Raw Local Honeys or Complaining about Too Tired to Give a Crap.(!)

Okay so it's like this: you go a whole year retweaking your internal clock from an adult life of late night debauches to a sober sunrise-sunset existence. Then suddenly your employer schedules you to work the night shift and the morning shift back to back... Oh the temptation to throw it all away! To become a potato sack in the wind for a faceless corporation! You wonder why my smile is so haggard as I pass you sweet treats through two layers of window (your car and the building.) Granted, my manager probably didn't do it intentionally. He's got weight on him, just like the owner's got weight too, all the way down from corporate. Nobody has time to THINK. When they say "America Runs on Dunkin" this is what they mean. Pop the pill and keep on chuggin'.

Oh yeah, the title.... "Raw Local Honey" I see on the roadside from time to time. Me in my profligate pervasity reads it as some kind of brothel advertisement (in France you could stare down your lady without even entering a building, right?) I imagine the statement as advertising skid row prostitutes with cunts cut up and worn by experience and time, ready to juice a little for you (just pour in some oil and turn the gear.).. Whizzing by at 70 miles an hour... Somewhere, someone, some reason. But excuse the obscenity, I'll try to keep it to a minimum, I know there are children on the internet. They're going to see much worse eventually anyway, but I don't want to be responsible for that. I've got enough on my pate as it is.

---Random Robot Interlude--- Plate spinners speeding down the interstate at 3AM swishing jugs in their bellies picked up between cash out and last call scanning for the spot to drop off the black market goods I poke you you poke me a little licking contract bound in need new genetic material this stuff's getting stale between the bedsheets rolling like rover tail thumping gets the springs going not much time left if I want to show up to work with my face on so make this frantic make this quick dispose of all formalities how bout I call you by my name you call me by yours?---

Review of Quality. Product: "Star Wars Jabba the Hutt The Dynasty Trap" Comic

Unlike literary fictional narrative, whose physicality (binding, pages, even the lettering itself) is submerged the moment the reader becomes engaged with the task of unfolding the abstract in her head [I'm still on the outs with you, men!], a comic book is constantly reminding the reader of its physical constraints. Images and words are constantly being negotiated within the geometric limits of frames, frames which often directly acknowledge their presence as character. In a strictly literary narrative the page rarely reminds us of its swishing flips or fresh cut edges. Conversely, simply reading a comic engenders a direct engagement with the physical. It is this fetishistic self absorption with medium that gives the comic its special flair. Spying through the frames of a comic's page is almost like peering at a secret through the slits of a fence, on the one hand limiting our access to the other side, on the other freeing us from the responsibility of possessing the occult knowledge.

And the occult is definitely the subject matter of "Star Wars: Jabba the Hutt- The Dynasty Trap," published by Dark Horse Comics. Despite a complete absence of any mention of the force, the presence of the titular character is sure to raise a flag in any fan of the Star Wars franchise. Brutally choked to death in a visually sexual sado-masochistic sequence very shortly after being introduced in Return of the Jedi, Jabba is resurrected in this comic series through the necromancy of print and imagination. Like the playwright in Borges' short story "The Secret Miracle," after intense prayer to the Gods of the Star Wars universe (the fans), he is given a temporary reprieve to finish his dark work.

And dark it is. At the end of reading I found myself questioning why Lucasfilm would allow such a direct representation of the type of "evil" only hinted at in the movies. These aren't passing occurrences like Greedo's treachery or playful costume sneering like the Tatooine wild bunch or the assemblage of bounty hunters in Empire Strikes back. This cruelty serves as the fixed object of the comic, every single event organically grows out of it, and the reader can marvel at each representation as at a giddy horror show. In one sequence Jabba is contemplating selling his captives into slavery. He ultimately decides he'd rather watch  their bodies explode in pressure-less space.

Even more troubling is that it isn't even given the moral weight of "the dark side," all of the cruel acts are enacted rather in an amoral vacuum of cut-throat pirate economics. I'm not complaining. Let's see more of this kind of thing. How about a comic solely focused on the sex slaves of Jabba's Palace, showing how the women are slowly beat into submission and numbed with drugs in order to provide Jabba satiation to his every passing whim. There is a reference to sexual slavery in this comic, a pair of tied up women barely visible in the back of a frame, but they're not being gathered for Jabba, but rather his nemesis. Perhaps the writers were aware that in depicting an anti-hero in the Star Wars universe, even some moral limits must not be passed.

I won't spoil the plot for you, because there is none. It's literally a pretense for Jabba to whizz around on his hover scooter and commit murders. The breach in logic of this over-sized space slug engaging in anything so physical makes it all the more appealing. But at their base, isn't this the point of comics? Flimsy contrivances for the readers to explore their darkest desires? If these were bulky written novels we'd definitely have a problem. What kind of sadist would expose herself to 400 pages of senseless murders? If there was a market for that kind of thing social moralists would be in a panic. Instead, 25 pages of tiny images, scant words, a slew of ads, and crossmarket potential for the sale of Jabba the Hutt toys is perfectly acceptable.

As to the actual quality of artistry, the use of framing is logical (although they do go a little bit overboard with sequential development ie the type in the above image). The color palette is very sparse but expressive in its economy.

On a side note, there's definitely some weird sexual politicking going on. The men are always more naked than the women. Guards hulk around the antagonist's palace like Cleopatra's servants, clad in nothing more than loin clothes. One is forced to wonder if the male crime boss commanded this to satisfy his sexual cravings, a homosexual suggestion made all the more palatable when it is revealed that he murdered his former wife. His son proudly juts a sports bra at each frame, while the daughter piles the clothes on like a creeping Autumn. In situations where a woman's form would normally be exploited for erotic impact, the art here subverts. A female servant is shown from behind delivering a drink to Jabba, but the clothing opted for is a one-piece swimsuit, and her body is death-grey and frumpy. Slave women are shown tied up at one point, but it's more to establish ironic continuity than to titillate. They're so far back in the frame that they're unrecognizable as anything more than the nugget of an idea.

All in all... I've never really been into comics because serial fiction makes me barf. But this here comic is a great deal, a self contained bag of Kentucky Fried something even Jabba would be proud of. You can purchase it alone or in the omnibus "Jabba the Hutt: The Art of the Deal."

Going Roman Polanski'ing

Okay gals (and guys) [though I don't mean by putting gals in the primary position to be feminizing my guy readers which could be construed in some circles as a sort of homophobic 'slight'; nor do I consider it as a chivalric, paternalist gesture towards the ladies, which perhaps in this day and age could be a little bit demeaning, though I don't see any gals around these parts anyway, so I'm not certain for whom in particular I could be accused of doing this. Nor either am I letting the gals in first as some kind of PC role reversal, much in the sense you might have seen sci-fi films in the late 80s casting women in positions of power and authority ie executives police commanders scientists etc.... Once and for all, to settle the question of why the gals come first this time and the guys come last: aww heck! I'm just sick of guys, they fill my head with such nonsense dart games, trying to get me to fling my thoughts in one direction and then another, all the while preventing me from hitting my real target, which is nowhere on the dart board at all, nor in this building which Elvis has never entered so I don't care how many times you've told me he's left it.]

Okay gals and guys, being a movie lover I've always heard a lot of buzz about Polanski, but for some reason most of it has been more in line with "Gossip" than about the guy's actual cinematic output, a fact which distresses me greatly. What people who enjoy cinema should be interested in when it comes to discussion is other people's processing of the cinematic content, their viewing experience and the like. When you watch the movie you're glued to the screens and the speakers, the entirety of the outside world is shut out, you could care less about even the person next to you. It's when those lights go off that it suddenly dawns on you that this wasn't just your experience, it was the experience of all those little limbs and faces shifting out the darkened room. You've had this grand emotional investment and suddenly you're cut off from the object of all that. The proper reaction should be to seek consolation in those with whom that experience is also true. NOT in acting like a nonce and mentally assaulting the origin of those cinematic masterpieces who has cut you off from the fix with the inevitable credits scroll.

Look: when you talk about movies, YOU TALK ABOUT MOVIES. You don't go spinning your spade digging up depravity. If you want to do that, go exultantly horde porno movies and complain about the trash after it's filled with rags of your semen [or if you're a woman, rags of the substance which excrete from your vaginal regions, though I haven't done the labwork to say with certainty just what those substances are.] (Not that I have anything against porno movies: it just seems to me that there's an MO about these parts ie planet earth, people who simultaneously deluge themselves in a flood of unmanageable feelings and subsequently declaim them as "Evil." And it's not just sexual pornography; it's food addicts, drama addicts, religious addicts, drug addicts. But we're talking about movies here, pure cinema... and it being the subject, I'm going to have to remind you against that. Go somewhere else and do that. I'm not going to talk about porno movies so that's why I don't mind you going there to release your steam valve of confusion in those marshes, it also being a medium of moving images and sound.)

All that being said, Roman Polanski said something poignant at Cannes the other day. according to the uk rag "The Guardian":

Speaking at the Cannes film festival of his latest film Venus in Fur, the 79-year-old Polanski said that "trying to level the genders is purely idiotic." "Offering flowers to a lady has become indecent … The pill has greatly changed the place of women in our times, masculinising her. It chases away the romance in our lives."

 Now you can tell by their highlighting his age in the context of the quote they want to depict him as some dirty old wanker, a slant no doubt enhanced by the fact of his sad past mistakes in the realm of sexual identity experimentation and subsequent societal-legal interpretation thereof, also mentioned in the article. But The Guardian knows whom they're crafting a narrative for, and it's certainly not people who are capable of enjoying the craft/art of film. Why don't we talk about his lighting choices or the way he frames a scene? Why don't we talk about the little things he has his actors and actresses do with their hands when they're not engaged in overt theatric drama? Why not talk about the way Polanski manages to craft characters who are constantly subverting their own understandings of themselves? But no, we've got to drag his ass across the carpet like a dog with the runs once again. If The Guardian could have its way it seems we'd all have some unforgivable tick in our characters. I'd only hope they'd have the foresight to prepare the gasoline so we could all immolate ourselves in a final grand testament against the frailty of the human spirit... But here I am getting just as sensationalist as them.

As to the quote itself, what bothers me most is not what the man says but how it's presented out of context. No one is allowed to ask the obvious question: is the pronoun "our" supposed to be interpreted as dirty old men, and is the implication then that he honestly believes, even after his 'pedophilic abuse fiasco' that the true meaning of romance is a sado-masochistic one way control game where the man, as Sinatra said, must have it his way? Instead The Guardian gets to work with its hacksaw of journalistic punctuation, gagging and binding the man, the reader along with him... A prismatic fractal switcheroo, if you catch my drift. The muckrackers never cease pissing their papers yellow. Whenever they beg the question it's just to get us to scratch our brains and blame the pain on whatever keeps the ad revenue coming in. But now I'm sounding petty punk post modern marxist.... As a good businessperson says, truth in advertising. We all apparently want to hear about innocent little girls being deflowered by dirty old men. So who's really making the joke?

Things went very, very wrong.

Sorry fellas and fellettes, for my prolong-legged absence (and please egg-scuse my zoological zaniness)... Things have been TOUGH. I almost don't want to talk about it. Remember when I told you about slipping on vomit? (duh just scroll down). Well they sent me home to change clothes (can't very well flip burgers with vomit dripping down your leg, and can't very well do those beef acrobatics naked: MacDonald's is a hamburger place, not a weiner joint after all.) So my drive all the way home... my drive all the way back. One and a half hours, and those snake bastards REFUSED to comp my pay for something which was entirely out of my control, and very well inside of their control. Long story short, I quit. Short story long: that night I got wasted on a couple of forties and took turns dancing in the darkness and sitting on my can. But what can you do? It wasn't ME who poisoned the watering hole: it was their cutthroat faux burgers and the uattuned digestive systems of that long necked little kid.

So scramble I did, and scrambled I am: or at least some kind of egg. Back to Dunkin Donuts and their frozen egg patties... and their frozen donuts (half baked, flash frozen, and pumped by preservatives, from our freezer to your fat ass.).. You can see I'm a bit ornery tonight. What do you expect? I was hoping to get this blog off on the right foot. Some Kevin Smith wayward man-child nonsense. Instead it's this. Church of Cheesus Crackers and Stinking Liver Shmears.

I thought I had moved on from that point in my life. I thought I'd graduated from half-fast food to full fledged fast food. The backbone of our nation. A company to be proud of. Opportunity and advancement... Then again I should have known better. I graduated college after all. What kind of advancement could a company whose flagship product is gastral discharge possibly provide to the prole who makes it all possible?.. I guess we're all responsible for something.

So there you go! Want to hear about Tanya and her boyfriend problems? Or maybe Joe's car troubles? (philosophically speaking, it's not a car if it doesn't work.) Or how about the lesbians? Damn, its hard enough  to cover some insanewad's gamut of office coffees right (one medium with 2 creams and four sugars, one medium with 3 creams and 2 sugars, 2 larges: 2/3 and 3/4), and then you factor our lives into the mix. I AM NOT ONE OF THEM I AM NOT ONE OF THEM. Gah.

Walking on Funshine

Today was a bad day at the job. I made a grand entrance sliding across the floor where some kid puked up its happy meal. Not content with dislodging his food, he displayed full disapproval of the MacDonald's experience by throwing his toy matchbox car at the ground as well which, in the moment all this happened, was occupied by me, my bum by this point resting sopping in the disgorged viscera. I repeat: I entered work today falling on vomit produced by my employer's business operation, and was further pelted in my humiliation by cheep chinese toys. On the bright side: if I had worked the shift before mine all this glorious circusry could have been part my responsibility.

NO no no no no

I'll try to keep this blog clean for you. My broom is on standby to shoo the overlarge critters away... my stomping boots tightly laced to deal with crush-acceptable life forms (roaches, land-fish, aborted fetuses that just won't die and why are they up in my grill in the first place?)... a flash light to scare away the ghosts. But most of all, the mighty word, which when the sabre's rearing to peel my apple, I'm sure won't fail to deflect. Alas! You knew what you were into when you signed up! (Her brother was a self styled Yorrick, or at least he adopted the name and did his best to live it up.)