Author Archives: bc
#NOPRESIDENT
RESIST MUCH
ABRAHADABRA
Praise Caesar!
My review notes from an advanced screening of the 2017 film War for the Planet of the Apes :)))
War for the Planet of the Apes luxuriates in its unique cinematic context, as the third installment of a very critically and commercially successful trilogy, but also as the 9th overall offering of a particularly ridiculous Hollywood film franchise. This movie has a mandate for suspension of disbelief that other films could never have, and uses it to great effect, creating a movie that is completely ludicrous, but also a wonderfully complex cultural artifact.
From its inception the Planet of the Apes movies have ostensibly been about the end of humanity, though more often than not the seriousness of that premise was hidden behind delightful rubber masks and fun sci-fi tropes. The reboot trilogy played it much more straight, but largely the first 2 films were just well executed action movies. War for the Planet of the Apes seems to have much larger ambitions, and appears to be trying to make a genuine artistic statement through the unique medium of the summer blockbuster. The film persists as a kind of pastiche of cinematic touchstones.
The first act of the film plays with the duel aesthetics of classic war & western genre films, before settling into a pretty straight forward Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now homage. And just in case the audience misses the references, the film hits you over the head with an actual sign post, spray painted on a wall, “ape-ocalypse now,” a jarring bit of meta-exposition that I don’t think many other movies could get away with, but here it just works, after all, it’s a Planet of the Apes movie!
The character of Caesar completes his heroic character arc, becoming a kind of Moses like mythic figure, bringing his tribe to the promised land, which then also completes a meta-contextual circle, as the story returns to its origins, waiting for Charlton Heston to come down from the sky.
War for the Planet of the Apes simultaneously functions as an action-packed-thrill-ride and as a thoughtfully constructed semiotic examination of modern humanity. Watch gun wielding apes on horseback ride boldly into battle!! As they also mostly communicate silently through subtle body language, bringing forth perhaps the most well realized representation of non-human intelligence in all of cinema.
TL;DR: As above, so below! This blockbusting story universe movie synthesizes both the higher and lower discourses, adding substance to the spectacle, and emerges as a fine example of pop culture’s accelerating complexification :)))
RAW Currency
Back in the summer of 2006 I created a novelty currency for Robert Anton Wilson to use in a crowd funding effort to help pay for his end of life care. The idea, as conceived by Vincent Murphy, was to print up some RAW money, Emperor Norton style, which Mr. Wilson would then autograph, and auction off on eBay. A plan which was pulled off w/ modest success, and ended up chipping in around about $1,000 to RAW’s medical bills.
(Eventually Douglas Rushkoff & Mark Frauenfelder would initiate a much more substantial fund drive, which afforded RAW the opportunity to pass away in comfort & levity.)
At that point I’d been studying w/ Bob for 2 years, and had become accustomed to regularly learning mind blowing life lessons from that damn old crank, but this one got me good!
See at that time I couldn’t sell any of my artwork to anyone at any price. Hell, I couldn’t even give the shit away! But in his hands 10 scraps of paper I made were worth $100 + each. Now the obvious difference is the autograph right? Except at the same time the RAW bills were selling on eBay, I won an auction for a signed coffee mug of his for $10. So what made the difference? How did RAW transform my paper into money? Well, magic, of course!
RAW had a bit about the surreality of the Federal Reserve, a private bank, printing money into existence, ex nihilo, which begged the question: what transforms that paper into money? And why does only the paper printed by that particular institution pass for money, and all else is considered counterfeit? RAW mused that the Federal Reserve must have a magic wand! After they print paper bills they wave the magic wand over the paper and presto change-o: the paper transubstantiates into money.
And the truth in that joke makes for some very funny money indeed!
So as to honor the lesson learned from this almost decade old caper, I should like to release the RAW currency into the wild. Print it, enjoy it, spend it, whatever you want it!
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE RAW CURRENCY MONEY SHEET.
A 2 page pdf, which if you print on a duplex (double-sided) printer, will give you 3 RAW bills per sheet.
(Cut out along the front page for correct trim size)
“Wealth is nature’s abundance, freely given, plus the exponential advance of technology via human intelligence, and as Korzybski and Fuller demonstrate, this can only increase at an accelerating rate. Money is just the tickets or symbols to arrange for the distribution—either equitably, in a free money system, or inequitably, as under the tyranny of the present money-cartel.”
From: Illuminating Discord: An interview with Robert Anton Wilson
I was reminded of all this recently after watching the entirely excellent film “The Big Short” wherein the absurdity of the finance industry is elucidated w/ stunning clarity. As the movie so bluntly states: “It’s possible we are in a completely fraudulent system.”
MUTATING COMIX
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Mutating Comix was originally an 8 hour mini comic made on 3/15/2006 for the occasion of Scott McCloud’s visit to Delaware during his 50 state tour.
TAO OF McCLOUD
A single Q&A with Scott McCloud from a Reddit AMA
bc: Hi Scott!
I must say I find it very noble that you don’t run around the comics industry throwing copies of Reinventing Comics at people yelling “I told you so! I told you so!” Though I know you’re skeptical about your own prescience, and haven’t seemed to have embraced digital distribution very much for your own comics. How do you see the concept of Reinventing Comics 15 years later? Also, maybe enjoy this ridiculousness! A comic I made and gave to you about 10 years ago, when you were at a store signing in Delaware, during a snow storm: MUTATING COMIX
Scott McCloud: (Great op art image there! Thanks. :)
There are plenty of things that I didn’t anticipate in Reinventing Comics like the importance of crowdfunding. And some of the rosy predictions that I made, which might’ve seemed prescient in 2010, could look sadly premature by 2020 if basic safeguards like Net Neutrality are murdered in the crib.
We’re really making some great progress in other areas though. Diversity of genre, gender balance, institutional support, public perception, the literary and artistic successes of the last 15 years… Those different revolutions that I wrote about are almost all on track!
BONUS! Back in 2021, I tried to google a phrase and the only result was from me 12 years ago talking w/ Scott McCloud, of which I have zero memory :)))
A Joycean Jinx!
“Being humus the same roturns”
JJ, FW Pg. 18
The sensationalistic tabloid story of Robert Durst, which regularly re-surfaced on print and digital front pages the world round, reached its most ludicrous form in a documentary called “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.” (Bear with me on this!)
If you’re unfamiliar with the story, in short, what happened was an extremely rich man’s wife disappeared under mysterious circumstances in the 1980’s, then a close friend of his (Susan Berman) was murdered 2 decades later when she was about to be questioned about the wife’s disappearance, and then he admittedly killed and dismembered a neighbor, but successfully claimed self defense. He was generally regarded as having gotten away with at least 3 murders.
He then agrees to participate in a documentary about himself, proclaiming his innocence and bad luck coincidence throughout, which aired to great interest, and concluded by bringing about new evidence, resulting in his arrest.
What was the new evidence? A misspelled word.
After Susan Berman was killed an anonymous letter was sent to the police informing them of the body’s location.
In the anonymous letter, presumably sent by the killer, Beverly Hills is misspelled as “Beverley Hills.”
The documentary crew then discovers a letter that Durst sent to Berman with the exact same misspelling and indistinguishable handwriting.
The documentary crew confronts Durst about this, and he appears to have strange involuntary reactions, all while still maintaining his innocence and bad luck coincidence. And then in a truth is stranger than fiction moment, Durst excuses himself to the bathroom, and forgetting that he is still wearing a microphone, engages in what sounds like a pathological rambling confession.
But it’s really the misspelled word that’s the more concrete evidence, and doesn’t this scenario sound familiar to ye Joyceans?
The Phoenix Park murders of 1882, which features prominently in the dreamscape of Finnegans Wake, along with the attempt of Richard Piggott to frame Charles Stewart Parnell as being involved in and/or supportive of the murders via a series of forged letters.
Parnell was cleared of the charges because Piggott’s misspelling of the word hesitancy as “hesitency” identified him as the author of the letters.
“Hesitency was clearly to be evitated”
JJ, FW Pg. 35
Joyce makes much of this incident and the theme recurs throughout the book, playing into the ambiguity of HCE’s guilt/innocence of the indistinct crime he is accused of.
Curious that in both cases of forensic linguistics it was the letter “e” that did the trick.
So it goes, around and around and around again.
ERIS’ NEW DRESS
A wonderfully Discordian media virus once ran its course through the simultaneous resonance of our social networks, a meme so efficient and contentious that it became ubiquitous almost immediately, and can be invoked simply by saying “The Dress.”
Like the mythic Apple of Discord, thrown by Eris’ to instigate a fight amongst the gods, the ambiguously hued picture sparked immediate conflict amongst its viewers, who vigorously argued about its contents.
A media virus, as defined by Douglas Rushkoff, consists of a protective & sticky outer shell, and a hidden payload of memetic code. (A Trogan Horse for ideas.) The outer shell is the surface issue/face value of a meme, in this case, the question: “What color is this dress?”
The adhesive shell becomes attached to a host medium and thence its memetic programming gets injected therein. This meme was particularly sticky because people could not understand how anyone could possibly disagree with, what was presumed to be, their objective observation.
The memetic programming contained within the argument of “Black & Blue vs. White & Gold,” amongst all the science of perception, seems to be something akin to the zen koan: “Who is the great magician that makes the grass green?”
Without really realizing it, the internet got a crash course in Maybe Logic :)))