In 2007 Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino brought the grindhouse/exploitation genre back into the theaters with Grindhouse. It was a kitschy homage to the exploitation films of the 60’s and 70’s with plenty of nods and winks to audience. Planet Terror and Death Proof both had their strengths and weaknesses, but the breakout feature of the film was ultimately the fake trailers used to give the double-feature an authentic grindhouse feel.

It wasn’t surprising then that in 2010 the first of the trailers was made into a feature and released. Robert Rodriguez brought Machete to the big screen and while it took some risks that paid off and worked hard to give us current political commentary on the hypocrisy and racism at the heart of a lot of US anti-immigration activism and legislation (Arizona’s outrageous and increasingly absurd laws and attitudes in particular), the film came off as too slick and too self-aware to really be effective. The film really wanted you to see how clever it was and the slick cinematography stood in sharp contrast to the genre it was supposed to be emulating.

Ultimately, Machete was fun but it was not really the grindhouse experience that exploitation fans were anticipating.

By sharp contrast, Hobo With a Shotgun, the second foray into bringing a Grindhouse trailer to the big screen fully committed itself to the genre and pays a sincere homage. Hobo hits you hard. It’s gritty as a bare-knuckle fight in an alley that reeks of urine and is strewn with discarded needles. When I left the theater I remarked it was like a jagged beer bottle neck to the face.

In other words, it was exactly what I had wanted from the resurgence all along, right down to Lisa Lougheed singing “Run With Us” through the credit sequence.

Director Jason Eisner plays it totally straight and the tone of the movie immediately benefits. There is no winking. There is no waiting for the audience to praise the film for how cleverly it adapts genre staples. It’s just straight up exploitation that executes perfectly the tropes of the genre.

It’s no surprise we see this resurgence in exploitation here in the dark year of our Lord 2011. In the height of the grindhouse movement in the 60’s and 70’s the movies took the fears and anxieties of the society, cranked them up to 11 and threw them right back in your face. It was a dark time for America. A grim war few people really understood was being lost and televised live on the evening news. Richard Nixon put some of the last nails in the coffin of a time where people trusted their government and corruption seemed to be everywhere.

From the high water mark of the peace movement in ‘69 where the Summer of Love crowd thought the world was going to get saved to the ugly realities of the Tet Offensive, Watergate, the ultimate collapse of the Vietnam war pop culture tracked and reflected the psyche of the nation. Cynicism took hold and those who didn’t escape into the “dance to our doom” hedonism of the disco era and inoculate themselves against the horror of the times with a steady stream of cocaine and dance music saw their anxieties and cynicism reflected in movies like Death Wish. The government couldn’t be trusted and the cops were all corrupt and only Charles Bronson could take justice into his own hands and punish the people dragging our society down.

Decades later in the post-9/11, post Bush era and once again the cynicism and mistrust has taken over our culture. Our government lies. Wars that are not well understood are being lost and American boys are coming home in flag draped coffins again and an entire presidential administration alongside a complicit and lazy media who lost their sense of what the fourth estate was intended to be collaborated to fool a nation into a war without end.

Crime is feared more than ever despite statistics which show marked drops in most segments of criminal activity and the authorities are the last people most of us trust to do anything about it, not competently at least.

Absurdly wealthy elites can orchestrate a giant global ponzi scheme and rob the most vulnerable of jaw-dropping amounts of money. They can nearly bring the economy to a screeching halt with outright criminal and fraudulent business practices which exploited the poor and pension funds of hard working, regular people and not a single one of them has spent even a day in prison.

Once again, society is turning to the anti-hero in Charles Bronson from Death Wish or Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs and now Rutger Hauer in Hobo With a Shotgun. We look to the marginalized, the outsider to give us justice and meaning in a world where we find we can’t expect these things from institutions we’ve idealized.

Hobo With a Shotgun Trailer

Matt Taibbi on Democracy Now: Why Isn\’t Wall Street in Jail?

This is from the bio of Alex Jones on the Infowars website, part of an small media empire with Jones at its centre. It paints a certain portrait of Jones, as does his radio show, internet broadcasts and documentary films, namely that of Jones as this crusader for truth and as a great unmasker of government charlatanry. Yet for all his years on the air and on the internet allegedly exposing the high crimes of states and corporations he’s never had the kind of attention Julian Assange and Wikileaks have garnered both from the press and from state powers themselves.

One might wonder why Alex Jones has been shut out of the big time.

No US senators ever openly called for his extrajudicial murder.

No committee was ever formed to determine if Jones and his extensive media properties broke laws that were more or less totally designed to suppress dissent like the Espionage Act.

Yet the things Jones has exposed about the US government and the big corporations looming over our lives are far more shocking than anything Wikileaks has ever published. Go check out Jones sites like infowars.com and prisonplanet.com and you will see the lurid details of the government conspiracy to destroy the World Trade Center and Pentagon and pin it on terrorists in order to justify an assault on personal liberty and for the bankers to profit. We are left to wonder if the bankers in question might be jewish, but we know the conclusion Jones wants us to draw don’t we?

Surely this story alone, covered in literally hundreds of hours of footage on Jones radio show, webcast, articles and documentaries, is far greater than anything released by Wikileaks to date and far more dangerous to the state. The searing Loose Change documentary which seeks to demonstrate that the official story of 9/11 is simply a fabrication lists Jones as a producer.

If that isn’t enough, Jones is among the loudest in the movement to expose the true birthplace of President Barack Obama, which according to Jones is Kenya. It’s more than just a cover up of the President’s roots though, it is an attempt to hide the fact that he is a Muslim sleeper-agent who is looking to take over America and impose Sharia law on the entire country. Oh, and socialism.

The Alex Jones media machine is a frequent supporter of David Icke who has worked tirelessly to expose the fact that the elites of the world are actually descended from reptoid aliens from the constellation Draco who partake in Satanic rituals and seek to dominate the earth to control “monoatmoc gold” that allows them to shapeshift and travel between dimensions.

So where is the outrage against these daring people speaking truth to Power? Where are the CIA hit squads and vicious media smears?

More importantly, if Jones supports daring info-guerrillas then what does he think of Wikileaks?

According to Jones, they are the new propaganda front for the global elites to feed us misinformation. It’s brilliant really, see “they” know we don’t trust mainstream news anymore so they have to shift their propaganda efforts so that they appear to be coming from legitimate progressive sources. What better way to convince people your lies are true than to have them “exposed” in secret documents, right?

Yes, this is actually what Jones is saying on his radio program and I think this whole situation is extremely fascinating because we learn so much about how Jones operates and how the world reacts to actual conspiracies being exposed.

First, the Jones account of Wikileaks is so tantalizing in its possibilities. It’s a paranoid dream. Of course, what a perfect stealthy package for state propaganda! This is part of the allure of Jones, how he makes many of his arguments so very likely to those who are already open to the message. How it all wraps up so neatly inside this paranoid world of feints-within-feints. If you accept the basic premises of Jones worldview, it is tragically easy to see this line of reasoning as wholly plausible if not likely.

Second, we see how power reacts to someone who actually exposes them in a very real way and while there are no aliens in Area 51 working with crypto-Muslim Obama in the leaks (not yet anyway), we are seeing the real world of “conspiracy” among governments and corporations. The reaction from the powers exposed by these leaks is extremely telling and the kind of publicity Jones would likely die for. I dare say if a government official stood up and called for the murder of Alex Jones he’d probably have an orgasm on the spot.

It must be frustrating for Jones. Working for years and years to expose the Truth and never once getting a death threat from the government despite fantaszing about it:

“You know what it’s like to gut up to this and go out everyday and go past the peer pressure, and come out day one and say 911 was an inside job and lose most the radio stations I was on, you know what it’s like going to sleep every night knowing you work for a bunch of psychotic killers, and you bastards are probably gonna end up killing me one day, you know what it’s like knowing you ruined my life?”

-Alex Jones

You kind of feel bad for the guy. All this work into making himself Public Enemy #1 with the elites of the world and here comes Assange to steal all his thunder. It’s like a Greek tragedy.

So I guess it’s no surprise he is out there attempting to trash Wikileaks as another government mouthpiece so he doesn’t look so bad to his audience, so he can have his dignity back like in the days before there were people actually exposing state secrets. If he wasn’t out in front doing damage control people might start to think that maybe something fishy was going on behind the scenes at Alex Jones HQ, that maybe Alex was a cynical manipulator of peoples fears, of their narcissism and desire to be in on secret knowledge that the “sheeple” will never comprehend.

Still, by coming out so strong he really only calls attention to the fact that he’s been outdone on every level by Wikileaks and that he largely occupies a fantasy world where he and his cohorts in paranoia-porn congratulate themselves for the fictions they “expose” in an insular community that demands adherence to the Jones dogma but rewards with belonging and with a sense of superiority that can only be gained by being privy to forbidden knowledge, or what one thinks is forbidden knowledge. There definitely comes a point where his criticism becomes a gun pointed in a mirror.

But as they say, haters gonna hate.

It is well known that Ford prides himself on answering every call and getting personally involved with every constituent who comes to his office. Hell, I’d be proud of this too, it is one of the things I genuinely admire about the man.

Ford demands better customer service from the City now that he is mayor. Wants the entire City to run like his constituency office-every call is answered and given personal attention not just the run around. This was one of the main planks of his platform.

Now, people attempt to contact Ford about an issue. The call isn’t answered, there is no official response, personal or otherwise.

Some in the press and in the public are stopping and pointing out the glaring issue here.

Ford supporters are suggesting what would amount to a media conspiracy to make Ford appear to be a hypocrite by suggesting media outlets only made one call, or they made a bunch of calls at once when they knew Ford wasn’t available just so they could have a “gotcha” moment.

How many calls, how long between the calls, it’s all just deck chairs on the proverbial Titanic. The point is a call wasn’t answered.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this is a failure on Ford’s part at this point. This is week 2 and it will take some time to realign operations at City Hall to Ford’s specifications. So to me, Ford gets a pass on this one. What I do think it represents is the future of the Ford mayorality; frustrated, stumbling and unbalanced as political reality comes home to roost and Ford realizes he can’t deliver all the goods he promised and his crowd starts to turn ugly. What happened today likely isn’t Ford’s fault at all, what this is is an indicator, a foreshadowing of Ford’s lance being blunted against the thick armour of the political realities of running Canada’s largest city.

Ford in a way has set himself up for disaster with his constituency in a way that paralells Barack Obama. Seriously. Stick with me here.

It is said politics is the art of the possible, that it always involve some level of compromise. It also happens to slow and incremental in its progress. Nations are always a work in progress, never a finished product.

Both President Obama and Rob Ford campaigned on a platform of reform, of change, responsibility to the people. They both emboldened their constituencies with passionate promises that it was not going to be “business as usual” in government. Disenfranchised people who felt shut out of past elections, who felt they didn’t have an equal voice turned out to support them and they won.

We now know that Barack Obama is sitting at 45% approval with 47% disapproval and has an angry base that he is now blaming for sinking him. We know when Obama couldn’t deliver all the goods his people had been hyped up to expect, when Obama ran up against the art of the possible the same people turned on him and made him pay for it.

It doesn’t matter that Obama has accomplished some amazing things in his term thus far. It doesn’t matter that Obama is possibly playing a long game with his opponents and trying to make a point about politics and partisanship.  The Obama crowd from the high-watermark days following the inauguration who expected all their dreams come true considered every compromise, every act of bipartisanship, every attempt to get the best legislation possible a failure and they punished Obama severely for it and continue to do so.

Is this prophetic of the Ford mayorality? The parallels are striking. We will see in the rhetoric of the day when Ford cuts his first deal whether this will bear out.

I strongly suspect that Ford’s people will turn cannibal on him the second they start feeling they got duped. Once the first rumblings start, his every compromise will drive more and more to consider his agenda a failure. It will reach a critical mass and Ford will be left with a riot in his backyard. In two years I think he’ll be in much the same place Obama is in now: damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.

Oh, and for the record I don’t care about paying 5 cents for a bag, especially if it results in the kind of reductions in bag use we have seen under this program. I also don’t happen to care if the grocery stores use the money on Thai hookers and cocaine. I don’t miss those cents more than I miss a marginally cleaner world.

The “No Trespassing” sign was just another warning they had ignored that night. Older versions of themselves were sometimes struck by how cavalier they were; either ignorant of the risks they took almost daily entertaining themselves in the way of small town misfits everywhere or just as flippant about it as they were with anything else Big and Serious in the world before them. It was a kind of grim fatalism that wore sexy on the young and the lost; sad and frightening on the adult.

It was well known this strip of lakeside cottages were long since sold to some developer or another and trapped in the limbo of failed real estate projects, tattered notices of applications for zoning changes stapled to plywood placards which served as a marker for the overgrown narrow private drive that lead them to the secret beach.

How long before the fences went up or even worse that it was discovered by the bush party crowd? It was only a matter of time, certainly, but this is why they were careful and went in only under the cover of darkness, down the pitch black gravel path, past the long abandoned sailboat with its flaking blue pinstripes fading after each winter spent entombed in snow and each summer turned belly up to the sun like a dying tortoise. After the boat it was a quick walk down a path marked by cracked patio stones until you felt your feet sink into the cloying sand, usually still warm from the daylight.

The beach that night was scattered with clothing discarded in the rush to the water. A rush both eager and hesitant as each faced the cold water and the exposure of their naked bodies to the night and to each other, some not for the first time naturally, but still not without the awkwardness of the abandon. It was an almost sequential trail; backpacks and purses to shirts to shoes to pants to underclothes to socks and then the choice to dive for the cover of the water and face the cool depths or anxiously shuffle around fully exposed while waiting for the courage to take the plunge. Shrieks and splashing would follow.

He watched it play out. Watched them silhouetted by the moon against the horizon and took a long drag of his cigarette. Beside him, planted in the sand was the cheap bottle of merlot stolen from his mothers wine rack. It was already half-drunk as they called for him to join them, to stop being a pussy and get in the water. He heard her out there too, asking him to come out and assuring him the water was great. The water was always great.

They would soon give up and resume their fun in the water. He knew it and waved them off like it was no big deal, like he didn’t need to swim right now and he just wanted to drink and relax on the beach.

Predictably they swam out further until he could no longer make out their shapes in the moonlight and just heard their laughter and faux-whispers, loud enough to be heard across the whole lake no doubt. He lay back, closed his eyes and puffed lazily.

He heard their laughter. The giggling of the girls, the shrieks at being grabbed by unknown hands underwater, the playfighting. He heard her laugh, so familiar to him yet sounding very different to him that night as she swam and played with the others. She sounded like some kind of pure joy out there, free and wild. His heart swelled and he felt himself drifting into reverie, the same joy in her voice as they lay in bed and shared a cigarette long ago. Maybe too long ago.

A sudden scream and he was bolt upright, ready to dash into the water, quickly followed by more laughter.

- You asshole…

He relaxed again, leaning back on his elbows and took in the night and the pleasure of his friends. Unable to deny to himself that he wanted to join them any longer he gripped the gritty wine bottle, took a gulp for bravery, stood up and began an uncertain walk to the shoreline discarding his shirt as he went.

Kicking off his shoes and pulling his socks off and tossing them with abandon due to his sudden surge of bravery he slipped a foot in the chilly water. Then another.

The splashing out there intensified though he still could not see them. Very soon he thought he would be joining in. He heard her talking with the other girls, marveling at what a perfect night it was. How could it be perfect to her, he thought, without him out there with her?

2 bold steps into the water. The cold stung and he closed his eyes. Felt the mushy sand and tiny stones between his feet and felt the first waves of fear grip him. His mind conjured unknown horrors from the depths, a rotting hand brushing along the bottoms of his feet grasping for him, hungry prehistoric species of something nipping at him, tendrils coiling around his calf and pulling him under.

Paralyzed for a moment he summoned his courage and willed himself to move forward.

He failed and as the bitterness of his weakness struck him, so did her words out in the water:

- I don’t know…he’s sulking on the beach or something. It’s typical, just leave him.

Deflated he went back to his bottle, took a drink, plopped down in the sand again and lit another cigarette.

He heard her laughing again and then a male laugh. One of their friends. There was more splashing, more laughter back and forth between them. He wondered what they were doing and if they were just playing in the water or if hands were wandering below. An accidental touch here, a sly grin and a blush. A bitten lip and a rush of blood riding a wave of confused emotions and the impulsive sexuality of their youth.

He sat up again abruptly and distinctly felt the wine go to his head as he tried to dismiss the images even as he heard the two of them laughing and talking, their words masked by the white noise of the water and the vast open space between them.

Surely nothing was happening out there. They were all loyal friends, were they not? He then recalled a night nearly a year before, drunk in a closet with a friends girl. The ice in his stomach grew colder.

He had to go out there. Had to put himself between her and whatever was leading her away from him, whatever was making her content to let him sit on the beach, whomever she was laughing with. It ought to be him.

Another walk to the shore.

Another foot in the water.

Up to the knees this time before the paralyzing fear took hold and he could go no further and he stood helpless, a pilgrim between two worlds.

He couldn’t hear them anymore so he stood completely still, closed his eyes and held his breath. Imagining them floating out there in the dark void, free and without fear he listened carefully.

Was that whispers? Or was it the wind through the plastic tarps which covered the unfinished boathouse? What secrets were being shared out there beyond his reach? What oaths were being made in word or flesh?

Stop it. Stop thinking like this. He admonished himself. He clenched his fists until his nails bit into his palms and still he found no more courage and no more ability to drive away the panic he was now in.

Just relax. Nothing is happening. They are just floating around out there. These are your friends, your lover.

A sigh. That familiar sharp intake of breath and barely stifled groan. He knew exactly where to touch her to make her do that and now so did someone else. Or did they? Was he hearing things? Was an overactive mind turning the ambient sounds of their covert beach into a paranoid fantasy? Were they talking about him? Were they talking at all or was it all unspoken now, the secret silent language of hands wandering under black water, of naked bodies brushing in the slick darkness.

He had no idea how long he was still for, straining his ears and contorting his head to attempt to better hear what was happening out there, his hand in the water to try to catch how their bodies illicit moves disturbed the lake.

Finally a series of splashes, some more laughing and a “race you back to the beach”.

He moved quickly now as if being in the water implicated him, made him an intruder. Back up the beach, shirt and shoes back on and more wine.

Her kiss seemed hesitant when she came for him and though she held his hand on the walk back past the derelict sailboat and along the gravel path he felt like she was still out there somewhere and he was on the beach, looking for her. Marooned.

Many years later as he reflected upon his life and where he was in it he would come to see this story as a metaphor.

He was found naked in the spillway of a dam at age 40, bloated from a full weekend in the water. He may have been in there longer but the discovery of his clothes in a neatly folded pile, wallet and an empty bottle of merlot by the riverside prompted a search.

The police wrote it up as a suicide. There were those of us who knew better.

So I found my battered copy of Racewarrior today and decided I would share it here. It was given to Julian in a kids birthday party loot bag and we actually ended up tracking down several copies at a Party Packagers store.

Here is what I immediately don’t understand about this comic:

Everything.

I initially thought this was some kind of NASCAR promotional comic and that is actually how I remembered it but now that I see it before me I can see that not even the NASCAR organization is so socially unconscious as to release something like this. No, the bewildeingly unaware award seems to go to 7Up for producing this insanity.

We could probably just as easily accuse them of being completely aware of the messaging that is seemingly right there in your face, but is 7up really racist?

Who could forget the famous “un-cola” tv spots from the 80′s:

Clearly they have no problem using people of colour in their advertrising. They even used one of the most awesome black actors ever in these spots; Geoffrey Holder, famous for his role in the best Roger Moore bond film Live and Let Die:

So 7up used Baron motherfucking Samedi in their ads. I don’t think they are horrible racists.

Which begs the question: How in the hell did they come to produce a promotional comic book about a super NASCAR driver called Racewarrior?

I don’t have those answers, ladies and gentlemen, but I imagine it went something like this:

JOEL FROM MARKETING: And we can distribute the comic at newsstands all across the country. In supermarkets, drug stores, convenience stores. Anywhere you can buy 7up you can get our comic. It’s beautiful product synergy.

COO: So let me get this straight: the comic is about a NASCAR driver who also has superpowers and he gets into adventures? What is the title again? The title of the NASCAR superhero book?

JOEL FROM MARKETING: We are going to call it…Racewarrior! Our focus groups have shown that our target NASCAR audience really responds positively to that name. I think it is part of the competitive spirit of the sport, that “warrior” kind of attitude.Plus it’s about racing right, so the name is kind of natural.

COO: Sounds great, but are there any downsides to this? Anything our competitors might be able to latch on to?

JOEL FROM MARKETING: Besides latching on to the trend of launching their own branded company superhero comics, I can’t see anything. We are going to be first to market on this.

BOB FROM ACCCOUNTING: Ummmmm…really?

COO: Is there a problem, Bob?

JOEL FROM MARKETING: Yeah, Bob. I don’t like the tone of that. Do you have a concern you want to share with us?

BOB FROM ACCOUNTING: Besides the fact that you are making a comic book about a NASCAR driving superhero who is white and calling it Racewarrior? Like besides THAT concern?

JOEL FROM MARKETING: Why do you have to bring up the fact he is white, Bob? What does that have to do with anything?

COO: Yeah Bob, I’d cool it with the racial stuff okay? Remember the seminar we all went to with HR?

BOB FROM ACCOUTING: In the second story arc he apparently confronts his archenemy for the first time: The Black Panther. That doesn’t worry anyone else in this room? Racewarrior fighting The Black Panther? In NASCAR cars?

JOEL FROM MARKETING: Listen Bob, maybe you should stick to accounting okay and leave the creative stuff to the creative people. That plotline got us huge numbers in focus groups in Kentucky and Tennesee. These are key markets where we are trying to build more share for 7up and Racewarror will help us do that. I think you need to stop bringing your biases to the table, Bob.

COO: Bob, are there some issues that maybe you need to discuss with HR? We have an employee assistance program you know. It can help you get over these things.

BOB FROM ACCOUNTING:WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?

COO: Janice, call security…

Ahh, the banality of evil.

You might think by that last line that I’ve surrendered my opinion already and that I’ve sided with the film elite against Avatar, but I like to think my opinion is a little more nuanced than all that.

Avatar is visually breathtaking, a stunning technical achievement in filmmaking whose innovative techniques will be used and used again by films to come for decades, but you already knew that part. It’s pretty much undeniable that Avatar shows you things you really have never seen accomplished so well on screen and several things you truly have never seen before Cameron developed the technology. George Lucas wishes he could have done effects so well and created CGI characters as relatable and full of character as the Na’vi.

There were times I was really swept away by the incredible visuals Cameron created and unlike some other largely CGI spectacles (Star Wars Prequels, anyone?) I never felt alienated as a viewer by the technologies inability to cross that uncanny valley between fantasy CGI and reality. Cameron achieved what I saw as possibly the best blend of CGI characters and environments with actual actors and sets since the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Nothing struck me as jarringly computer generated and took me out of the moment.

What did take me out of the moment more than a few times was some terrible acting, which can to some degree be laid at the feet of a script that seemed written by an 8 year old. Everybody seemed to have a hard time saying a lot of the lines with anything like real conviction or without sounding like they are looking over their shoulder to make sure nobody is watching, and really who could blame them? Saddled with such a one dimensional plot and one dimensional characters I’d question the actors self-awareness if they weren’t even slightly embarrassed by some of the nonsense Cameron has them saying and doing.

I say it seems written by an 8 year old, but really that isn’t fair. Cameron’s script, and indeed the whole execution of Avatar is a work of genius from the perspective of making a film that is casting as wide a net as possible to capture as much audience dollars as it can grab.

It’s the KISS principle in action. Keep It Simple Stupid. Keep the good guys monolithically good and always being Good Guys. Keep the bad guys monolithically bad and always doing Bad Things. Make it real easy for the audience to figure out who they are rooting for and who they are supposed to identify with. Throw in an interspecies romance with hot alien cat/elf people with blue tits and an action packed third act where the good guys on the brink of defeat rise up to beat the bad guys against all odds and you have pure box office gold.

This is ultimately what I think my main problem with Avatar is. The plot and the characters never feel organic or seem to have much depth. What they are given they are given specifically to serve some element of the plot or another and nothing more is offered.

Never before in a film have I so clearly seen the puppeteers strings as I saw in Avatar. You can see Cameron’s ham-fisted machinations in nearly every scene. I understand that all art in some sense is supposed to manipulate the audience to some extent, to prompt or elicit some kind of feeling or response, but I think in the best art you never see the hooks tugging at your consciousness, it’s all very organic and you aren’t railroaded to one conclusion. Avatar browbeats you into seeing the story exactly one way and one way only, even when if you think about it there are some very interesting questions raised by the mythology of the film that could have made excellent subplots and threads and added that missing depth.

This really is Cameron’s stroke of genius though. Making a film that so effectively manipulates such a wide segment of the population is a remarkable feat. I’ll reserve judgment on what that might say about the critical literacy of this population segment for others.

In summation though I have to side with those who like Avatar. Not for it’s story, not for it’s characters but for the technology that made it entertaining to watch despite my eye-rolling at the cliches. Some will argue that Avatar is leading film technology in exactly the wrong direction and on some curmudgeonly days I might agree with them, but overall any technology which widens the scope of possible stories that can be told on film is something to be celebrated and welcomed. It increases the potential for filmmakers to express themselves as they want to by taking advantage of the incredible techniques pioneered by Avatar and that is ultimately a good thing and ultimately why James Cameron and Avatar deserve our respect, but probably not an Oscar.

I’m excited to see what others do with Cameron’s technology. Not so much to see the inevitable Avatar sequel.

This is why on the internet I can learn how nuclear fission works or I can discover the world of biology. I can email astronauts in space or learn how people all over the world are creating homemade solar panel networks to power their neighborhoods. I can read firsthand stories of brave people who challenge tyranny in places like Iran.

I can also read about Hannibal and Faceman from the A-Team having a totally non-consensual sexual encounter in the back of the fabled A-Team van while BA jacks it in the drivers seat.

This is the magic of our age and it can either be cause for alarm or cause for entertainment. I’m not about to pass judgment just yet.

I thought since I am going to try and bring you into this strange world in the Mary Sue project that I’d use my space here to try and introduce everyone reading to the source materials and people that I researched and continue to research and draw inspiration from. There is language to the world of fanfiction and some fluency in it is required in order to get everything out of it.

To that end, every week I will be posting a link to a work of fanfiction or to a specific personality from the fanfiction community. I’ll provide some commentary and invite you to go and see for yourself what is happening out there in the bizarre and growing world of fandom.

I do need to point out one quick and dirty rule though: This is an art gallery, not a petting zoo. DON’T TOUCH THE ANIMALS!

Take a look, marvel at the insanity and then let it pass. You poke sticks in the cages and then they won’t come out and play anymore.

With that out of the way, let me introduce you to my first feature:

Gilligans Island: Passion Fruit

The story is circa 1995, hardly the beginning of fanfiction but it’s damn funny and I think it captures the absurdity very well.

Next week I want to go back to the earliest days of fanfic and slash and introduce you all to some basic terminology. In the meantime if anyone has a better idea for a name for this feature you can suggest it in the comments.

I leave you with this excerpt from Passion Fruit:

Gilligan wandered around the lagoon, his erection tenting his pants. He reached down and untied his trousers, letting them drop around his feet. He took a firm grip on his penis, and began stroking, faster and faster.

“Ginger… Ginger…” his voice, beginning low, became a chant as he pumped his cock. “Gin-ger-gin-ger-gin-ger-gin-ger”

The question of whether or not it was going to be a funny story forced me to really consider what the story was about at the heart of it. It isn’t that I hadn’t been thinking about the themes of the story and what it would ultimately be about, it is that I’ve never had to really articulate it anywhere besides my own mind. Having to actually write it out and try to explain to someone else what this story was supposed to be aiming for was a great exercise for me and forced me to cut through a lot of the tangential notions of what the story is and just focus on communicating the core of it.

Very useful to me at this stage because I think having as a clear an idea of what your themes are and what your objectives as a storyteller are happen to to be very important to have nailed down from the outset of the undertaking.

So thanks Mike. Writing that out was very useful to me in helping me hopefully write a better story and in clarifying why I think this blog is important to me as a writer.

The project is novel that currently has the working title of “Mary Sue”. The title refers to the Mary Sue concept in literary criticism which is ultimately best described by the Wikipedia Article. It is a term frequently used in the fanfiction communities to denote a character which serves ultimately as some kind of idealized/delusional self-portrait of the authour, lacking in flaws and riddled with cliches.

The story will revolve around a struggling young writer who has recently graduated from a prestigious university with a degree in literature and has all the makings of a successful writer. Unfortunately he is having a very hard time getting his “masterpiece” of a novel published. In fact, he can’t seem to get anything published at all and he watches his friends from school move on to success in their fields he craves that success and attention; he wants people to love and admire his art.

On a whim and as a joke, he enters an online contest to write a short story based on the TV show Lost. It is a promotion for the shows website. He writes something up and to his surprise not only does he win, he is flooded with adoration from fans of the show who in turn have read his winning contest story.

Finally getting the attention and appreciation he craves he slides further and further into the surreal world of online fanfiction and fandom, all the while leaving his literary ambitions behind in favour of his new online audience. Before long he’s writing slash fiction in exchange for PayPal money and more hits on his website. The degeneracy continues until he is faced with the ugliest sides of the world of online fandom.

It actually sounds a lot better in my head than it does on here. Go figure. Just trust me people, I think it’s going to be a good time.

As I move along I will be posting sample bits of the story and putting out more details. As it stands I officially start work tonight and I will be posting the results of that so I can share how I write with anyone who happens to be interested, which so far is nobody.

It’s a nice Sunday morning and I’m ready to work.