, threatened with death, but always, he's just in the moment. Yeah, he might die, but he's going to die with his boots on and with love in his heart. At least he didn't die in a cubicle.

The question: is he diluted? Normally, we'd say yes. But the kid has got massive onions to come this far. He's fearless in a noble pursuit, which downplays the possibility of delusion.

Not an actual quote: "Baby, I love you. I have to leave for a while though. This orphanage / righteous rebellion / ancient treasure ain't gonna save itself. I'll come back as soon as I can." That's the truth. And holy shit does the truth hit with crunchy impact.

He's the hero you normally wouldn't believe in because he becomes such a White Knight. It's the fact that we were given the "before and after" shots that we realize how he was made into the zen-ified, monogamous, desert badass. He's the guy we hear about at high school reunions that make us scratch our heads and go "whoa, he refused how many awards?" And that's the point -- that's the resonance! It twinges our can-do attitude for just a second, nipping us just a bit to maybe risk something, to step out of line, to pursue what we consider -- and feel deeply -- to be destiny. What's better than deciding our fates, knowing our fates, seeing that it's good, and then growing as people further than we ever thought possible, finally taking what it was we wanted so badly. And what happens if that wasn't destiny? Well, ideally, you've grown, changed, gotten better. If not, you can always go back to your sheep, man. That's something better than somebody else slapping a value on what you've done. It's something even better than value. Because you made it that way through an assemblage of intangible experiences known only to you, ones that make you who you are in this moment, and in the unknown moments to follow. 

You kick your feet up on your desk. The air conditioner is a little bit colder than you remember. Your chair is a little bigger than you remember. The lighting in the room seems different. Want to try again? Want to walk at destiny? Think you can? You know you can.

* * * *

(out of 4)

Recommended related reading:

[Paradise Lost  |  * * * *] by Ghost Little and Doberman

[The Hunger Games  |  * * *] by Ghost Little and Doberman

[FULL REVIEW ARCHIVE]

 

-- Ghost Little and Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#16 -- "Sucker Punch" Reviewed | * *

"It's like Michael Moore's version of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. That movie would blow, and so does this."

The titular sucker punch refers to the fact that you, moviegoer, are what powers shallow, exploitative, CGI-soaked power-fantasies that dominate modern Hollywood. And that's why this movie is hard to enjoy, even when its German/orc/robot bodycount is in the hundreds. 

A girl's mom dies, she is taken to an insane asylum named after the lead singer of The Eurthymics so that her wicked Stepdad can have her declared insane, lobotomized, and then collect her inheritance. The asylum is a grimy toilet filled with sad girls and corrupt orderlies that consider themselves kings. They keep saying when the girls are lobotomized, they see paradise. Twenty minutes into the movie, the girl called Babydoll is lobotomized for seemingly no reason by Don Draper. 

What follows is a lengthy flashback told through a weird framing narrative. Without warning, the events of the previous 5 days before the lobotomy are related, but now, Babydoll is introduced as a "new girl," not at an insane asylum, but at a brothel, of all things. So what's going on? It's a badly-handled shift. Look, the workers at the asylum -- ostensibly the "real" world -- are re-drawn as 60's swingers and scummy club-goers. The girls working the brothel are mesmerizing dancers, we're told, and the dances they perform represent who they truly are when given the chance to create art. They lose themselves when dancing, falling into their roles as entertainers, all for the enjoyment of the club's audience. 

When Babydoll dances, she assures herself -- as all diluted entertainers throughout history have -- that this, distracting the trollish, all-male audience, is power, and she is then sent to a world where, at least in her mind, she's a hero. She fights samurai in an absurd costume, using katana and pistol like it's time to Devil May Cry, and it's so over-the-top that you, the actual movie-goer, should make the realization: 

This is satire. 

A poorly executed satire, sure, but it's satire nonetheless. Between the art direction, which eerily echoes Unreal Tournament III, and the "How The Fuck?!" action, particularly during the robots-on-a-train sequence, we give it 2 stars. We can't in good faith recommend it though. To anybody. It's basically all for naught. Let's drill down just a little bit further into the satire, because it's the only thing saving the story. It sure as shit isn't the characters, but a story can be carried a decent distance on the bent ankles of "concept" and "industry commentary." Yes, it's a metaphor for the stupidity of Hollywood, but so were Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back and Three Amigos! and those movies wasn't self-important and were very funny. 

This movie isn't good, but it isn't good for the reasons you'd initially think. Breaking this busted, poorly-acted metaphor down:

• Girl in insane asylum. The innocent goes to Hollywood, realizes it's an icky, insane, corrupt place that lobotomizes people if they cause trouble or stop being profitable.
• The subconscious brothel fantasy. What the higher-ups in Hollywood try to glam up to keep the audiences coming back and "the talent" dreaming their dreams and dancing their dances. There's a jarring sequence when the worm-man villain says he won't kill the girls just yet because they're going to make him so much 'effing money. But at this point, are we still talking about actresses or a certain writer/director/producer auteur, hmmm?
• The steampunk power-fantasy sequences. The movies "the talent" are told they are making, when in reality, they are actually making smut for the leering masses back in the brothel. Can the girls use this power to get what they want? Maybe. Is it empowering? Well, it's a mocking empowerment. Was it actually empowering to see Angelia Jolie punch dudes in Salt? No. And this is the same.

So it's no coincidence that the battles are bloodless, without consequence, and highly-stylized (/wink). It's no coincidence that these girls jump from battle to battle like highly-disposable working actors over the course of the movie. One day they're shooting an empty-suited, steampunk, (deliberately) historically-inaccurate World War I set-piece, the next, they're slaying inhuman orcs and murdering CGI dragons. Setting dragon-slaying to a cover of an Iggy Pop song is so blatant that it has to be mocking Kill Bill or any movie that thinks using obscure music for action sequences is hip. Then, it's worth repeating, comes the above-mentioned robots-on-a-train. And seriously, this scene is the "entering the Copacabana" of tracking-shot action sequences. We dare any living director from Michael Bay to Timur Bekmambetov to shoot a more jaw-dropping piece of ass-kickery. This movie treats action sequences like musicals treat elaborate dance-numbers. We just drop into them like pocket-dimension murder-soliloquies. They're the only moments when the movie speaks to the audience and goddamn they're good. Snappy, crunchy, hyper-accelerated and beautifully choreographed, like good bullet-riddled dance hip-hoperas should be. Give that one girl, Sweet Pea, her own movie, because she rocks the hoodie, assault rifle, and zweihander like it's her IRS-documented occupation.

She is self-employed and will have many itemized business expenses.

This film movie is a commentary on how we've allowed talented artists to become corrupted by the movie-making machine. Problem is, it has to become a monster to kill a monster. It's not a fun topic to tackle with a straight face. Somehow, Sucker Punch is a fairly humorless dry-heave, when we want physical comedy to be funny, but it's just gross to watch our friend wretch over a shit-stained toilet. For example, movies like Hot Fuzz manage to be comedic homages to the stupidity of Bad Boys II while sufficiently matching the action one-to-one. But this -- this isn't a celebration of thrilling cinema -- it's a dirge. We want to talk about Sucker Punch, the steaming-hot afterbirth of the 2000's.

We also want to talk about movies being compared to video games as a negative. Did you notice we compared it to a video game earlier? We did. But we didn't mention that we mentioned it (until now). Go back up and try to find the reference, it's in passing, but kinda funny, now that we think about it. 

Go do it, scroll back up. We'll wait. Do it. Did you find it? Good. 

Now, want to know why movies like Sucker Punch borrow concept and style from modern video games? Because modern Hollywood movies are artistic graveyards and aren't worth borrowing from. That's why this very film is throwing itself on its sword in defiant mockery. Today, imagination lives in interactive media, so to say it looks like a video game is a compliment. How is it that Quentin Tarantino borrows from shitty 70's exploitation grindhouse B-movies and he's called an visionary auteur? We're assuming nobody lives and dies by the artistic integrity of I'm Gonna Git You, Suckah! So how is the rambling, patchwork plot of Inglourious Basterds (sic (the rod up that man's ass has a rod up its ass)) worth any praise? His characters are matchsticks. His plots are vignettes. He knows nothing about story structure. Nothing he shoots could be called "beautiful."

Except the car chase scene in Death Proof. That's beautiful. 

And yet, Tarantino's best moments are when he steals, so we take that back about Death Proof. He steals the spiky dialogue from snarky French films by way of blaxploitation. He steals the Yakuza gangster attitude from Japanese anime. Want to know a secret? Video games stole from Japanese anime. American movies stole from video games. Anime stole from American movies. Oh, shit! Inspirational ouroboros! See, the thing is, these Tarantino eccentricities aren't part of conscious American culture -- we give it some grace. Sucker Punch's school-girl, robot enslicing, Call of Duty fetishism is very much a part of conscious American culture. It gets no grace. It gets no grace because it's Apple Jacks, and kids love that not everybody understand why they like it, in spite of it not tasting like apples, man.

But Sucker Punch. Oh, Sucker Punch. You are, at first glance, everything that parents hate in their children. Sucker Punch is basically a problem child -- it's other peoples' kids. Parents love making snap judgments about other peoples' kids. Maybe the movie critics of Sucker Punch are meant to represent the parents that actually allow and enable these movies to succeed, or something? We're just stunned that nobody has made this comparison of the film-making industrial-complex -- it took us a while to see Inception as a metaphor for constructing a movie and planting a story inside an audience, and not many critics made that link right away. These people should go back to, uh, like, creative critique, college, for the film-watcher? Put it on a dog. 

We've said before that Avatar is passable because of its audacious bird-flipping to accusations of being generic (it's a monomyth, assholes, just like Dances With Wolves, just like Star Wars, and just like The Bible). Avatar also lifts from 90's video games of all things. Those floating mountains are straight out of Chrono Trigger, which probably lifted them from a 70's prog-rock album cover by Roger Dean. You might call Sucker Punch a kid's wet dream. You'd be right. It's also a film exec's worst nightmare coke-fueled rampage ever. A bad movie about how they allow bad movies to be made, hurting talented people to make half a metric fuck-ton of money? With elaborate -- and unsurprisingly removed from this cut of the movie -- dance sequences? With too much CGI and no discernible script? Man, the dialogue in this bad. It's video game bad. But the action is video game good, which is better than movie great action. Eh, we'll call it a wash. 

Sucker Punch didn't need to exist. The only justification for its existence is so we could all have the black mirror held up to us and have it scream, "You're an enabler! Look what the machine does to cinema, to art, to critique, to talent!" It's like Michael Moore's version of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. That movie would blow, and so does this. It's like staring into a backed-up toilet and the only way for you to come to grips with a clog this bad is for somebody to smash the porcelain. And what a goddamn mess it makes. For all it does "right," it still doesn't "win." A casualty of war, this thing is exactly $7 worth of terrible. Here's hoping we've gotten all of this self-loathing out of our systems.

* *

(out of 4)

-- Ghost Little and Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#15 -- Guys Don't Particularly Like Strip Clubs

"We could've kept everybody happily blackout drunk for this entire weekend with the money you're wasting on having somebody's mom hit you with brittle pillow!"

NB: This is entry #15. We skipped #14. Why? Because #14 is Paradise Lost, the greatest thing ever written. Not only do we need to do it justice, we got to writing about it, and left the computer for a bit, and then came back, and had an epiphany. Needless to say, in order to prove a point, the review of Paradise Lost might not go live until July 19, 2011. You'll understand why when it drops. So, instead, we have a treatise on strip clubs.

| | |

Fact: 9 out of 10 guys in any group of friends dislike, if not outright loathe, strip clubs. 

We approach them the way we might approach an wobbling badger, so unmistakably infected with rabies, that we can't help but stare, wait, and see if this animal isn't simply friendly and wants to pal around. We make excuses later, jaws locking up, hand swelling with animal saliva and puss-choked blood. We feign ignorance even in defeat. By design, guys might get fired up along with everybody else at the prospect of the idea of maybe going to the strip club and run for the 15-passenger van like a 14-year old after his second shot of Wild Turkey, like, ever. But they're still just lying to themselves and everybody around them. They might even try to explain to their girlfriend -- metaphorical rabid-badger bite be damned -- how sick their trip to the strip club with their buddies was and how girls just don't "get it."

No. No, no, and no. 

You are fucking embarrassed and ashamed. You would bathe your brain in lye if you thought it might wash the stink out of you but you know it won't do the job. You can't un-smell this shit. You didn't know what the hell you were doing while you were there. You weren't really sure what you were paying for. You will always and forever remember that strangling burn whenever you hear Wicked Garden by Stone Temple Pilots, and you really don't ever want to have to go back to a place like that.

But as sure as the sun shines, birds fly, and grass grows, there naturally is that 1 guy out of the 10 that does, quite honestly, really and honestly love strip clubs. He is infatuated with the notion. He's medium-sized and usually wins your fantasy football league too. He's the one that is being done a favor by all of his saner, emotionally-grounded buds when they agree to venture into that yawning chasm of clingy carpet and blackened cum stains. So, this one friend, is a burden! Yes, you, Trevor! 

(We don't know anybody named Trevor, but we'd bet 4 of the finest otter pelts and a bottle of firewater that some fuckstick named Trevor is causing his friends trouble somewhere right now.) So, Trevor, asshole, you should realize that you are an awkward bundle of blue-ball-loving baggage. Want the fast answer as to why you think strip clubs are awesome, Trevor? Because you got puked on during a BJ once. Since then, all of this right here seems, well, kinda okay, man.

Trevor is the guy that will actively save single dollar bills for months if he knows he's going to Vegas, or Atlantic City, or the suburbs of Tampa, or something with his bros. He'll save up for it like most people would save up to buy a new set of headphones or or a sofa or a lift ticket at Vail. It is at the forefront of his brain. He'll read up on these things and study and go back and watch those parts of The Wrestler that take place in the strip club to try to understand how things might work. He'll tell you about all the shit he's seen at the clubs before. He'll tell you about those times in Montreal and Prague the way middle-aged guys show you pictures of their kids on a swingset.

Well, those girls are somebody's kids on a... swing. Of some sort. These stories are terrible. Worse than the dentist. Worse than choking. Worse than hearing a guy's story about watching poker on TV. It's a second-hand description of something that doesn't qualify as a vague turn-on. How can you, Trevors of the world, giggle at this kind of sexuality when you know that the Internet is a thing that exists?

"Yeaaaaahhhhh! Strippers! Whoooo!" Untrue. Guys don't care. Groups of guys don't care. They know that if they go to a strip club, and they show up wearing decent clothing because... well, who really knows what's appropriate to wear in front of women that have chosen inverted nudity as their profession... they know they, as a group, are there to be drained of their cash. That's why you go there. When you walk in the door, you are literally obligated to shell out cash. It's not fucking Lowe's Home Building Supply! You can't peruse and think, "hmmm... I suppose I could let a vagina rub on me if I wanted, but I don't think I have time this weekend. And we're going to the lake next weekend. And then Thanksgiving is the week after that. Never mind. No, thanks Cheyenne, I'm quite alright. Thanks for your help in my decision. Nice vulva though." It's not like that! What you see is what you're getting, scars and cellulite included. LeRoy is going to be there by the door with his earpiece and shaved head and your fear vectors are going to activate, and you're going to sit down in that creaky, damp chair, and drink two $12 Scotch and sodas out of a dixie cup, while Trevor blows his water bill money on a lapdance from a chick eating a cheeseburger.

"Guys! Look! I'm making it rain!" Fuck you, dude! We could've kept everybody happily blackout drunk for this entire weekend with the money you're wasting on having somebody's mom hit you with brittle pillow!

You'll probably pop half a chub and walk uncomfortably out of the club later that night with no money and blue balls.

Thank god the cover was... oh, wait, yeah, it was like $30 to get in. But we all had fun, didn't we? No. Strip club regulars have fun. The dudes waaaay past the point of caring that watch reckless young groups of idiots come in -- and they pray every day that one of these little punks tries to get too rough with one of their regular girls (Yazmeene, the first 'Y' is silent, the third 'e' isn't) so they can come flying in with a bottle of Jaeger upside his head, and the punk just lies there bleeding and crying, and the local and his girl (Fanta) run back to his truck where he can plow her over and over before showing her his softer side -- and that's their entertainment on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

 -- Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#13 -- "F-Zero GX" Reviewed | * * *

"...casually whittling down the competition as you race is shark-esque. It's Tiburonean."

The men and women that work on Wall Street are often accused of making money off of other people by simply saying the shit they own is more valuable than the shit other people own. Oftentimes, that shit is something like the predicted value of a commodity in Malaysia, and the Wall Street firm has a physical copy of the exact booking numbers to back up what they're saying, so you don't have much a leg to stand on if you want to disagree. Plus, these investment firms have a team of, like, 30 dudes and chicks fresh out of Columbia Law on retainer. Mean motherfuckers. The kind of people that list "killing drifters" in the Interests section of their Facebook profile. Regardless, Armie Killingsmanship, Esquire, is legally right in more ways than you are. Don't bother trying to fight them in a court of law. A lot of people think what these firms do is rigged, calling them thieves and morally-compromised manipulators, caring about nothing but their dangerous competition, gambling all day and night because putting their nuts on the chopping block is the only way they can achieve an erection these days. We don't really know how it works -- we assume at the end of it all, one guy gets rich and the loser gets prostate cancer or something. F-Zero GX is the greatest Wall Street Investment Firm Simulator to date. It's Goldman Sachs: The Official Game Of The Firm.

In this game, you either win, or you die of prostate cancer. Slow, omnipresent, sad, probably-already-there prostate cancer. How much are you willing to risk to win?! Some of it? ALL of it?! The answer is "all" of it, of course, and "it," is a pronoun representing pride, in this case. It becometh pride. Unfortunately for you, in this game, you're strapped to the back of a rocket, which goes fast. Also, it's a race. Also, there are 29 other rockets racing against you on a narrow gun-metal pulse-light lattice. And they want to kill you. All of them want to kill all of the cells in your body. Add rock music. Speed up the rock music, add techno-synth bass, and Bollywoodlian lights.

F-Zero GX is the sport that would exist if there was an apocalypse, and the only people that survived were a tribe of former MIT engineering PhD candidates and a tribe of professional wrestlers trained as old-school method actors that can't manage to break character anymore. Both groups eat cocaine and Bolivian Tree-Frog sandwiches, and nothing else! Then they build and race rocket cars in contests where on-track murder is encouraged. You'll learn that explosive murder is the best kind of murder and fast rocket cars are the best kind of rocket cars. We like things that go fast. Going fast, straight, is a thrill in this game. Control is never certain. Basic operation of your rocket car can be a mind-killer in F-Zero GX. The speed, and the precision you can and must continue to exact upon your craft at that speed, is skin-cracking.

While your skin is cracking, you'll have a few things to do. Keep an eye on your shields, expend extra shield energy for a speed boost, stay within the guardrails, and try to eliminate your opponents. Before talking about how thrilling eliminating a rival can be, the sensation of boosting needs addressing. It's frightening. It's necessary. It's the repeated sensation of chopping down a tree with an ax while the girl you like watches. The rush of hitting the Y button drains your shields a bit, leaving you open to attack and maybe to fishtailing out of control. The strength of the thrust can be tailored prior to the race, balanced with your overall top-speed, which is the only major machine-tuning you need to take part in. You pray things hold steady. Your back-end might fly out. On steep uphills, you can grind your nose right into the track. Boosting into the guard-rail, losing shields twice-over while scrubbing a ton of speed is another hole in your head -- you just don't need it. That worst-case scenario is a fucking Sword of Damocles, yet it is too exhilarating not to lay into the boost button. 

Sidebar: They recently had a computer named Watson on Jeopardy! It crushed. The problem with having a computer compete against humans for a prize that is only tangible to a human -- money, for instance -- defeats the purpose of having them compete. The computer doesn't feel greed and it doesn't comprehend personal consequence. Program a Virtual Intelligence (V.I.) opponent that can process material, malice, and irrational value. Program a V.I. that can deliberately cause somebody grief. One that can become afraid of a human or find joy in personal operation. We want a digital opponent that is excited to hit the boost button and regrets when it hits it too many times. That would be impressive. 

Near the end of each lap, there's usually a "Pit Strip" on the course. In the future, there is no pit crew! You just service your car with pink ooze, or magnets, or science, or however it works. It's a bit like driving through strawberry milkshake and it refills your shields/boost while slowing you down a tad. You always exhale slowly for the half-second you drive through it. It's the most fun you'll have losing speed while racing and the second most fun you can have while breathing.

You need shields. They sort of keep you safe and every car has them. Killing your opponent's shields is the crunch of cracking semi-frozen cubes out of an ice tray. If they crash and burn, they get no points for the race. It's such a simple concept! "Go fast in your hover-ship for three laps." There are literally no other rules in F-Zero GX. It's simpler than full contact soccer with no off-sides. It's horse-racing with swords. (We would so go to watch the horse-sword-race! Every jockey would have to be a cosmically bombastic roided-out David Bowie and every horse would have to be a car -- then we'd go to watch. Otherwise, no, we just need a GameCube.)

The scenery flows by at 1500 km/h like hot soy milk spread over a Christmas snowfall. In particular, the Lightning levels stand out. The relativity of rain spraying in your face ironically forces you to not blink. Yet it remains a videogame made in 2003 -- suck it, modern HD rendering software! The tracks swoop, climb, loop, and rollercoaster. Rollercoaster is a verb now. It pains our vital organs to know that one false move during the race, and we'll send our custom-built plasma-coffin into the Smeared 2D Plane Of The Beyond. That Smeared 2D Plane Of The Beyond is the world far below each of the elevated tracks -- it is everything that sucks in life. It is:

Removal from the race completely. Fall and explode. Exploding means you lose because your car has exploded. It's a stunning, real feeling. Cats run in fear and homes echo with profanity when this occurs.

A reminder from the announcer. The announcer is normally is reminding you that "YOU'VE GOT BOOST POWER!" in his most enthusiastic Sega-voice -- that you're "Off course." His voice is your dad in all the menus in the game, giving you info on cars, races, lap records, and then... "Off course." It's one of gaming's most brutal reminders that you disappoint your father and you can't escape your Oedipus Complex.

Removal from the modern videogame realm. The crash isn't spectacular. You just turn into a low-resolution smokey blip on a Smeared 2D Plane Of The Beyond. The transition is a stark contrast. You don't deserve 128-bits anymore. You can try again if you dare, fucker.

As we mentioned earlier, you can't drink the salty tears of the A.I.'s infinite sadness when you knock them off course, because the A.I. is run by the game, the game isn't alive, and therefore can't "lose," but you can inflict very permanent damage on your rival racers' point totals. Starting with a field of 30 racers and casually whittling down the competition as you race is shark-esque. It's Tiburonean. It's hard to eliminate a fellow racer. You have to bash his craft into the wall, or do a spin attack. The spin attack changes you into a power tool for a few seconds. Ostensibly, you "are become fucksaw, The Destroyer Of Worlds." It helps you smash your opponents to shit and it also helps you take absurdly-sharp corners. Depending on what you're driving, your car can be somewhat floaty in it's controls, it is a hover-vehicle after all. The spin attack pressures you with absurd down-force (or something, there might be some mythology behind how it works) and suddenly your car is a table-mounted disc-sander wrapped in double-sided tape. The difference in friction is so dangerous that you absolutely must know your car, the track, and the competition intimately.

If you take a corner, hit the spin-trigger, hug the hairpin, and smash a few rivals, it's sensational. It ignites your senses! The cars are tiny compared to the size of the track -- giving you ample room to maneuver if the whole field is clustered together -- and you're always wowed that you can collide, let alone smash, your fellow racers at 1500 km/h. When a car dies on track, it loses all friction but maintains its speed, so the most common thing you'll see is this black, burning ember ricocheting helplessly between the walls before eventually stopping. The busted cars stay on the course for the rest of the race too, so there's a chance these poor fuckers might be hit the next lap. That's fantastic continuity. You'll be coming around on lap 2 or 3 and see the smoking wreckage and think, "yup, I orphaned that guy's (or lady's (or alien's)) kids. Good." 

And you don't care! You can't help but become a villain in F-Zero GX. The game will step on your neck and take your ear as a trophy if you don't. F-Zero GX makes you mean. It's a game that's hard in a way that the only chance you have is to get mean. That's what good competition does to you. You've got to hate losing. There's no helping hand, no grinding, no upgrading, no guidebook, no way to out-smart, no way to cheat. You can out-cheat though. The entire game is cheating because there are no rules. The entire thing is just there from the beginning. Your progress is measured in your ability and your victories. The victories might be leftovers, they might be full meals -- you'll take what you can get. 

"Go fast in your hover-ship for three laps." 

The game isn't good until you get ruthless. It's a cocktail of pure skill, self-loathing, cheap gin, and dehydrated bull semen. 

Are you willing to sacrifice it? Your pride, we mean. This game will make you rethink your morals. It's a moral oil-change. Cram a lifetime of emotions into one race. Cram your youth, your anticipation, your thrills, your love, your career, your naivete, your fears, your downfalls, your malice, your identity, your triumphs, your shattered dreams, and your answered prayers. Cram a thousand lifetimes into a moment of leisure. 

* * *

(out of 4)

Recommended related reading:

[ExciteTruck  |  * * * *] by Doberman

[The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask  |  * * * ½] by Ghost Little

[Final Fantasy IX  |  * * * *] by Ghost Little

[FULL REVIEW ARCHIVE]

 

-- Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF