Arianna, my first play!

Ed.-I never liked this stupid asshole, never trusted her. Giving someone like her a second chance was always gonna be a mistake...

http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2009/01/arianna-satirical-play-by-matt-janovic_31.html

On the windborne devastation of Henryville: Mitch Daniels has made more homeless than all the recent tornadoes combined

Still don't believe in global warming folks? It's my opinion that this is a warning, like Joplin, Missouri last year, from the earth. We cannot keep using fossil-based fuels, we cannot keep using petroleum, period. A consensus is forming in the scientific community that 2017 might be the year of no return, however, with carbon dioxide emissions exceeding all predictions, and with the reaction in the atmosphere growing geometrically, that window might be closing sooner than we think. Do we really want to gamble on that? Everyone with their finger in the oil pie says yes. You sure? I know, I know, Jesus is coming.

Speaking of the Naz, crazy Pat Robertson made one of those predictable remarks one usually sees from slavering goobers when someone "takes the Lord's name (What's his name? We don't know) in vain: "Something's going to happen to you for that," always a popular comment at keggers. Yes, yes, Robertson was doing an "I told you so!" version of it when he said tornadoes wouldn't reap destruction "if we'd pray more" as a nation. This is true: there was no weather until the fall of  Man, the fossil record illustrates this clearly. Yesterday I was running the van on some remnants of Adam and Eve (not Adam and Steve, surely), it's true, I saw it, I smelled it. Souls have a smell, after all, especially American ones, which is why we shower so much. Speaking of stink...

How about that outgoing Republican asshole Governor, Mitch Daniels visiting the devastated Henryville, Indiana on Saturday? A journalist asked the small government asshole what he would tell the families of the town who were now homeless (OK to become homeless through natural disaster is acceptable, not so through man-made lay-offs, downsizing, etc.--your fault). Daniels had this empty comment which he feebly blurted out as though someone had told him he'd lost all of his money, or that someone had photos of...you know:

"Well... we love you...and we're with you. And... if it isn't already obvious... It's not just government, it's their neighbors here to help. I would just say to those families that we're going to do everything we can to get you back on your feet, to get you back in business and in your homes."

After being faced with his own general inhumanity because of the destruction around him, the Governor couldn't resist making his inappropriate political statement and experienced premature ejaculation.

Anyone could envision him having difficulty achieving a erection merely by his nebbish appearance. Goober was painting a neocon portrait of America that's never going to work, never did, common knowledge since the end of 2008. He knows better than anyone; it must be at the back of his mind at all times. Yes, in such events we get to see what people are really made of, Daniels being no exception. As predicted, he's comprised of ineffectual bullshit as all Republicans and Libertarians are. "Neighbors" will never be enough, and for the Ron Paul crowd (mooks), neither will churches.

"Well...we love you...and we're with you." Fuck you too, asshole. This scumbag has never cared about the fate of the homeless in this country, and then suddenly he does? What's he been doing for all of the unemployed during his unfortunate tenure as an officeholder? Working, as one example, with his fellow Republicans in the state house to end their unemployment benefits, actually hurting them, driving the economy down, destroying jobs. On his way out the door Daniels and the Indiana GOP have passed their right to work law, because "Well...we love you...and we're with you."Even in the aftermath of natural disaster, these people never let up, these lunatics, these criminals, these Republicans.

This guy is the "hope" of the GOP? They want to draft him to run for president? They've finally lost their minds. Expect the Republican Party to die soon, of a self-inflicted wound, so be it. The problem is that their "love" will be "with you" in the form of a shattered environment and economic malaise, maybe even social chaos. Do we ever learn? Of course not, this is America. How many times does it have to be said? Daniels was George W. Bush's budget chief. If we were to be honest, he's greatly responsible for the economic crisis we're in and likely will for years to come. He's made more families homeless than all the tornadoes combined. But he's not a total idiot like others.

Unlike Governor Kasich of Ohio, he took the help from FEMA, and the federal money, anyway. This time he had to dole out money to help people. There are limits to venality because, unless we're mentally ill or damaged organically, we all have an inborn sense or right and wrong. Not helping people after a natural disaster is our moral line in the sand. Why is it alright for government to neglect people rendered homeless as they were in Henryville, but not for everyone else who experienced the same through no fault of their own? That's why he made his little government comment--he was busted outright and he knew it. A good thing for him and what he represents that most Hoosiers and Americans are too stupid to notice it.

Of Mice and Not a Man:

http://consortiumnews.com/2011/05/14/mitch-daniels-architect-of-us-debt-crisis/
 

He Jerks Hard for the Phonies

"I work hard!" he told a room of openly uninterested listeners, something he did a lot of the time, especially after he left work at his private firm, his minuscule fiefdom. OK: especially at work, since his employees never listened to what he had to say because they were immune to bullshit. He didn't care. He was better since he made more money than they did, thanks to ripping off all of them through creative accounting and delusions of adequacy, and legally too.

"Goddamned deadbeats--won't work, plenty of jobs out there, I know!!*#^!" As was always the case, nobody acted as though they were listening, and on a conscious level, they weren't. The man kept going on anyway, yammering away while seven people in rags were lined-up outside clutching signs with various inscriptions on them, but all of them essentially said "Will Work for Food" in one way or another. Most of them had been working weeks before, and very hard.

"Spoiling my view!" he muttered. He was only 35, but came off as a moldering 88.

"For the love of God, would you please shut the fuck up, sir, asshole--whateverthefuck your fuckin' name is? Jesus, fucker." asked and projectile-vomited a young lady in black leather, festooned with tattoos and piercings from head-to-toe.

"Why don't you go get a job, like me? I'm even self-employed, eh, top that, you loud-mouthed Goth-cooze!" he growled, drool flowing from both sides of his mouth, a vein throbbing on his forehead, and a visible erection showing through his dockers. Baboons have their own male species.

"I have a job, bitch," she shot back instantly, visibly smacking him in the face with the comment. "But...everyone fuckin' works, you crybaby asshole. What makes you so special, fuckface?" and she sat back down in the booth she was in and turned her back to him disrespectfully. There was a round of applause for a solid three minutes, but a few in the corner slunk out after paying their bill, looking suspiciously ignorant, even furtively so, as they went across the street to do business at the asshole's unimportant fiefdom.

Dan Zukovic's Dark Arc (2005) review

If anything is obvious about Dan Zukovic it's that he's a cultural enigma and that a violent personal sense of boredom with modern life pervades his work. Why would someone want to piss off their audience? Why not if it's art with a purpose? The man loves to provoke his audience, to piss them off, and to make them laugh again and think, which in turn makes them even more pissed off, a neat trick.

I can relate. In the embarrassing days of “grunge” he fronted the incident-provoking Northwestern Canadian band “the Gargoyles” whose recorded works must be somewhere next to impossible to find and could be described as incredibly obnoxious. Good luck in your search of his music outside of his films, he's shooting for obscurity on purpose.

Since that time, the raconteur’s been writing and playing his inimitable style of underground rock, writing and directing plays, and so far, one film each decade. His career in theater seems to stretch back to the late 1980s. Zukovic, then, has a solid background in stage, television (he was seen in two episodes of the X-Files) and screen and is mainly known for creating one of the great satiric cult hits of the 1990s: The Last Big Thing, which featured the then-unknown Mark Ruffalo (Shutter Island) in one of his first film performances. Call it myopic, but I have to love someone this determined in making their vision a reality, then hiding it under a bush for the thoughtful.

Zukovic dipped his own toes into the mainstream culture during that lame-ass decade of the 1990s and is found in a memorable character performance in the sci-fiction horror film, Disturbing Behavior; but that's about all he's done for the most part of over a decade as a freelance actor. At one point in the early 1990s he was making appearances in "Matlock" and several in "Days of Our Lives." He's a very elusive man. Just try finding much information on him, anywhere. Even in the age of the Internet, he's managed to remain mostly an enigma. Is he hiding from the “suits”? These are some of the other people he's interested in within his works, those people who took that other path he mostly rejected, the careerist. From what I took from both of his comedies he both admires and loathes them.

He saves some special hatred for corporate suits, but if the suit fits... ”Admires”? Yes, Zukovic admires them, though he sports a cravat more often than a conventional tie so the blood-flow to his brain is intact.

"Admires?" Yes, I wrote admire, so shut the fuck up already. First: he admires them for their nihilist discipline and even some of their accomplishments, but he also fears and hates them since they're probably some of the very same people he has to deal with in order to get a film financed and distributed, and his films are extremely low-budget as it is, he has to go begging for money. The fear is always going to be there that you're dealing with a flaky, ineffectual desk-bound asswipe with an ego (and bank account) big enough to poison your vision and kill the movie with the swipe of a pen, potentially ruining years of work and preparation. In other words, an executive producer—or worse—some asshole that they sent to represent their interests, a shill, a glorified gofer with an MBA and no imagination.

If your luck's really bad the shill will also secretly hate creative people, not simply the director, but anyone with a creative bone in their body working on the production and go after them.

There are other problems: you still need a competent and motivated crew--however small--and that's even before the costs of post-production editing and dubbing, the finishing of a movie, and promotion. This is the curse and the bane of all artists who have to work in expensive mediums like film, a century-old battle between art and commerce. I believe Zukovic keeps things small so that his chances of ever brushing-up against redundant bureaucratic asswipes is going to be a statistical error. I'd imagine that he witnessed his share of these kinds turds and their malignant influence working on the "X-Files" and its spin-off, "Millennium," as well as in his walk-on parts in other Hollywood fare. That's probably some of the key to his self-accusations, that he felt he'd sold-out at some point as an artist and was making-amends for being a hypocrite and a pretentious ass in public to average, naïve people who sincerely just wanted to have fun when they all collided some two decades ago.

Yes, it was artistic “frisson” at play to screw with ordinary people, and yes, he's clearly learned from his mistakes. That still doesn't stop him from pointing the finger at his audience and needling them, which he does expertly. His movies, then, can be seen as a form of penance and Zukovic should himself be admired for it. This is something that takes incredible courage--to put yourself out there like that. ridiculing oneself. The “war”--if there is one between the writer/director and the money people—often seeps into the narrative of his stories, and that's where some of the self-accusation comes into play. Many motion pictures, and even plays, have this “hidden” subtext in them (like later Peckinpah), but Dan just lets it all hang out, all over the place, so it's not so hard to understand why it takes a special group of backers to be attracted to his work. Like the suits, nothing stops this guy from doing his thing.

They say that the tough get tougher and the weird just get weirder, but who wants to hire a Private Detective just to experience someone's art? In the modern world, the weird is becoming commonplace and it's not necessarily entertaining, though art and entertainment are two different things. What's left when everything is the same urban sprawl? Don't people start to hallucinate in solitary confinement after awhile? Yes. The mind is eventually going to wander, create, and entertain itself when everything becomes the same empty routine. But when is something adapting to life through humor and when is it someone going nuts? When is it all of the above? Raging against an ocean of indifference and a vast cultural wasteland that was always there in some form or another has an implicit comic humor to it, but also all of the elements of profound tragedy.

Zukovic is so divinely twisted that he's capable of finding humor in a yawning spiritual abyss, an impressive feat for any artist. I've known about Dark Arc for over five years wondering how I was going to be able to see it outside of some stodgy, remote film festival. There's some implied strategy here, like that of his protagonists. Leave them wanting more, and so he does, a good rule of thumb for anyone wanting to make an impact and to preserve the power of their images.

Even being able to find a trailer or a clip of the The Last Big Thing online--until very recently--has been practically impossible and any biographical information on its author is scant at best. Does this guy ever do interviews? I'd imagine promotional appearances are a rarity for Zukovic and I can't blame him. The availability of his films still begs the question: “Does he attempt to promote his films at all?” Yes, apparently so, since they've made the rounds of various international film festivals without much luck in getting the attention and the interest of distributors--or at least ones who were willing to cut him and his investors a square deal (for readers who don't understand traditional movie distribution, just recall all the horror stories from the music industry and it should make sense).

Zukovic doesn't seem to be interested in some kind of hollow fame or anything beyond his ability to keep producing plays and his quirky comedies, which is enough effort in itself.

What's most interesting is that he's had more luck finding American investors for his low-budget comedies than native Canadian ones, but that's also a matter of the Great White North's legendary tax credit laws and his projects come cheap to foreign backers. Americans always love a deal. Being a fan of this guy's work is a daunting task, but I think like all great finds, the hunting was worth the effort. No matter: The Last Big Thing was picked up for cable in the late 1990s. It's been shown at film festivals and on IFC and Cinemax over the years and received the inevitable bootlegging treatment—my own copy was taped off of broadcast TV over a decade ago.

Cultural obsessives of the obscure will be happy to know that a DVD of it is slated for release for sometime in 2011, just shy of twenty years after its obscure initial release. Does the mainstream media shun this guy? Does he shun them? Both? It's a hard call in an era that demands answers to everything, and be fast about it, will ya? Zukovic's having none of that and I'd wager that had he wanted stardom he would've achieved it around the same time that Ruffalo did, within the last fifteen years. Did he ever want that fame? I believe he did, but rejected it and its trappings.

He's a strange bird--to put it mildly--and he has a screen presence that's unforgettable, looking like an emaciated John Saxon-on-Sartre with an obsession for high culture street fighting. There must have been some intellectual crisis for Zukovic by the mid-1990s since high culture and its failings was the main theme of his first film. Logically, he's also obsessed with criticizing cultural snobbery, namely his own, and opening oneself up like this can only be art; the humor of it all is obvious without being preachy. Like all of the greats of comedy, he understands comic timing and rarely ever misses a beat. To make great comedy takes incredible effort in such jaded and cynical times, but he manages to pierce the layers of defense in a way that's timeless, a rare gift in a world that doesn't care that it doesn't care.

The key to some humor is in being annoying which Zukovic excels at, right down to his hilarious fuzz-guitar stings which always come at the right emotional moment. To be sure, he's a good example of a Renaissance man working on several levels at once. You could literally ignore the high culture jargon in his two films and have no difficulty understanding what he's saying about the characters--just listen to and observe the comic interactions between them and it all makes natural comedic sense. There's also a great love/hate/ambivalence for the everyman at play, the “average fuck,” the “basic fucker,” in the Zukovic universe, a love of people who are simply unassuming and sincere in their basic ignorance. If you've ever been in a scene or an artistic milieu, these gasps for “normal” air can be refreshing.

There's a point where you have to admit to yourself that you wouldn't want to be, for example, in the same room as Picasso or Rimbaud, and certainly not with Jackson Pollock on a drunken tear. This love of ordinary people is something to be treasured and the director's finest moments are when his snobbish stand-ins for himself are confronted with their jaded assholism by people who aren't nearly as stupid and ignorant as they assumed. Too often, the life of the self-described Bohemian has been a refuge for emotional retards too afraid to embrace people and life, running to elitism, a manufactured classism that obscures their lowly-roots and what most of them really are: cowards.

Zukovic is no coward. Both of his films have some magic turning-points where these confrontations with "normals" happen, though I'm not going to give those moments away to the reader, they'll know them when they see them. The truth is, if we don't change and grow in this life, we ultimately die.

With its obvious use of theme-named characters Dark Arc could be a satirical story by Terry Southern. Zukovic casts himself once again as the protagonist of the tale, a Viscount Laris, a walking cultural anachronism out of Cervante's Don Quixote searching for...searching for what? Does he even know? Laris is the quintessential wannabe artiste since they have such an ill-defined place in a modern technological world, an almost soulless human society that has no appreciation of the divine, of the symbols or of art itself, only viewing it as a commodity to be sold. It's a world that devours meaning and that's ultimately what the characters of Zukovic's stories so desperately want in their colorless lives; their feeble attempts at finding that meaning is often their first mistake since they should stick with making it honestly and for the right reasons. Instead, most of them use it as an indirect form of communication that's bound to fail.

This is a lot like the dialogue of the equally damaged characters in Steven Soderbergh's very personal Schizopolis (1996) which not-so-ironically contained actual sentences taken directly from the incomprehensible notes of movie producers to the director from his early days navigating the completely batshit Hollywood system. Do they ever connect with each other? In Zukovic's universe, they do, and the writer/director offers a sense of redemption for his tortured creatures, albeit an utterly bizarre one in the case of Dark Arc. Zukovic offers us a very peculiar love triangle, because...well, just because, folks. Boy-meet-girl still packs-'em-in.

Without giving too much away, Laris takes his recently acquired aristocratic title to its logical conclusion in a way that would do Aaron Burr proud. Laris is looking for love, yes, but also the ultimate experience in a mind-deadening present, that great image he's been looking to recapture from his childhood, an ineffable archetype to heal something that's missing, something that's broken inside. Serendipity brings Lamia his way, but is it a good thing? It's tragicomic, but Zukovic is being very serious while at the same time prodding us into laughter; oftentimes, he makes both possible, as though he were some Peckinpah of art house cinema, making us confront ourselves for a laughter that he's coaxed us into, a mercurial touch. What's funniest is when his well drawn characters have their social masks fall--or are ripped-off violently--and the gloves are truly off.

Once the quasi-aristocratic facade slips, the North American working-class origins start coming out in full-bloom like a drunken sailor out on a mission for a prime piece of ass, and expressed in roughly the same terms.

Laris meets “Juxta/Lamia” (a role which is nailed to the floor by Sarah Strange who also appeared on the X-Files), his muse, a woman straight out of an image he first encountered in his childhood: a vintage photograph of a woman lying on a couch in a Berlin opium den, circa 1923. That's pretty specific, isn't it? The dryness of it all reminds me of the best of Bunuel, that sardonic laugh at the absurdity of the human condition and all of the pointless machinations people descend to on the Pilgrim's road to getting laid. To make things more absurd, Zukovic throws in a geeky, aged graphic designer (played subtly by Kurt Max Runte) with a dead-end life who suddenly comes to the attentions of Laris and Juxta. Laris has it in mind to cultivate the “basic fuck” through repeated exposure to “charged imagery,” frequently in the form of his muse, festooned as a “slash of pink.”

The sexual tension is everywhere in the storyline to the point that I felt compelled at one point to utter aloud, “For fuck's sake, just tell him to fuck you, goddamn it.” I was watching it alone, at home on my laptop. That's good filmmaking and a natural storytelling ability.

Dark Arc's obsessions are similar to the Last Big Thing's, but where writer/director Zukovic and company diverge is the greater focus--and I mean this literally--on imagery and the power of the image on people, so it has a greater visual beauty than his first feature. Intriguingly, there's an examination of both the male and female gaze, a visual-pun that the director handles well, if darkly. For fans of his first film, yes, Edvard Munch's “The Scream” makes a comic return more than once. The beauty of all this is that you don't have to know about the great artistic, intellectual and literary movements of the last two hundred years to get the humor of this very dry film. For all of its high flown language and imagery, the focus is still on what it always has to be in drama: people and their problems.

These are extremely weird ones, mind you, but people all the same. Suffice it to say that Zukovic is most obsessed with people who are unable to relate to or to communicate with each other conventionally anymore, which is the great tragedy of our time. These are people who are--to put it politely--profoundly neurotic, dysfunctional, and terminally middle-class. There's always a deep sadness about our eternal consumerist present underpinning all of this—that over-thought and desaturated bleakness of modern life, the unfulfilled promises of rock, religion, politics, art, philosophy and literature. The hipster sense of elitist solitude that was always a part of North America's counterculture is his clay to fashion as he will and damned if he isn't angry about it, and at himself, for once being that snobby social creature.

There's a lot to be angry about when unfulfilled promise is the rule of the day. This sense of an end of culture is echoed in the brilliant comebacks Zukovic nails a vapid scenester with in the third act of the story; it's a brilliant compression of the life-cycle of a hipster scene, going from superficial fun that in-turn almost as rapidly disintegrates into conformism and paranoid cliquishness, alienation and acrimony. You have to hand it to an artist who's accusing himself for laughs while kicking his own milieu squarely up the ass.

When everyone's a hipster and in on the joke, the ultimate irony of this era, what's left? A film like this is a rare event indeed, even in an age when most are going to view it for the first time on their laptops or in the privacy of their own homes. What's left after every conceivable form of cultural rebellion has been assimilated and drained of its power and purpose (originally intended to subvert a death loving dominant culture)? What's left? The individual. That's who made Dark Arc, for the rest of us sitting out there in the darkness, often alone, in a room full of people.

Mel Gibson to join reunited Norwegian Satanic Metal band Burzum

A burning church, Norway--At precisely 7 a.m. GMT, the recently reunited metal band announced to the international press that Mel Gibson would now be fronting the group. So as not to confuse hipsters, they explained that Gibson "wouldn't be disrespecting us--quite the contrary," but "will be out front singing for us, on vocals. Thank you all, and have a nice day, especially Jews."

In the spirit of tolerance and brotherly love, the band produced a sampling of song lyrics (still in their embryonic stage) Gibson wrote and will be singing from his padded cell in Los Angeles, via satellite.

The song is titled, "Flowers, My Dearest Love":

Stay on this phone and don't hang up on me.
I have plenty of energy to drive over there.
You understand me? (repeat four times)
AND I WILL! (repeat four times)
SO JUST F------ LISTEN TO ME.
LISTEN TO MY F------ RANTING.
LISTEN TO WHAT YOU DO TO ME.

You have no f--king soul.
I left my wife because we had no spiritual common ground.
You and I have none, zero.
You won't even f---king try.
You don't care.
You don't care.
You don't care.

I'll put you in a f---ing rose garden you c--t!
You understand that?
Because I'm capable of it.
You understand that?
You understand that?
You understand that?
AND I WILL! (repeat four times)
SO JUST F------ LISTEN TO ME.
LISTEN TO MY F------ RANTING. LISTEN TO WHAT YOU DO TO ME. (all lyrics by Mel Gibson, 2010)

In an unsurprising turn, Mel's volume of fan mail from disturbed women proposing marriage rose, while the market fell. Most of the new material will return to their black metal roots, eschewing (whatever the fuck that is) their more recent attempts at crust punk (whatever the fuck that is).

Ronny Deutch is a fucking liar...

Why? Because she's really Suzi Quatro, that's why, but she says she's a reputable national lawyer. She's not. You know, it all falls off from there...

Why she came to America... (a satire)

"Why? Why did you come here?” they asked her, almost incredulously, but their questions were also mixed with a sense of profound fear and admiration. Some of them quaked in her presence knowing a little of what she was about and less of where she had been. The reporters attending her event wanted to know; they always wanted to know, and usually the most inane details, everything that was beside the point, tangential. She sighed internally and wished she could unleash her media Blitzkrieg (more like the “Schlieffen plan”) now, at this moment. She could hardly bear waiting any longer and felt the craving coming on. Were all paid speaking engagements this grueling? Maybe she could roll everybody after the speech.

This was a tough crowd, descended from European cave dwelling mutants who could detect the faintest scent of blood in the air, real sharps, sharks would cower when they were around. To show any signs of humanity could compromise her overarching philosophical agenda, triggering a genuine Mexican standoff before its time. Surprise was everything. Was her cheater showing? The waiting was killing her, but it was better this way. Had she remembered to tell the help to pack her .9mm with laser sighting and intelligent ammunition along with the sarong, the first editions of Rand, and the collected speeches of Lenin? She had. She chuckled that rednecks believed what she wrote and said when they were all from different worlds, but believe her they did, the rubes. What was most amazing was that these were the people fooling everyone else.

The attendees all looked slick, too slick, in fact, to be human. Some came running. Others were gathered there, the suits, in a peculiar semi-circle, chanting some strange and factually incorrect mantra about Adam Smith; it sounded more like a reunion of the outer heads of the O.T.O. to her, and it grated upon this realization. There are no Secret Chiefs. She knew that the core secret of Western Civilization was that no one was in control. The rest was a myth, but you could have some fun on the way back down into the mire if you played your cards right like the rest of the squalid nihilists. Only the eternal moment and objects mattered, and how useful they were.

Their clothing was of the finest materials, tailored as close to perfection as this life's gonna get, brother. Most were wearing lightweight body armor and held high security clearances because of who they were; 93.7% of them hadn't slept with their wives in over a decade. They were entitled. Their innermost collective secret was that their suits fit so well that you felt naked, and this was very true; they were feeling the love, higher than kites, clutching a staggering variety of mixed, hard drinks and packing powerful narcotics that were illegal for everyone else when she first entered the complex.

Some of them were CEOs, others bankers, and they all agreed that if the public--never mind their underlings and the redneck petit bourgeois--ever knew how truly freewheeling their lifestyles were they might view them as communists and hippies. The reality is, in their own sick, twisted, degenerated, and delusional style, they really were, ensconced in a cocoon of free market self-deceit and a smokescreen for the little people to chew on. The old methods weren't bringing in the dazzling profits anymore, so communism it would be, but just for them. They enjoyed lying to each other and considered it a form of sex. They lied so much that whatever the lie was, it became true on accident most of the time, except that that route was delivering less all of the time. Nothing was real, but they weren't all born liars. Lying requires those first baby steps forward, and these were real monkeys, this lot. The first one is always the hardest, they say, but it gets easier each time...lying that is, not combat kills or the behaviors of people like Ted Bundy, a serial killer who nearly became a Republican congressman from Washington state, a real “ladies man”. The others that got further than Bundy were able to hide the bodies better, with considerable effort, but old habits die hard.

“Why?” another smarmy attendee demanded again.

“Thee ansower ees wary simpal,” she said, and giggled (and snorted) falsely in her Slavic accent, “bud yoo weel haff' to wade for eemportant messaage forst.” Was it a Slavic accent? At times it seemed to waver in-and-out of that and a Germanic inflection. In an instant, a holographic advertisement appeared to fly dramatically out of one of their ears and half of them pondered the effects of the new technology on the human psyche but then wrote it off since questioning it might cost them a promotion down the line. These holograms were creepy because they appeared so real, so solid, as though they even emanated normal ambient sound that all objects make and which we sense almost subliminally. Of course, it wasn't real, but neither were any of their social interactions, so who cared? Not them. Still, they all persisted over why she had come to America.

“Greed?” queried one of the journalists in a dramatic non sequitur that had everyone agog. He was forcibly removed by two men in Chekist-style leather jackets with earpieces and a criminal record that was thicker than the Paris directory or even Department of Homeland Security contractors.

They showed no emotion when they first grabbed him, then dragged his person into a nearby warehouse, never to be seen or heard from again. His person was not pleased, but that was his tough shit. They continued on. They all looked to her with half-earnest yearning: in other words, only because they might get something out of it for free. The expulsions were thrilling, possibly one of the few existentialist realizations they would ever experience in their miserable, gray lives. A few of them were Rotarians, so they knew the drill, understood it's permutations, exalted its psychobabble, and pronounced it “marketable”.

“Sowry, yore juss'goink to haff to wade!” she said with equanimity and a trace of murderous annoyance, but only in her eyes, those windows to the soul, and hers were clouded. Her mind raced, and she beheld a superimposition of her thoughts of the Italian Christian Democrat, Giulio Andreotti--his visage--over the gathered attendees. In an instant, the thought form was gone.

They all waited some more, and in no time, the commercial's message was clear: there was something missing from their lives. Yes, they could feel it, and they all began drinking heavily, which was normal for most of them anyway. Some began breaking-out mainlining-kits, cocaine paraphernalia (including a few rolled-up Franklins), while others began having religious conversions and began quaking, speaking in tongues, and other forms of deviant sexual intercourse disguised through ritual.

“Yoo see, deer ees a rea-son why I haff called yoo heer dis' even-ink.” and she paused dramatically.

“Because 'someone's been murdered?' ” asked one of them, without thinking first. He'd been spotted and tagged as a known heckler at concerts for over three decades and Karma had finally come-a'-knockin'.

“Zer ees now!” she spat back, and the two nondescript men returned, this time grinning. “I'm gonna enjoy dis' one.” said the shorter one, and his fist made instantaneous contact with the journalist, breaking their jaw and his hand. “OK, maybe I'm not going to enjoy this, shit!” and held his hand in the crook of his arm as though he had a sling on it. Both the reporter and the goon were dragged to the warehouse and never seen nor heard from again.

“Wow, she's not fucking around, is she?” said someone in a voice that appeared to be emanating from everywhere and nowhere.

She continued: “Yoo may now ask questshuns.” and they gathered at her feet. She felt nothing but contempt for them, which was appropriate considering her escape from...and what of her actual last name? Why did she change it, and why the specific WASP surname? She'd never tell anyone, not on your life, man. Her thoughts floated to the image of a bottle of Pernod, and she warmed to it.

“Why, then, madam, did you come to these here U-ni-ted States?” asked an 87 year old Rotarian. He was wearing a bandolier over his Armani suit, kept pushing his horn-rimmed glasses back up his nose, and recalled that he needed to pay his American Legion dues for next year.

“Zat ees eazy wun for to ansower. Yoo see, een A'murka, you haff thee right to be wrongk, and eet pays goot too!”

“Is that it?” asked a young woman who had been walking past.

“Da. Zer ees mohr: yoo can say whad the fuck yoo want here too...”

End

Coming soon, very soon: A satire on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln titled "The Inside Job of All Inside Jobs"

Soon come, even before Babylon fall!

And they saw that it was hideously flawed: The Day God Died (a very short story with dissolves and flash-forwards)

In the beginning, there were six-packs and microwaveable meals, and they were good, or at least better than nothing at all, so quit yer bitchin'. Nobody ever got hurt--muchly--and all mimsy were the Borogroves, not even a mouse. There was something I was going to write, about some "City on a Hill," but they say the place has fallen into disrepair...you really don't want to go there, trust me on this one (worse than Detroit).

And the Lord spake far too often when there were no people around to hear it, then silence for thousands of years when there were and spake again saying, "Let there be light...oh shit. Did I pay the electric bill for last month? Oh boy. There I go again!" Yet somehow, there was light, and it too was good for a time until the bill collectors came. Six thousand years passed, somehow missing the dinosaurs and several ice ages by a mile, and then it was time to go to bed again, day-in, day-out, I tell ya'...

And they found that God's all about non-sequiturs, so he must be a Libertarian: One day in the 21st century (because you can do flash-forwards and even dissolves in allegory), a corporate executive belatedly died of a heart attack in his very posh home office in upper state New York. Like most CEOs, he was a criminal asshole and nobody cared when his time came, but you have to put these people somewhere after they're six feet under, so he made his way to the afterlife. No, the streets aren't paved in gold there either, so quit asking! "What idiot would believe such bullshit?" shrugged St. Peter. No one knew.

"I'm here to win!" said the CEO to the beleaguered bureaucrat manning the Gates of Heaven. Peter grinned.

"It appears that you have lost, schlub, but I got an idea a week ago I want to try out, so come with me." He took the CEO by the hand like fathers do with their drooling children at Wal-Mart and they ambled down the crumbling halls of a crappy Ministry in a dank, smelly corner of the afterlife. The stink of piss was everywhere, and the walls of Heaven were covered with obscene graffiti. Worst-of-all, someone had written "J.D. Salinger," which confused the executive since he'd never read a book after high school, or even that much during it.

"What's that?" said the CEO as they were looking at a hole in reality into a flat plane below. Tiny dots appeared to be moving on the surface, and it reminded the executive of his many flights over Ohio--the sprawl, with capillaries and arteries of commerce spreading out like a bubbling cancer, eating-away at the surface of the plan.

"That's limbo, also known as suburbs. No actual life takes place there."St. Peter retched while the suited Golem looked down at the scene below wishing he had a piece of the action.

"Right," said the CEO with that absolute certainty all the ladies love. They kept on further down the labyrinth of halls, endless halls, all growing darker and more disintegrated as they went. At times the walls seemed to exist merely as rapidly vibrating vapor and the CEO was able to stick his arm through them. "Nifty," he said, and shrugged.

"Keep talking kid, keep talking," said his divine escort laughing softly as old men often do.

Finally, they reached an enormous set of double-doors, bronzed and festoomed with lavishes of spirals, eyes, and flora. At the heart of the door was the design of a man who was in the center of a circle, his arms and legs endtended-out in the shape of a rightside-up Pentagram. All was silent and even the pair themselves were completely immobile. There is no movement in the presence of the divine, no action...but suddenly, there was. A deep moan pervaded the hallway and seemed to emanate from everywhere, then abruptly faded away as a sickly gurgle.

"What's that? the executive asked nervously.

"That was the death of God," St. Peter said, laughing and nodding wisely.

"What killed God?" he asked. St. Peter looked at the executive sadly.

" 'What'? You mean 'who.' Why, you did. Your very existence accomplished it."

"That doesn't make any sense to me. What do you mean? I've done everything right in life, been successful, did what I had to do to get ahead, and..."

"All fine and well, but did you ever consider the beauty of a Beethoven symphony, or the divinity in children laughing and playing in peace? Did you ever see the worth in all human beings, that every life is sacred in the end? Have you ever pondered in your life why mankind yearns for more, the loneliness, the angst that created the great works of art? Did you ever try to control your animal-impulses and be the better man? Did you ever try to improve yourself? Have you ever taken a stand in your life for what was the right thing to do for others?"

"Nope, none of those--hey, are you communist or something.?"

"Yes, I thought not, and that's why you were brought here. You see, you're lack, the temporal evidence that God created something imperfect, and therefore, was imperfect himself. Your mere proximity was enough to finish the job of an already dying deity that was in the denial stage of the grieving process. I can sleep the sleep of ages now, but first..."

Someone started hacking their way through the double-doors. With an abrupt kick, a man with wild, greasy hair and a thick-mustache crashed through. He was wearing a beautiful red robe studded with Hermetic symbols on a gold-red lame background, clutching a staff, wearing jack-boots. His eyes were both of the darkest night and the brightest day.

"Who's that? said the executive.

"That's Nietzsche, here to fix some shoddy craftsmanship."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"Nothing, you are lack, you never existed."

Nietzsche spake, "The last man has come...and where's the nearest bar anyway?"

"Can I finally sleep?" said St. Peter.

"Soon, but there's a universe to fix! We're off!"

As well all know, such an allegory is preposterous, impossible. Nothing so absurd has ever been contended by any religion at any time in human history, except at lunchtime and before bed.

"Radical Pirate Chic," a satire by an effete who wears ice cream colored suits (Matt Janovic)

“Queenie” was the first to saunter onto the aft deck, stepping insouciantly over the bodies of food and drink servers, piles of banned-in-the-USA flintlock AK-47s, broken unbreakable combs, and Bam-Bam’s toys. Her moves were getting the boys in the crew pretty hot, and they weren’t even over-hyped gangster rappers. The atmosphere was assuredly sultry, that was for sure. The armed Somalis running all over the place had boarded The Fountainhead several hundred miles off of the coast of Yemen, beating a flotilla of Babary Coast pirates to their quarry. Normally, it was “hands-up,” but something was amiss with the passengers of this particular vessel.

“Really, do any of you pirates have air-conditioning? I mean—really—it’s unacceptably balmy here in…where the hell are we? Who’s got a map? Not that I could find where we are on it, “exhaled the washed-up diva. Her face had seen better days, and so had her career, but she still had the gams and she was loaded in every sense. Perhaps this pirate fundraiser could get her more exposure in the mainstream media, she pondered. How that was going to happen off the coast of Somalia was anyone’s guess.

A teenage Somalia pirate angrily pointed his assault rifle at her and started yelling at the top of his lungs. Where were the canapés?! No, this GOP fundraiser wasn’t going as planned, let alone according to schedule, but at least the collapse of the voting base was still coming in on time (these were hard times for issue-baiters). If they couldn’t politically demonize these pirates, maybe they could bore them to death, or even join them. It seemed redundant. Who was responsible for this mess? Who did the booking? Who could they scapegoat when the usual victims were pointing guns at them without a nigger-beating cop or a gullible and bigoted public for thousands of miles?

Had Karl Rove planned it, or was it Bebe Rebozo? Nobody knew who Bebe Rebozo was, so it didn’t matter. A Republican junket had gone off-the-rails again (and again, and again…), and they were all looking like the ruthless, scurvy dogs they always were. At least they could glean their Vitamin C from some of the cocktails, but the food was rapidly running out, if not being looted or immediately consumed by the starving Somalis. But these good people were taking it in stride; they weren’t going to let anything ruffle their feathers, not even objective reality. Maybe a saber-or-two up against a throat might; or maybe a bullet in the arm, a leg, or the trunk, but not from a randy corsair or some buggery dog from the Spanish Main.

“Quick, quick,” many of them were thinking, “where is a copy of The Wealth of Nations for a Confucian-like consultation?” They couldn’t make a move without it--or a functioning nervous system--so it was going to be hard going for the foreseeable future. Were there ever Chinese pirates? Sure. But, after all, every fear hides a secret desire, and besides, the booze and grog were flowing, there were tons of Black teenagers (albeit training guns on them all), and the drugs were on the way. How was this different from a party at the Westin or Watergate? Right: the CIA wasn’t here.

“Those Somali pirates were just teenagers, and our Black Muslim president MURDERED them, that dirty racist mulatto—that tragic mulatto. I know, I know, it’s not as though I’ve ever shown much empathy for those Negroes—publicly--but I do have a yen for them black teenagers!” said a shaking, sweating Rush Limbaugh.

Withdrawal and the rhythm method weren’t part of the Republican lexicon, but the monkey on his back was getting vicious, barbaric, and it had to go. Rush called it “Joe,” but its real name was “Sam.” Hey, don’t ask me--I don’t write ‘em, ask the fat man. In a moment’s notice, the well-muscled simian sprang across the foredeck, gingerly and lovingly ripping the faces off of every suburbanite that motioned to pet him. Just as suddenly, he grabbed for a vegetable tray, but was violently rebuffed by violence. The chimp didn’t look very amused by this unacceptable state of affairs, and began effortlessly throwing pirates overboard. The “hosts” didn’t seem too amused either, pointing their flintlock AKs in Limbaugh’s undulating, porcine face, forming an aesthetically pleasing semi-circle that would’ve looked natural in a Fritz Lang film. One of the young pirates dropped his saber and started to dance in a delightful pirouette. This Republican Party wasn’t amounting to very much, but at least it had some camp value.

Limbaugh began shaking, pulled a microphone from nowhere, and spat out: “Look, look, we can do business…I’ve contributed greatly to your people in the Caribbean, I understand you people—as crazy as that sounds—I understand you. Wait exactly one minute and thirty-three seconds, and I’ll say something crazier.” The Somali pirates were not amused, and began rifling through his pockets, finding pornography depicting young black men in various states of undress, several bottles of Viagra™, Oxycontin™, and a key of heroin and some Havana cigars in a diplomatic attaché case affixed with the Seal of the Department of State. That was when the real party began. It was time to get fucked-up, and that’s exactly what the skeletal Somalis did (wouldn’t you?).

With superhuman swiftness, they began whipping-out their grubby shooting works, grabbing cafeteria trays and any flat, reflective surface that they could get their mitts on. Now the Republicans finally saw their quarry, and an opening; they knew how to play this game. The old divide-and-conquer routine was coming, and they all knew it. It was at that point that a doddering old country doctor from Dallas came forward, brandishing a flaming (Christopher) cross, speaking utter nonsense (the nomenclature of American politicians, Libertarians and businessmen). Everyone was seriously fuuuuuccccckkkkkkeeeddddd uuuuuuuuuuuuup--even Ted Nugent, who appeared to have become a switch hitter.

Ron Paul misspoke: “Ya’ll need to hire some more pirates to deal with these here pirates, it’s worked before! I’m a Medical Doctor, and as we all know, we’re experts in foreign policy,” he droned on. The Somalis began nodding-off, and it wasn’t from the heroin. “…But there’ll be MONEY in it.” At those words, the young, Black, and gifted Somali pirates began gathering around the doddering redneck from the failed and theocratic Republic of Texas, now occupied by federal troops after a failed insurrection. The Doc was right for once in his miserable life: the pirates began rifling through his pockets, and when they were done, he was unceremoniously thrown overboard with a volley of RPG and Kalashnikov rounds following him.

“You’ll never take me alive!” he said, frantically clutching and wrapping himself in an American flag as he took several dozen rounds in the trunk. Absolutely everyone on the ship applauded for ten-minutes-straight.

“He was right!” chuckled one of the bilingual pirates, and I don’t mean “bi” in that other respect.

The rest of the pirates thrust the RPGs and flintlock AK-47s into the air in a defiant cheer. It was time for MORE sailor’s pay, and there were plenty more passengers to loot and…you know. They all spread-out across the main deck and filtered down to every level of the luxury cruiser, it was a spectacle that Michael Bay or any number of kiss-ass Hollywood producers would have drooled over, and it didn’t require any set up or union guidelines. Had there been video cameras, it would have been a reality TV show. Once the press arrived, it would be, and the surviving passengers could snap-up the distribution rights in-perpetuity.

But Harvey Weinstein was all ears, and had been hiding in the engine room eating blintzes and snorting coke off of a starlet’s taint. He motioned from his new hiding place in a lifeboat from beneath the tarp-coverlet to one of the Somali sentries running past: “Hey—you—fuck nut! Get over here! Gonna make you a star, asshole [SNUFFLE!].” The sentry was interested, though mainly in the peculiarly positioned starlet and the cocaine.

Meanwhile, on the foredeck, Limbaugh and others were finding escape in watching one of the few operating television sets that had been left unplundered by those scurvy dogs. “Socialists!” yelled the pathetic gaggle still gathered around the sweating, porcine reincarnation of National Socialist Gauleiter, Herman Göring. George W. Bush was onscreen at that moment. In the end, anyone who tried to escape reality by watching television was shot by the pirates.

“Are there any real socialists left?” queried Chuck Norris. He didn’t have that dumb animal look most rednecks have, so his rank was higher, but not much.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean, Chuck?!” chortled Limbaugh.

“Well…I don’t know. We just keep calling everyone who isn’t an actual socialist a socialist. I mean, how times have any us referred to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as one? He actually is one, y’know? Don’t you think red-baiting is over? If only I had the martial arts abilities that I do in my movies, we’d be out of this mess in no more than seven edits or wipe-dissolves!” Like the still-decaying Queen Victoria, Limbaugh was not amused.

“I decide who’s what—either a Republican or a socialist!” exploded Limbaugh. Food was flowing out of his mouth as he said it, and his pupils were dilated, as always. Finally, belatedly, he too was thrown overboard with the same treatment Ron Paul got from the angry Somalis. More were to follow, with the end result being the entire decimation of the original passengers and crew. In short order, the Somali pirates had commandeered the ship and set the navigation computers for New York City. A midshipman was perplexed and asked their ostensible leader, “Why New York City?”

“That’s easy,” said the pirate captain, “We’re all going to work on Wall Street with the phony credentials we’ve gotten off of these dead assholes. Soon, we’ll all be embedded permanently in several key lending-firms, with little-or-no accountability. That’s where the money is….”

The End

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