Category Archives: METAHEADCANON

Praise Caesar!

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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! 

“IT’S A MADHOUSE!”
Though this supposedly summer popcorn flick then takes a perilous turn towards symbolically representing some of humanity’s greatest atrocities. A metaphor that at first seems far too heavy to place upon these flimsy pop culture icons, but again, somehow, they get away with it. The film piles on allegories of numerous oppressed people, so much so that eventually the specific cases give way to the general principle of dehumanization. The apes emerge as true archetypes of the other, making their eventual triumph magnificently cathartic and emotionally resonate. When the narrative journey of the film inevitably leads to the last remnants of humanity being obliterated, the climatic moment is a subtle, but interesting, emotional juxtaposition. The extinction of our species is experienced as a well deserved victory for our beloved protagonists. A conflict resolution that sends quiet ripples of cognitive dissonance through the viewers dual identification with both the main characters of this story and their own real life humanity.

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

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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.”

TAO OF McCLOUD

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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!

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“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.

DAN ON THE MOON

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A single Q&A with Dan Harmon from a Reddit AMA

bc: Hi Dan!
Amongst everything else I really enjoy your story structure ideas, and am curious if you’ve ever read Joseph Campbell’s “Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake”?
(If not, it’s the first iteration of JC extracting the monomyth idea from James Joyce’s FW, a modernist version of the story circle, eternal return, etc.)
Similarly, do you like James Joyce at all?
Joyce influenced Campbell as much as Campbell seems to have influenced you, so in a sort of transitive property telephone game, you seem to me like one of the most Joycean writers around. (Intended as high praise!)
Sincere thanks for all the great work!
Also, here’s a drawing of you on the moon: http://i.imgur.com/7GUCwFo.jpg
bc

Dan Harmon: Ha, thank you for that art. I love it. And no, I haven’t read a single word of James Joyce and you’re right, I should, because you’re right, Campbell was obsessed with him. But unlike Campbell and probably James Joyce, I’m a lazy, shitty, self-satisfied blob of rapidly fading pop cultural influences and video game addictions.

RED STATE

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A single Q&A with Kevin Smith from a Reddit AMA

Q: I had a really awesome time at the Red State premier at Radio City Music Hall! So much so that I drew this when I got home. Wd love to go to an event like that again!

A: Nicely done, sir.

Next SModcast Pictures Presents tour is with the Slamdance winning flick BINDLESTIFFS – which is about three high school kids who go ape-shit when CATCHER IN THE RYE is banned in their school.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qahkCMIJzeU

Easily one of the funniest flicks I’ve ever seen.

Next year, SModcast Pictures will do another RED STATE USA-type tour with our first animated feature, JAY & SILENT BOB’S SUPER GROOVY CARTOON MOVIE. We’ll show the flick then Q&A after, all of which we’ll eventually podcast. We learned a lot touring RED STATE, so we wanna put it to use on BINDLESTIFFS and the cartoon JAY & SILENT BOB flick.

Digital Prophets

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“These people, Joyce, to some degree Pound, McLuhan, they were the prophets of the world in which we now stand, the world of integrated interactive media, extraordinary data retrieval that erases the 17th century notion of the unconscious. Nothing is now unconscious if your data search commands are powerful enough.”
– Terence McKenna in Riding Range w/ Marshall McLuhan

JOHN TITOR

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“IT IS THE BUSINESS OF THE FUTURE TO BE DANGEROUS.”
– Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

In the autumn of 2000 an avatar called “TimeTravel_0” began to communicate through the world wide web, claiming to be a visitor from the year 2036!

Though that someone should make an outrageous claim via the internet is hardly noteworthy, except perhaps when so very many people actually come to believe it. (and/or also when those that disbelieve it engage with such dedicated opposition.)

John Titor, as the character would eventually be known, entertained netizens for nearly 5 months, offering creative speculations on the physics of time travel, and prophesying a great many catastrophes for the immediate future. Upon the Spring Equinox of 2001 he bid farwell for to return to the year 2036 and has not been heard from since.

Though the avatar itself has long since disappeared, the John Titor media virus carries on and on even 10+ years later. There was a notable outbreak recently on account of a meme he left behind:

John Titor: “… the major breakthrough happens at CERN …The creation of microsigularities…its a black hole about the size of an electron… “

(Check out the live webcams monitoring CERN’s Large Hadron Collider)

Most of the Titor predictions have come and gone, with perhaps some generalized correlation to some actual events, though really without actually having come true.

That there is not a civil war raging in the United States right now, as predicted by John Titor, should invalidate his claim to having come from the future, right?

Not quite!

Within the sticky shell of the preposterous time travel story, there are sub plots which necessitate contemplating actual and incredible postulates of the science of our day.

“The Everett-Wheeler-Graham or multiple world theory is correct. All possible quantum states, events, possibilities, and outcomes are real, eventual, and occurring. The chances of everything happening someplace at sometime in the superverse is 100%.”

So as to craft an enduring and vital media virus, John Titor did not claim to be from THE future, but rather A future.

Thence the saga continues!

COMING ROUND AGAIN

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Written by Toby Philpott W/ Illustrations by Bobby Campbell

Don’t talk to me about journeys to the Underworld. I think of myself as one of those people who doesn’t dream. Oh, sure, ‘Everybody dreams!’ they say, with a knowing smile, ‘it’s just that some of us remember them’.

But I forget, I forget.

They tell me this stuff, these people who remember all their serial incarnations. Seriously, they emerge into our daily world from some curious realm that reacts directly to their thought, and calmly step into this entirely different reality – finding me haggard, hung-over, habitual – and they seem neither excited nor scared. Why? Because they not only remember their dream interludes but they also remember their continuity from the day before. Despite all the picaresque adventures of their nights, they seriously rejoin this apparently stable place I call ‘reality’ with quiet resignation. Maybe their consciousness is virtually continuous.

I can go no further. At this point I feel blind. When I finally shut my eyes I drift awhile then I vanish into the black – not for an eternity because as soon as I open my eyes again the world continues. It often seems as if no time had passed. When I felt frightened of the following day I used to stay up – waking hours last longer – if I fell asleep then OPENED my eyes I would face the feared morning (oh, I don’t know, dentist, exam, interview, opening night). And yes of course, sometimes the anticipation felt great – how do you think I ever let go into sleep then OPENED my eyes to another day?

But here I just refer to the good days. After all, I often seem to only get sixteen hours daily life to many other people’s twenty-four. So I get a bit behind having to do my dreaming in the daytime – pressure on – but then again, I don’t have nightmares, I guess (how would I know?)

They’ve done tests. It appears that sleep deprivation alone doesn’t make a human hallucinate in the waking state, but the deprivation of dreams does. So, imagine – me with no dreams, no surrealism, no lucidity, no monsters or jump-cuts, zooms or eternities, always stuck with gravity, and hunger and life-threatening situations that are REAL goddamit, how do you think I feel when I open my eyes to the same old world, still, without a break.

At the breakfast table the jet-setters come in with their travellers’ tales of mythic adventure in lucid dreams. Me, I feel like I haven’t slept (I often feel like I haven’t slept – sleeping often seems about as refreshing as blinking). Anyway, my ‘real, one and only’ world has to incorporate any fun I might get, and for sure it contains some problems I’ll have to confront – dead subtle, too, some of them.

Dream rememberers often appear refreshed by their dimensional vacation (though sometimes they report getting stuck at some psychic airport), and they also remember what they were doing in real time yesterday, and why – so they may well have a script and plan for the day ahead, as they move smoothly back to take up where they left off.

What I call sleep is like the black bar between the frames of a movie. Normally (awake) we don’t see it, but when someone like me slows down into sleep it takes an age (a split second) to cross that line. Many mornings it goes as smooth as a flicker book – next image, next day. Just some days I cross the line and it’s a CUT to another scene entirely – sure, there’s probably a connection, some editing gets real suggestive, but there are shock cuts, like coming round and finding someone tied you to a chair and a light shines in your eyes.

Oh, sure. Call me hero. ‘Talk! ‘ they said. I can’t talk after I wake up until I have had at least three cups of coffee, some days. At 150 milligrammes per cup I must use a gramme a day. A gramme of caffeine.

It keeps me in the awake world – better the frame you know than the one coming up. Funny that, most people think coffee speeds things up, and I take it to stay awake and get more time in the same frame.

cut

– somebody slugged me

– They put something in my drink

– what happened?

– It all happened so quickly

I find myself back again – seeing if I can figure out a sequence to this movie or find out if the cuts have a logic or merely a careless randomness to them?

Each morning I struggle to piece together what I remember of the time before the last blackout. With a continuous memory of previous frames I might have a chance to pick up a theme, at least – some kind of order apart from mere habitual days, another page of the book, semi-coherent action flickering by (or at least the image of it.) No abruptness interrupts my days.

I find belongings, sometimes, and notes to myself, when I wake up alone and I’m not tied to a chair or whatever. I have no idea what they mean, beyond what they say.