Let's Talk About The Savage Land and Savage Times

Memo From The National Affairs Desk

DATE: August something or other 2012 (it's kind of foggy let it go)
FROM: Edward R. Wallick, MCSE, MCNGP, A+, D.D.S.

Subject: Savage Times in a Savage Land Call for Extreme Measures & Liquor

When the Managing Editor of this site first asked me to write him an article I was somewhat taken
aback. To be honest, he still owes me money and seems to have a talent for disappearing from
any given room that happens to have the poor luck of containing both of us at the same time, it's
a gravitational mass thing. We think heavy. But then I recalled, through my hazy thoughts of that
morning, that his bedeviled text messages (yes, plural! messages!) had dragged me laboriously
from a lovely dream where I was once again being worshiped by several thousand Polynesian vestal
goddesses. This bastard would have to pay for that if nothing else in a just and fair world. Also, I
remembered that in addition to the several thousand in cash, he owed me a ballad with which I wanted
to try and seduce the first real island bred goddess that happens to cross my path. But still, none of this
is unusual for me on any given Tuesday morning.

But then this Tuesday actually was a special Tuesday and by special I don't mean it was 'Taco
Tuesday', which though a great value is diversionary from our topic here. This morning, I found upon
reading the papers, was the day one of my favorite GOP ring wraiths had decided to allow his state
to kill a mental deficient, a disabled person, a special needs person, a dummy, a moron, you know, a
retard!

Don't misunderstand, I have no problems with a good public stoning of your whores of Beersheba or
even a lippy divorcee. I like to hang the occasional itinerant wandering carpenter up on some of the
larger Redwoods here in NorCal myself, not for any moral reason I just like to keep busy on Sunday
mornings. But even I have never killed a mental deficient, which is tough for me. That personal choice
in victim selection takes most active members of the GOP and local Tea Party off my 'active roster'.

I do however have a problem with a man whose IQ was tested at 61 being put down like a dog when
he most likely was railroaded. Even if he wasn't, the issue here is his mental culpability, the guy really
believed as they were killing him he was going home to Jesus. What more proof could be required of
his delusion and naivete? A written record of him voting for a Bush?

The victim in this case was an undercover 'drug informant'. Meaning, someone the cops in Texas had
busted for a drug offense and intimidated into becoming their informant in order to reduce or overturn
entirely his own charges brought about by drug activity. This guy was already a dead man because he
broke the first rule, never open your fucking mouth. Don't get mad at me, it's not my rule it's a 'criminal
seedy underbelly types' rule, so take it up with their local subcommittee in your region. In fact if
anything I'd suspect this poor mentally deficient man was instructed to kill that rat by someone smart
enough to know he'd take the fall. Unfortunately for our victim he took that fall and an additional 6 feet
in the end.

I don't understand how we can allow a 'Born Again Christian' to let a mentally retarded person be
clinically killed by a state? It's not ok to abort them but it is ok to kill them with a chemical? Why?
Because a bullshit piece of fiction written by multiple authors who never knew the truth about the
universe all worked independently and then had their works thrown together like some ancient fucking
Barnes & Nobles Classical Stories Collection?

I know an itinerant carpenter who travels all over America we'll call him 'Steve', he is real and he walks
this earth today. I love him! He's a friend of mine! But none the less I wouldn't follow him, or any of
his philosophies, if he died tomorrow because he got hung on a tree by a bunch of whacky citizens
from Oregon (they are literally the closest thing to the Romans in the world today) who were on a tear
for some reason.

There are several reasons for this: First, just like with Jesus we don't know what Steve was doing from
the ages of 12 to 32. It's a literal fucking mystery that hasn't been solved to this day! I'm not even
certain that Steve knows himself actually, he claims he was in schools and working at various jobs but
there is no verifiable proof! We know he used massive amounts of drugs and alcohol during this period
as well as fathered up to 3 children out of wedlock whom he has trouble supporting to this day. Second,
and this is actually the most important reason, following people on blind faith is for children, people
with special needs who can't understand logic or reasoning and stupid ignorant little brained people.

What can we learn from this parable? Obviously, Jesus fathered many, many children whom he
abandoned all over Judeah. Mostly with drunken women he'd met in bars based upon Steves parallel
period 'wandering the lands and ministering to the less fortunate' in North America during the late 80's
and early 90's. Basically Jesus was a whore monger, a drunkard and a meth abuser. And Gov. Rick
Perry is a stupid slack jawed pig killer of cognitively disabled people who follows his 'laws'.

This country was founded on a lot of really great ideals that were great as long as you were white and
wealthy when it was founded. If you weren't white, if you didn't own land or if you weren't pretty
enough to marry up and out of your class restrictions by polishing a good 'knob' then you knew (even
then) that evil is part of America's core. It reared it's head the minute we set foot on the shore and
started killing the natives. It was so full of evil that once we'd killed off the local natives we should
have enslaved we imported exotic natives to do the same work doubling our initial costs. Oh, if only
we'd left more Native Americans alive we'd have turned a bigger profit while we stole the West and
completed our God given quest of manifest destiny.

Today is just another day in America. Just another evil, vile, disgusting little day. We all let a retard get
killed in Texas last week. Because we're either too lazy to fight for someone we don't know or we're
all just too frightened to really stand up and say what we believe when we see something wrong going
down.

Because it's a scary thing when you're seeing the death of the American Dream on a 1080p HD LCD
screen in your living room. Especially when you can't find your ammo.

--ERW

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Let's Talk With Ed Wallick

The first episode of 20 Miles Past Weird, the Destination: Asphyxiation podcast edition has launched in a stellar flame of mediocrity.  Hear it now!

Let''s Talk With special guest cohost Ed Wallick about Cash Cab, The Dark Knight Rises, good script writing, and appropriate Twitter grammar.

Special segments include:
The Adventures of Casey Delaware
Weekend Movie Forecast
and the unveiling of secret weapon Strike Plan Operation Alpha, codenamed: STROPHA

Special thanks to Ed Wallick (@EdWallick) of Don't Quit Your Day Cast (@DontQuitYourDay, www.dontquityourdaycast.com) for calling in as guest cohost. Huge ode of gratitude to "An English Gentleman" for his contributions, as well.

Additional voiced by Michael Cornog and Levi Thomas

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Let's Talk About Anna Karina

Marilyn Monroe is Clown Shoes: Stop It

By Robert Patrick

Anna Karina is a touchstone of French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague, for those of you who are brooding elitists and clerical mavens). The slight, doe-eyed symbol of Jean-Luc Godard’s affection is forever branded in monochrome stills as a foxy chain-smoker with the lettuce of Clara Bow. Karina’s flippant mane was later worn by the foot herself, Uma Thurman, in Quentin Tarantino’s jazzy, sardonic Pulp Fiction. That maintained mop of hair Karina sported on her proud dome ensnared viewers into a celluloid bear trap.

Karina was a music box ballerina with a smoking gun and the heart of a maimed lioness. Marlene Dietrich was steely, cool and aloof. Audrey Hepburn was wiry, frail and steamrolled with mascara. Marilyn Monroe was an hourglass smeared with lipstick. Karina, though, balanced her cigarette like a baton and dusted her fingertips over sticky coffee tables.

You decide who wore it better.

She was an existentialist’s muse. A woman who padded her lungs with cigarette smoke and wore frumpy sweaters with fuzz balls. A woman who single handedly out smoked an entire circuit of New York cocktail lounges in the 1960s.

So why the deal with that cooing, salacious Marilyn Monroe?

Why is her porcelain mug branded onto stamps and lacquered onto walls? Because she pursed her lips and mewed, slunk around with serpentine abandon, and struck walls with the wingspan of her eyelashes. Maybe for her time, if you were a hammered Charlie who used his drunken hips to play pinball with bar stools, you would be smitten over the curled locks belonging to MM. Today, I have no idea why teenage girls fawn over the star’s hushed whispers and flighty, staccato speech.

Unless every seventeen year-old girl is a reincarnated JFK.

And the fact that the infinitely talented Michelle Williams had to dumb herself down to play the vodka inundated, lolling star has me rolling my eyes like a struck cue ball. If teenagers and twenty-somethings want to use their short bones to claw at an actress, why not pick Myrna Loy?

Norma Shearer, who was smug and sexual rather than naïve and crestfallen, is even a better choice. The Cliff’s Notes say that if you’re a girl, 15-30, and like the carbonated, fuzzy-brained Marilyn Monroe, you likely suck. You’re not a 1950s businessman with a perversely agape maw, so there is no reason you should be pining over Norma Jean – that means you, too, Elton John. Get your shit together.

Old school is foxy as fuck.

 At least the posthumous popularity of Audrey Hepburn is generating interest in someone other than the boggle-eyed Norma Jean. I don’t really mind when I see girls dotting their speech with compliments for the fair-browed Hepburn (though I mentioned her before in a semi-negative light). Sheathed in gloves, each one of Hepburn’s hands, as if a skewed liberty scale, weighed a cigarette and a cocktail glass. But she was still smart as a whip (ever see a blind Marilyn Monroe antagonize Alan Arkin in a dark room? I didn’t think so).

So, my advice to you is to go meet cute with Anna Karina in a smoke plumed 1960’s France. Go waltz with a coy Audrey in a Cary Grant misadventure. Watch Norma Shearer clink her teeth together in searing manipulation. Adhere to Myrna Loy’s slicked back buoyancy. Just shut the fuck up with this Marilyn Monroe garbage.

Go fourth, young person, and understand life!

Robert Patrick has worked for The East County Herald and Alpine Sun newspapers. He has contributed to The San Diego Reader and is currently the food reviewer at The East County Californian. He is part of the San Diego Film Critics Society and runs a website, far less active than the one you're on, called cinemaspartan.com. He is also a popular sports expert (Boston University women's ice hockey). Robert failed to make it into the fencing portion of the Olympics this year. He instead earned gold in forcing Tom to publish his work on this site.

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Let’s Talk About the Death of Jimmy Callaway

I met Jimmy during my first year of college (if you can call it that – it was a community college, so let’s say, my first year of half college, keep it up, champ).  I’ve always been the impatient type, so my first year of college began the summer of my high school graduation.  So, I think I graduated in 2006, so let’s say I met him somewhere along the summer of ’06.

Christ, that means I’ve known him for six years?  Something has to be wrong with my fucking math.  Don’t take any of this for fact, gents.

So, I met him in the hypothetical summer of ’06.  I was in an introduction to creative writing class.  C’mon, get off my back.  Everyone told me it was a pre-requisite to take the Masters of [INSERT LITERARY GENRE HERE] courses where I really belonged.  Turns out it was all a bluff and I probably coulda done whatever I wanted.  He came in, on behest of the instructor of the class, I imagine, and told us how to make our characters talk.

To this day, the first thing I remember when I think of Jimmy Callaway is him telling me that people can’t hiss a sentence – literally.  “Try it yourself,” he said.  “You’ll just sound stupid.”  Or something like that.  And it’s true.  People can’t hiss a sentence unless it’s made up entirely of “hi-“ and “-ss” sounds. 

He gave a short lecture, and when he left, our instructor told us he wanted to be a teacher.  Knowing him as I do now, I don’t think that was really true.  I mean, he was an English tutor at the school there, and he knows a bunch of stuff about some things, but I can’t imagine him having that special spark that teachers have, that patience, that utter lack of faith in the degeneracy of human beings. 

Still, what he taught us that day made more sense to me than anything I learned that entire summer.  Hell, it made more sense to me than anything I’d learned my entire time in college.  Later on, maybe the next semester, maybe the semester after that, he and I wound up – entirely by chance, I wasn’t stalking him or anything – taking a fiction-writing workshop together.  Our friendship was planted in the soil of a poorly written zombie yarn by yours truly.

Jimmy's private affair.

To win his affection, I remember I bought him a second-hand copy of Stephen King’s “Cell.”  Really, I thought, as a fan of the whole zombie thing, he’d appreciate it.  From there, we’d talk about comic books, why his band always played in bars (y’see, at the time, I hadn’t broken twenty-one yet and couldn’t legally go into those establishments), and he was a frequent consultant to my own writing.  But now I’m rambling.

I’d go on to briefly emulate Jimmy’s don’t-give-a-fuck overtly informal prose and shotgun crime fiction style.  I wasn’t as cool as him, so it didn’t work out well and I turned, instead, to cutting out words from everything I’d write and calling it poetry.  After his college graduation and my dropping-out, Jimmy would go on to become a figurehead in a small school of internet-based writers all sharing that same flare for crime – writers that you probably haven’t heard of yet, but most definitely will at some point in the future.  Writers like Keith Rawson, Cameron Ashley, Matthew Funk, and Josh Converse.  Seriously, if you want to read some good shit, google any number of those guys.

Jimmy’s first assault on the internet centered on machine-gun submissions to various online crime magazines – Flash FictionOffensive, Plots With Guns, and A Twist of Noir, to name a few.  Not to say I read them all, but I read many of them.  Nearly every one of them was better than the next.  It’s around this time that I read Jimmy Callaway’s novel, the name of which I forgot, and fucking loved it.  I then read a novella he penned called His Father’s Instruction.  Both very publishable, very marketable, very easy to read, enticing, et cetera, yet, for reasons unknown, Jimmy made little effort to get them published (from what he told me, anyhow). 

At that point, I decided it was my destiny to somehow be linked to Jimmy’s name.  So I did what any logical-minded individual would do: I adapted his novella to a screen play and shortened the title to Instruction.  It went equally distant into the plains of nowhere, so if anyone out there is looking to make a movie, shoot me an email and we’ll get it on track.

Original art by Callaway, I would assume.

Jimmy then shifted his focus to a number of online critic forums.  He’d long been maintaining  his personal blog about his one true love: comics.  The blog, Attention Children:Sequential Art was a monthly staple in my reading regimen.  A deep and thoughtful contribution to the discussions on the funny books in the stark language only Jimmy could provide helped pull things into focus around the industry and served as an invaluable tool to decide which comics were worth focusing on.

Then, he took it one step further and started yet another blog called Let’s Kill Everybody!. an examination of the slasher genre and its social implications.  It grew into as critical an analysis as there is out there for the genre and spawned the spin-offs Let’s Fight Everybody!, Let’s Fuck Everybody!, and Let’s DrinkEverybody!.  I mean it when I say this blog really took on a life of its own, as it grew and morphed into something bigger than a blog, with new writers coming in to help Jimmy out.  That was the beginning of Jimmy Callaway: Editor-in-Chief. 

Your one-stop shop for all things criminal.

Having a taste of editorial blood, I suppose Jimmy decided to keep on pushing, trying to get into the sweet tight-pants of the internet machine with the sole purpose of penetrating our eyeballs.  I don’t know the exact story behind the Criminal Complex or how Jimmy became attached to it, but it happened, and he did, and if you want to know more about it, then cruise over there. 

What I’m trying to say is that Jimmy Callaway is one of the most influential and daring writers you’ll never read.  Of course, now that you’ve read this, you’ll surely look up anything Callaway’s ever touched and read it for yourself.

No one knows for sure when Jimmy was born, but we all know that it happened sometime in the past.  Of course, he died doing what he loved the most: reading comics and being a smart-ass.  It was the ghost of Lee Marvin who finally did Jimmy in.  He didn’t appreciate his cameo in the aforementioned novella and came back for a bit of payback.

Life.  It imitates art, y'know?

Jimmy loved two things: crime and comic books.  And the Big Lebowski.  And I think he said he had a sister, so maybe he loved her, too.  As far as I know, he wasn’t married, so we don’t have to worry about accidentally cuckolding him in the grave.  And although I saw a guy who looked a lot like him once, this guy was old and ugly enough to be Jimmy’s brother, so it probably wasn’t his son.  So, no orphans, I hope.  I’ll always remember what you taught me: you can’t hiss a sentence.   Jimmy, old boy, you’ll be missed.

Happy Birthday, Calloway.  

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