I'd Ream A Genie

FADE IN:

EXT. DESERT ISLAND – DAY

This is an idyllic tropical island, white sandy beach framed by a lush verdant jungle. A 60s era rocket capsule Stardust One rests on its side in the sand just beyond the surf and various rocks, logs and seajecta form the letters SOS on the beach beside it.

A man in NASA garb, CAPTAIN TONY NELSON – early 30s, tall and of regal bearing – carries an armload of driftwood and other material from the edge of the jungle to complete the second ‘S’. The bottom tip of the ‘S’ is an old bottle which rolls out of place after he sets it. Confused, he picks up the bottle and sets it back in place.

Standing back, admiring his handiwork, he is again bewildered by the bottle rolling out of place. He looks at it then looks around, as if being played by someone.

TONY
What the…?

Retrieving the bottle he examines it.

CLOSE ON BOTTLE

It is made of oxidized brass, purple in hue with gold accents, about a foot tall with a ridged bulbous base about five inches in diameter. The neck is thin, perhaps an inch and a half in diameter with a rounded spout and a stopper with a truncated hemisphere and a golden nipple on top. It is fairly ornate and CAMERA ADJUSTS as TONY considers it.

MEDIUM BEACH – TONY shakes the bottle and listens. Considering it again, he grabs the stopper and yanks on it. It is firmly in place. He looks around again then back at the bottle which he again attempts to uncork. He struggles with it for a moment, stops then tries again real fast as if it could be tricked. It is stuck fast.

ANGLE DRIFTWOOD LOG – TONY considers this fairly hefty piece of driftwood then looks at the bottle. He wedges the bottle into a crook between branches and applies all of his weight to the stopper. It releases suddenly with an audible POP sending TONY hurling backwards into the sand.

TONY – He looks up in wonder as a pillar of smoke arises from the neck of the open bottle obscuring the area before it. The smoke dissipates and a beautiful blond woman in very revealing harem attire appears before him, smiling widely. She is JEANNIE – 2,000 years old but very fit and hot – and she speaks to him in Farsi.

JEANNIE
Amok aluck uncorkage suk, salabeem.

SUBTITLES: Your wish is my command, Master!

ANGLE BEACH – TONY stares at her aghast. He’s either lost his mind or made the greatest discovery known to man. He is mesmerized by her breasts, poking through her flimsy bodice.

TONY
I have no idea what you just said.
This is amazing! Who would have
thought of bottled women?
(sniffing)
How do you stay so fresh in there?

JEANNIE
Deem inute boot ekwipt wida spay
seeos ressa rume.

SUBTITLES: It’s small but has a big powder room.

TONY – He is utterly amazed. He drinks her in as he considers the possibilities.

JEANNIE – She is completely smitten, her wide almond eyes swirling in the deepest adoration as she hangs on his every gesture. She will do anything to please him and awaits his command lustily, hungrily. She steps toward him almost predatory.

ANGLE BOTH – TONY steps back, a little intimidated. He clumsily attempts to divert her ravening. Pointing skyward he speaks to her.

TONY
Helicopter. I need a helicopter.

She smiles at him while he attempts to mimic a helicopter by spinning around with his arms out. He steps back up to her, a little exasperated as she LAUGHS uncontrollably at him. Sensing his displeasure she looks into the sky, where TONY pointed and blinks. Above them a huge albatross swoops in low, depositing a little poop in TONY’s hair.

This causes JEANNIE to burst into peals of laughter, rolling into the sand. TONY on the other hand, inspects the damage to his rapidly fleeing dignity, then wanders over to the surf to rinse off his displeasure. As he cleans his head, JEANNIE appears suddenly beside him, startling him, causing him to stumble back into the surf.

His annoyance is now beyond question and JEANNIE chokes back her laughter lest her master renounce her vintage.
ANGLE BEACH – TONY walks back up onto the beach, his spacesuit soaked, his hair sullied and his genie, not only linguistically challenged but mega-disrespectful. JEANNIE, offering a display of serious judgment, does her blinky thing and TONY finds himself dry and feces free. This improves his attitude considerably.

TONY
Well, that’s better. Just wish you
spoke English…

JEANNIE
Your wish is my command, Master!

TONY
You do speak English.

JEANNE
As you will it I shall make it so. You
have freed me of the lamp – now I serve
only you. Master.

She sidles up to him. His eyes lock onto her breasts again.

TONY
This is udderly amazing. In the 20th
Century, magic. Round, glorious
firm and uplifting magic.

ANGLE TONY/JEANNIE – TONY pulls himself away and considers his options.

SERIES OF SHOTS – MONTAGE SEQUENCE

ANGLE BEACH – DAY – CHOPPER sweeps in low above beach.

FULL SHOT AIRCRAFT CARRIER – DAY – The massive sea city receives TONY’s capsule Stardust One lowered from a chopper.

MEDIUM SHOT AIRCRAFT CARRIER – TONY is received by the crew, saluting the Commander.

EXT. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER – DAY – Establishing shot of the massive facility.

INT. DOCTOR BELLOWS’ OFFICE – DAY – TONY reclines on Dr. Bellows’ sofa as Bellows shakes his head displeased.

INT. DOCTOR BELLOWS’ ANTEROOM – TONY argues with fiancé MELISSA STONE, DR. BELLOWS shaking his head in BG and making notes.
INT. SENATE CHAMBER – NIGHT – TONY addresses a phalanx of stodgy, rumple suited senators, who keep talking over him in this smoky room.

INSERT HEADLINE: Mortem Post – Hero Astronaut Astro-Nut

EXT. TONY’S HOUSE – DAY – MELISSA carries her bags to a waiting cab as TONY follows her pleading. She climbs in and speeds off, leaving TONY standing dejected in the street.

INT. OFFICE DAY – TONY is hastened out the door by NASA security while BELLOWS and former pal ROGER HEALY shake their heads at the fallen star.

INT. BAR – NIGHT – TONY sips a whiskey in this smoky dive while others talk about him furtively in the BG.

EXT. BEACH – DAY – TONY, old and demented, stumbles toward the lapping waves.

PULL IN ON OCEAN – The sea is relatively calm, spotty clouds on the horizon.

PULL BACK REVEALING TONY and JEANNIE back on the beach. He has been projecting this and now looks back at JEANNIE.

TONY
What do I call you? Genie?

JEANNIE
You call me whatever you wish. Jeannie
is fine. If it pleases you.

TONY
Is that it? Is my pleasure your purpose?

JEANNIE
It is that and that alone.

TONY
And you can do…anything?

JEANNIE
If you can conceive it, I can make it so.

CLOSE ON TONY – He thinks this over for a couple of beats. He smiles, then looks at her. PULL BACK TO TWOSHOT – She is utterly ravishing, her left breast, perky and substantial, peeking from beneath her barely fastened top. Her eyes gaze upon him enraptured and expectant. Her every move says, she wants him.

ANGLE TONY/JEANNIE – TONY looks at her and speaks.

TONY
All right. To begin, we’ll dispense with
the wishing. Too Disney. I’ll tell you
what I want, you make with it. Capiche?

JEANNIE
What you wish and as you wish it.

TONY
We’re gonna get along just fine.

JEANNIE
I have no higher purpose, Master.

PULL BACK SLOWLY as TONY lays out his plan.

TONY
Not sure about the ‘master’. We’ll
see if I grow into it. Okay to begin,
you will never be jealous of me. And
as of today, you are bi-curious. No,
bi-adventurous. So we want to have
some nubile and libertine young servant
girls, to feed us, another thing on the list
as we explore these powers of yours.

TONY is lifted gently onto a throne made of driftwood and broad leaves from the jungle by a bevy of impossibly gorgeous naked women (17 to 25) who feed him slices of rare beef (Prime Rib) and butter oozing lobster, while others massage him. He continues.

TONY
Okay. Oh, this is good, delicious.
Hello. My, you’re a big one, or two.
Okay. Jeannie. Just a second, sweety,
Okay, I want the bastards that killed
JFK, uh, in prison. Being raped, gang
raped in prison, for say, forty years…
every day for 40 years. And the bomb
we need to do something about that…

FADE TO BLACK

FIN
For Larry.

Maybury: RIP

FADE IN:

EXT. MAYBURY SOUTH CAROLINA – PRESENT – DAY

THEME MUSIC OVER – THEME is whistled but slow and melancholy – sad.

PULL IN ON a man and boy walking together down a desolate dirt road.

MEDIUM CEMETERY – DAY

The pair wander into a derelict cemetery and stop before a fresh grave. The man is revealed to be OPIE TAYLOR – mid fifties, bald and conservatively dressed. The boy is his son SCOOPER – 10ish redheaded and freckled – and they stare silently at the burial plot before them.

CLOSE ON GRAVE – The headstone reads:

ANDY TAYLOR 1921-2012 Beloved Father, Beliked Uncle, Betolerated Moral Authority – Cornpone Sheriff for 10 Seasons (with reruns)

CLOSE ON OPIE

He sips from a flask he’s concealed in his Bible.

SCOOPER (O.S.)
Pa?

OPIE
Yeah, Scooper.

PULL BACK to include SCOOPER.

SCOOPER
Granpa was mighty old.

OPIE
He lived a long time, son.

SCOOPER
Seemed like he’d never die,
didn’t it.


OPIE
Shore did Scoop. Your ma and
me wondered if he’d ever kick.

SCOOPER
Kick?

OPIE
The bucket – we wondered if
he’d ever kick the bucket.

SCOOPER
That what happens when you die?
You kick a bucket?

OPIE
Not everyone. Uncle Floyd kicked
a state trooper up in Hog Flats. He’s
dead too.

PAN ACROSS GRAVES REVEALING that virtually everyone from Maybury is dead and buried in the same shitty cemetery. Floyd D Barber, Ain’t Bee, Barney Fife, Otis B Drunkard, Goober Pyle, Gomer Piles…

MEDIUM GRAVEYARD

OPIE and SCOOPER shuffle away from the graves and back onto the dirt road, OPIE spitting a brutish lunger onto OTIS’s grave.

OPIE
Pederast.

SCOOPER
What’s a ped a rast, pa?

OPIE
Remember cousin Willy?

SCOOPER
The Boy Scout leader?

OPIE
Yep. Know how he liked to do
tent checks during the jamboree?

PULL BACK FAVORING OTIS’S GRAVE as the pair wander away from the cemetery.
SCOOPER rubs his ass as he responds.

SCOOPER
He did other checks as well. What’s
a prostate?

OPIE
Something Boy Scout leaders shouldn’t
be examining while on bivouac.

SCOOPER
I’ll say.

As the damaged pair leave frame, the soil over OTIS’s grave begins to push up from below, clods rolling aside as the ground opens revealing a very decomposed OTIS – 65 and pickled – as he crawls from what appears to not have been his final resting place.

OTIS
(hocking and hacking)
Powerful parched.

DISSOLVE TO

INT. TAYLOR HOUSE – BEDROOM – NIGHT

OPIE and his haggard wife BUTTY SOO – 46, plain and a trifle flabby – rut it out under the comforter on ANDY’s bed in a fairly uninspired missionary position. BUTTY SOO stares longingly out the window, through the gap in the gingham curtains as OPIE grunts his way to his ineluctable conclusion.

OPIE
Uh, uh, uh, uh, owww.

BUTTY SOO
I told you not to put that in there.

OPIE
Why do you call it that?

BUTTY SOO
What do you want me to call it?
It?

OPIE
I told you what I want you to call it.

BUTTY SOO
Well, it isn’t and it seems silly to
call it one.

OPIE
(finished, he rolls off)
Don’t know what the big deal is.
Prickly Sutton, over in Hamster
Swallow, well his wife calls his…

BUTTY SOO
I know what she calls his, everybody
knows what she calls his. But his is.
Yours ain’t so I cain’t call it that.
(sotto voce)
Magnum. Huh! More like Derringer.

OPIE
I heard that!

BUTTY SOO
Facts is facts, Ope. Ain’t saying it
ta hurt ya.

OPIE
Hey…How do you know Prickly’s is?

BUTTY SOO
Oh grow up. He shows it to everyone.

OPIE
I know – he showed it to me.
(conspiratorial)
He had me touch it.

BUTTY SOO
You touched it?

OPIE
He put it in my hand once when we
were in the locker room. Thought it
was a goldurn snake. Creepy.

PULL BACK THROUGH WINDOW REVEALING the entire cast of the original series zombified and watching this exchange. As one they look at each other and ANDY posits:

ANDY
Well, no brains here. We oughta
head up to Mount Pilate.

They turn and stumble away, disappointed. Gomer shakes his head and it falls off. Hilarity ensues.

FADE TO BLACK


FIN


For Andy

Fuck

Why do animals die in the wild? This isn’t a trick question, more a thought exercise, like any reading of substance. Does this have substance? One good way to find out, huh?

Old age. Many animals die because their bodies can no longer sustain them. Happens to all creatures in time – nothing particularly revelatory there at first blush. Disease. Predators. These both fall under the same category as disease is the tiny predator that brings down giants. In the wild, animals have no physical defenses against disease, meaning they can’t hide behind a tree and growl menacingly to ward off a cold or something. They can’t see disease coming so they can’t defend against it.

Animals in the wild, on their game, sustain themselves through rigid focus on the moment. A gazelle or wildebeest on the savannas of Africa isn’t thinking about whether that other gazelle or wildebeest thinks their ass is too big, or who’ll win during the big game tonight. With the finals and all, a heated match is pretty much assured. Go Wildebeests!

Creatures in the wild stay alive through that focus: they assess based upon experience and observation of movement around them. They move with the herd, the more resilient staying toward the inner regions of the mass, allowing their less resilient brethren to be picked off by encroaching predators. Animals in the wild are said to exist in only two modes, fight or flight. But simple observation shows that this is not the case. They also exist in fuck mode.

Fuck mode is fundamental to their existence. Because whether they know it or not, they exist to fuck. The fighting and flighting is just to stay alive long enough to fuck some more. What do individual animals fight each other over? Pussy. We call them elaborate mating rituals, but they are nothing more than a couple of animal jocks showing off for the animal cheerleaders, on the sidelines egging them on. Animal pussy knows it doesn’t want animal cock that can’t stand up to some pounding – what, are they animals?

Sure they are. So are we. Came from the very same place, Earth. Biologically we are so close to our fellow beasts that tests on rats can tell us what will happen to us when we eat that GMO corn or suck down too much smoke. Parts from other animals (here piggy, piggy, piggy) are transplantable into human bodies. Try that with a sapling from a larch or poplar.

Biological organisms have no purpose beyond reproduction. Lions ain’t solving universal conundrums, spider monkeys ain’t curing cancer, ring tailed lemurs ain’t explaining what God really wants – they exist as the product of fucking and exist to fuck and propagate. That’s all.

We have been told that even though we are animals, we are not animals, we are better than animals. Often the one telling us this is us, ourselves. We’re always comparing our vain selves to other people – are they fatter, balder, flatter, poorer? – so it becomes easy to feel superior to that which can’t argue the point. Stupid dog. What the fuck does he know, anyway?

Well, for one thing they know how to get rewarded for laying around the house all day, licking their own crotches. How many of us would turn down such an enviable position? They have figured out how to get humans to pamper them and even walk around behind them and pick up their shit. Stupid, my ass! It’s pretty obvious who the stupid ones in that relationship are.

Cats? We bow and scrape to them. Make them their own little toilets and everything and even become the biological flushing mechanism when they doody it up sufficiently. (We call it litter – dogs and people shit; cats litter.) We scoop up their furry puke-balls off the rug and cater to their mewy whims while they lay around licking themselves building the next belly tribble.

Domestic animals (slaves) have no agenda; they’ve no big plans for the future; they’re not working on those memoirs. They are for the most part content to lay around, eat and fuck. But because humans are very sick animals, animals that think they aren’t animals, they take care of that little fucking problem. In the name of conservation, we steal these animals’ capacity to do the one thing they exist to do: fuck.

This changes them; they become docile, or crazy; they become useless consumers, ornaments for lonely humans to connect with when other human contact becomes too complex. Neutered, they have no purpose and exist waiting for the next meal, walk or display of affection. They never argue any point you make and will actually cower should you be compelled to menace them. Most people try hard not to giggle when we do that to them.

Of course, naysayers will challenge such assertion: perhaps they exist to reproduce, but to say they exist to fuck reduces it to something base and unseemly. Bullshit. Only human thinking makes fucking anything other than what it is: our biological imperative. If you are reading this, thank your parents for fucking. Because if they hadn’t, you couldn’t.

If fucking wasn’t pleasurable, we wouldn’t be here because really, who would do such a thing without the reward of pleasure? It’s too much work. Sadly for too many, fucking only has to be pleasurable to the masculine participant. But the act in itself isn’t the problem. As always, performance is defined by the actors.

Humans can alter our reproductive process so as to eliminate contraception but not destroy sexual ardor. We call it vasectomy. I had one and consider it among the best money I have ever spent. No diminution of ardor; I can maintain my purpose and what remains of my sanity.

We can fix our pets without ruining them, but as slaves with no field to till, neutering is done to reduce the drive, the will, the force which makes them live. We want our slaves (pets) calm, well behaved, not fucking everything that walks in the door. Reduces embarrassment. So we take their balls or ovaries before they ever get to fuck, thereby stealing their raison d'être and watch as they hang around the house, looking for something to do.

Kinda like their humans.

History is written by, if not the winners, at least the survivors. But then only the literate among them. Animals, while demonstrably able to abstract (nesting a fine example), do not write their histories; they exist in the present without terms and figures to confound their thinking. Billions of them exist in the wild every day without a language, medical system, communication network, food repositories, government, corporations, money or god.

Billions of them exist in conditions most humans, with our superior knowledge and physicality (in God’s likeness and all), would perish in. Naked in the wild, most of us would die. And not a happy nicely sedated, family-gathered-around-to-see-you-off kind of death. More akin to eating your own flesh out of desperation after starvation drives you mad and drinking what urine you can muster to stave dehydration, while consumed with bugs and roving predators.

Best I can tell, God didn’t make us particularly special. We’ve articulated our grunting into language and come up with all manner of reasons for all the stupid shit we do. We’ve convinced ourselves that not only are we better than the animals (we tell our deepest secrets to) but indeed, better than most other people around us when it comes right down to it. We’ve come up with all kinds of purposes for us to engage in to keep our collective minds from going crazy with boredom. To keep us out of mischief.

We’ve manufactured all manner of distraction to keep us idle and inoffensive and polarized, perpetually at odds with someone or some group or some mindset that we can ultimately feel superior to. But these notions, these goals and objectives, while on an intellectual level are gratifying, are but distractions of our own to hide the truth we dare not face: We are only here to fuck.

Because we cannot face this – and let me be clear, I am not advocating reproduction in this, for that is a very hard and oft times disheartening road – we are culturally discontent. While we have neutered our pets to keep them docile and not pumping out litters every five minutes, we have intellectually neutered ourselves. We have made sex result- or goal-oriented – gotta have a baby/gotta come – instead of pleasure-oriented. It becomes the rushed appetizer to the boring meal of sitting around afterwards watching others banter cleverly on a screen somewhere.

All this manufactured human bullshit has completely fucked up our thinking. Why would God create in us a drive only second to hunger if the fulfillment of that drive was wrong? Is eating wrong as well? Is it not just stuffing different stuff into different holes? Is shitting a sin, or only if it feels really good? How about pissing? God knows how good that feels. Suspect that’s part of the reason beer is so popular. Lots of opportunity to run a little more through that sweet, sweet channel.

Our software (minds) has fucked up our hardware (bodies). Our perverse perspectives on sex have made us confused and befuddled and frustrated and ultimately asexual as we settle in to lives more ordinary, seeking the comfort of inertia rather than the challenge of action. Elevating ourselves above animals has made in so many a perspective which keeps them from elevating themselves above the ones they love. And that is a shame.

And thus we behave as animals, describing our work as a rat race, our workplace as a jungle and clawing our way to the top over those too weak to seize advantage. We make our world a battlefield where we describe those who behave most horrendously as animals. Yet animals don’t sit around and come up with reasons to attack each other, don’t organize and arm massive contingents and lay waste utterly to that which they would dominate. Humans do that.

Perhaps if we behaved more like animals (fucking because it feels phenomenal) and less like humans (not fucking for any one of a thousand reasons), we wouldn’t be so angry all the time. Perhaps if we weren’t angry all the time we wouldn’t fight each other so much. Maybe if we didn’t fight each other so much we wouldn’t be in a constant state of warfare. Which, it seems, would make our lives better, as well as the lives of those we are currently waging war upon.

Never heard of someone on their deathbed saying they wished they had fought more during their lives. I wouldn’t be surprised if many had wished they had fucked more, whether they expressed it or not. Seems like an unnecessary regret in a world of so many horny people.

Fuck. Why the fuck not?

© 2012 simmbiosis 11/5/12

The Bottle

I live in a bottle
The bottle lives in me
The influence of the bottle
Affects all I hear and see
Everything I think, I feel
My very sanity
Every time I drink, I seal
My fate, my slavery
Equate equilibrium
With a sense of harmony
Conflate wittiness and charm
With drooling debauchery
Confuse misplaced ardor with
Growing dependency
Addiction needs must assure
Sustained advocacy
For deep is my thirst
The bottle’s is as well
Which outdrinks the other first
I suppose time will tell
I’d bet on the bottle
If history is a guide
It proceeds heroic
Support network wide
The lubricant of empire
Wet nurse to undue pride
Ejaculant of industry
With profits liquefied
Detracting its advocates
Advancing suicide
Each drink further we sink
Thirst never satisfied
Diminution of the self
Relinquishing control
Labeled poison on the shelf
The bottle takes its toll
Each sip the bottle bests me
Each draw my life it drains
In self-control it tests me
Only my control abstains
In time it will ingest me
I lose, the bottle gains
In my darkness I molest me
Waxing wroth as my life wanes
Diminution of the self
Relinquishing control
Labeled poison on the shelf
The bottle takes its toll
As my father before me
As his father before him
Back throughout the ages
Where our history grows dim
The thirst ever unquenched
The hunger never sated
So deeply entrenched
Cannot be satiated
Besotted missionaries
Proffering our imposition
Stumble forth impiously
And toast to our tradition
Of destroying everything
That we could once hold dear
The past laid out before us
Our future appears clear
The wisdom that we strangle
The madness we inflate
The apotheosis
Of the drunken reprobate
Elevate society
Consuming a depressant
Crumbling eventually
By thinking adolescent
Diminution of the self
Relinquishing control
Labeled poison on the shelf
The bottle takes its toll
Get blotto
Or wasted
Hammered
Or stupid
Smashed
Or wrecked
Or gassed
Or plowed
Or pickled
Or stewed
Or soused
Or tanked
Destroyed
Or ruined
Diminution of the self
Relinquishing control
Labeled poison on the shelf
The bottle takes its toll
The bottle takes another life
Consumes as foe a friend
The damage we do to ourselves
Difficult to comprehend

© 2012 simmbisos 7/8/12

Fiend

I’m a little pothead
Average sized
Configuration
Standardized
Twist me up a fat one
Bud comprised
Fairly useless
Unsurprised
What makes a man a junky
What makes us want to hide
Attached to the detachment
That eats at us inside
Detached from our attachments
Unable to decide
Behold devolving monkey
How do the dude abide
Is there truth to be gleaned
From the plight of the fiend
Caught in the throes of addiction
The stain never cleaned
The human demeaned
Pariah in social depiction
A hungering that gnaws
The oft refreshing pause
The ever-clenching jaws
The effect or the cause
Drawn to the effect
Cause harder to detect
A major disconnect
Especially when wrecked
Am I hiding from the fact I’m hiding
Or drawn to hiding something deeper still
Am I merely one more fool presiding
A life of dreams unable to fulfill
Downward through this hell I’m sliding
Genius disguised as an imbecile
Until with reality colliding
The emptiness I can never fill
Is there truth to be gleaned
From the plight of the fiend
Caught in the throes of addiction
The stain never cleaned
The human demeaned
Consumed by this sad predilection


© 2012 simmbiosis 11/5/12

A Punch Assault

“Post coitum omne animal triste”

According to my understanding that means, “Every creature is sad after sex.” I suppose the suggestion is that after sex, we have nothing grander to aspire to, which causes us sadness. Or perhaps it is but the sadness of another superior moment relegated to the dustbin of memory. In a current context one could suggest men are sad because we are again expected to speak in something other than grunts, and women, well, come on, we all know why they are sad. Men and all. Grunting through our exertions or grunting our sundry disapprovals.

Or approval. Enjoyed The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan’s swan song to the Batman franchise – his grand final shot if you will. Or so he has stated. It was a hell of a thing. And long – but one could count on length to enter into the ultimate dick swinging contest between good evil and evil evil. There was much grunting, usually exertion based, though more than a little disapproval was grunted as well. Which is to be expected in any film with an animal in its title – or as its protagonist.

It is perhaps prudent to define my terms and Batman is a serviceable example of good evil vs evil evil. We culturally accept his torturing suspects to save the girl or Gotham, because even though such torture is most assuredly prominent in the evil evil category, it is done to prevent greater evil still. As when he blasts through police cruisers like broken toys in his numerous high speed pursuit/evasions – if he is able to save one life, then the 15 he killed or maimed in the process were a small price to pay.

The media of the USA is full of people engaged in some torture or another to prevent the unspeakable from occurring, usually with a digital timer counting down, tense musical stings and some dirty little brown bastard holding out for Allah. In this, we are trained in the distinctions: good evil is when we do it to them/evil evil is when they do it to us.

The Batman’s primary antagonists in this outing are Bane, a giant of a man, an animal himself, who can bend steel in his bear hands and crush a man’s skull with a well-placed boot or bomb or brutal bludgeoning with a side of Darth Vaderesque asthmatic philosophizing; and Selina Kyle, the Catbabe, always appointed stunningly in black leather stripper gear and heels to die for, or from, depending upon her mercurial affections. Of course there are many other bad guys too numerous to mention, all wretched and horrific underworld overachievers and very proud we are of them.

Of course, the title of this essay comes from another bad guy, portrayed by Al Pacino in Donny Brasco, another film of good evil going head to head with evil evil. Pacino played a loser of a mobster named Lefty who befriended Donny Brasco (played by Johnny Depp), an undercover Fed who ultimately gets a lot of other wretched assholes killed – protecting and serving and all. Lefty was seasoning some food he had cooking and applied a punch a salt which led Donny to correct him. And hilarity ensued.

Anyway…

Bane is portrayed as a huge, bear of a man. The cartoon character dressed kinda gay, like a Mexican wrestler, so they gritted his costume up and covered his face with a mask feeding him his precious gas of choice, defining his menace sufficient to make Gotham tremble. Interestingly, the actor who plays the giant Bane is young Tom Hardy (well, younger than me) who stands 5’10”. I think of all the giants put out of work by this average Joe. Or Tom.

Bane mashes a lot of people in the face. I note that behavior in a lot of movies, especially the ones which promote violence as an unfortunate, but necessary, good evil. James Bond, Jason Bourne, all the heroes in all these comic book franchises, films like Fight Club and the Matrix series, every cop movie or western, all got the goodish guys and badass guys kicking and punching and mashing and smashing each other right in the face. A lot.

Seems to me, other than the fact they would all be babbling wrecks trying to put more than two syllables together owing to the repeated head trauma, none of these guys would have any teeth. I mean were you to hit someone in the mouth hard enough to smash their head through a brick wall, their teeth would likely be everywhere not in their mouth. The ground around these fight scenes would look like a Chiclet orgy gone horribly awry.

But at the end, all these hyper-violent men and women (for Catbabe took more than a couple to her puss as well), smile the smiles of well-funded orthodontistry. Sure, one would expect a multi-billionaire like Bruce Wayne to have all manner of new choppers available as needed, but most of the headbangers in these movies maintain their Hollywood pearly-whites on the budget of thugs and mobsters. The majority of street crime vocational opportunities don’t offer dental plans.

Which, of course, is fine from an audience perspective. We all have those nasty dreams of finding a prominent tooth missing or loose. Or worse. It is hard to look at mangled dentistry, regardless how heroic the actions which led to it were. It’s like visual bad breath: avoid the offending cake-hole at all costs.

But in a realistic sense, and these films go out of their way to make the fantastic look realistic, none of these heroes would make it through a film with more than a couple of teeth in their mouths. How could they? Generally, once the blows to the face kick off, these characters don’t have time to get their teeth worked on. And few would stop at the end of a fight and crawl about on the sullied floor trying to gather only their own teeth from the many which most assuredly would be littered there.

I consider this through the lens of 2/3 corpse Ron Kovic. Ron, you may recall, was a young aspiring jock, suckled on Audie Murphy and John Wayne films, who joined the Marines at 18 and lost his body from his chest down by 21, the age he could legally drink in America. Where he lost his America First war fervor was where he lost his manhood: Vietnam. A place he shouldn’t have been because we shouldn’t have been there, denied him and hundreds of thousands of others their ability to walk, talk, see, hear, feel, fuck. Their ability to live.

Kovic says in his book Born on the Fourth of July that had he seen the real cost of war to the people who are engaged in it, not the sanitized, heroic Hollywood propaganda, it would have likely colored his choices differently.

If John Wayne had had his legs blown off, or Audie Murphy had been horribly burned and lost his arms in their war movies; if the soldiers who came to indoctrinate the students at high schools all over the nation had been crippled and maimed (as so many are) and warned all the boys and girls also suckled on propaganda that they would never be able to have sexual intercourse; no families; disappearing friends; limited job opportunities; tragic futures, and a bag and diaper for relief every night for the rest of their lives, how many would have considered what would be demanded of them instead of reacting with the imprudence of patriotism?

“Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.”
Bertrand Russell

In real battles, where actual people engage in life and death struggles with each other, a single bullet can kill or cripple a fully realized person. A single blow to the head or kick can end a person’s capacity to do the things most of us take for granted. When our media heroes are wounded, even grievously, they are never disfigured. Consider John McClane from Die Hard: Here is a guy who in real life would ambulate in a wheelchair and shit in a bag under the best of conditions, but just keeps getting better over the decades. Hard to kill? You bet. Money making franchises assuredly are.

That’s why they don’t show what would happen to these characters were they to actually engage in this behavior: crippling injury. Inability to support themselves or help themselves or those they love. Disfiguring wounds. Horrible burn scars. Batman got torched in the first remake, Batman Begins falling from a multi-storied building, but you’d never know it after the fact. We don’t want our heroes as toothless bruise bags covered in burn scars. That’s too much like real life, the thing we watch these movies to avoid.

Batman has retired by the beginning of The Dark Knight Rises and so has Bruce Wayne, who hobbles around the newly retrofitted, stately Wayne Manor with a cane, a victim of his earlier extra-curricular nocturnal activities. Now, while Bruce does offer us consequence for his sundry amazing behaviors, he still looks whole – no overt scarring, limbs still attached, his teeth look great. Sure, when his shirt comes off, he is clearly a marked man, but only his select women, Alfred, Lucius and we, the loyal viewing audience, get to see that much of him, so his poorly maintained secret is maintained. Poorly.

Some Gothamites (and Bane) have noted that Batman would necessarily have to be mega-rich with access to some amazing stuff. A simple Google search of billionaire industrialists in Gotham in their early thirties and anyone even slightly interested knows who the Batman is. So disappearing at exactly the same time as Batman goes on the lam is one of Bruce Wayne’s many mistakes, perhaps the result of too many blows to the head.

He is confounded by Catbabe and broken in half (in one piece) by Bane and left in the hell hole of, well, some hellish place to die among the scum of the Earth. Here, with a serious untreated spinal break, as well as numerous other trauma-based wounds (teeth still accounted for), he and his fellow annoyers of authority nurse him back to top physical condition and after only 8 years of sitting around on his arthritic ass. Way to go Bruce!

Ron Kovic had the best treatment available to enlistees or inductees in the USA in the 60s and 70s and while not a hellish prison, the VA couldn’t put him or hundreds of thousands of others back together. Of course war is real and movies are fantastic, but clearly boys drawn into warlike scenarios are more inclined to such behaviors, not measuring all the degrees of life between the top of one’s form and death. And boys and girls are trained to define heroism through the lens of distraction: movies, sports, TV. The Web.

Where even the losers look good.

Everyone knows media is fiction, nobody really thinks life can function in such a manner. At least, that is what we tell ourselves. But in reality, people do believe this stuff can happen, and not just a few. Lots of them. People believe impossible stuff they see, impossible stuff they are told, that they read – out of convenience as much as anything I suspect – stuff that defies everything we have come to understand as humans. When an exceptional man is posited, we can accept that because we all know them, or at least of them. A resilient fellow with a ready supply of armaments and bottomless draw from the money spigot could be imagined to do these things, especially with the fine veneer of science and technology applied liberally.

A willing suspension of disbelief.

Young minds dare to hope. Hope they’ll be heroic, hope they’ll survive, hope they’ll impress whomever it is they seek to impress. With no concept of consequences, foolish behavior becomes inconsequential, young minds make terrible choices based upon earlier poor choices and young bodies suffer. Real men, even real men who play Supermen, break under diverse circumstances. Christopher Reeve became virtually 7/8 a corpse upon falling from his horse. Not long after that he went 100% corpse and another man of steel was stolen from a hero hungry public. The earlier TV incarnation, George Reeves, proved to be slower than a speeding bullet fired at close range.

Batman, over the course of the current franchise, has been shot repeatedly, stabbed, burned, punched, kicked, slammed, fallen from buildings, hit by moving vehicles, slammed into stationary objects, poisoned, pummeled nearly into Batjam and finally snapped like a twig. (We won’t even go into his being nuked.) Through all this mayhem and carnage, his teeth remain perfect, his face unscarred, all of his appendages and extremities function and on top of that, he still gets the girl. The advantages of fictional living.

Impossible heroism has its rewards (in the realm of the impossible) but it has its price as well, as generation after generation of young people perceive the human ideal against a marker of the fantastic instead of the possible. When one aspires to Batman-like heroics, the job at Mickey D’s holds a diminished appeal. When we aspire to the achievable we stand the chance of achievement – when we aspire to the impossible or even merely improbable the surety of our failure kills our will to strive. We become observers of life, no longer participants.

And as observers we all know what it takes to spice up any fare – just add a punch assault!

Bon appetite!


© 2012 simmbiosis 10/30/12

Mental Work

I conversed with my grandmother a while back, on the occasion of her 90th birthday (way to go Grandma!). With beginnings I believe in the mid-west*, she moved to California where she met my grandfather, who had already sired my pop and his brother with his first wife. I had two grandmothers on my dad’s side of the family and one on my mom’s side, but no grandfather there, so I suppose a level of equilibrium was achieved. One grandfather and three grandmothers – it seems almost biblical.

June (name changed to not further annoy her) and my grandfather moved to Florida when I was young and got into real estate. Did fairly well at it by every indication and has had a very comfortable life as a result and good for her. She is a very nice lady and I love her dearly and wish her nothing but joy for the remainder of her turn. She has always been very good to me.

I recall a couple several Christmas’s past I posited the interesting conundrum of how we as a family are more inclined to remember each other on the birthday of someone who probably didn’t even exist on the pagan holiday of solstice than we are on our own real life birthdays. We give each other cards and gifts and phone calls and all kinds of love on a made up person’s made up birthday, yet rarely even call each other on our own. I suggested that if we promoted our own birthdays as much as our culture promotes Christmas, people would more likely remember them.

They just wouldn’t talk to us anymore.

During our verbal visit the notion of mental work was offered as a response to my query regarding the differentials in say, getting paid to sweep a floor or making money making phone calls and such. Note the difference in how these jobs are represented, not only by me here, but by our culture as a whole: getting paid/making money.

We tend to think of people working in janitorial or field labor or mining or heavy industry (as metal workers and such, not management) as getting paid. You get paid a wage to do back breaking work. You make money doing mental work. You get paid for making something; you make money by the use of your mind.

I believe they call that thinking.

As one who has been paid to do physical work and even made money doing mental work, I find the distinction is compelling. As a writer/composer, I do all kinds of mental work, even manifesting such abstracts in the form of the real. For this expressive and creative mental work I get nothing beyond joy of composition and the occasional appreciation of those close to me. The one closest to me interestingly enough is the one most appreciative of my mental work realized.

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” Samuel Johnson

I clearly differ from the esteemed Mr. Johnson on that point, but one would expect such things of a blockhead, so it comes as no surprise. Not that I exist in opposition to making money for my work, my art – to the contrary such income would allow me the freedom to do even more and better art, mental work. I have considered that perhaps one reason I have never been paid for it – ignored over a long enough timeline, it is naturally presumed that one will accept their failings and have the dignity to sit down and shut up. Any level of attention to me or my work will reveal a natural capacity on my part to defy presumptions.

I don’t sit down or shut up.

Nor, given the vast empty drivel polluting the input holes of humanity, do I feel I should. People motivating us to dance, watch, consume, obey and murder, make millions of dollars, while those suggesting that we question, reason, and demand accountability from those who demand our obeisance get paid to do physical work when they’re lucky, while their mental work is marginalized and dismissed.

We who don’t get paid to create, yet do it because we must are artists. Entertainers make millions of dollars, artists make art. What is art? Picasso said this and I gladly quote it because it resonates so with me:

“Art isn’t truth. Art is the lie which makes us see the truth.”

Not bad from a Spaniard, huh? And one who got his work recognized by popular culture and became rich owing to his entertainment value and the cachet such recognition brings. Dali as well, a fully realized artist that got rich off his brilliant promotion. The artist as the gallery.

Popular culture isn’t about truth; it is about commerce, about distraction. Dancing is fun and all but most guys do it by way of getting laid while most gals do it to see how much work a guy is willing to do to get laid. Originally a tribal mating ritual, now it becomes the consolation prize for those who just don’t have the energy for a relationship. Dance all night, go home alone and masturbate. The internet will provide all the stimulation we need.

According to the Nielsen Company, Americans watch on average 5 hours of television a day, 151 hours a month. I wonder if we listened to one source, a politician, preacher or even rap star for 150 hours a month, if over time we would be influenced by them? I wonder how many husbands listen to their wives 150 hours a month, or wives their husbands; how many parents listen to their children 150 hours a month, how many children, their parents?

Television isn’t art, it is not a repository of truth – it is pop culture, a diversion, a distraction. It is a sales pitch most odious. It is mental rest. And the average American gives it 5 hours every day.

There are many Americans like me who give it zero hours a day which means that it exists in an operational state for 8, 10, 12 hours a day in other homes. When I flew back to Florida to visit my grandmother, I noted that it was on virtually 24 hours a day. I spent a week listening to Fox News during all of my waking hours in her house. One station, one corporate perspective, one mindset being perpetually introduced into the minds of those who give it such primacy in their lives – no other influence superseding the ones we electively allow access to our thinking.

Our mental work.

If art is the lie that makes us see the truth, pop culture is the lie that makes us buy.

When I was teenaged and still stupid enough to think I had something going, my dad laid it out for me: physical labor is for chumps. Losers. Brown people. Used to be black people, but since slavery ended they don’t work anymore so the browns and yellows have to do double duty. That’s why our major multi-national corporations put their factories in places like Mexico, or Puerto Rico, or the Philippines. Or China where they have very few black people, likely not working either.

Of course, wrong thinking people might suggest that shifting the manufacturing base away from the nation denied millions of blacks employment while the agricultural labor they were once compelled to do has been placed upon the backs of migrant laborers from Mexico. Or imported from China. I live in California, an amazing agricultural state. We grow among other things, garlic here. Yet at the markets in Southern California, garlic comes from China. Weird.

The popular mythology is that blacks, for the most part, are stupid and lazy. That’s why the people who thought that way forced them to harvest their crops and care for their children. Cook their food. Who better to raise up a bunch of stupid and lazy white folk than their stupid and lazy slaves? Now, even the good slave jobs are gone and Mexicans harvest our food while Hondurans nanny our children. So the blacks for the most part are left with only welfare or crime to sustain them. And we, white folks, are for the most part good with that. Makes the work of the law enforcement community easier: “Suspect is black. Any questions?”

As if to punish them for their impudence for demanding to be treated like white people, we treated them like white people: white trash. They became the coveted criminal set and our society did all we could to confirm that bias. They became not even good enough for nigger work. So we put them and the poverty stricken white folks ruined in any of our alternating depressions on the dole and they became beholden to the state. In food is fealty.

To counter this liberal rubbish it will be pointed out that the system works for all with initiative and successful black entrepreneurs exist in abundance, rich beyond their station through the diligent application of mental work and good old American ‘stick-to-itiveness’.

Is it not interesting then that the blacks we know so well through our sundry media are less noted for their success than their scandal. I could likely name three blacks noted for their success off the top of my head as opposed to easily ten who turned that success into scandal and tragedy. This is not to suggest that there are not as many successful blacks as embarrassing ones; just that our media prefers to focus on the embarrassing ones, often to the exclusion of the others.

Which means we tend to focus there as well. In many cases Michael Jackson was either perceived as the king of pop or a vile pederast dependent on little more than if the question was put to a white person or a black one. Even one of our most beloved black men, Martin Luther King is portrayed in the media as a philandering communist. But he did help the blacker people among us achieve more social parity with white people. Sadly not so much by elevating blacks as diminishing whites, as our economic masters widened the gulf in wealth between them and us to teach us not to be so uppity. We learnin’ real good, massa!

It is estimated, based upon government figures that upward of 80 million Americans are unemployed. I’m not talking about people like my grandmother, old people, (who is still employed – mental work tends to more physical longevity than physical work) or babies; I’m describing people who are able and should be working. Who need to be working. The reason this figure isn’t trotted out is obvious, our economic recovery would be seen for the depression it is and has been for about 7 years. Instead they talk of figures based on unemployment insurance.

Doing mental work as a location manager, I created a company, Locators. Did that about a decade ago. Haven’t done locations for a couple three years, as of now. Because I own a company I am not eligible for unemployment compensation. Which means when I’m not working – or earning, because I’m always working – I am not counted among the unemployed. Independent contractors, business owners, people whose unemployment has run out are not counted. The pathetic reality is one of the world’s major work forces is sitting idle.

Why, I wonder is that?

Could it be perhaps because as the structure of industry changes, there are more and more people doing mental work (management) with all the perks and bennies of such lofty status, which puts a strain upon the bottom line when you also figure in the cost of the people who actually make things and their sundry necessities? Health care, pension, safe working conditions cost more which then reduces the amount the people getting paid to think have available to them.

So they move the jobs to places where that nonsense doesn’t affect the bottom line.

The notion of mental work likely originated in the priestly class where men of lofty aspiration who suffered physical limitation decided to think their way to power. Thus came the river gods and the rain gods and the Sun god and the Moon god and the solitary person in the tribe or community or kingdom who could talk to them. Persuasive personalities with direct access to the afterlife are not the ones you send out into battle or compel to till – they are more akin to shepherds. Even kings initially attained their acclaim by actually going into the battles they encouraged, perhaps until they got smart enough by watching the priests to stay more toward the back of the battlefield. Strategizing. Mental warfare.

As the families of the landed gentry became bigger, likely owing to all the free time they had to lay around and fuck all the time, the smart among them realized they would need things to occupy them as they grew into their inherent wealth. They also realized that physical labor is for chumps. So they invented bureaucracy so their type of people would have mental work to keep them occupied and also allow them to feel they didn’t just get born into a big pile of rich; that they actually earned it. Thinking and all. Think hard enough, hell, you might get a raise.

Fast forward to American lassie faire capitalism and before you know it, you got millions upon millions of people, mostly white, who need something to occupy them that doesn’t require a bunch of sweating and physical strain. Enter the bankers, insurance companies, investment firms, real estate, all sales brokers and law firms, hell, the entire legal system– paper pusheries all.

Work for millions, which keeps us busy making calls, fielding calls, reading forms, legal docs and material so horrid and dull that after a day of wading through it you never want to read again. Instead to bask in the smarmy narcosis of television, distracted and divided.

“Capital must protect itself in every way…Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When, through a process of law, the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd.” JP Morgan

Sadly, as teachers, they have succeeded beyond all of their dreams and their students (commonly herd) have learned everything they’ve been taught so well that we now engage in perpetual war so they have things to gamble on. Things of interest. Men and women with no principle still know interest.

I can state with no equivocation that if all physical work ended today, civilization would end tomorrow. With no food, power or medical (for doctors do physical work, although hamstringed by mental work via bureaucracy) what we know as civilization would become a ravening chaos.

On the other, were all mental work to end today, civilization would continue, albeit a very different civilization – one where all contribute physically to our welfare, not just the least among us. Where survival is based upon actual real life considerations and not merely abstract notions of money and property and divinity. Were those who do mental work compelled to do physical work to survive, I suspect such labor would be held in high esteem and even higher tax brackets.

I fear we have created a growing percentile of our society that not only looks disdainfully upon physical work, but also upon mental work as well. I suspect there are millions upon millions of Americans who think all work is for chumps. That life should be like on TV, interesting and leisurely – at the same time, all the time.

But life isn’t those things always, unless one looks through the right eyes, or more correctly, through their eyes right – it is often tedious and demanding. But through tedium and expectation do we learn to appreciate the interest and leisure we seek to a finer degree. It provides context.

Humans need something to do, not just look at or listen to. Our bodies tell us what we need and often that need is accomplished through physical effort. All of the good things we enjoy come from the physical effort of others and even from our own, if we’re inclined to it. People who give their bodies for our social benefit should be paid as well as those who think about it. Time is life consuming, for all of us. At the end of the day, the day is gone for everyone.

Could be worth thinking about.

*It has been brought to my attention, (thanks June!)(see? this stuff does bring people together) that my grandmother was in fact born in California.

© 2012 simmbiosis