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May 20, 2010 - May 13, 2010

Thursday, August 06, 2009

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

[Boss asked me to post this one. He chucked his computer through a window, after a heated screaming match with it. He wrote this as me. In my style, he tells me. I haven't had a chance to read it. Sure it's awesome.

[You say I don't sound all that enthusiastic? Your ears (or eyes?) are playing tricks on you. Couldn't be more stoked to be the butt of one of the Old Man's "homages." I'm fit to burst.]

BRIZONI'S THE MAN. Rumors are, it was driving in Kenya at the time when Obama popped out of it. How un-American can you get? Except that a car isn't a vagina, even if it provides a lot of the same comedic opportunities. Which is why I'm now going to proceed to do a totally AllahPundit trashing of Birthers catalyxed by a bunch of killer vaginal jokes. Cool, huh?. I mean, imagine. I have it all set up. The foreign car, the yaaaaawning SOMETHING, and hey, the punchline writes itself, right? Doesn't Michelle have a yaaaaawning  SOMETHING herself in herWookie-sized Princetonian carcass, and then I close on just how stupid and southern the people are who believe Obama has anything to hide about his past. GIT IT ON, BRUTHA.

Uh, Boss. You asked (ordered) me to post this as if I wrote it, and (given the fact you set fire to your computer in yet another drunken rage). I was willing. I mean, you're the Boss and all. Except that in this instance you're totally, completely full of shit.

I have to admit I love the idea of an Isetta as a metaphor for the First Lady's vagina. I even love the slick word tricks (don't know their names) you use to blur reality into Obama somehow being born out of his own wife's Isetta door. But there comes a point where even I draw the line. And it's here.

Like, I got some problems with this whole Birthers are idiots position. Number One: Allahpundit thinks they're idiots. Allahpundit. Wake up, Boss! Are you listening AllahPundit!

I don't like to tell stories out of school, but there was this time that the Boss and I were hanging out on Twitter (we're really tight that way), and I said I saw something clever on HotAir and the Boss, he says, across however many miles and gigabytes of difference, he says, "That AllahPundit. The only writer he ever met bit him in the leg. And the writer died a day later."

After that I went to Borneo for a month or so, okay, seven, and Suli Li and I were just about to become a lifetime item when the Boss showed up again in his indefatigable and most remarkably sudden way. How he knew I don't know. But there he was, damn him, with his tradmark hundred-proof Stolichnaya bottle welded to his hand. "Meeee," he said -- and this mind you, was at the exact moment when the presiding shaman asked if anyone had any reason to keep Suli's and my eternal union from reuniting the shattered fronds of the [entire fucking, just so you know] universe -- "Heeeeeey, that's Brizoni. He owes me money, amd not only that, but his cat bit my dog and cost me thousands of dollars in cosmetic surgery. An Akita with a cat-jaw sized hole in his ear almost never wins the annual Animal X Games -- you know, the 'Kill or Be Killed English Sweepstakes' Michael Vick blesses every year in Druidic robes at Stonehenge."

Well, I'm just saying. I haven't seen Suli since (I sleep with a loaded revolver instead.) I've been reading all the adulation in the sci-fi comments the Boss arranged for himself. Okay. I admit the guy has a certain facility with words and arguments and like that. And some of his early poetry-like writing is something like poetry (if you like poetry that's isn't like poetry). But the guy behind it all is an absolute animal. I'm not going to make a big deal of it. I'm Brizoni, and I've spent so much time in foreign climes that I'm used to animals. Hell, I've been to Rio de Janeiro. Even the Boss seems civilized compared to what I do on a Saturday night in Rio. Where was I?

Oh. Dudgeon. Are we all going to sit still for these outrageous vagina jokes just because he's a fucking genius? I think not. It's unconscioniousable. Or whatever the word is. You'd have to be one of those perverts like the Boss even to pronounce it.

You see what I mean. If you know what I mean.

That didn't work out how I intended. Where the hell was I? Oh yeah. Birthers. Does any one of you Boss-worshipping tools know that a first-rate attorney named Andrew McCarthy (from the National Review) actually defended the Birthers, sort of? Sure you don't. You love the Boss. Who's really, really, incredibly, oh-so-unbelievably smart.

Like I always say. Right, Boss?

Monday, August 03, 2009

FOLLOW......... Sorry about the computer glitches. They happen from time to time. But the lengthy discussion in the comments section was good. As a result, we have two new websites for you. Bad news: the Sci Fi website will probably have to be restarted, although we will capture all your comments as part of the 'Mission' and "Rules of Engagement' discussion. We're not very expert at the starting new blogs business, so please forgive us. As a consolation prize, we're soliciting better names for it than the one we thought of off the top of our pointy heads. There's already a big blog site with approximately the same name. Give us a better name, and we'll grant the winning entry full honors.

Good News: A new site we should have started a long time ago from the sound of your posts. A place to talk about everything without the heavy hand of InstaPunk and his minions in the way. You get to make to make up the rules about what goes there and what doesn't, except for the rules we've laid down limiting the influence of InstaPunk, LocoPunk, TruePunk, and CountryPunk. They're still allowed to visit and post, but only as equal participants, not as scolds or authoritarians. It's all explained at the new site, which is called:


Go take a look. Of course we'll still be doing our thing at InstaPunk, but our hope is that some of the topics you debate and discuss THERE will inspire us to do a better job HERE. All the instructions you need about how to become a poster at 'In the Metalkort' are contained in the first entry, which we delegated to the last real survivor of South Street. He dates back to the time of Zack, before there were punk demortals who thought they were so smart, and he never bought into the reign of Cadillac Mope, the fourth king of Punk City, whose hubris has so obviously set the tone here for so many years.

And, yes, we're dead serious. We want to hear your thoughts. About everything that interests you, no matter how slight or seditious. It's never been our intention to become our own echo chamber.We confidently expect you to spur us to better writing and more insightful thoughts.And we're always here, always awaiting your best ideas, always ready to engage when you are.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

SPILLOVER. All right. You all like Sci-fi. Got it. Just wondering if it's possible to get past the favorite shows, favorite episodes discussion to something deeper. Let me try. I admit I'm at a disadvantage here, even though a lot of the punk writing oeuvre could be considered science fiction, too. Irony? I'll leave you all to wrestle with that if you want to. Feel free.

I think the thing for me to do here, though, is explain why a lot of science fiction icons leave me cold, and what I did like about the few works I've enjoyed. Then you can fiill me in on where I've missed the boat or why my own experience and criteria are deficient. Sound fair?

First, a sort of honest inventory of my likes and dislikes. I loved the original Star Trek, despite the cheesy sets and effects, because of Shatner. Period. He filled that captain's chair. He had a real taste for combat. When he went to work against the Romulans or Klingons with photon torpedoes, etc, I believed it. The worse the odds, the more he seemed to be alive and in command. None of the endless other Star Trek spin-offs ever convinced me, and perversely, the more they tried to upgrade their makeup and special effects, the more bored I got. Turns out, one of my biggest hangups about all science fiction is plastic faces and bizarrely eccentric body forms, which from the very beginning seemed to me to be a kind of cartoon multi-culti statement intended as propaganda for dumbasses. I also think the few plots I saw of the Star Trek Next Generation series  reinforced all that in a big way. The last thing in the world Piccard ever wanted to do was use the awesome firepower of the Enterprise. And since these shows really are space operas (i.e., high tech horse operas featuring the U.S. Cavalry against the Indians IN SPACE), what on earth (pun intended) is the point if nothing ever really happens?

I have truly loathed every single episode of the endless Star Wars saga. Too cute by half, fake mythological, and increasingly self-important. I remember Bill Moyers conducting an interminable series of interviews with Joseph Campbell, whom I actually liked when he lectured us at my school. But his repeated references to Star Wars in the Moyers series set my teeth on edge. The beginning of pop intellectualism, which is no doubt responsible for the fact that it's now possible to take courses in comic books at major universities. Suck.

[My only other personal brush with icons in this realm -- the day a publisher bought The Boomer Bible I saw Isaac Asimov hailing a cab in New York. I thought his muttonchop sideburns looked ridiculous, and he looked sour. But no one's at his best hailing a cab in the Big Apple.]

I didn't read the science fiction classics as a boy. No Heinlein. No Arthur Clarke. Like everybody else in the known universe I was required to read Ray Bradbury's Illustrated Man. A Hitchcock/O'Henry trick ending sort of piece. Yawn. I once saw Harlan Ellison interviewed on the old Tom Snyder Show, the one with the blacked out set and lots of cigarette smoking going on. Ellison explained -- this was way back in the days when people were wondering if Star Trek would ever rise from the dead -- that he had submitted a movie script in which the entire universe is destroyed and the Enterprise has to bring it back, but the producers told him his story "wasn't big enough." He was clever, but he was also fondest of one of the -- to my mind worst and shallowest -- Star Trek scripts ever, the gruelingly obvious allegory about a half-black-half-white man chasing a half-white-half-black man through the universe in perpetual hatred. He was proud of that effort. Phooey.

Which is a big big part of my whole problem with science fiction. I actually began my professional writing career at a company called Datapro that did technical reviews of every kind of computer product. Everyone who interviewed there was told of the constant dilemma of the hiring bosses: hire a technical whiz who could learn to write or a writer who could learn about digital technology. (The best of us all was a Wesleyan music major who learned datacom by "hearing" the bit stream in her mind. Genius.) Science fiction writers always struck me as scientific types who fancied themselves as writers. Their technical inventions were formidable, but their characterizations, their themes, their philosophical musings were, well, superficial. And in the rare cases when they weren't superficial, they were decidedly lacking in passion. 

I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey the year it came out, in Cinerama, which was stupendous. But in human terms, it was as dry as one of those ancient inert craters on the moon. A function of admittedly admirable intellect entirely divorced from human experience. How much wisdom could it possibly contain? One could admire it as some sort of intricate puzzle, but one could not feel anything for anyone in it. Is that even a movie?

What else? I liked the first Alien, but it wasn't really a science fiction movie. It was a horror movie set in space. Every sequel has gotten worse. I liked the first two Terminator movies, but chiefly because they were action movies, science fiction as prop warehouse rather than perspective-changing premise. The more they grapple with time travel, the more incoherent they get. (Really hated the TV series about Sarah Connor; I'm as fond of gratuitous nudity as the next guy but the female terminator was creepy, the putative savior of mankind was a hopelessly immature chump, and mom was borderline incestuous in the way that only network television can intimate without ever committing to.)

I liked the Stargate movie, which is to me one of the few science fiction movies that resonates past the end credits. Why? Because it did not amputate itself from human history, the ultimately fascinating mystery of human origins, that to me is the only real topic of art and literature. An absurd take on it, perhaps, but still one that allows us to consider and reconsider our own unexamined assumptions about where we come from and what that means.

Does it seem like I'm not getting anywhere? That's where you're wrong. I have a litmus test for science fiction that is closely analogous to my litmus test for religions. The latter is a simple one: if your religion discourages you from asking questions and seeking illumination from the possibly surprising answers to those questions, your religion is a death cult, not a path to salvation or spiritual enlightenment. Sci-Fi? If your premise separates itself entirely from earthly human experience, any allegory it attempts is cheap, and there's absolutely nothing remotely worthwhile about it. No exceptions. No human imagination can make up an entire civilization from scratch. Every such attempt is chock full of cheating, hidden assumptions, and most often, downright propaganda. (There goes Dune, including all past imperfect and future perfect versions of the same failed vision.)

That's why I got taken in, as I admit I did, by Battlestar Galactica a year ago. I thought they were converging on a human experience. Table lamps. Whiskey. Anglo-European military ranks. Pet dogs. In the end it was the most fraudulent piece of sci-fi crap I have ever endured. Corrupt and empty from start to finish. A talky, muddled, self-indulgent soap opera that resembled Twin Peaks more than it did Star Wars, of which the original series was a blatant ripoff.

To my mind, sci-fi is mostly junk. The few examples I like are movies that succeed on traditional virtues like character, clever plot, and action fun. I like Riddick. It's exciting. I like the first Predator movie -- simple and exciting.. I like -- and I'm surprised no one mentioned -- FarScape, which I like because of Claudia Black, Claudia Black, and, of course, Claudia Black. I like Soldier starring Kurt Russell. I liked the old  Doctor Who starring Tom Baker, not because it was sci-fi or moving in any way, but because it was classically mordant British comedy, which they no longer do now that they're a dying nation. And I liked the cheesy sets and the music one of the commenters finds unsettling. Loved it, in fact.

As a kid I read an Edgar Rice Burroughs book, one, about some hero on the moon. Enjoyed it a lot without understanding a word of it; I think it was part of some saga I never found the beginning or end of. Only science fiction I actually remember. Well, I remember reading Fahrenheit 451, but nothing in it. No Claudia Black.

Now. Do your worst. You started it. I invited you to continue. Have fun.


Who the hell else is actually having fun these days? You see what I do for you, my children?

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