Not a Slave

 

I would never go to work for another boss unless I had a firearm pointed directly at me

by

JPW

Little Blue Rogue Cop

 

1976 Motion Picture Dish

The foremost motion picture that is an exact genetic splice of exactly two previously distributed motion pictures on the public record is John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, which is a clean and mean genetic splice of Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo and George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Don't knock it 'til you've rock-a-cock-cuck-cocked it. Bird is the wüürd, sailor.

Jason Philip Wierzba presenziz 

The Trashmen playin' "Surfin' Bird"

 

 

Jason, 2026

I deserve food, shelter, and clothing...

by

Confession: cigarettes may be a stimulant, but I smoke ten or fifteen of them things each and every day...

Dressed as Jupiter

I’m left with little more than my basic kindness and generosity when you take away the name that would live in infamy. The war was asymmetric but I was barely with it. You can’t storm a garrison with a soup spoon. My tendency to harass and harangue seldom pleases me much more than it does the target. The rolling thunder of compulsion leaves me feeling lost in blurry motion in mid-contortion. Folks have all kinds of opinions and believe their opinions and beliefs to be sacrosanct. They would oftentimes have you be different from how you presently are so that they’ll be able to fit you in their hip pocket and massage you like a pet rock while they put on lip gloss and walk-and-talk. Never really knowing the real you that never was. If you know the game is rigged and you continue to play you shouldn’t expect legislators to come save the day. If you want to get the stalactites of peanut butter from off the roof of your damn mouth, you do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around. Naturally, I’m plenty able to wince at what enmity compelled me to do…upon such occasions that it has actually been me what gone done it. They say that resentment is drinking poison in the hopes that the other person will die. You can turn your guts to motor oil. It is a beautiful summer day with a breeze. I have not really gotten manic this summer. How can I be sure? I often need one or even two short naps during the daytime. I’m feeling a lot of pressure in the surrounding atmosphere and my head is frankly more thought-clogged than I would prefer. Sometimes my sinuses feel like they’re clogged with gravel. The cumulus clouds over the city are riding low and easy. Every few years I get to a place in my creative work where the spree comes to a short halt because every single first next step is a step into oblivion and the discontinuous stellar lines of the outer limits. I need to huddle inward and hum. If you let your thinking do your thinking for you, don’t be surprised when good fortune choses to ignore you. The voices you should be listening to are not going to sound a lot like friends to you at first, but either you take on the mass of that divided part or the open air may no longer be there to saturate your hiccupping heart.

Arnold Dreyblatt, "Resolve" 

Definitions of 'Plot' and 'Story'

When it comes to narratives and the art of making them bustle and boogey—whether we’re talking about a barroom joke told to a woodpecker, a short story, a novel, or a major motion picture from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—the main thing a person ought to know about plot and story is that story is the entire planet and all of time stretching back to the Big Bang and the void of no yesterdays that precedes it, whereas plot is Google Maps. One of the fun things the marvellous and drunken detective fiction writer Dashiell Hammett likes to do with plot is to employ it in the opening chapter in such a way that the reader starts off with a bit of a mistaken idea of what the story is and where we’re physically supposed to be atop its surface. In Russian Formalism, “fabula” is the earth’s crust and crudeness and wanton babbling brooks—its timequakes and spaceways—and “syuzhet” is the plot, a grocer’s itemized inventory as scrolling banner advert. There is a special feature behind-the-scenes documentary on the Arrow Blu-ray for Terry Gilliam’s classic 12 Monkeys where we see the director arriving on set early in the morning looking like he got his ass kicked by a kangaroo and complaining, as he no doubt searches for the script supervisor, that he never remembers what he’s supposed to be doing on any given day of production anymore. That is a man who is swamped in story and has lost the plot. The secret truth behind how you build suspense that’s used by all the top professionals is that you have the story everywhere all around you at all times and then the plot moves like a slow, rickety sled through the, uh, permafrost. Things are materializing in front of you and you’re impatient because you can’t see them clearly yet. If there are trapdoors in the plot you can play snakes and ladders with the story. Actors who ask their directors for backstory should be ashamed of themselves. The whole fucking cosmos is backstory, thespian.    

Sun Ra, Spaceways [Full Album]

Dinner and a Movie

 

When Winifred got home from work I had already started dinner and it reeked of garlic throughout the apartment. I asked her how her day went and she said: ugh, I’m afraid it’s going to remain something of a hostage situation for so long as I remain alive. Winnifred spent some time with her meddlesome aunt Gladys yesterday evening and her tongue has been a little sharper than normal since. I guess the question of children and when we’re going to have some came up again…but the answer remained: we are absolutely not having any children ever. Winifred told Gladys that it’s immoral to bring children into this putrescent and mouldering world. Why?!, exclaimed Gladys. Well it was certainly immoral to bring you here, snarled Winifred. To her credit, she didn’t feel great about it by sundown.    

 

Neither Winifred nor I drink alcohol anymore. You could say we developed an allergy. For a time she experimented with mocktails, but it really was all very frou-frou and saturated in silly ritual, especially since I would probably prefer a glass of tap water anyway. We always keep coffee, tea, Coca-Cola, and Pellegrino. I like sugary breakfast cereals and Winifred doesn’t really approve. She was born in Medicine Hat and comes by that small town toughness real natural. A few years ago we went to see Guillermo del Toro’s remake of Nightmare Alley at Country Hills, and when Rooney Mara came on the screen for the first time in her period sideshow finery, I turned to Winifred and said that she and Rooney Mara betray a bit of a physical resemblance. I thought it flattering and gentlemanly. Her lip curled slightly. Yeah, she said with mild disdain, because we’re both so farmy. 

Winifred and I each consider ourselves specialized connoisseurs of Cold War-era Eastern European science fiction, and following the dinner I basically botched but which we finished off most of, we decided to throw on the new Blu-ray of Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel that Amazon delivered earlier. It’s adapted from a Strugatsky brothers novel that I read a long time ago but distinctly recall to this day being by far the zaniest and most odd thing I’d ever read from those august filial noble notables. The movie is like Twin Peaks, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and Dario Argento’s version of Fawlty Towers all rolled into one tight little motherfucker of a blunt. It made me delirious and I couldn’t really follow it…but it was fun. Crazy purples and blues and reds. When the weather is nice, we usually like to sit out on the deck during all or part of sunset, Winifred dutifully making sure she’s got on the proper viscosity coat of sunscreen, which is not something I’d be inclined to fret over myself. I don’t take a lot of precautions and never did. I was the touring bassist with a popular rock ensemble for awhile and one time a significantly younger musician came up to me before the set and asked if I’d forgotten to put in ear plugs. I never use them, I told him. The music doesn’t sound as good. The little brat looked at me with absolute terror and nausea. He looked like he’d just sucked a lemon. 

Believe it or not, there was a time where I had made such a great big mess of things that there was almost no coming back. I was a pariah and I stood out like Big Bird. As I watched Winifred sleeping, almost tranquil and not yet snoring, I quickly realized how grateful I was to have had her to cushion my landing and recalibrate my settings. There was the sound of a branch lightly slapping against the bedroom window and the commencement of steady rain. I was reading in a science magazine that was lying around about synchronistic movement and mirroring between creatures. In interrelating, creatures develop an “automatic imitation bias.” It helps build trust, empathy, and collaborative spirit. Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel isn’t really a science fiction story. It has the kind of comedy and magic you find in classical antiquity, but it’s really a story about people snowbound at a very remote and very absurd hotel in the middle of nowhere that is also a madcap museum, and then Agatha Christie stuff starts to go down with the bodies piling up and the suspects shape-shifting. Well, I guess it is science fiction after all, isn’t it? It’s openly suspected that many of these chameleonic hotel guests and suspects manqué are actually extraterrestrials.