Friday, April 20, 2007

James Bond Vs David Bowie

My latest Brilliant Idea ( No.17), is a movie bringing together Sex, Violence, Spaceships, Rock & Roll, Kung Fu and Politics, now ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages (actually everyone over 17 ) Spaceman Jack in association with Freakytime productions now presents a Jack Dee Joint

The Island of Major Tom





"I heard a Rumour from Ground Control"

Featuring;
James Bond Vs David Bowie


Secret agent 007 is sent to investigate and infiltrate a mysterious island in the Caribbean (or Pacific depending on the budget). Home to a now reclusive Rock & Roll Movie-star, played by David Bowie. After he announced his retirement in the late 90’s this multimillionaire superstar is rarely seen, only whispered and speculated about. Is he mad ? Where does his money really come from? Has he had cosmetic surgery ?
The major governments with satellite surveillance know more, and they are starting to get worried. There is a lot of traffic on the island’s airstrip, the high speed executive jets apparently used to transport celebrities look suspiciously like fighters and what is that large North Korean construction crew doing deep in the island central volcano ?
Rumors also abound in the popular press and the gossip sheets about the statuesque ebony beauty Iman, Bowies’ favorite wife and mother of some of his several children. They say she first grew bored with her husbands eccentric ways and then with his isolated life style. She yearns to return to the bright lights and celebrity scene of the worlds great cities.
The London spymaster "M" employs Bond to good effect as she sends the irrepressible poon hound on the trail of Bowies’ Negro Supermodel wife, intent on playing her against Bowie.
After tracking Iman down to a Pairs fashion show, Bond drops some "truth serum" into her gin & tonic, electrocutes her bodyguard with a "Q" section cattleprod disguised as 2 chopsticks and hooks up with her in the laundry cupboard of a Parisian hotel.
Bowies’ secret surveillance of his wife has picked this all up. The body guard recovers and a satiated and sleeping Bond is clubbed, tied up and flown to The Island as a prisoner…

how will it end ? I can’t say for sure but I think Bowie will start by frying Bonds testicles with a laser, or at least attempting to do so, there has to be a few hairs breath escapes
The climatic death scene is also very important. I think the climax will be when George W Bush shoots David Bowie’s space ship with his Global Ordinance Project lasers just as it begins its orbit…
Will he die ? is the Stardust program doomed ? Will we never know if there is truly life on Mars ? or will Sir Richard Branson, Bowies’ old college room mate and one time rival in love turn the tables once again, leap across the Pentagon control room and Kung Fu kick the primary focusing crystal out of the activation chamber, a fraction of a second before the main coils discharge ?

Cool eh ? I think I will stay with David Craig in the role of Bond, Judi Dench as "M" and I’ll get David Bowie to play the role of David Bowie, or maybe Mick Jagger.
Beyonce Knowles will play the role of Iman (in 1979) and Iman will play the role of Grace Jones (in 1989).Then Grace Jones will play the role of Beyonce Knowles 2027. That massive tattooed Maori dude from the Mitre 10 Mega store ads can play the role of the bodyguard. (1979 and again as his own son in 2007)
I’ll play the role of Sir Richard Branson (1979) and Richard Branson will play the role of Sir Richard Branson (2007)

Shooting will start this fall. I’m still looking for an assistant director any suggestions ?

Friday, April 13, 2007

Goat Lover

Yet again I have been confounded by the fact that the BBC actually says and does the things it does.
If I for example were to say

Sudanese Goat Rapist forced to marry a goat

People might call me unhinged or even racist but here it is on the good old Auntie Bee

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_4740000/newsid_4748200/4748292.stm

All joking aside What would You do ? right now I am assuming that you are not the actually Goat Lover, or a Goat Loving Sympathizer
(I hate that sort of person) But if you were the Town council Sort of person maybe even the local magistrate with traditional Tribal Elders powers .
The charge is Aggravated Goat Loving in the first degree.
What is your verdict ?
I can understand the $1500 fine which I reckon would be pretty steep for a Chadian dude too poor for a hooker but What’s with the marriage

What Does the goat have to say about this ?
isn’t it just compounding the crime to force the victim of this whole sordid affair into a loveless union with the man who abused her honor in the first place ? I would like to think that she would be better off with her own kind back in the field far away from the cities but now her chances of finding a decent Goat Husband are slim.

If as is the usually life cycle of domestic Goat its killed Barbecued with salad green into a delightful low carb Breakfast Lunch and Dinner. Isn’t it Sexual Homicide with Cannibalism with a Goat-Wife ?
What would they Do in Eketahuna ? Actually according to ancient law they would secretly kill the goat but never it is flesh bury it in a pit.
Then try to get the offender some sort of a human girlfriend type and never speak of it again. If he was to continuing in his offending exile him to a mental institution or secretly kill him but not eat his flesh, bury him in a pit and never speak of it again.

Movie Review The 300


Movie Review The 300

** ½
Rating; 2and a half Ninja stars


The swords ! Gasp ! the shields ! Swoon ! the bronzed pectoral muscles flex and sweat, Egad !
I decided to break with my frugal habits and see this movie on the big screen before the Chinese pirates wash all the color out. I’m glad I did the visuals are superb its a shame the rest didn’t follow suit
This movies has twisted through the cultural wasteland that is Hollywood and come back to us, once as a movie, once a comic book by the ghastly master Frank Miller. Once upon a time it may have even been a history about a tribe called the Spartans but after the entertainment machine has eaten its own dung so many times its difficult to be sure.
The true ancestor is not classical Greek history but Frank Miller’s own dreams and fantasies of the films he has seen. The look is very similar to the other screen version of this his comic book work "Sin City" which I enjoyed ( but not as much as the ground breaking comic.)
The story is solid enough and pretty straight forward. The Spartans are tough and cool, they have been invaded for no adequately explained reason by the Persians who are rich but decadent and possibly poofs.
Who can boil down a race and culture, classic heroes and massive wars to a few short minutes and show them true with only light and sound ? These guys certainly don’t and don’t even try.
I can buy the Armor plated Attack rhinoceros, I can even buy the Ancient magical hand grenades ( Lob’st now thine holy Hand Grenade ) but I cannot suspend my disbelief long enough or high enough to span the bizarre Persian King Xerexes and his hordes of mutants. The king himself appears to be 7 feet tall and a headline act for a Las Vegas night club, his servants are flabby freaks and his executioner appears to have cybernetic sword arms.
The rather weird spin on this movie has been the high geopolitical line taken by certain Iranian officials. With the amazingly successful global war on terror now into its 6th brilliant year some in Tehran are suspicious of Hollywood’s motives.
They need not worry Hollywood’s motives are what they have always been, purely mercenary. They are bagging Iran only in passing.
Miller is seeking out a sort of Death and Glory machismo that the Spartans seemed to have buckets of. The cold steel (or bronze) of combat especially against overwhelming odds is the antidote to the creeping plague of modernity. King Leonidas is hairy and virile he makes a point of not actually saying to his wife he loves her because he is so manly he doesn’t need to.
Hair appears to be a crucial marker of ones manliness and hence moral goodness in this pic. King Leonidas has the blackest beard but King Xerxes is bald, each of the Spartan soldiers can be measured in rank and coolness by the length and fullness of their whiskers. The Ephors for example, who are Spartan but corrupted priests have no facial hair at all, just plague boils and scrofula. The honest councilor has quite a respectable beard, trimmed a bit short but the evil traitor has an even shorter one.
The politics of the whole movie is far too mixed to be anything other than a mess, there is some talk of "freedom’ but it’s never explained.
The sad thing is that a real straight (no pun indented) telling of the story would have been much better. The real story is always tougher and harder but also better than anything even the most coked up Californian script doctor could ever invent.
In a straight retelling were the word Freedom is more than a cliché the brave Spartans would have some explaining to do about their own indigenous race of slaves, The Helots whom the Spartans would formally declare war on every year, giving the warriors citizens legal impunity to kill them as they pleased. As has been noted the passage to adulthood for a noble Spartan man would much more likely to be from murdering a helot farm hand than battling a dire wolf single handed.
A real dialogue between the Spartans and the Athenians would have been good to. They are referred to in passing as the "Philosophers and boy lovers" but you would have to go to ancient Sparta to get the real Greek institutional pederasty. We only really know of the Spartans through the Athenians, several frugal Athenian Philosophers idolized the tough Spartans but the Spartans themselves left us little. Their stories were told by others, like Frank Miller who would have been appalled if he actually had to live the Spartan life. History is written by the winners in this case the Athenians not the Spartans, Leonidas probably couldn’t even write.
Final verdict; 2 ½ Ninja stars, see it but don’t believe it

Friday, April 6, 2007

Easter time in China

Or,
"Christ has Risen ! Grab your Shotgun and follow Me !"

The seasons turn on and we find ourselves once again at the rather mysterious but delightful celebration of Easter, when we remember how our Lord & Saviour Jesus Christ rose from the dead through the miracle of the chocolate rabbit’s egg.
These are mysterious signs indeed and the whole Idea or Festival of Easter is a odd mix of symbols and feelings.
For a start;
for us New Humans living in New Zealand, Easter loses some of the Springtime festival feeling it enjoys in it’s native Northern Hemisphere.
Symbolism of death rolling on into life again is a little more optimistic in the spring than the autumn. Without the context the whole mixed bag of cultural symbols becomes frightfully confused. Change the space, physical or cultural and you change the message.
This puts me in mind of a Chinese Easter time,
A few years ago I was in South West China. Working for the Rand institute mainly, authenticating some bronze sculptures from the early Xia dynasty but I was also doing a bit of free lance research, investigating the effects of post-communist economic restructuring on brothels for Kerry Packer and the boys back in Sydney.
Anyway, long story short; one long sultry evening after work I was winding down with a chilled tsingtao beer, and a few skewers of barbecued pigs skin, in the company of a lovely young lady I will refer to as Tim-tam.
(You really have to go to Chongching to get the best barbecued pigs skin, I’ve tried making it at home but you just can’t get the spices.)
For some reason the conversation turned towards religion, I don’t know why maybe I was feeling home sick or
maybe it was the cumulative effects of thirteen servings of barbecued pig parts, 6 pickled eggs, a liter of lager plus 500gm of Mono Sodium Glutamate.
At any rate I said something like;

"Soon it will be Easter Tim-tam, that is the festival where Jesus dies and then comes back to life"

To which Tim-tam replies

"Ah yes I know like in that movie you make me watch
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD’ yes ?"

"No Tim-tam ! No ! Jesus is the Good coming back from the dead , Night of the living dead is the Bad coming back from the dead."

Tim-tam had no reply. She just sat there with a strange look on her face and barbecue skewer in her hand, trying to simultaneously digest both the concept and several deep fried sparrows.
I sympathized yet could not help her, I had about enough Chinese language to say

"I am a 15kg Taxi please "

I couldn’t really explain the metaphysical and physical differences between Resurrection and Reanimation in the colloquial dialect, I’m not sure I understand it myself .
I guess the real difference is the Soul.
It’s mentioned the Orthodox Nicean creed which is used at most Christian Churches, and states Jesus was Resurrected Body and Soul.
The complete package presumably with all his superpowers intact.
Zombies have been dragged back to a state of semi life or undeath without a Soul.
Ghosts and Spirits on the other hand have the opposite problem, a Soul but no real body.

Trippy eh ?

I think I'll eat some chocolate

The Robots are coming !





The Robots are coming !
Grab your Plasma rifles and run to the Hills !

Did you, like me, ever wonder where the 21st century got to ? You know the one I mean, the brave new world of jet powered rocket packs, hotels on the moon and Buck Rogers on Mars ? I thought that I had been promised a Jetsons hover car and a personal robot butler but here I am sitting in a wooden house with a tin roof and an internal combustion powered automobile.
Fear not brave adventurers ! The dawn of the Robotic age so long promised and long delayed may soon be upon us. However there will be a few bugs to be sorted out first and a few unexpected hitches along the way.
Check this out, the Times reports on Japanese attempts to get a handle on some of the issues that our plastic and silicon servants will bring with them.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article1620558.ece

Issac Asimov, the Sci-fi author and prophet of the Robotic world now seems a bit outdated and naïve. His 3 laws of Robotics now look like something a stone age king might have carved on a obelisk, nice and neat but hopelessly simplistic. For those who need it a quick update maybe in order;

Asimov’s three laws:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm
  2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

All of which sounds logical enough. But its still smells to me like the rules a 18th century cotton plantation Master might write to "protect" his slaves. A Negro must obey all orders, a Negro may defend himself but not if it injures a white man and so forth.
Those pioneer science fiction writers and amateur philosophers saw the outlines, the promises and problems of a Robot world but couldn’t possibly see the width, depth, and flavor of the society which would finally make them.
We already have any number of computer controlled automatic systems, technically robots building, monitoring and controlling systems that are too difficult, dangerous, boring or expensive for humans to do but as long as they were in industry Joe Public didn’t really care. Now they are going to be in your home, sitting on your couch, lying in your bed driving your car.
What you gonna do when they come for you ?
Despite what "the Flight of the Conchords" have to say in their ground breaking song "The Humans are Dead", I’m not worried about a "Matrix" or "Judgment Day" style War of the Machines where the human race has to battle against their own creations. Humans will just try do each other in as they always have, just using robots instead of clubs as the tools.
The real problem of course is not the mechanical Robots but their fleshy masters, the ‘bots will do what they are told but what are we going to tell them to do ?
Naturally we will construct them as a we have with all our previous technology to fulfill our more basic needs namely,

Sex, Violence and (to a lesser extent) Food and Comfort.

All obeying a law much more powerful than Asimov’s; the Golden Rule.

He who has the Gold makes the Rules






Monday, April 2, 2007

Personal Fragrances

If you had to choose one, what would you like to smell like ?


Not for any particular reason I was scanning the shelves at a local department store when I noticed a new range of fragrances.
They were of a rather cheap variety, from the "Impulse" range. All of these new fragrances are themed for a particular city.
"Paris Chic" "New York Sass" "London Vibe".
I have never been to any of the cities in question, I suspect that many of the target consumers are in the same position. Yet for all my ignorance of these great metropolises, I cannot in my most freaked out dreams imagine that they smell anything like this. Not unless Paris has been swamped in synthetic fruit, London had been fumigated with Satan’s smelly socks and as for New York ! well the only vaguely plausible explanation for that funk would if the green slimy Ghost off Ghost Busters crapped all over Manhattan island.
So much for that experiment in metropolitan perfume but it raised in my mind the possibilities of perfume themes.
If you had to choose what would you smell like ?
Paris Hilton has an eponymous perfume. I have never bought it nor do I intend to. Paris H is probably the same but I think she has at least tried it. I haven’t but I like to think it would have the major aromas of Bacardi and Cocaine with subtle under tones of 5 Star Hotels and sticky knickers.
P Diddy, another pointless waste of space also has a fragrance out, I’m not likely to rush out to buy that one either, but I read that it smells like money, probably with just a hint of lawsuit.
I think that in the future everyone will have their own personal fragrance. They do already of course but these won’t be embarrassing ones. For me I will create;


Funkyfiend
by
Jacques Dee
"Be the Man you always wanted to be "


Major themes, Masculine Musk, Colombian Coffee,
Minor themes, Pizza,Meadows after rain, Patchouli, Cannabis oil,

What about yours ?