Death Hilarious

Pages 51-53 from Cormac McCarthy's old-west scrape-fest Blood Meridian.

"I Survived"

Fumbling through the American TV lineup for the first time in 15 months, I found a cup of purple splashed across my face as I drove by Biography HD.

"I Survived," is strictly composed of raw interview footage with people who have been severely scraped and lived to tell about it. The aesthetic of the show is notable for its minimal approach. the visual is simply the interviewee's shoulders and face in stunning 1080i against a black backdrop.

There is no verbal narration, only intervals with situational subtitles layed over scenery. Typical subtitles look something like this: "Michael, Jean's ex-boyfriend, has entered the house with a loaded gun. Jean is asleep with her 8 year old son."

Here are a few glimpses from the stories I've seen in two episodes:

• Young woman held hostage for 20 hours in a convenience store at gunpoint while husband and 4 children wait with police and S.W.A.T outside
• middle aged couple suffering mountain lion attack - "I knew I needed to get the mountain lion to release my skull, because [the mountain lion] was trying to crush it and move down further on my neck, so I jammed my hand into his mouth and grabbed his tongue... when I was running away, I felt something snapping and tapping against the back of my neck -- it was chunks of my skull."
• women who was sexually assaulted and kidnapped along with her cousin in the deep south before convincing the killer to let her call 911 after he suffered amnesia. she still has shotgun pellets lodged in her neck and abdomen
• dude driving 40 ton truck full of swimming pool chemicals who drives straight into a forest fire and gets THIZZED
• subtitle: "fire moves 17 times faster uphill than it does on flat land."
• "maria and her 16 year old daughter were asleep one night when Peter came to the house... 'his face was right there when I woke up, and he just kept on pounding and yelling.'"
• Perhaps one of the most astounding stories, from a 15 year old girl who was robbed at gunpoint, covered in tape, shot in the leg and raped before she jumped over a balcony and escaped into a neighbor's house. "The gunshot passed through the back of my leg and exited through my kneecap... the sheriff asked me, "How did you get over the balcony and move yourself over to your neighbors? How did you do that?"

The question, "How did we do that?" emerges as the Kern of the show.

Jobs and Coffee

"I thought you'd never ask!!"

Our paper thin Baltimore FOX affiliate attempts to highlight some local talent for their "Hometown Hotspot," which incredibly turns out to be Wham City people talking about Whartscape. What follows is an opportunity for the news team to LEAN WAY BACK in their chairs, except for the weatherman who is forced to stand and thus reduced to hysterics.

It's hard to know whether the McDonald's ticker ads are genuine.

Man in the High Castle

a remarkable and unexpectedly wide assortment of covers

An interesting thing happened at the end of Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle that I thought fellow lean-sippers might enjoy. The setting of the novel, as you might presume, is the west coast of the U.S. in an alternate-history 1962, controlled by the Japanese after the Axis powers won World War II. An nice enough concept that helped usher in an already developing alternate-history sub-genre of SF at the time. It's an approach that holds some pretty immediate interest for people with a historical imagination, but there's a certain level of gimmickry involved, in that when a book banks on a fascinating setting it often belies a less-than-solid story. If you're like me you've probably read enough bad speculation (and made enough bad speculation) to scrape the varnish clean off the entire idea of "imagining what it would be like!"

Anyway our mutual friend Phil manages to put it down quite nicely. I should mention, before I talk about the end, that throughout the book there are constant inner monologues where white people think about being a minority in a Japanese controlled environment. It's unusual and a good example of the 'trading places' dynamic the book is supposed to engage with. If I were, say, teaching a class on race I'd provide some passages from this book as catalysts for discussion.

Book in book

The I Ching

To the ending. Running throughout the novel is a notorious book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is banned in German controlled parts of the world but available in Japanese controlled parts and printed in neutral areas.The novel describes a world in which the Axis powers lost the war. The author, Hawthorn Abendsen, is the title's "man in the high castle," and in the final pages of the book one of our main characters tracks him down as asks him about the novel. Also running throughout the book is the I Ching, which countless characters rely on to guide them during times of confusion. Dick reportedly used it himself to write the novel, and I have no doubt he referred to it as 'The Oracle" in the same reverential way the book's characters do.

Ultimately what happens is that several characters consult the I Ching on the meaning of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. The response they get is simple: the book is true. The Axis powers didn't win the war and the U.S. stayed a sovereign nation. Which seems simple because for the reader (us) that's the case. The problem is that Abendsen's novel doesn't describe what actually happened in our world, but rather another alternate history appropriate to the world of the book. The only supposition you have to make is that somewhere within Abendsen's book he wrote in the equivalent of himself, someone writing an alternate-history novel about how the Axis powers actually did win. The white lines separating Abendsen's author's alternate history from his own and from Dick's alternate history suddenly become purple and start to melt away, reaching further to suggest that our own history could radically appear quite "alternate." In the same way that it does for the characters at the end of High Castle. Anyone who takes the study of history seriously knows it's a malleable thing, that the past comes down almost entirely to representation by the present. If you take the implications of High Castle's ending seriously (which, for the brief moment where you're reading it, you should) then you'll find the same sweet, slight, fleeting but potent traces of drank on your lips that you did when you read the lines

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players."

or when you tried to live life normally for the first hour post-watching-eXistenZ.

Follow Me

(giant twitter button)

(plainclothes Baltimore police officer wearing a "bodymore murderland" t-shirt)

If the drain of reading about people being "up early for work! soo tired!" and 20 minutes later "thinking Starbucks might just be my new religion!" gets to be too much, don't worry. There's more out there than the same old "trending topics" pointing you towards a stream of people with nothing better to do than chime in with their one-line epiphanies about "things they'll never forget."

Better to follow something of substance, like the Baltimore Police Department. Deep sips of drank provided hourly. Let's take a trip down memory lane (i.e. the past couple days).

1. MEDIA ADVISORY: Chief of Patrol John Skinner will be @ the Gilmore event @ Pressman and Mount St @ 630pm to speak abt Nat Night Out. about 20 hours ago from UberTwitter
2. AGGRAVATED ASSAULT: W.Lombard/Fulton St-Male w/ severe head trauma. about 22 hours ago from UberTwitter
3. Recruitment Event: Nat Night Out @ Stillmeadow E.F. Church, 5110 Frederick Ave. Speak directly w recruiter from 5-9 PM about a career w BPD 5:36 AM Aug 4th from UberTwitter
4. SHOOTING, 607 MELVILLE, ADULT MALE SHOT IN ARM 9:31 PM Aug 3rd from UberTwitter
5. BANK ROBBERY: 3470 ANNAPOLIS RD. BPD ARRESTED TWO SUSPECTS AND RECOVERED MONEY. 9:01 AM Aug 3rd from UberTwitter
6. HOMICIDE ARREST: Brandon Brown (B/M/19) was arrested on July 31 for July 19th murder of 16yr old Jerrod Reed. 6:20 AM Aug 3rd from UberTwitter
7. HOMICIDE ARREST: On July 31, BPD arrested Michael Akonom (W/M30) for the July 25th murder of Marcus Sanchez 6:16 AM Aug 3rd from UberTwitter
8. DOUBLE SHOOTING - 800 BLK ALLENDALE ST, POLICE INVESTIGATING 10:07 AM Aug 2nd from TwitterBerry
9. SHOOTING: 2715 SPELMAN RD, ADULT MALE SHOT POLICE INVESTIGATING 7:58 AM Aug 2nd from TwitterBerry

Be sure to check out the addresses on Google Maps Street View, it'll help you more closely connect with the bullet-point you've just read (about).

And if you feel like you're craving more, I've good news for you: they update often.

"the new flesh"

Promo shot from the set of the upcoming movie Julie & Julia



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