Political Post: Those Damn Hypocritical Hippies

Strap in, kids--it's soapbox time. This week I go deep into why I hate the smiley-face, the "peace" sign and why the Beatles' legacy bugs the shit out of me.

                Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A crazy foreign dictator waggles nukes at the U.S. as he threatens to wipe every country who doesn’t agree with him from the face of the earth. If anyone so much as LOOKS at him wrong, he’ll do it! Swear to God, he’ll do it!

Sound familiar? Yeah. The Kim family’s been a boogeyman for the U.S. literally since I was a child, taking on Saturday-morning supervillain status. Most of us still see them as toothless—compared to the United States. The odds of us, even of Californians, getting nuked by a bunch of nuts with homemade rockets are pretty slim. While a full-scale nuclear attack would be a tricky thing to fend off (can we stop it? We don’t really know! How exciting!) supposedly a hit from Pyongyang would be like throwing pebbles at a giant. At least, that’s what we’re all trained to think. Despite all the shit the DOD gets for its Godzilla-sized budget and wasteful allocation of resources, we are all conditioned to assume the U.S. is best and smarterest at fending off nuclear attacks, because instead of education we put all our federal dollary-doos into stuff like this. Surely our doom lasers, which can’t shoot through fog or dense cloud, will save us from Kim and his endless armies of starving, brainwashed stormtroopers.

                But that’s a bit of a dark topic, ennit? Let’s talk about peace.

                Specifically, let’s talk about how we look at peace in this country. The 60’s has always fascinated me, and not in a nostalgic way, because I wasn’t there. It’s been immortalized in pop culture ever since the decade itself out. It was, supposedly, the first time a counterculture movement made real dents in the superstructure of America.

                But did it, really? When the lofty-minded flower-children of that era ran smack into the 70’s—into the Manson family, Jonestown, designer drugs and Iran—all of that idealism was lost, and we traded a newer, brighter vision of the world for the Home Shopping Network and Ronald Reagan. No one has ever gotten up since and demanded a complete social revolution. (Well, except for Occupy, but the police infiltrators took care of that pretty efficiently.)

                When I was a kid, I went to a Charter school. And not just any Charter school—a Montessori charter school. Those who know Maria Montessori’s history usually conclude she was a cool person: she was ahead of her time, predicting kids didn’t always learn in a linear, A-to-B fashion. Sometimes to get important info into a child’s fuzzy head, you had to think outside the box. You had to get weird with it.

                

                They certainly got weird with it, in my school. From elementary all the way through middle school, we were drilled in such exotic policies as the Golden Rule (treat others as you would like to be treated, etc.) and sitting in a forum-style circle during daily meetings. To this day I still wonder if any of that stuff remained in the hearts and minds of students, or if they just brushed it off when they walked out the doors and returned to cable TV, boomer-parents and the Iraq War’s deepening miasma. It was hard to absorb peace and tranquility when your country was bombing a bunch of people into dust on the other side of the planet.

                The Charter school I went to was like a secret hideout, a citadel for hippies and boomer free-thinkers trying out different ways of teaching than smooshing us all into desks and shouting at us. I’ll always be grateful they tried this, though I did get quite a dose of culture shock when I went to high-school after and got my ass kicked for trying to “treat others as I’d like to be treated.” Turns out those policies are pretty hard to apply in the quote-unquote Real World, and people have a tendency to call you a pussy and a fag when you practice non-violence.

                Anyway, peace. Peace is tricky and nebulous, especially in a country that hasn’t been out of international conflict since the years after WW2, and that was just before we said “hey Korea, how’s it going, we got bored not shooting stuff so GIRD YOUR LOINS, HERE COMES ‘MERICA.”

                We all want peace in the USA, right? We’d all love to see a world where the news isn’t filled with suicide bombings We’d love to see a world where dictators are quietly shuffled off the world stage and replaced with democracies of some stripe or another.

                Of course, it doesn’t really happen like that. We tried that in Iraq, in Libya, and even Syria for a few hours until our “president” got bored with it. We can’t just strong-arm the world into accepting our form of government. That attitude has gotten us in more trouble than ten generations of Americans can fix. And the reason we keep fucking this up is not just because the people in charge of foreign policy are idiots, or because our Congress is beholden to oil and gun lobbies. (Anyone feel weird that we just sold a bunch of arms to Taiwan? Isn’t it kind of weird that our country is selling guns like some creep in an alley wearing an American flag trench-coat? Is it just me, or is that super weird?) This attitude has gotten us in trouble because we have a fundamental flaw perceiving what peace is.

                Consider the hippies. These guys were the real deal, the authentic item: doing LSD and toking up and generally just being a bunch of groovy revolutionaries. Except, with very few exceptions, there was nothing revolutionary about them. You don’t overthrow a government or a set of ideas by sitting on your ass and going “everything is astral, maaan.” And I think they knew it. Outside the few exceptions (Black Panthers, or Marxist hippies who burned books on college campuses) there was nothing particularly earth-shattering about the counterculture of the time. It may have seemed that way to the Greatest Generation (“Young Billy is smoking the pot and having the sex! Disown him!”) but in actuality they weren’t committing to any of the logistical or long-term requirements a revolution needed: real political change, starting new parties or successfully running for office, using new platforms like TV and talk radio to spread and refine their ideas of peace. Take a look at what happens when someone dares to walk outside the typical boundaries of the two-party system today:

                It's fucking impossible. The decks are stacked. Hell, turning a party against itself by playing center against left is so effective, even Russia got in on the action. Just saying.

                We never had a real revolution because the boomers didn't want to. It was more comfortable to whip up trouble for a few years, and then fade away. In the end, hippies just wanted to sit on their asses and have a good time. They talked a big game and got to play counter-conformist, but the type of peace espoused by hippies in this is deeply flawed because it didn't do anything. Let’s talk about their music, for a minute. Let’s talk about Bob.

                Bob is a name I’m going to give a dude who worked as music instructor at my Charter school. Bob was generally a chill guy: he had dreadlocks, which were surprisingly lice-free for a white guy, and he was genuinely a virtuoso at music: he knew like fifteen instruments and could play them all masterfully. I don’t think the parents liked him much, and because of that, we kids loved him. The trouble was, we didn’t understand him.

                Bob taught us a lot of cool songs in elementary. We sang “Octopus’ Garden” and wow, wasn’t that cool? An octopus with a garden, radical. We also sang “Revolution.” My problems with the Beatles are a little too big to put into one blog post, so let’s do the cliff-notes version: the Beatles were a very skilled, very influential group of musicians who did absolutely nothing with their cultural legacy. They became immortal and, like all boomers, used their newfound generational power to cash in immediately. I’m not saying their music wasn’t genuine, or that they were bad people. But they had all this amazing cultural energy, and what did they use it for? To sell albums.

                They did manage to become “the music of peace.” But what does that mean, exactly? When Bob taught us “Revolution” we absolutely dug it, because wow, revolution sounded exciting! Plus the beat was nice and you gotta love that guitar riffing in the background. But the lyrics didn't exactly work for me, long-term.

 “You say you’ll change the constitution,

 Well, you know / We’d all love to change your head.

You tell me it’s the institution, / Well, you know,

You better free your mind instead.

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao,

You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow!”

                Okay, unpacking this. First of all, this song is fantastic as an anti-radicalism jibe, a tongue-in-cheek mockery of faux-Marxists and deluded rioters who weren’t really looking for progress, just to break stuff. Lennon and co. knew a band-wagon when they saw one: hell, they WERE the ultimate band-wagon. The song is an anthem for moderates, for middle-roaders, for people who saw the flag-burning and stuff going on and said “whoa, dude, you gotta chill.” But they were also defending their comfortable position on top of the pile. The Beatles, before they were even finished rising to the top, had already become the status quo. They embodied what you might call the moderate 60’s—that’s why we still play them, rather than leftist thrash metal. They’re comforting, they’re familiar. And hey’re the endemic problem with the 60’s: a watered-down legacy that left us kids with no actual goals and objectives for counter-cultural activism.

                We sang the words, but we had no idea what the 60’s actually were about. We had no understanding why anyone would want to change the Constitution, or why revolution felt necessary to people at that time, or why “freeing your mind” was important or indeed how to do that (spoiler, it’s just drugs.) We had no idea who the hell Chairman Mao was. And when Bob tried to explain all this, we did our own “tune in and drop out” and didn’t get it. We hadn’t lived it, so we didn’t really care. We couldn’t understand that political involvement was important and crucial to stop your government from being a bunch of dicks all the time. Vietnam had happened thirty years before most of us were born.

                Let’s go back to that refrain: “Don’t you know, it’s gonna be alright.” Nice! Very reaffirming. But in the years since the 60’s it’s become very clear that everything, in fact, is not gonna be alright. Kind of the opposite. We have relative peace and quiet here in the U.S. (despite news stations telling us ISIS is hiding under our beds) and our cities are slowly becoming less violent, year by year. But the toxic undercurrent of cheap, fake “peace” as a currency of tranquility is something the 60’s never left behind. Because after the 60’s quieted down, “give peace a chance” no longer meant world peace. It meant “convenient peace for us.” Lennon’s anthem of “just sit back and everything’s gonna be alright” was a great way to tell radicals to calm the fuck down and try to have dialogue. But it hasn’t worked. We’ve only gotten more isolated, more polarized.

                So what’s missing? What’s the solution? I am going to do the straw-man thing a little harder and point at the baby boomers for a minute. The boomers kicked off the original counterculture, and then happily let it fade, turning it into flower-shirts and retro VW paint-jobs. (Don’t get me started on the smiley-face.) They never followed through on their promise to “give peace a chance.” Mostly because once they sobered up and saw “HELTER SKELTER” in every headline, the 9 to 5 job seemed a much better option than activism. The recessions of the 70s and 80s also kicked revolution in the ass. It’s really tough to jump-start society when you’re struggling to pay for half a tank of gas.

                But with the exception of guys like Bob who struggled to teach the meaning of what they’d learned to the new generation, people stopped caring about making change. Easier to be complacent, to salute the flag and never question it. People wonder why Trump won; one of the reasons is, the counterculture lost the few teeth it had, and the “left” ended up going for Hillary, a middle-of-the-road glass of water whose idea of “going high” never worked against an enemy who went low, appealing to the lowest level of human instinct. That's how we got... well, basically this.

In spite of the continual wars we make, the comforting culture of “peace, man” remains seductive: I see it on Jamaica Plain bumper stickers all the time. But what that sentiment means is “a peace that is convenient for the middle class person driving this car.” It doesn’t mean “I am going to campaign to stop my country bombing the shit out of the Middle East, again.” It doesn’t mean “I am going to work to find solutions to the toxic and broken two-party system.” It means “I am going to get high, do some crystal chakra cleansing, and tell myself everything is fine. Because that makes me feel better than working with reality.”

                Peace, real peace, takes work—maybe even a lifetime of work. And that’s assuming we really want it, and not just a comfortable set of blinkers. Until we’re ready to do that work, maybe we should ditch the bumper stickers, and stop pretending like everything’s gonna be great—no matter how groovy that makes us feel. 

The Cherry Blossoms of Regulon V

               Zob Kane stood above the greatest floral spectacle in the galaxy: myriads of grottos and rosy shadows, elegant trunks with spines extended and quivering in the alien sunset. “Ah, Regulon V is so sublime, in its summer cycle. Can’t you feel the sublimity?” He sighed: the long, peaceful sigh of the Artist-In-His-Element. “I could paint here forever.”

               Perhaps, thought Will. But nothing good.

               They set up their tripods, planting the legs deep in the nitrous-rich earth. Sublime… What did this idiot know about sublime? They’d eaten burgers for breakfast, for Chrissake. But Will didn’t go for mockery—it wasn’t like his friend would’ve listened.

 “Very sublime,” he said.

               “They’re poisonous, when they come down. The blossoms. Did I tell you?”

                “I was the one who told you.”

               “Right, right. Just like you told me about that girl, back home. Good call there. She was fantastic.” His friend fumbled for the z-axis paints, failing: the mittens of his space-suit were soon stained in a clumsy rainbow. There were newer models, but Zob had insisted on “authentic” suits. He tried to preen his Dali mustache, couldn’t do it because of the bubble helmet, and settled for a raconteur pose. “Look at those blossoms, how rugose! That quintessential sunset! I think I’ll start in lime-pink. Lime-pink is so trendy.”

               “You do whatever feels right, man.” Will moved his easel several steps back; he didn’t want to get in the way of genius, after all.

               “I’m so glad we came. My Muse is with me, Will. She’s embracing me.”

               I brought you here. It was my money, my life. Given for you.

               Will painted a Regulan flatworm. He wasn’t sure why; it just seemed to fit the empty space, its features sharp and vicious. The colors came to life, wriggled free of the canvas, and started floating towards Zob. The pincers snapped, the stinger flashed and throbbed with menace.

Will was quite far along, in Z-axis painting—farther, he suspected, than anyone had ever gone. Without a better word for it, he supposed he was a god. It brought no joy; the girl had been the last in a series of insults that stretched for years. His hands trembled.

Regulan flatworms were ethereal; they wriggled right through the molecules of your clothes and skin, to suck your organs empty. It was a horrific way to die.

                Zob, the peacock, stayed oblivious. “They’ll hang this one in the gallery, just like my thesis. I can sense it.”

               Liar. That work was mine.

              The theft had been subtle: “a little help” on the final graduate assignment had required more and more work, until it was unparalleled. Now, Will’s piece hung in the alumni hall at Berkelee, a plaque naming it Bee’s Insides in Radical-Yellow… by Zob Kane. 

            The flatworm was very close.

You do whatever feels right, man. Was this the act of a just god? 

A loving god?

Will’s hands grew still. He painted a gentle breeze of lavender-indigo: it rose from the canvas, drifted and blew the flatworm away. Its delicate body tumbled over the leaves.

               “The petals! Oh, the petals!” Zob was painting, Will saw: really painting. Not well, but still. The pigments were a pale copy of the valley, but the first layer had promise; the second might well contain real technique. The third… Well, by the finish, his friend might have something. His very first non-plagiarism. “Look at those colors. I see what the religious types are about, now. God is great, and all that shit!”

               Will smiled. “Yes. He truly is.”

               Zob turned to him, and his cheeks were shining the color of the toxic blossoms. “What would you know? You haven’t even started yet.”

Movie Review: "You've Got Mail", and the Infinite-Tom-Hanks Conspiracy Theory

                Sometimes I miss the 90’s. Not in a waxy, nostalgic way, although that was the period I grew up from a grubby child into a grubby adult. I miss that era in a “the world was marginally less screwed back then” way. It’s nice to look back and think at one point, the most racist person in U.S. politics was probably Newt Gingrich (remember him? No? Good, be glad) and for a brief period, reflect that people actually cared about “Crazy Bones.” What a strange and magical time.

                But there are some things from the 90’s that are very rightly forgotten. Time has rolled over these pockets of evil, steamrolling them into the grease-soaked tapestry of American history. Depressing headlines like the Unabomber, scandals like the Clinton affair which seem quaint to us now, have all faded. But the 90’s serves as a cage for a darker power, an insidious evil that history can never truly erase: Tom Hanks romantic comedies.

                “What?” you might say. “But I loved those!” Sure you did. And that’s fine. But you don’t understand, man. You don’t get it yet. You haven’t seen these movies like I’ve seen them, okay? Let me bring you into my world. Let me show you the face of pure evil.

I didn’t have much cable growing up, so when I discovered Tom Hanks romances were a big deal, I was curious. I’d seen Castaway of course, and Forrest Gump, but that’s about it. Recently went back and watched You’ve Got Mail, to find out what I’d been missing living under a rock all these years. 

What I found was pure nightmare fuel.

             Let’s revisit this movie together. Let’s explore the terrifying, cosmic implications of a world where screenwriters have decided your reality, where Tom Hanks is the only romantic partner you can be with due to cruel fate and lazy screenwriters. Let’s dive into those oily folds under Tom’s weird chin and see what we can uncover.

                Here’s the trailer.

              

                Cute, right? Pure, mid-90’s, “New York is so cool and trendy I hope nothing bad happens to us lol” chuckle-a-minute romance. The email plot is adorably dated, and “Joe and Kathleen” seem like fun, quirky people. Maybe a bit too quirky. You can see the bare bones of the “manic pixie dream girl” archetype in Meg Ryan’s Kathleen, a book shop owner whose nail-biting illicit romance with someone on the new-fangled Internet is bound to cause havoc. And even in this trailer, something in Tom Hanks’ monosyllabic “Joe” seems a bit off. He’s clearly a fun-loving guy, and very quippy. There’s a frame of him riding in a go-cart, playing with some kids you assume might be his:

            

“Oh, Tom Hanks, you scoundrel, you’ve done it again,” you smile as “Mr. Postman” plays jauntily in the background. “There you go, winning audiences’ hearts and minds again, with child-like glee and a twinkle in your—”

                “But he can’t possibly be the Rooftop Killer,” protests Meg Ryan to Steve Zahn, mid-trailer.

                … W-wait, what?

                Let’s dig into the movie. Already a kernel of subliminal unease has nestled deep in your belly, but you ignore it, bury it; you’re just here to have a good time, get a couple laughs. And at first, it seems like that’s all you’re going to get. The opening setup between Hanks and Ryan is a boring montage; their email relationship is shown, and their real-life bookstore rivalry set up. By now you’re probably asking “What the hell is a bookstore?” Well, sonny, long ago there were these physical book shops, and they sold real books, and somehow they made actual money and were profitable. Those days are long behind us now, but the skeletons of titans like Barnes and Noble and Borders Books (I know, too soon) still litter our nation, rotting and festering. And in this world, Tom Hanks runs a very successful “bookstore chain” called Foxbooks, with his best friend, Dave Chappelle—

               

                Really? Dave Chapelle? In what timeline does a great comedian and the living hunk of beef-flank known as Tom Hanks become friends? Let’s just put that aside for now. Trust me, we’ll be coming back to Dave Chapelle in a BIG way. He’s the linchpin here. He ties it all together.

                For now let’s watch and have a sensible chuckle as Meg Ryan and Hanks bounce off each other. Oh look, they’re both with significant others they hate! Okay, that’s a bit sad, but kind of funny. Oh look, Tom Hanks has a couple of little kids as his “aunt” and “uncle” because his ancient grandpa banged a twenty-year-old! That’s… Wow, how zany, how crazy is that? It’s definitely not creepy at all. Nope. Not even a single bit.

               

                Okay, it’s a little creepy. And note how Hanks—excuse me, Joe Fox—starts off his very first meeting with Kathleen by lying to her. “It’s just Joe,” he protests as his little “uncle” tries to give the game away by spelling F-O-X over and over. The pattern of deception will continue for the rest of the film.

                Things progress in usual rom-com fashion: Joe and Kathleen continue bonding through the titular emails, baring their souls to each other, “on-line!” Scandalous, right? Not really. This concept wasn’t novel in 1998 when the movie was released. We’re always one “information superhighway” away from the movie collapsing under its own dated weight. But the implications of their bonding—both of them are in a relationship when their “friendship” starts moving really fast—are both morally dubious and saucy enough to hold our interest.

                But then things start to get weird.

                Joe and Kathleen go to a book…event… thingy, where they see each other and Kathleen realizes he’s a Big Corporate Jerk (TM.) Here’s a chance for Hanks/Joe to redeem himself: He could apologize for his earlier lie, and begin his redemption arc. But no, he shits all over Kathleen’s bookstore, insults her as a person and for liking Pride and Prejudice, and stands idle as his own girlfriend flirts with Kathleen’s hipster boyfriend. He later breaks up with her after spending five minutes in an elevator with her, presumably the first time he's ever actually listened to her speak. We begin to understand Joe has issues relating to others. What we don’t realize yet is that Joe is Satan himself, incarnate.

                We will learn, though. By God, we will learn.

                What you need to know is this: 90’s Hollywood was just a slightly less coked-out version of 80’s Hollywood. Even though the whole “corporations are evil” thing was well-established, in 90’s movies, rich people could do no wrong. The wealthy were at the top of filmmaking society, and it would have been rude to lambast them. Also, in the words of Ronald Wright, everyone else considered themselves “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Fact two: Tom Hanks was a golden boy back then. He was right up with Robin Williams and Jim Carrey, in the “zany endearing funny guy” category. The combination of these—Tom Hanks the golden boy, and his wealthy-white-male-character in a 90’s movie—becomes basically unstoppable. He’s a narrative Super Saiyan. He rolls over other characters like an M1 Abrams rolls over sand-castles at the beach.

                Joe goes on to mentor Kathleen in the art of the put-down via AOL, not realizing he’s empowering his enemy. How Shakespearian! This is where Dave Chapelle comes in. Oh Dave, you beautiful bastard, thanks for being in this movie. You are the only thing saving my sanity from Tom Hanks.

Chapelle’s scenes are a breath of fresh air, because he acts as Joe’s moral compass. Observe him trying to get Joe to have basic humanity:

             

                “You don’t feel bad putting her on welfare?” No, Dave. No he doesn’t. Because he’s Tom Hanks. And he's an uncaring monster.

                Now, a few things seem off about this scene, and I’m not talking about the cam-rip quality either. Why is Chapelle friends with Hanks’ character anyway? Presumably, they work together—there’s a line later about Chapelle running the Foxbooks outlet “like a well-oiled machine.” But we never see how they met. They don’t seem to interact much outside the gym and at work: they never get shots at a bar, or play golf, or whatever it is rich people do with their friends. In fact, we never see Chapelle talk to anyone but Hanks, throughout the movie.

                He also doesn’t touch anything.

                Or appear in scenes without Hanks.

                Wait a minute.

               

                Oh my God. OH MY GOD! It’s all starting to come together! Joe’s abusive behavior, his dead-eyed stare. His conspicuous lack of any real friends other than Chapelle. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve stumbled across the first enormous clue to the Hellraiser puzzle-box that is You’ve Got Mail: Chapelle does not exist. He’s Tyler Durden, he’s Harvey the Rabbit. He’s Joe’s imaginary friend.

                Once you realize this, everything else starts to fall into place. At no point in the movie does Chapelle interact with anyone other than Hanks/Joe. No one ever interacts with him either, not even to say hi. Which is very suspicious, as he’s the manager of a huge bookstore and there are several scenes in which he’s in that bookstore. Finally, in the gym scene, people turn their heads to stare at Joe. “Of course they do,” you say, your voice shaking as your mind begins to unravel, “it’s because he’s pissed at Kathleen. He’s being loud and abrasive. Typical Hanks stuff.”

                Wrong. They’re staring at him because he’s talking to himself. Wake up, sheeple!

                The rabbit-hole goes even deeper as we watch, helpless to look away, helpless to stop the emotional carnage. Joe learns that Kathleen is his online paramour, via contrived plot events. Okay, here’s his chance: time for him to open up to her IRL, yeah? Maybe apologize for ruining her bookstore’s business and give her a loan or something to foster good old capitalist competition?

                Absolutely not. He agrees to meet with her and then proceeds to dupe her and torment her psychologically, turning her existence into a horrible farce as her business dissolves, her friends disappear from all future scenes and the sweaty-faced goblin known as Tom Hanks capers around the ruins of her life, cackling.

                You have to see this shit to believe it (and bear with me, because Blogspot doesn't play nice with "timed" YouTube URLs.) Specifically, check out this scene in the diner, the first time they’ve met after Joe’s discovered they’re secretly Internet pals, and after he’s roundly mocked her for planning to meet an anonymous “friend” with a rose and a copy of her favorite book. She drives him to the next table, goes to get out her hand mirror to touch-up, and…

                Oh no. No, NO.

                ... AHHHH!

               ....... AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!

                Dude, what the fuck?? As the movie progresses, Hanks progresses further and further away from being a goofy rich playboy and more into looking like a psychopathic stalker. Here he is forcing his way into her apartment after she specifically asks him to leave:

                Joe Fox? More like Joe Bates.

                Dude, no! No, dude!! Consent is a THING, Tom Hanks! No means NO! Also, you’re always sweaty! Always! No woman would even want to even be NEAR you in temperatures over thirty degrees Fahrenheit, which I have to assume is your normal body temperature because you’re a terrifying cold-hearted lizard person!

                Here he is knocking on the window of a café she’s in, ostensibly because he followed her there:

                "HELLO, CLARICE."

                And here he is lurking in the depths of the creepy bachelor boat he’s living in, gloating over his laptop like a high-tech Buffalo Bill:

                "These machines let me monitor her heartbeat as she sleeps."

                Really, this series of clips summarizes everything you need to know about “Joe Fox” in this movie, but then you guys wouldn’t get to watch my sanity unravel from viewing this turd in action, would you? Listen: Joe is a dead-faced, calculating creeper who continually harasses Kathleen for the rest of the runtime. Here he is totally fucking with her after Kathleen, now single because of the wedges Joe has driven into her life, has dared to ask if he’s married or not:

                "Ha ha, watch me destroy her self-esteem until she wants to be with me! Isn't this fun?"

                Is it all coming together now? Is it starting to click for you? IS IT??

               

                Okay, so maybe I’m over-analyzing this. Maybe I’m reading too deeply into what is really a sweet, well-intentioned film about a rich book mogul slowly convincing (read: coercing) a woman into being his girlfriend. The fact that he plays psychological mind-games on her is weird and unforgivable, but maybe there's a deleted scene where she slaps him for it, or at least gives him a taste of his own medicine. Maybe. Oh, and for the whole movie, I’m supposed to accept that Meg Ryan's character is somehow dumb enough not to realize until the final scene that this gas-lighting, boat-dwelling lunatic is messing with her, playing her like a damn fiddle. It’s maddening to watch: you feel like you’re going crazy. “How did people miss this?” you scream to the uncaring skies, tearing at your hair. “Tom Hanks can’t even act! He just walks around being Tom Hanks!” Your mind reels, rejecting the reality of the film.

                Because doing the alternative—deeming Joe’s behavior acceptable—just doesn’t sit right. I get it, this was a different time, these things were seen as romantic, even if you can practically hear Joe sharpening his skinning-knives in the background. SHHK, SHHK. But I like to think we’ve moved past that and can leave this movie safely in the past, where it be… wait, what's that? There are MORE movies like this? How many more? And how many of them star Meg Ryan?!

               

                This… this goes far deeper than I imagined. It’s like a Tom Hanks multiverse, where no matter what she does, Meg Ryan is never safe from the sweaty palms of Joe Fox. The mind games and the forced romances unfold again and again, across infinite timelines, an endless fractal-construct of cherubic Tom Hanks faces slowly spiraling through time and space. What was wrong with the nineties? My God, what did we unleash back then?

                Tune in next week, as I over-analyze Joe Vs. the Volcano!

               

"Alt-History Sunday Sneak Peek"

This is the intro to an unfinished short story about temporal terrorism, set in the Bush years for maximum chuckles. I'm still working on the ending.

I also have a new novel in the works--haven't sold my first one yet, of course, but stay tuned!

-Paul

 

                On September 11, 2001, federal agents arrested a group of terrorists whose hijacking plan would have brought down the Twin Towers. This operation was conducted with little fanfare, the perpetrators were locked away, and few newspapers even bothered with a front page splash about the plot. The CIA and FBI had done their jobs and the threat of Al-Queda was contained; as far as the media was concerned, there wasn’t really much to report.

                On September 12, radical eco-terrorists from the future set off a device in the middle of Times Square. This device directly linked New York City with a period in the late Cretaceous, sixty-seven million years in the past. This “temporal link” erased whole entire neighborhoods, including portions of the Bronx and Queens and much of upper Manhattan. The fabric of space-time was permanently shredded in the region, and the rips spread quickly, replacing parts of upstate New York and nearby New Jersey with vast swathes of jungle. Carnage, confusion and panic were widespread, and the National Guard was mobilized. By the time that President Bush declared a national state of emergency, several thousand people had died: many were shunted into the past when the Link was activated, and countless were injured by prehistoric creatures. Many of these were carnivores, suddenly and violently introduced to an environment they did not understand. They reacted aggressively, seeing the intrusion of human beings and skyscrapers as an assault on their territories.

                The photograph summarizing the madness, taken by war correspondent Steve McCurry, shows an Allosaurus rearing its head over Central Park. Its taloned foot presses down on a police cruiser, and NYPD officers are firing their sidearms at the animal. The serrated teeth of its massive jaws are bearing down on the officers, all of whom would lose their lives that day trying to secure the nearby boroughs.

                It goes without saying that the Link defined a generation, changed the face of the earth, so on and so forth. The terrorist’s ultimatum—an immediate end to carbon emissions, under threat of further devices being detonated—were ignored, and Operation Home Front was begun to exterminate the dinosaurs and find the people responsible. Over the next decade, hundreds would be arrested on suspicion of harboring temporal fugitives, and the fledgling President would be impeached after he authorized the use of nerve gas on “contested” (read: rioting) areas of New York City. The damage to time’s fabric continued to unfold, spreading from state to state, churning out regions and animals from bygone eras into America’s terrified streets.

                Some fortified their homes. Many simply packed their things and ran.

                Jim Conway’s family drove right into that shit.

In Defense of Cheesy Monster Movies

               Everybody hates thinkpieces. Periodically, the blogs and publications I follow get a bad case of the ol’ self-righteousness: some ancient evangelical urge bubbles up, and a navel-gazing pundit waddles onto a soapbox and announces This Is The Way It Is! Deal With It, Scrubs!!!! They’ve got the answer to Current Social Problem XYZ, you see, and if you just reblog their position enough, you too can be enlightened… Such intellectual monkey-spanking is endemic—when you run a blog, it’s very easy to go groping for that soapbox, and tell yourself the world just doesn’t get it, maaan. And your two-and-a-half followers might happily back you up with an echo chamber where you never have to be wrong or uncomfortable.

                I’d rather direct my energies towards something a less topical. We’re all sick of topical shit right now—even the supporters of His Oiliness the Cheeto (short may he reign, senile and debauched) are worn out from all their sieg-heiling. So let’s focus on something a little less current-events, and a little more ridiculous. I’m talking about cheesy, shitty monster movies. The absolute shittiest. I'm talking The Crawling Eyeball, Human Centipede XXVIII level stuff.

                The genre’s had a revival, recently. Godzilla and King Kong are lumbering slowly back into theaters, and Toho itself—the company who created Big G in the first place—has stretched its muscles with the excellent Shin-Gojira, 50% horror-Godzilla and 50% men in suits arguing over noodles. Legendary Pictures is brewing up a Pacific Rim sequel, and nerds like me couldn’t be happier. Meanwhile, my family and girlfriend remain totally confused by these schlock-fests. “They’re so juvenile,” a homemade straw-man hypothetically might say. “Why do you watch that junk?”

                Well, there’s nostalgia, to begin with. The things you enjoyed in childhood never quite go away, and men in rubber monster-suits beating the crap out of each other was one of my first passions. But I think there’s a deeper pull towards high-lactose thrills like “Matango” and “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.” There’s a dweebish joy to these movies, but also a cultural story, the evolution of the fireside tale into something new and strange. Once upon a time, these monsters scared the crap out of audiences: it seems impossible , but the original clay-motion “Lost World” adaptation convinced people the director had filmed real dinosaurs. And the famous “War of the Worlds” radio adaptation in the 30’s sent hysterical families rushing to lock their doors. We may laugh now, but in a world of “fake news” and paranoid travel bans, these reactions start to make a sort of sense. People jump when they see the boogeyman, and they even jump when they think there's a boogeyman. Or there might be. Our ape-like instinct runs deep, and it teaches us to keep out the menace, the outsider. The monster.

                Monsters have power. They stand in for things, neatly slipping into the role of the scapegoat, the Antichrist, the menacing foreigner. They take the slings and arrows of our natural xenophobia and terror of the unknown—and that's a good thing. If we didn’t have entertainment to soak up our fears and paranoia, the world would be a whole lot worse. We'd go to witch burnings instead of movie theaters, for starters. Even the original Godzilla film was a manifestation of fear: fear of atomic power. A beast rises from human mistakes, and burns mankind. If you go back further, you find the precursors--the werewolf who became Kong, the dragon who became Godzilla. Their power didn’t dry up and go away when we started telling our stories with film projectors—if anything, they got stronger.

                “Cheesy” monster movies are an inversion of this kind of fear. They take the unknown, the terrifying, the cosmic force that stomps buildings... and turn it endearing, almost goofy. They break down the invading evil into something digestible and sane. When Ultraman punches a bug-eyed alien, we cheer, or we laugh. (Or, if you're not me, you turn off the TV and wonder how that station stays in business doing Ultraman reruns. Which is a pretty legitimate question.) The dust settles, and the monster has been neutered by defeat. It can’t hurt us, and this is why B-movies will always make money. The plentiful fears of the modern world have been condensed in these films, locked away on the screen. The monster appears, terrorizes, but is then swiftly dealt with by the Army. Or wild-haired scientists. Or heroes in spandex.

                There is, of course, a dangerous flipside to this.

                When we take the monster and break it down to a punchline, we forget why we feared it. The werewolf has not gone away; in fact, he seems stronger than ever. The werewolf is the betrayer, the cannibal. He is mugger, the office shooter, the lurking terrorist. Each day we are told to See Something, Say Something, and yes—I’m returning to politics. Sorry, not sorry. The parallels are too strong. Our president practically postures with a silver revolver every day, insisting only he can save us from the werewolf among us. And people totally buy it. "Watch for the mutant!" he crows, shaking an orange fist. "Watch for the heretic! Keep those torches ready!" He defies the Other. And we eat that up. We always have.

                We’ve forgotten that the monstrous is fiction. People do horrible things, but not because they're inhuman: they do them because at some point the fragile network of human decency has failed them, and allows them to behave this way. But that level of responsibility as a species is too much for us: we much prefer to see evil as the face of the monster, the face of something alien, and therefore outside our responsibility. There is no longer a division between the xenophobia we direct at our screens, subconsciously, and the xenophobia raging in our own lives. The walls of unreality have been unable to contain the monster-hunters: they have stormed the voting booths, the online forums, the talk shows. Our rubber and CGI “cultural pinatas” have all been beaten to shit, and can take no more; they have failed us.

                But still I hunt for secondhand "Gamera" DVDs, stockpile the history of imaginary beasts in my brain, and write stories about the Creeping Brain-Eater from Venus. Why? Because the monster itself still provides a focus for fear, an escape, softening the blow of the real world’s monsters. And the cheesier the escape, the better. These stories also remind you to be cautious when real horror and fear creep in: once you are familiar with the fake monsters, it becomes easier to handle the real ones with logic and patience. "To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders." I don't think Lao Tzu was talking about the comfortable sanity that comes from indulging in kitschy kaiju movies, but he might as well have been. And he's not wrong.

                We have to control the monster in some way, or he controls us.