Underworld is the Star Wars of vampire movies.

"Underworld" surpasses the idea of the creature feature. It personalizes the horror the way Anne Rice did, additionally throwing it back out into a greater context of conflicts. It's not just "Dracula vs the Wolf-Man", an indefatigable will slugging it out against uncontrollable beast -- it's an implication that these forces secretly dictate the workings of man. Michael Corvin's journey is the discovery of the darkness that underlies the mundane. And despite his every noble intention to practice medicine and save lives, the dark is in his blood and it's in our blood. This uneasy truth is what makes the film important & significant.



As primary example the first film gives its viewers Selene, a vampire warrior, a monster you root for and identify with. "Hunt them down and kill them off, one by one," Selene states as her joy. "I lived for it." Selene's accepted her darkness, using its inherent strength for a centuries long crusade of vengeance, and the virtue of that darkness attracts Michael. Corvin could instead turn his interest to the girl he helped save from the subway shootout, but the obsidian shadow he detects in himself, and in the nature of the world, appeals to him more.



While this edgy theme's the most insightful reason a studio-backed small budget film of $27 million unexpectedly garnered so much commercial success that it was re-issued in a sexy slipcased double DVD Unrated Extended Cut, there was quite alot more to it than that.



There's the litigation framing the picture to consider: White Wolf, makers of a roleplaying game wherein vampires & werewolves also happen to be bitter enemies, sues media giant Sony Pictures -- a losing battle. What the RPGers in Stone Mountain, Georgia, later forgot as the money kept rolling in over 13 prolific years was that they too built upon the mythic edifices which came before them: Augustine Calmet, Montague Summers, Bram Stoker, Richard Matheson, Whitley Streiber, Marv Wolfman, and of course Anne Rice. Director Len Wiseman denies he & his co-writers had any familiarity with the game, which is a legally safe answer (as legally safe as White Wolf stating their gaming books had no bearing on the vampiric murders committed by Roderick Ferrell in 1996). But even if writers Wiseman, Kevin Grevioux & Danny McBride had read the RPG sourcebooks, they took the archetypes and made them their own, exactly as all their predecessors had done, which is why there's a common set of similarities. The major divergence is the scientific: that both vampirism & lycanthropy spread from a mutagenic virus that only a small percentage of victims are susceptible to, cleverly accounting for why the mortal population hasn't been converted in epidemic proportions, and also why the urban decay endemic to the setting's ever present.



Plus, there's all the offscreen drama within the drama. Kate Beckinsale, respected for her roles in historical films, works against type by signing on to "Underworld" along with her longtime live-in boyfriend & father of her child Michael Sheen, who plays Lucian. While acting together might seem designed to ensure domestic tranquillity, during filming Kate and director Len Wiseman connect, and the British tabloids have a field day with the triangle as Kate relocates to LA to begin a new life with her new man. All this tension must have been channeled into the performances. When Lucian chases Selene's car, catches up to it, and punctures the roof with his sword to bury it in her shoulder, perhaps we're not just seeing a werewolf attack a vampire -- maybe we're witnessing a former lover stab his ex-girlfriend with relish as well.



A few months ago while waking up to one neighbor's brood cavorting on their back porch, my first reaction while lying in bed was to wish all the brats a painful loss of feet & tongues. "Hiss! Hiss!" a boy said. Then, "I'm a vampire!" And the girl also suddenly empowered said, "Now I'm a vampire too!" It made me want to go to Lown's and get all of them a pair of those cheap plastic fangs (but then I reconsidered as it might change their fearful impressions of me as the Goth next door). This mass influence, context & insight is why the 2003 "Underworld"'s achieved such cult status, meriting its hard-hitting 2006 sequel and this 2009's third medieval installment. Like the vampire, they will endure the test of time.

[Amelia, look out!]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

you are all under cardiac arrest.

Dominic stomps his way across the breakroom. A boyish early 20s only reinforced by the baseball shirt and toe cap sneakers.



"I'm just so angry."



I look up from week five's healthy meal selections. "At least you had a choice."



"It was my decision, and somehow I'm still angry, and I don't even know why."



Back down to the plate, I'm confronted by my pile of raw nuts. "What angers you is the futility of it all. All the time, investment of self, and when it should and still doesn't satisfy, it pisses you off."



"Guillermo, you're completely right."



"Of course I am." I am the goddamned cheerleader of broken hearts.



A week ago Abram's live-in lady Sarah kicks him to the curb. Not for the first time Abram reflects: "Think I'm going to be one of those guys who starts cross-dressing in his late 30s and figures out he's gay." I bring him empty boxes for his extensive wardrobe after work. He takes them resignedly in his overly ringed fingers, thanks me, and trudges back inside.



After years of unrequited forests of pining in FriendZonia, Donny's object of obsession Sofi, a svelte 20-year-old dance instructor from Mexico, finally decides to learn him a horizontal mambo. It is two weeks of golden bliss for Donny before she crushes it out as a "mistake".



"I can't stop thinking about it. She even moaned my name with that accent."



"Look at it this way: Most guys never get to have sex with their dream girl. You win."



Chris is given an ultimatum to read New Age books and change by month's end. Mira still uses him for sex, but then throws him out of their apartment come August 1st. He breaks down live on KXCI during his guest set that night, but soldiers on until the end.



By all accounts Mira was on wheels.



"Now you can go find someone who's actually nice."



"But she was the one!" he insists. "And now it's too late."



I sigh for him, but know he'll feel differently when he finds out she was cheating on him by August 25th.





"G, are you married?"



"Why Rose? You asking?" Her boyfriend Paul has the most inexcusable hair. It's like the mange, really. Last week she confessed to planning on leaving him.



She laughs and links hands with me, palm to palm. "No, but I thought you were."



"48 hours ago I just got my walking papers from a two-year relationship."



"Relationships suck."



We smile at each other, pushing away, hands parting.

[Tarjeta de Lotería #27: El Corazón.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

on being the Gothfather.

My 20-something friends have taken to calling and sometimes even introducing me as "The Gothfather," which isn't so new, having jokingly been called "O.G." for "original goth" to pun off the hip-hop patois.



And while I would love to take credit for Goth in Tucson as a whole, I'm afraid it certainly isn't true, Gothic Exemplar that I am. But my thinking about it has raised the question: How did the Gothic germinate in Tucson?



My memories of the whole affair remain quite muddled in the haze of clove smoke and Boone's Farm, hypnotized away by silver serpent rings on pale fingers, skull-buckled boots, and a worldwiew outlined in kohl.



By the time I managed to get the car from my 'rents, and a passable explanation for where I was going to stay out so late, there were already maybe 15 or so core people wearing the black. Petite & doll-eyed Little Norma, now dead of pneumonia in the wake of AIDS. Laura & Suki, both evil twins who loved to hate each other. Patrick, both doorboy darling and verbal whipping boy. The antics of our very own local deathrockers Fall From Grace, including the devilish Frye brothers when they were young and cruel. Jen & Jenn, the Dress taller than her cohort, both dommy of stature and attitude, cleavage queens of The FineLine. And the Barbara, so problematically cute and somehow unwinnable. All were larger than life, and I remember it all dearly if not clearly. And then the first blush of those later '80s baby bats, Teri, Leslie, Kim, Emily, Zev, Maxx, and the others. "Trainjumpers", regulars grumbled. But if it were not for those new passengers, our night train might have derailed long ago.



Where are most of them now? Slipped away from the lifestyle, a period disregarded as an acid-soaked tab in the books of their past, or moved & lost to the mists of time. But I'm still here. Like the setlists that still repeat from The 'Line to The Cage, Abysmal beneath The Double Zero, to the Teagarden's Haunted Palace, in the Heart V, a day at Eclipse, through the unshui-itude of Asylum, back to the Surly Wench's "FineLine" monthly, to The Motherland this very night, maybe I am a fixture, a small cultural lynchpin in my own iconoclastic way. The Gothic is mine, as much as I am its.



As much as memory allows I can place the scene's genesis in The Old Pueblo as early as 1986, which would be only 4 years post-Batcave, which is fair catch-up in a pre-internet world. Whether that was by an issue of "Propaganda" landing in a progenitor's hands at punk-indie Wrex Records on East 6th St or an actual transplant from NYC or LA, I'm unsure. I'd emailed Dick Plowman, the in/famous proprietor of The FineLine, but he's probably too ill at this point to shed any light on the matter. The all-ages dance cabaret/bar catered to a homosexual clientele most other nights of the week which supported the what initially was a fairly small turnout. Door counts were soon bolstered by more affluent suburbia punks, peacocked new wavers, skins, and more adventuresome preps, though the night was still felt to be owned by the Deathrockers/Gothics. Bear in mind there was no mall outlet for our fashion, everything was either mail-ordered from specialty locales or self-crafted: Fishnet shirts were actually strategically torn fishnet stockings, black nailpolish was cheap drugstore dark brown Wet 'N' Wild either multicoated into near black or judiciously mixed with ballpoint pen sludge. And, of course, the whiteface. While it seems almost ridiculous now, then it was nearly de rigeur for most, and some really did achieve an alabaster stature. There was a feel of inventiveness, daring, and transgression at that point in time. We were an amalgam of old and new, dark-clad harbingers of an insight we were only subconsciously beginning to define. We behaved aloof & serious as a heart attack to the world at large, but irreverent, glad to be with, and to have found one another. Early social self-defense or ego-mechanism? Probably some of both and the usual exclusionary anthropological earmarks to both preserve and keep us secure individually and collectively. Fortunately we no longer require outward anti-social behaviour to survive.



And why consider the Gothic in the first place? You ask anyone in the scene as to why they wear the black and you'll get likely get different answers everytime. Ultimately there's an attraction and identification that's both instinctive and aesthetic, a knowing, if you will, of this perspective. (See my "regard for the Gothic." entry.) Given Tucson's warmer weather, it's always been harder road of fashion to walk, but Tucson's never lacked a Gothic high-profile subpopulace.



My dedication may sound resolute, yet there's always been a certain amount of purposeful distance. I've watched the drama bomb explode twice in a social holocaust that leaves its damage so that things are never the same again. The second time it actually shut down a venue as the promoter was involved. The scene's a fragile thing, and if it's important to you, then respect that. Even big cities only have goth populations in the lower triple digits, and given how insular a subculture we have, it can take very little time at all for small things to become blown out of proportion and cause damage not only within, but without. I'm not saying we have a proclivity for drama more than say our love of horror literature or Victorian coats, but I know to stay out of it because I believe we're more high-minded than the rest of the world and its celebrity-obsessed lunchroom cafeteria hater clique dynamics. From day one there've always been disaffected people who think this or that sucks or is boring but take closer look at their posturing and see how it really reflects a deficit of imagination or character. Remember, the scene's what you make it, and while there've been some good but unrewarded attempts like Parasite at Matt Bevel and Doomsday at Skrappy's, others have succeeded, and on a personal scale, it's how one lives that makes it a rewarding lifestyle.



So if you want to light your candle from my torch, this so-called "gothfather" would be honoured. And here I'm not only setting the record as straight as I can, but also setting it down for the record itself. It's our legacy. Be glad to be part of that. I am.

[Plowman at the 'Line's third incarnation on Lester St in 1999.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

the girl who saves the world.

We starve waiting for our order at the Lucky Chinese Food.



Not because they're slow mind you, but because we were too busy fucking to bother eating breakfast or lunch before our $800+ three-hour class on vampiric folklore which we're crashing for free.



The clouds race across a Ford's windshield parked out front much too fast, and people begin to race by as well, looking up at the sky over the building we're haplessly sitting in.



Outside there's a dark torrent of smoke curling up over the row of eateries and shops. Lucky's asian owner runs into the Domino's to tell the counter wage grunt that the building might be on fire.



Rounding the corner we find an amphitheater curve of 20+ gawking, just watching what may as well be the fire channel as far as they're concerned. Atop a huge heap of plastic and cardboard, flames seven feet high begin to lick the side of the rear wall, already engulfing a back stairway and blocking the rear entrance to the Domino's. Aside from Lucky's owner running off with an empty little bucket, it seems the audience has let the fire merrily continue for quite awhile, and if left, that fire's going to win.



Christina, of course, is the first person to note a certain something only 15 feet away.

"Isn't that a hose?"

"Sure is, babe."

"Shouldn't we use it to put out the fire?"

Gods, she's so smart.

"Yes, let's. I'll get the faucet."

Grabbing the hose, Christina strides right up to the blaze in her white Steve Madden hightop wrestling boots, belted black cotton hot pants, and proud pigtails, an exceptionally buxom vision, her powers of reasoning fearlessly focused, and just lets the fire have it full blast.



Over my shoulder an accent matter of factly says, "Fire is a good servant, but a bad master." African student straight out of the veldt, except for his UA football jersey and baggy sag jeans, grins, explaining that it's an ancient proverb. The fire reflects in his dark eyes, and I know it's not the only holocaust he's ever beheld.



Somewhere in the middle of the girl versus flame face-off I get behind Christina to yell over the hissing steam and angry sizzle, "You are so superhero!" The crowd now looks as awed as I feel.



By the time five fire vehicles do arrive, Christina's doused the whole conflagration into wet & smokey submission. She hands the hose to a firefighter, and we thanklessly slink away to the front to pay for our takeout, which still wasn't quite done.



Walking back to the car I can't help re-examining Christina, unable to stop smiling at her.

"What?!?" she says. "Stop staring at me."

"I can't believe it."

"Believe what?"

"That it's somehow even possible to look at you with more admiration than before."

She smiles back, blushing, and we kiss, tasting the smoke on our lips, the shared heroics making our evening all the sweeter, a heat greater than any fire.



We pass by the heart of the sprawling university, looking at the unsuspecting masses who never realized what danger had just been averted a mere half a block away. "You know, all of this would be a heap of blackened rubble if it weren't for you! All these fools owe you their lives!"



"Well, not everybody can be action figure Christina!"

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

an open letter.

One night you will search for yourself, Miss Kris Nicholson, and you will find this, thereby finding me.



Come September it will be 11 years since I walked away from you on the curb of the New Orleans airport, trying my hardest to never look back -- but a part of me has been looking back ever since, unable to forget the splendour in the shadows of that old whorehouse turned hotel on Rue Dauphine. We only stopped long enough to eat oysters in the Vieux Carre, returning for more on bended knees & arched backs, over the ottoman, & upon the silks. 



Talks of literature applied to living. Drama from the page, characters & plots twisted from lips that echoed the leaves even more than mine, so worth the listening as hours became minutes. Your skin, a pallid pleasure wrought in alabaster, hair a red river silted in gold. I never tired of looking at you.



I never got the chance to. You poisoned us. 



You went back to your once-spurned fiance willingly. Know that you were the last person I could love more than myself & you put paid on that innocent mistake. Maybe on some level you felt undeserving, returning to a man who'd hit you, an unimaginative parasite who had already cost you years. I had no choice but to leave. 



Then some odd Thanksgiving I spotted you, a ghost. You looked worn & tired. I was nearly relieved at the sight. Katrina had destroyed 90% of Hattiesburg and even after so many years my first thought worried if you were still in Mississippi, crushed beneath the wreckage of the South. But Tom was near, towing the lesser and later vision of you, and that looked to be a far slower demise than nature could devise. 



You were the love of my life, but you don't deserve such high regard. What is eight months of passion compared to many dedications of three years? Yet I think on you more, for good or ill. Equal measures of pride & self-respect have kept me from actively seeking you out. They still do. They still will. 



In letter & person I was the night to your day. And it seemed to be half you. Was it actually you? Or was it the heaven you made me feel? It was both. Only far later I realized it never really needed you as an external catalyst, because it doesn't come from another -- that bliss comes from oneself. It just wanted you to share with, and that was the miracle we had together. 



But on rare nights it still hurts, the poison, burning that lesson inside me. In turn, remember me on this sainted day of love when we'd first touched one another in earnest. Remember that I bought a star in Scorpio to name after you, lit smaller than a pinhole & greater than all the world.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

Fetishy Barbarella for the New Millenium: Ultraviolet Ultra-Disappointing.

"Ultraviolet" ramps up with a title sequence of nonexistent comic covers, showing adaptations of the action heroine drawn in styles from golden age through modern. Unfortunately the film itself more resembles a gutless Image title -- all arty flash with only semblance of substance.



Set in a technologically advanced late 21st century where a biolab accident has created a highly contagious race of blood-drinkers, a civil war ensues between humanity and the new breed of faster, stronger hemophages. Guarding humanity from the forces of infection is Vice Cardinal Ferdinand Daxus (Nick Chinlund of "Desperate Housewives") who creates an antigen that will wipe out their vampiric adversaries. Enter Violet (Milla Jovovich), who will stop at nothing to save the oppressed hemophages from destruction. Neither side comes across as likable however, even if the vampires are better dressers.



Model/singer/actress Jovovich brings the experience of "The Fifth Element" and "Resident Evil" with her as the heinie-kicking hottie, and there's no lack of her in skintight apparel shooting, cutting, and mad-dogging thousands of faceless guards. Loaded moments play her as an over-the-top fetishy Barbarella for the new millennium, but none of it is enough to support the film's shortcomings.

[Okay, that sword's admittedly bad arse.]

"Ultraviolet" unapologetically borrows from many successful films, including "The Matrix", "Underworld", and even an element from "Pulp Fiction". Supersaturated digital grading imparts an airbrushed look to everything, which is so heavy at times it gives a "Tron"-like appearance to the setting, nicely complimented by a neat techno-orchestral soundtrack. But for all its slickness, the story shows its cards halfway through to become predictable. And as soon as that happens battles lose their dramatic impact, the characters flatten out, and enemies meet their demise -- so why even care?



Given a few more screenplay treatments this movie could have been exceptional, and there's the shame of it. Instead, it was ultra-disappointing.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

the treasure in the Wardrobe.

In remembering the 1979 cartoon and 1988 BBC versions of The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe a viewer might wonder how necessary offering this story for a third time is when there's a surfeit of other just-as-good literary sources waiting out there. Is the remaking of movies our visual recital of stories, like the oral retelling of folktales? The persistence of culture, or just safe commercialism? Ultimately the proof's in the work, and if it's managed to keep with and fill out the mythos more. This latest version of C.S. Lewis' Lion does just that.



The tale and movie's charm is that it works on many levels. Narnia isn't just some fantasyland -- it's a deeper state of subconscious awareness where the mythological symbols play out against each other. Seductive queenly witches versus kingly noble-spoken lions, pagan night tribes versus monotheistic sun worshippers, the immutable preservation of pallid ice versus nature's colourful turnings.



Set during WWII, the London blitz forces the four Pevensie siblings to relocate to the manor house of a professor (Jim Broadbent, Moulin Rouge) who's willing to take the children in -- somewhat based on Lewis and his step-kids, for whom these tales were originally written for. During a game of hide and seek, young Lucy, played to perfection by toothy Georgie Henley, tucks herself away in a wardrobe full of fur coats, but accidentally backs into the magical realm of Narnia.



The film takes Lewis' rich story and adorns it nicely: mean Mrs. MacReady's vengeful clip-clops as she pursues the children and Liam Neeson's rich voice of Aslan both show attentive sound design, watching Jadis in her crown of icicles put seductressey moves on Edmund with sibilant promises of "whole rooms of Turkish Delight", and Father Christmas reinterpreted as a field general handing out weapons stating, "These are tools not toys. Use them wisely", all add new dimensions to the characters and showcase some great acting, especially from Tilda Swinton (Orlando) as beautifully regal Jadis the White Witch.

[Oh, Jadis! You & a roomful of Turkish Delight, please!]

On the slightly negative side, we suffer through a particularly stagey set within what should have been an impressive ice castle. When greenish-white interiors seem only a few steps above the flat matte paintings of the 1939 Emerald City, it's time to farm more work away from ye olde Disney and let WETA handle it. Also, a few modern taunts get slipped in: "Kitty wanna a saucer of milk?" and "You haven't got it in you!" Lewis never wrote so obviously, and fortunately these are the only glaring examples of such cop drama-style drivel. The film also tries to push forward the supposition that the support of family conquers all, but it comes off way forced during moments where the brothers and sisters snap at each other when their attention would actually be better spent shutting up to fight off a wolf attack.



More successfully than Lion's two previous tellings, this version conveys the book's central theme: the mystical wardrobe, lined with warm coats, serves as a womb, a portal of rebirth, and the ability of children to see things without preconceptions or limitations allows them entry into the otherworld of greater possibilities. Susan's mind first denies this: "We're not heroes! We're from Finchley!", but as events unfold even she realizes she's bigger than Finchley ever was. Our power to possess a limitless perspective so you can potentially change the world -- and not just during one's unassuming youth -- is what Narnia's really all about.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

Into the Velvet Darkness: Vincent Price & The Masque of the Red Death.

During the mid-1960s aspiring director Roger Corman was wrangled by producers into making a series of films loosely based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, most starring Vincent Price. Unforeseen by anyone, it would be this unlikely congruence of resourceful auteur, gothic progenitor, and incomparable leading man which resulted in the dark miracle that is "The Masque of the Red Death".



Set in early renaissance Europe, a plague known as The Red Death makes everyone it touches bleed from every pore of their body -- an excruciating end to the lives of millions. Yet safely within the sealed keep of tyrannical nobleman Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) an endless party of sinful delight and decadence goes on. Three peasants are also trapped with them whom Prospero plans to use as both fodder for his court's entertainment and object lessons to spread his satanic gospel.



As inhuman as Price's Prospero seems, he's also potently charismatic, and slowly convinces and compromises peasant girl Francesca (Jane Asher), whose life and faith (and the lives of her fiancee and father in the dungeon below) hangs in the balance, towards her first tentative steps to a darker illumination. At the same time his courtship of the naive Francesca destabilizes his relationship with fetching princess and disciple Juliana (Hazel Court), making for poisonously royal intrigue.

[It almost looks like they've been caught doing something ... .]

While much of this plot is not in the original 30-page short story, Corman integrates Poe's "Hop-Toad" too, and adds fitting elements to flesh out a top-notch hour and a half. And a viewer would never know Corman worked on a less than shoestring budget, with only five weeks to deliver it. Early Universal monster films aside, there are few other horror offerings more classic than this parade of costumed revelers, garishly gorgeous path color splash, and soul-stirring dialogue.



So put on your best Venetian mask and listen as Prince Prospero mellifluously intones, "The way is not easy, I know, but I will take you by the hand and lead you through the cruel light into the velvet darkness." Thank you for the soirée, sweet prince.

[Francesca listens to Prospero!]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

Your Future Looks Like a Danish Luxury Hotel: Aeon Flux's Sexy Dystopia.

The future will look like a very large Danish luxury hotel. At least if "Aeon Flux" has anything to say about it.



Set 400 years from now, a disease has decimated the world's population to a mere five million, all enclosed in the walled city-state of Bregna run by an iron-handed committee, opposed by righteous alt-looking Monican rebels who feel not all is right with the way things are. Disappearances and strange dreams for starters.



The attraction of the 1995 cartoon, aside from the obvious machine pistol toting lanky domina in catsuits with ram's horn tendrils, is the dichotomy of order versus change set within a mysterious Moebius-esque world. Totalitarian Chairman Trevor Goodchild and anarchist-assassin Aeon Flux are more than just characters -- they're concepts that give the other context. They need each other. And in that need there's a palpable lust that electrifies the story of their working at crosspurposes. They recognize they require each other to mean something, and that internal conflict of individual desire against a greater duty (whether it's to the state or the revolution) always made the outcome uncertain. Translating all these qualities to live-action movie, however, only works in some ways and not others, but the basic spirit is captured.



The severe design of the sets, some shot in Berlin with its Bauhaus concreteness, is gorgeous. By contrast, bad props, such as very plastic explosive charges, stick out like sore thumbs, along with fake computer generated elements. Costumes are all wonderful. Charlize Theron's black numbers are all winning. It's a shame that her performance doesn't hold up under equal scrutiny. Oh, it's mostly good like Marton Csokas' Goodchild, or Jonny Lee Miller ("Plunkett & Macleane"), but for all the principals there's moments where the emotional integrity just isn't being delivered, and those moments fail to skate by on looks alone.

Direction's from an MTV school -- understandable since it's an MTV property. But like many action films using tight shots and quick cuts, we lose a sense of space and fight choreography, and the far too trebley foleys do not help matters. Only when director Karyn Kusama selects long shots in some sequences, which is about half the time, a graceful ballet of violence is revealed.



And the movie explains much about the enigmatic cartoon -- why Aeon actually wears such a high-maintenance hairstyle, the rebels' rational for trying to destroy their perfect society, some practical uses behind Aeon's BSDM couture, and why the law of eternal return occurs. This last one was the most confusing for fans, but as the cartoon progressed it became accepted. The film underestimates general audiences by not using that device. If it had, it could have made one of its big revelations with so much more impact. (Yes, I'm being oblique here, but I'm trying very hard not to spoil things for you.)



Cinema can add "Aeon Flux"'s Bregna to its depiction of far future dystopias, like those of "Metropolis", "Dark City", "Logan's Run", and in extremis "1984" & "THX-1138". It's not the best of these predecessors, but it places as the sexiest.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

The Rita Fragments.

Note to the Editor: There are a couple redundancies in these entries but you've asked for the fragments as is. I thought of editing the similar statements out, but then leaving them shows the persistence of my holding the idea over time in the separate accounts. I'm not sure which is more important, but if as a reader with the editor's eye you find the repetition more obvious than emphatic, let me know & I'll chop the lesser of them out. This is, of course, if you find this whole thing acceptable.

~ gM4

* * * 

From the bookstore forum:

05.13.05 

"haunted when the minutes drag".

So I'm in the can upstairs minding my own business, when the lights turn off. Fumbling about with my pants I get up and cross the room to discover the lightswitch has been moved down, yet the bathroom door is still locked, and of course I am alone. Or was I?



Hearsay has it that when Grant was but a humble grocery store a young lass named Rita tripped and snapped her neck at the bottom of the stairs. Since then Granties have felt her presence, found the phone music turned on in the empty conference room at the end of the hall, and a lucky handful have even seen her standing near the stairs only to vanish an instant later. And very few days go by where someone doesn't misstep on that same fatal staircase and barely avoids history repeating itself. 



One staffer gives account of a Darke Man suited up 1940s style with a chilling aura appearing & disappearing in the Kids' room as well.

Would like to suggest that we take these two souls with us when the Grant store moves downtown. Transplanting a small chunk of kids' room concrete & our bottom stair should prove enough to rescue them from oblivion.



The living now number as many as the whole host of history's dead. Despite this, the dead still have the advantage. Anything could have happened to me during those moments in that darkened bathroom after all, but I think Rita likes me. May the Phoenix staffers find equal peace & respect with their hauntings. Otherwise I hear salt or spit sometimes work, but don't bet on it.

Memento Mori ~ 

Sñr Guillermo the IVth



"If you stay in the Center 

& embrace Death 

with your whole Heart 

You will endure Forever." 

~ Lao Tzu 

Tao Te Ching 

ch XXXIII

* * *

From the Dark Diary: 

11/23/01 11:17 pm

It comes together while driving to my girlfriend's like Beethoven's roaring silencio at 29: the rabbi's tapes said that the dead are not to be feared (for the most part) unlike the horror movies would have us believe. Since they've passed into a state of permanence some of their characteristics become fixed. Rita can trip people on the stairs, turn on the music in the back room, and sometimes flick off the lights in the bathroom. The old tenant in my apartment can open cupboards. Angie's milkbottle presence can follow people down the hall and make its presence known. But they repeat these instances over and over again like other ghosts because that's all they can do -- it's the only way left they have to manifest, and it's also how they’re bound. That's why people who are at haunted sites see the same things. Their choice to do otherwise has been taken away, as the rabbi says only the living get free will and choices. This idea makes sense, but the reality's not as rigid as all that. The dead can be malign like Angie's winged hallway wraith, and can affect the living adversely even though their means of doing so might be limited. Your free will also might be the answer to the question "Why do the dead hate the living?" in some cases. They resent us because they can no longer choose, or they resent having to watch some of us make the same mistakes they made and they can no longer affect this, or they wish to thwart us in these choices and hate that they cannot.



Take these theorems and apply them to the vampire: a being has passed into a state beyond death into an immortal coil, but because it lasts forever it must perform a certain action -- feed on the living. That is the vampire's repeated manifestation. In this, the Strigoi has no choice.

* * *

[Not Rita, but some other ghost on some other staircase.]

***

From email: 

Subject: the Seen & Unseen 

Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2001 16:31:03 -0700 

From: Guillermo the IVth 

Organization: Club Golgotha 

To: "A.G." <--@-----.com>



Bearer of the Spirits A---- ~



It's not just the ghosts; there are things above & below us, infernal & divine. It is written that a third of the angels, a rebellious 133,306,668 of them Fell, leaving their stations as intermediaries from us to god, to think for themselves, to serve and pursue their own desires -- & some still cater to ours but in a different fashion.



Also a balance has been struck in terms of population: the current living equal all the world's Dead, and so now for every one of us there is one of them.



"If the eye could see the demons that people the universe, existence would be impossible." -- Talmud, Berakhot, 6.



These and the ghosts and angels (or what we've culturally decided to name them) aren't agents of anything so ordered as karma or destiny, but more interested parties of the Blessed & Damned, either to aid or hinder or just watch. Mine provide protections over & under me, and I'm thankful to be within their aegis because I know they want me to be here, and my sense of permanence reflects their intentions.



Everyone at work trips on the stairs, teetering to repeat that moment where Rita lost her life at the bottom. Does Rita want company? Does she just want to know that someone can be as unlucky as she to suffer such an empty and stupid Death? Or is it not even her, just the echo of the moment reaching to the present? (The last is a theory proposed by some physicists who say places retain intense emotional energies [like alpha waves] that influence the now. But Rita's there -- she turned the bathroom lights off on me once, and every so often I'll go to the conference room and the background music will be on at full blast coming from the phone, but the lights will be off and nobody's there at all. She just wants something to listen to, or someone to come in back and be in the dark with her for a moment.)



In my apartment cupboards slowly swing open without aid of my hand, the same shelf has fallen 3 times in the past couple months, and my sugar skull recently split apart for no apparent reason. Maybe the former tenant still doesn't know he had a heart attack here. Maybe he does and he's still angry about it, and this is all he can do. Maybe he just needs some attention from time to time so he can stay.



Poe (the singer) placed samples of her late father's last lectures from tapes that she found in his attic into her songs on her last album, "Haunted", and contrasts them with samples of a little girl's voice that is supposed to be hers. It's clever and creepy at times.



My mother's father, Cippriano, visits her. Alone in bed, she'll feel somebody come to sit down on the mattress but my father's not home. And she has a reoccurring dream that he was buried alive, and is still there in the ground trying to get out. She still dreams this dream after 30 years, and it's something she's learned to live with.



Existence is significantly different for the Dead, with differences in time, thought process, manifestation, need, and these factors as well as our own sensitivity and accessibility determine if and when we can perceive them.



Some metaphysical systems state that our souls suffer a second Astral Death. We stay lost here for a time as ghosts, but post-Death the "silver cord" that binds us to our physicality in life has been severed and in its absence the energy that makes up the Soul, which is now untethered, disperses and we meet a more final oblivion -- unless provisions or circumstances ensure otherwise.



Outside of Chicago there's a small town where lies the tomb of the Massochs, a trio of brothers who were butchers (professional not criminal) early last century. In the 1960s their rest was desecrated when someone broke in and took one of their heads. The culprit was caught and punished, the head returned, but since the event a woman and a decade later a girl were found near the crypt, alive but suffering huge blood loss. Other lesser incidents also occurred: a gang of camping bikers was scared away by someone, a dog was found dead, what appeared to be a gigantic "black worm" flew forth from the keyhole at a ghost hunter.



The property was made private.



In 1998 while visiting Chicago I drove out to Spring Valley near sundown and asked in the town until someone was kind enough to direct me there. Set 30 yards away from a bend in the road sits a group of graves in the wood, the mausoleum being the only above ground gravesite.



Waited two hours until I could barely see in the gloaming darkness.

Near the end of that vigil, the sound of scraping came from inside and for a few breathless seconds my heart stopped. A little later I went back to the car to get some paper and in a slot-like hole in the upper western face of the crypt placed a letter to the Brothers requesting audience, and bloodied the paper so I could later be found.



The pictures I took didn't come out.



These things, the daemons, ghosts, angels, Undead, are inhuman, either more absolute or abstract in existence as we know it, and some possess a supernature and qualities that are transferable. We sense this monstrousness & this is why it's horrifying when we brush up against such things.



Much of post-Death states has to do with power of will, and it is that force, how well one knows themselves and the resulting strength of id that may very well keep us here. Desire to remain lets us remain.



In many ways words, like component in occult ritual, and even as part of creative ritual, lock and capture and embalm the Soul, and the more artful we are in defining ourselves in the medium and Art, the more likely we can endure past Death not only in our works, but even in this life.



We are Touched by Our Dead ~ 

Guillermo 

who courts & is courted 

by the Seen & Unseen

* * * 

Afterword:

10.09.05

Two months ago my co-worker Peter, the man who witnessed the Darke Man in our kids' room so long ago, walked down the back stairs as he has for every workday, six times a day, for 18 years. But that afternoon he fell down from the landing, careening off the handrail, and somehow landed an improbable four feet away from the bottom of the stairs to smack his skull against the corner of a sharp baseboard. When he came to, he cried out for help, and we found him a bloody mess. Disoriented as he was, we called paramedics, but as he slowly collected himself, Peter seemed more embarrassed than anything, even apologizing to the men who came to help him. Something had gone amiss with his knee, and the gash was only superficial. "It was the ghost!" I wrote in his get well card, and after Peter got back a week later, he took a moment to ask me about that when we were alone in the breakroom.



"You really think it was the ghost?!?" 

"Well, no -- I really don't think Rita's that kind of ghost."



Peter laughed, which was what I wanted him to do, but the question was still there for him, scarred into his forehead, marking two moments in time, a piece of misfortune shared, one dead and one spared.

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[Still not Rita, just another haunted staircase.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.