May 27th, 2008 by Hoopleton

Okay, I think it’s time to be brutally honest. Things are really fucked up. Hyper-capitalism is starting to backfire, humanitarian crises on top of humanitarian crises monopolizes the front page and our politics has not only hit rock bottom, but there’s real evidence that both parties are starting to dig. If our leaders aren’t gearing up for preemptive apocalypse then they’re openly plotting assassinations on the campaign trail. And if all that weren’t bad enough, the new Indiana Jones sucks.

I was talking with a friend the other day and we both agreed that at this point we’d probably be just fine with good old-fashioned Communism. Sure, all that murder and arrest is a pain, and the secret police, lack of personal freedoms in general, Gulags certainly aren’t a picnic, and who the Hell likes to stand in line for bread? But seriously, at least under the glory days of Soviet Communism things were so much simpler. You could be a party member, touting the line, or you could be a freedom fighter, battling the riot police and trying to avoid kidnapping in the middle of the night.

I’ll admit it, I often long for simplicity. I long for some clear purpose. The American dream seems more and more like a distant memory and only hopelessness, consumerism and unimaginable debt seem to fill the void. Living in the modern American-dominated world order I for one could really go for a drab tiny apartment and a steady job at a cigarette factory, at least then my sense of the world would be so much less polluted by the insane complexities of absurdity that dominate every facet of our waking lives. Trade personal freedom for a home and a job I can have forever? Just don’t ask any questions? Where do I sign up?

Of course living under Communist totalitarianism there would still be preemptive wars, humanitarian crises of all sorts and dirty politics galore. In fact, I’ll even go one step further and admit that under a Communist state all those problems would not only exist but would probably be even worse, but at the very least I wouldn’t have to hear about them all the time. Wars would all be justified as defense of the motherland, humanitarian crises would be blamed on the evils of capitalism and when politicians screwed over the people or one another no one would ever really know.

See, the thing is, it’s not that people don’t get fucked over in a free society, it’s just that they find out about it. Hell back in the day politicians in democracies at least had the decency to lie to their people. Once they at least respected us enough to conspire, plot and hide their evil deeds. Now they screw us right in the open. And the worst part is that we don’t even do anything about it. We just buy into their shit, salute the flag and reelect them over and over and over again.

Sadly there’s no way out of this. Capitalism and the democratic societies it built will just have to self-destruct and we’ll have to suffer the uncertainty of what comes next. Not even Communism can ever return now. China’s a Leninist state in name only, settling for glorified dictatorship with a “for sale” sign on the great wall. Cuba is thawing more and more with every day and will probably turn into a Disney resort before the end of the decade. Vietnam? They have more KFC’s than Kentucky. North Korea is just insane. All that remains are Europe’s few surviving red parties and even they aren’t real Communists anymore. I mean seriously, what self-respecting Communist tries to get elected?

It’s all a pipe dream anyway. Not even the Communists could help these days, they’re too busy trying to ban the newest Indiana Jones for its “false depiction” of KGB agents. They say Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are trying to “provoke a new Cold War” because of their “absurd rewriting of history.”

Sad isn’t it? The party of Stalin, a man responsible for the murder of hundreds of millions of human beings, the greatest threat to freedom and chief rival of the United States for sixty years, reduced to picketing a third-rate sequel. Life sucks and there seems to be no real way out, not even the cold, cruel, iron-fisted rule of past evils. No one to save us. No one to rule us. What ever shall we do?

May 23rd, 2008 by Hoopleton

George Lucas is hardly new to the art of over-reliance on special effects in lieu of a plot, or the giddy destruction of his own legacy with the blunt axe of unwanted, unnecessary and torturously awful sequels (or prequels, as the case may be). At the very same time Steven Spielberg is a master of derailing movies thanks to a hysterically unfunny sense of humor and what can only be a fetish for speed over storytelling. I’m not really sure which of the two is the bigger waste of a film budget (though I think George Lucas still holds the lead), but what I am sure of is that the two of them together seem to form a perfect storm of cartoonish incompetence and unbelievably bad taste.

I went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and now, barely thirty minutes after limping out of the theater a broken man, I’m suddenly wondering if it were somehow possible for me to build a time machine so that I can go back in time and stop myself from ever buying the ticket.

I honestly don’t know where to start. Should I write about how transcendentally, unbelievably, categorically fucking bad the movie was? Should I spend the next thousand words making a case for why George Lucas and Steven Spielberg should be stoned in the public square, or at the very least, marooned on some deserted island as far away from computers and film equipment as humanly possible? Should I go through the film reviews I read and attempt to find the coded pleas for help that critics must have hidden in their articles as they were obviously forced at gunpoint to give this unimaginably horrible movie their praise? Or should I just walk away from the computer right now, get my hands on as many pills as I can and a bottle of Absolute and pray that the resulting brain damage will make me forget the last two hours of my life?

All right. All right, to be fair maybe I should talk about the good parts of the movie, which should be easy as there were only three.

The beginning action scenes, where the 65-year-old Harrison Ford (or should I say his obviously much younger stunt double) does battle with Soviets disguised as American GIs and survives a nuclear explosion by hiding in a refrigerator (yes, you heard right), are definitely fun to watch if you walk into the theater having suspended any sense of realism or any expectations higher than the floor. Also surprisingly good is the next major action scene involving the intrepid archaeologist and his new sidekick (who you guess immediately to be his son if you have even half a brain cell working) as they avoid capture in a high-speed chase through the streets and walkways of a University, though I warn you that this part is only enjoyable if you suddenly allow Steven Spielberg to hit that Indiana Jones nostalgia button that he seems to have fastened to your head. Finally, the one other good part of the movie is the sudden appearance of the wide-eyed Karen Allen reprising her role as Indiana’s old flame from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Marion Ravenwood, though to be honest you start wishing almost immediately that her role was just that, an appearance.

The only major problems with the three “good” parts of this awful, awful mess of a movie, are that they are constantly interrupted by what I can only guess passes as plot development in the diseased Lucas/Spielberg brain and that all three happen within the first hour. Yup, it’s all downhill from there. And my God, what a steep decline it is. Except for a few somewhat enjoyable laughs throughout the rest of this seemingly endless Bataan Death March of obsurdity, there is only one other thing to look forward to. The end. No, not the ending, the end. The long overdue appearance of end credits is like a religious revelation; it gave me the kind of sensation that I imagine is only reserved for pardoned death row inmates and children rescued from wells.

Now I know. I know. Some of you may end up going to see this “film,” and you may actually find that you liked it, as I’m sure was the feeling of the dozen or so what I can only guess to be highly medicated people in my crowded theater who actually applauded. If you are one of the few unfortunate souls who actually thinks that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is worth watching, all I can really say to you is that you need serious professional help. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, really. Go see someone.

The bottom line is this: George Lucas and Steven Spielberg must be stopped. If an argument had to be made for the eroding and corrupting influence of power and wealth I don’t think a more prime example could ever be found. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull represents everything that is wrong in modern movie-making. From its overuse of computerized special effects, its complete lack of character development, its shabby storytelling, its absolute misuse of what were once good, respectable actors, all the way to its almost pathological obsession with itself and its marketing legacy, this movie is a masterpiece of modern blockbuster trough cinema and ultimately is just fucking bad. There are no other words. It’s just fucking bad.

Thank you once again George, Steven, for destroying yet another beloved movie franchise.

May 18th, 2008 by Hoopleton

Writing is difficult because you live the words on the page. Joy and love, agony and sadness. What your characters feel you feel. What they experience you experience. What they see you can’t help but imagine before you. Even the most beautiful sensations, even the most wonderful highs are hard for a writer. They reinforce the imperfections in your life. They reinforce the overwhelming ferocity of human frailty. Of your own frailty.

To be a good writer, to be a great artist, you have to lay bare everything on the page. You have to be able to expose all your faults and inner demons to your audience. You have to honest. Really honest. Completely honest.

Of course the problem is that we’re not very good at being honest. To truly know ourselves is a frightening prospect. It means being intimate with our faults and that means accepting the cruelty we lock deep inside. Maybe that’s why misery and great art are so intertwined. Maybe that’s why artists feed on people. To truly know ourselves we tend to destroy everything that exists within us. To cope, we have to destroy it in others as well.

Right now I’m in the midst of writing the most honest work I’ve ever attempted. No silly humor, no gimmicks, just bare and naked honesty. My soul exposed to the criticism of the world. The full range of highs and lows for the jury to judge. Each word is an agony. Each sentence is a task.

I can’t help but relive every moment I try to capture and I struggle not to let the weight of the past keep me from finishing. But I wonder if I can do it. I wonder I why I do it. Writing is difficult because I live the words on the page. Because I have lived the words on the page. My characters are not just phantoms from some other dimension, they are part of who I am and who I’ve been.

Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I was free from it. Four complete unpublished novels and somehow I keep writing. Somehow I can’t stop writing despite the harm it has caused me and the relationships I’ve had. I can’t stop writing despite the fact that I get driven further and further into isolation with every passing day. I can’t stop writing despite the fear that I’ll never enjoy the fruits of my labor. For some reason I just can’t stop. And I’m afraid that if I don’t stop it might ultimately destroy me.

But I can’t stop. I won’t stop. It’ll have to destroy me. Even if it means surrendering everything that is me, I’ll keep writing as long as I have strength. I’ll continue to live the words I write. To experience what my characters experience. To relive what I have lived. That’s the curse of writing. That’s the curse of art.

May 13th, 2008 by Hoopleton

By noon the mechanics had managed to fix the plane, an operation that took longer than expected when a second engine had to be replaced due to a slight problem with everything.

Beyond my initial terror during takeoff, the second leg of our journey was much smoother than the first. This despite the fact that Baxter’s new cameraman, a local taxi driver that he picked up for a dollar a day after his original cameraman was shot while trying to escape, wouldn’t shut up about the legend of the infamous Flight 12.

As the story goes a group of Newsweek reporters had chartered a small private single prop on a trip to El Real by way of Panama City. Somewhere about twenty minutes into the flight a meteorite sliced through the engine block, causing the plane, and most of the writers of Newsweek, to crash to their deaths in the Panamanian jungle.

The plane was never found, but rumors of the passengers’ survival sparked countless investigations and even a hefty reward by the weekly’s publishers. The short version was that beyond one gold emblazoned cuff link nothing was ever found.

The long version, subscribed to by many a local taxi driver, was that the Newsweek reporters, cut off from civilization, faced with the horrors of the plane crash and the alien landscape of the jungle, discarded the trappings of modern life and began on an odyssey in search of the Blood Stone of Viqua, an ancient lesser known Cuevas god of fertility.

No one ever satisfactorily explained why the Newsweek survivors should go on a quest for an artifact said to turn water into blood instead of heading for the nearest American consulate, but most versions of the story, including that of Baxter’s new cameraman, were consistent in their claim that it had to do with a vision received by the photographer on the flight after he clubbed a Howler monkey to death for eating his last candy bar.

Anyway, as the legend goes, the small group of reporters traversed many an obstacle in search of the Blood Stone, at one point even doing battle with the jaguar avatar of the sun god and riding the moon serpent to the lake of the ear people as to replace the cracked lobule at the Great Temple of the Listener. Months passed into years and the Newsweek reporters, or as they were now known, the tribe of the Ne-swek, became demigods capable of healing the crippled and blotting out the sun. Of course this came at a price, as the Ne-swek achieved their miraculous powers only through the eating of human flesh. Many a virgin was sacrificed and the age of marriage dropped proportionally as a result.

Eventually, as the story goes, the Ne-swek did find the Blood Stone, which was lodged under the thrown of a gigantic four-headed toad who had the power to manifest a fire-breathing cockatoo. As though a gigantic four-headed toad weren’t bad enough. After the ensuing battle only one of the Ne-swek remained standing. Bloodied, burned and covered in bright feathers, the former feature columnist staggered through the jungle with the Blood Stone in his hand.

Here, in my opinion, the story lost some of its edge, as apparently this last of the Ne-swek, after a harrowing ordeal of Biblical proportions, decided to use the Blood Stone as collateral at a high stakes poker game hosted by a local chief of police. No one ever seemed to know why a demigod needed the money, but most people maintained that he had been a degenerate gambler before the plane crash and some things just don’t go away even after shedding this mortal coil.

To make an already long story short, or at least shorter, the demigod, whose powers seemingly did not extend to the realm of Texas Hold ‘em, lost the Blood Stone to a full house. He had been showing pocket tens.

This is how Mecklenberg Xerxes, the famed American author, now living in Veracruz, came in possession of the Blood Stone of Viqua, and became forever linked to the infamous story of Flight 12 out of Panama City.

Why Xerxes hasn’t turned the waters of the world into blood as yet I couldn’t guess, especially as he is famously remembered to have stated his intentions to do so upon cashing out of the poker game.

He is also fabled to have jumped up on a table and screamed, “Motherfuckers! Motherfuckers! Motherfuckers!”

As for the last survivor of Flight 12?

After losing his shirt in poker, and the Blood Stone to Xerxes, the former feature columnist for Newsweek incurred the wrath of the god of the Underworld, Bub, and was left to wander the Panamanian jungles for all eternity in a half ghost-like state. Some say, including Baxter’s new cameraman, that if you find yourself out in the jungle at night, you can still hear his pager, beeping for a peace that will never come.

May 12th, 2008 by Hoopleton

I will not die, it is the world that will end.

Such is my thought for it is this that makes sense. It is only this that I can prove.

I was walking out of a movie theater last night. The late show on a Sunday evening, the last refuge for people unable to cope with the disapproving sun. As I crossed the empty street, glancing at the blooming trees still damp from the day’s rain, for just a moment I felt as though I was all-alone on the planet. I was all there was to creation.

It was a fleeting thought. It was a selfish thought. But it got me to thinking about who I am and what my role could be. I realized that I cannot prove the existence of anything outside the barriers of my own mind. Everything that I take to be real is born out of impulses digested and reformed by the connections in my brain. The ground, the sky, the people I see on a daily basis are only there because I do not question them. If I were to examine this life through only my life, then the conversations I have about the meaning of existence would forever be altered. The focus would shift and I would have to understand my soul before I could understand anything else around me.

When I was born I created the world. Its history a back-story to allow me to accept the things I cannot change. Its cultures and languages to place limits on my ambitions. Its cruelty and mechanism to give me struggle and through that resolve. Its complexity to offer guidance. Its beauty to give me pause. And in my last moments I will not die, it is the world that will end. I will destroy as surely as I created it. Is this what I am meant to understand?

If the only thing provable is that I exist then what is the essence of creation? Am I, are we, God? Does the world begin and end with every birth and death or is it just me and mine? Time as a moving column, no future, no past, just now as it marches across the face of a clock and I the prisoner of my own making.

I will not die, it is the world that will end.

I have experienced things that I can only describe as miracles perhaps because no language exists to make sense of them. I have seen things that seem out of place in the context of reality, maybe because I do not see the world for what it really is. But if all these things I struggle with are the result of my own daydreams, then why do I continue to keep myself so perpetually in the dark? Is my role to accept my isolation in a crowded world and embrace that, which can very well be the result of self-induced delusion? Is that where enlightenment lies?

I’ve always preferred the dark, empty streets to the brightness of human contact. I long to be acknowledged as breathing, but the chatter of people is often more than I can stand. If this is the world I created, then why have I made it so alien to myself? And if I do not die, but destroy the world in my wake, then what was the point of its creation? Will another be created in its place?

I will not die, it is the world that will end. It’s the comfort of believing that the void has purpose, that darkness has meaning, that emptiness has its place. I for one, despite my inability to disprove this equation’s validity, would like the world to go on even in my absence. There might be little point to our lives, our time here barely the blink of an eye, but it is a very nice world. It should outlive at least me.

May 3rd, 2008 by Hoopleton

Rain descended on the city, water pouring down in sheets. The temperatures dropped. The wind blew hard and swarms of people ran for the cover of buildings and sidewalk umbrellas. All at once the light seemed to disappear out of the sky, carpeting the tall skyscrapers of Chicago in a glittering darkness. But I didn’t run, instead I stood my ground against the water and against the cold and watched as a performance troop in grotesque masks, wielding ropes, locks and bicycle tires put on a spectacle in the middle of Federal Plaza in Chicago’s Loop. In that moment, as music blared from a tent behind me, as a mobile stage rolled through the crowd, as the actors screamed and chanted at the top of their lungs and as the water soaked through my coat, I knew that my May 2nd was going to be a very interesting night.

The name of the event was Looptopia, billed by the organizers as ” America’s first dusk-to-dawn cultural and artistic spectacle showcasing the vibrancy and excitement of Chicago’s historic Loop neighborhood through musical and theatrical performances, unique shopping and dining opportunities, indoor programs, outdoor exhibitions, architectural tours, artistic installations and mesmerizing light displays.” Yea, I guess the official description of the event is accurate, but to me it would be more appropriate to describe the whole thing as a wonderful chorus of free creative chaos. Hundreds of artists descending on the streets till sunrise to display, inspire and confound – if only this could be life in Chicago on a daily basis.

If I have one criticism of Looptopia is that there’s simply no way to experience it all. As in everything in life decisions have to be made. Priority lists have to be drawn. There’s just too damn much to see, but in that there’s a certain freedom. Accepting the fact that you won’t see everything allows you to drift. And drift is what I did. I got there at six, grabbed a program and just let instinct guide me. I just walked, listened to music and allowed myself the freedom to go wherever I wanted. Creativity, inspiration – these things are made out of chaos, so whay should I try and impose order on my night?

I stumbled onto a short film series at DePaul University and watched as kite runners on stilts tossed clown noses to passers by on the hectic city streets. I walked the halls of the Art Institute in the late hours of the night and listened to Gypsy jazz at the Cultural Center as a sketch comedy troop performed three minute improve on a continual loop. I watched a percussion group make rhythm out of garbage cans, I caught a midnight hip-hop show at the Civic Center and watched a series of street performers doing thirty-second sketches between red light changes on Michigan Avenue.

One of the creative highlights for me was the ghostLIGHT one-man street performances on small stages arranged all along the main shopping district. Performers acted out a series of abstract pieces, each dressed in white and illuminated by the glow of a single lightbulb. One woman cared for a mechanical doll with macabre tenderness, another went through the motions of martial arts to empty a bowl of gummy bears one piece of candy at a time, but my favorite was the performance of a masked man writhing in agony and madness in a prison without any walls. For this last act it was almost as much fun to watch the reactions of passers-by as it was to watch him.

But the most incredible part of my night came just an hour after I came to the Loop at a performance called the Humechanical Nightmare. An abstract, sometimes comic, sometimes disturbing forty minute piece depicting the loss of innocence amidst tribal chaos in a post-industrial world where the sleeper is often the victim of her own dreams. I don’t usually like interpretive art that overdoes the costume and the mask, but I also usually don’t see the dismembering of human frailty so well captured and so completely full of truth. It was a mesmerizing act that not even a full force deluge could hope to undermine. Though I think the rain only added to the moment, the sudden absence of sunlight enforcing the bleakness of the story being told. Later, as I was using a hand dryer at a public restroom to dry my coat and hat, I couldn’t help but smile at the fun I’d already had.

On the whole of course there were problems with the event. Yes, most venues were crowded. Yes, the CPD was out in force, looking sternly at anyone having too much fun. Yes, options became limited as the sun began to reappear. Points of criticism can easily be found. I for one didn’t like that street traffic was still allowed. But to focus on the negatives takes away from the spirit of the night. Events such as this give us all a chance to admire the city in which we live. Events such as this connect the artistic community and help foster the thirst for shared ideas.

Looptopia ended for me under the vaulted ceiling of the Victorian-inspired Auditorium Theater just before dawn. I sat in a box that I could normally never afford to sit in overlooking the stage , watching vaudeville acts and musical comedy troupes, drinking vodka with cranberry, smirking at the lowbrow humor and enjoying the solidarity of the crowd. If only for one night Chicago was really our city. If only for one night the arts ruled the streets.