Trauma Corp To The Kind Of Rescue!

It didn't take me long, watching Attack on Titan to come up with my preferred alternate title, Trauma Corp. I think it sums up the heart of the show the best, expresses what the show is really about, beyond the enormous, cannibalistic eunuch monsters.

What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Con

AUTHOR'S NOTE:
I wrote this last year, after the SDCC 2013 and was unable to find a place to publish it, so it's languished on my hard drive ever since. So now, nearly a year after it's writing, I bring it to you in the hopes that you'll think about the con experience you had or have been dreaming about and get motivated to try something different and think something new.

I did not attend the con this year, so I don't know if any of the issues I raise in this piece have been addressed or if things have gotten worse. I welcome your comments and hope that you're kind.

 I'm waiting in line for The Black Panel and I can hear it already. Voices of others in the line, happily acknowledging that they're only here for some X-Files panel hours away. This sets off an alarm in my head, an alarm that rarely stops ringing while walking around the San Diego Comic Con. The alarm that says something is very wrong here. The San Diego Comic Con is a microcosm of American inequality. Everything you see outside the convention center is mirrored within (and what you see is literal shanty towns of homeless human beings, living in tents blocks away from the modern celebration of disposable plastic culture that SDCC has become).

Emotional Rescue (From Graboids)

I'm a barista these days and that's how I maintain a dim connection with living people outside myself. One such living person was a young, heavily tattooed man entertaining a young woman on the couch in our shop, using his ipad to show trailers for movies he thought were messed up or "must sees".  Having worked in a video store for nearly a decade I'm always curious as to other peoples conceptions of messed up movies.

Becoming Gamer Thoughts (Part 1)

I've been obsessed with the notion of using my time wisely for the last number of years. I believe it probably started when I stopped smoking cigarettes and using hard drugs, as right around then I began to develop the urge to actually stay alive and actually do something with my time. I realized that I had lost a lot of that, time, in the blurry years prior. The blurry, fun, memorable, life changing, personality developing, lesson learning, insane years prior, but in that time was lost.

Talkin' Apocalypse Blues

Or It's All The Rage (Virus)

Guillermo Del Toro's The Strain premiered this week on the internet and presumably on television as well. To the best of my knowledge this is the third medium that the story has spread across, spread...like a virus some might say. And will say I'm sure, for capsule media review content providers are nothing if not blandly predictable. The Strain went from book, to comic, to TV series, making it very much Del Toro's Neverwhere (just out of order)(and yet to be made into a stage or radio play)(yet).

Y and Time and Memory

And I'm reading Y the Last Man, for the first time in a long time, and I'm seeing its place in comic history as well as my personal history. Realizing that cultural artifacts and entertainment based nostalgia trips exist as these dots on our personal timelines, that loom huge and then slowly sink back into the background as we continue to be swept forward into a blurry future, our treasured artistic attachments become our blurry past, we get used to saying "X is my favorite book" at parties, even when it's been a decade since we read it and if we were hard pressed to talk about it with someone who was in the middle of it at the moment we'd probably stammer out the oldest response we can remember on the subject and try to change the topic. I don't know if that's "we" meaning "me" or "we" meaning "we", but I think we get the point.

To Wong Foo Thanks For Everything, Bela Lugosi

The Raven by Roger Corman is a mystery of a film. Not the film itself, it's a zany madcap send up of horror films. Or is it? (Yes, it is.) But is it? Is it really? (Again, yes.)

It is and isn't. It's an anomaly on the Corman/Poe/Price landscape (as far as I know, I'm still a relative neophyte when it comes to the Corman/Poe/Price cycle, having only seen The Raven, House of Usher, and The Pit and The Pendulum.)

This isn't rock and roll.

Thinking about Thomas Disch's The Genocides. (Just tried to CTRL "I" an italics there, apparently I'm not in college anymore). HTML instead of Microsoft Office shortcuts? The real world is bullshit man.

I suppose I could write in Microsoft Office (let's be real here, OpenOffice, I'm not a millionaire) and then copy and paste the text but somehow that feels dishonest. Even if there was a way to import the text without the aid of copying and pasting, it would be dishonest. Also I'm sure there is that option. They can print guns that shoot food now apparently, they can certainly import documents within the same platform. Or thing?

Thinking about Thomas Disch's "The Genocides". (Put in quotation marks even though I'm sure that's incorrect for the title of a novel.) Or is that just MLA Format? This doesn't have to be in MLA format does it? I hope not because I got good and lazy my last semester in college and just used the citation machine which I'm almost positive wasn't really all that correct or accurate most of the time. Thankfully I think my professors weren't that strict because they felt bad that I was still in college and almost as old as they are.

I was thinking about Thomas Disch's The Genocides. (Just got lazy and did it this time).

It might seem silly to think "My this book is very dark." when reading a book called The Genocides. Yet that is exactly what I kept thinking the farther into the book I got. Because, my that book is very dark.

If you haven't read it, it's about these plants that destroy the world. They could be aliens, they could be something else, they grow incredibly quickly and suck up all the water, devastate ecosystems, and decimate the human race. (That's decimate used in the broad, common sense of "kill a bunch of", not the literal sense of "divide by ten").

As I read it (reread actually. I'm at that age where books that I've been saying are my favorites, are books that I read ten years ago or more so it's time to give 'em a reread to refresh and also just to make sure that I do actually love these books) (and films to a lesser extent, but more on that in another post) I kept seeing the story in my mind's eye as an HBO show. This could have to do with the fact that I've been watching (and loving) The Leftovers which is a nice bit of apocalyptic what-have-you. Or with the fact that I'm just trying to use my mind more than I have been in the past and actively engaging with the text is a part of that.

I've also been thinking about attempting to adapt a favorite book of mine to script form, not for any production in particular, not to answer a real world demand, but just to see if I can do it. As a bit of creative homework. This is creative homework, in a way. Just the act of writing.

As I reread The Genocides I marveled at Disch nailing today's apocalyptic genre serial format 50 years earlier (well 40 if we want to credit The Walking Dead with giving birth/rebirth to the apocalyptic genre serial format in the early part of the aughts, but I don't want to do that, even if it's true and I have to). The biblical tyrannical patriarch, the lovesick young woman, the smart outsider with the secret agenda, the nurse, the grieving mother, the violent oaf, all the character types that populate so much popular apocalyptic genre fiction are all at work in The Genocides and move the story quickly, smoothly and unexpectedly throughout a lush nightmare eden. Well Eden without the animals. "Eden Without The Animals"! That would've been a better title for The Leftovers! (That's a separate obsession, marveling at the the divide between how good that show is and how bad its title is)

The Genocides would make for an amazing television show. There would have to be some changes from the text but not many. For instance, many of the scenes in the latter half of the book take place underground, in the roots of the plants, therefore there are many scenes that take place in total darkness. I think the total darkness aspects would work wonderfully at some points, it would become rather grating on an audience to have to experience so much of the story in the dark that I think some of the roots (or "tubers") should glow a sickly, ethereal green, not bright raver green, but just green enough to make out the haunting shapes of the withering survivors.

It's really dark though. It would be a jarring visual experience but I think it would be a worthwhile one. It would at least be better than The Walking Dead which remains the Walmart of television genre storytelling, that is the biggest and dumbest that swallows up other fandoms under it's stocky, empty husk of marketing and ads. No, I'm probably kidding, everyone loves that show and everyone couldn't be wrong.

(It is a rubbish show though. I mean come on. I made it through the first two and a half seasons and with every subsequent season I was told, "Yeah but it starts to get better next season" and that never happened and it remained a poorly scripted, one dimensional, bland mess of cliches and tedium)



xoxoxo

louie