What Brings You to Procrastacritic?

One week last month, these were the top searches leading here. 
 
I have never been so proud. It could have been better only if "jack lord fake name" and "joe dirt underrated masterpiece" also showed up. But about this list,...no, this poem,...I will not bemoan. I stand by it...at least until Mr. Rollins hunts me down and crushes me with his patented Bicep Vice-grip move. 

 

Rambo (part __)

Resplendent in Ralph Karen hand-woven headband, Rambo heads up river.

It was a summer evening in northeast Washington state, wavy heat rising from the pavement outside the hotel, where some channel had a Rambo marathon going on. I thought, "Great. I haven't procrastacriticized Rambo, and it's about freakin' time."

Then a couple of things happened to waylay me. One was learning that the Rambo I was watching was not from the '80's but a mere four years ago. But that wasn't what stopped me. It was learning the very next day that Stallone's son had died. Even though nobody looks at this blog, picking on the grieving seems mean even for a blog critic, so I gave it a break. I feel for him, and cannot imagine that kind of loss.

Rambo, however, is an imaginary guy, even more so than Rocky or Sly Stallone his own self. In the confusingly eponymous 4th episode (at least they decided to stop the even more confusing "First Blood Part __" titling), John Rambo is near Burma. Presumably in Thailand or Laos, although I could tell most Americans he was in Vietnam or Guyana and it would make no difference.

Now, he is a reclusive villager (a feat tat only w Westerner can pull off), spending his days catching snakes for the locals to use in their tourist shows, in a place where the rain only ever stops when he wants to do some face-acting. For some reason (I'm thinking it must be common sense), the locals prefer to have a crazed vet do their cobra-catching, and I even suspect that they invented the whole snake-show thing as a way to put this uninvited psychopath in harm's way, hoping the problem would solve itself. Instead, they end up having to complain that enough cobras are in custody, and they'd like to get some pythons; Rambo has been so effective a snake-catcher that the village is soon to be devoured by rats.

Admittedly, I an no expert in the economics of snake-catching, but I have to assume that the villagers are horrible snake-keepers or Rambo is secretly killing the serpents at night, because otherwise a once-daily snake show would not create sufficient demand for a snake-grabber bringing them new talent day after day, earning enough to afford a boat and nice archery gear. Unless, of course, the people really were trying to kill him and divvy up his stuff.

Or maybe he supplements his living by blacksmithing. John J Rambo, brooding and Thorish, pounding rebar into propellers. Later, as he prepares to do battle, he makes a machete. In a jungle country, where machetes are the single most common metal tool and the closest rebar is in Yangon, hmmm. Makes no sense, until you ponder the depth of the man's self-sufficiency, the scope of his killer artistry. No store-bought blade for him…not a chance. I can respect that.

So then along come the missionaries. The movie failed to portray them as being drawn to his snake-handling abilities, which was disappointing. Instead, they just want to sneak them into Burma to help tribespeople who are being persecuted because they are Christian (and oh yeah, the wrong ethnicity). Clean-cut do-gooders clearly disgust Rambo, who is too wise for that peace and love bullshit. The intensity of his dismissal, of course, can only signal a turn-around, and the fact that one of the missionaries is a pretty female can only mean that Rambo's heart will melt, and that we are all about to learn something.

What we viewers learn is that by 2008 the effects, if not particularly special, are more convincing than in First Blood Part I, or II, or probably even III. [Oh the redundancy, it reminds me of that time I saw in a friend's footlocker of porn the title "My First Time, Part II"?!] Every lead-hitting-flesh shot seems to be individually miked, and both the injuries and corpses seem more realistic than at the dawn of the Rambo Age. This installment reportedly has the highest body count of any in the series, and we are treated to everything from fresh dismemberment to pig-gnawed bodies to blowfly-bloated bodies. Two thumbs up for realistic carnage.

Not so much for the dialogue. Rambo remains speech impaired, and prone to saying things like:
"when you're pushed, killin's as easy as breathing'"
or
"there isn't one of us who doesn't wanna be somewhere else…but this is what we do...live for something, or die for nothing" (his longest speech, I think).

Rambo does not want to go with the woefully unprepared and naive Jesus freaks, and warns them against entering a war zone. Of course they do, and of course he ends up going in to save them, cajoled by their preacher (the White Shadow!) into joining a group of mercenaries hired with the job. Rambo is aloof, though, and clearly sees this whole episode as an imposition on his usual snake-catching gig; he is not  one with the mercenaries, and we see that he is better and wiser than they are.

Rambo guides his boat up-river to the…yawn…heart of darkness. There are no heads on sticks or acid trips, just some pirates with slow enough reflexes to be dispatched easily. The hot missionary's milquetoast guy friend objects to the killing, warning Rambo that he will report the murders, which we should all immediately recognize as foreshadowing to his subsequent bashing-in of a Burmese guy's head with a rock. With typical understatement, Rambo responds with"They would've raped her fifty times... and cut your fucking heads off! Who are you? Who are any of you?"

The whole movie is like this. Stallone recognizes hypocrisy and loathes it, but deals with it though subtle writerly devices like head-bashing and mass murder.  Or men of god who hire mercenaries, who turn out to be not that good at fighting. Oh, and of course the evil villain who wants to 'purify' Myanmar has a thing for young boys…genocide is not quite bad enough, so you gotta throw in some pedophiliac buggery to make it clear. I keep wondering what would have happened had a young Stallone been handed a dictionary instead of a copy of armaments catalogues and boxing videos; what if he had gone for a refined message, instead of escalating body counts?

At some point after said body count topping 200, after he gets to use his hand-forged blade on the evil Myamarmy, after he delivers the missionaries to safety (having taught them to not be so damned peaceful and self-righteous), we see that Rambo has finally made a breakthrough. He returns to Arizona to find his dad; he is ready to step out of the heart of darkness. Or maybe he's just tired of cobras, and wants to try his hand at rattlers.

Godspeed, John Rambo, Godspeed.

Front Man Capitalism: Precrastacriticizing Henry Rollins

The Magnificent Creature known as Henry Rollins, bottom (Artist's conception by Coop)

Henry Rollins is a comin' to town soon, which means I should review the show several years from now, but this time I'm going precrastacritic, because I ain't going to the show anyway. May as well pre-judge (as per childhood religious training).

The reason I won't go see this icon of American Hardcore punk, this spokesman for the outsiders, is that he's gonna charge more than I've ever paid to see anything in Olympia, and has the gall to call his tour "Capitalism," in which he goes to the capital of each state (get it!? Pure Henry Gold) and talks about the injustices of capitalism that he has seen in his world travels.

People my age came to know Henry as the singer of Blag Flag, a seminal band which became that way under Dez, but hit punk fame (translation, suburban demi-rebels like myself were able to buy the album) when Damaged hit the record stores, overwrought Henry photo on the cover (he's punching a mirror!). Then he had to have a band named for himself, showed up on a bunch of cable shows and the movie blockbuster Jackass, did whatever it took to make a living without ending up as the burger flipper he sometimes says he was set up to be. 

But instead, he's a "spoken word artist," a phrase that, when translated from it's native Capitalistian, means, "I don't like sharing the take with a band, and I'm more of a visionary/poet/raconteur than a musician."

And I am supposed to pay five times what I would pay for a Fugazi show to take in this one guy, no smarter than Ian for sure, and without the music. He did promise Capitalism, so I guess I shouldn't complain.What sucks is the "I'm with the proletariat" conceit. I watched the video linked to at the calendar that announces hi Olympia show, sitting through  11 excruciating minutes of him talking about how his free-spiritedness and tough upbringing made him qualified to work in the service industry at minimum wage, and thus is my brother.

Bullshit, Henry Garfield (yup, Rollins is a made-up name). Were you street-wise, or a student at the elite Bullis School? Were you earning your blue collar cred while working at a Haagen Dazs ice cream store back when the name meant luxury to the rich, and a complete blank to the rest of us? You like to talk about how close you are to the edge, but you say you've been on tour more than 100 days this year, each time a few hundred people paying 25 bucks a pop to hear you claim that you're just a poor working stiff. 

But you're not cleaning piss in a public nursing facility, and you are not flipping burgers or even slinging yuppie ice cream. You are, as you mostly have been, starring in the Henry Show. Appearing and voicing over, DJ-ing and blogging. Lots of it at henryrollins.com (not .org, .net, or even .us, but .com, just to be clear), where the rest of us can also buy t-shirts with the Henry birth-date emblazoned on them, again for the low low price of $25. Ignoring for the moment the creepy cult-of-personality vibe of selling stuff celebrating the Adored One's date of issue, I'm sure that the reason the shirts cost so much is that they are made in a unionized American factory. 

To harp on the website a moment longer: why is Capitalism so much more evident than that there Freedom you claim to love and defend? The "Dispatch" blog allows no comment, no democratic feedback, and when I get to the "Contact" page, most of the addresses are for money stuff. The approach seems to be, "I am Henry. Now shut up and listen. Or buy something." I wonder too, how far your internet power extends, since I posted an abbreviated rant of this sort at the Olympia Film Society's page announcing your show, only to have it never appear.(Maybe there will be something tomorrow...I tried again.)

However, I do get to see this poster, featuring you as Uncle Sam, co-opting our nation's most scoldy icon to sell tickets. Clever, very clever. And better than that "I copied it from Johnny Rotten" crazy-eyed stare you do; the Uncle Sam pose demonsrates your versatility. Also, it's a welcome relief from the muscle guy stances you seem to favor, looking like Napoleon's Uncle Rico, only meaner. 

Meanwhile, you are making your way here as I pre-criticize. Honolulu to Anchorage to Olympia, and you've traveled all over in months and years preceding. Ergo the "Dispatches" trope on your .com website. We imagine tuning in to read your tales of exotic travel, global humanity, and regional complexities. But mostly there are plugs for your radio show and appearances. Since I know something about Honolulu, I was happy to see you posting from there, but was disappointed to see you only plug away and write boringly about the logistics of traveling shows. There was no there there. Not even any Henry there. If you just wanna phone it in, give up the blog and tweet.

The people who do go see you will enjoy it, probably ($25 is a powerful inducement to feign satisfaction for most of us, Henry). Hell, I enjoyed Black Flag (most recently a half hour ago, on the original vinyl), and actually would rather abide a show-boating, only slightly ripping-me-off guy who speaks out against corporate corruption than most of the alternatives. 

But your being a disingenius is bothersome. Why not admit you were born weller-off than many, that your service-working years were spent in an upscale establishment, or that maybe you got the gig with Black Flag because you had the resources and the parental indulgence to goto NY city to be at their shows for nights on end? People with publicists and booking agents are not your garden variety proles. It's OK, I'm too old and too employed by a state government to call you a Sellout. And if you priced your shows a bit more like Fugazi, I'd probably be among the appreciative crowd.

Nemesis: Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Ready, set, steal!

Even for a procrastinator, I've put off facing off with my nemesis long enough. So long I had to rent the movie to remember anything beyond the melting nazi (but not enough after that to suppress memory once more). Enough years between release and review for me to have kids who can mock the old-timeyness of the production values and special effects. Nearly long enough for the movie to meet the federal threshold for being historic.

Until such time as archaeologists can officially start considering the locations (AD 2031), they must satisfy themselves with the film. Raiders sits proudly astride the canon of Archaeology Training Films, if only because we cannot avoid it, along with Planet of the Apes (for the second smartest character in the movie, an archaeologist chimp, and of course for the material culture images from another branch of the primate evolutionary tree), Platoon (for the jungle-stalking hand gestures), and,...and some other stuff.

Archaeologists cannot escape Dr. Jones. People always ask where my whip is (I got your bullwhip right here, buddy), and about the hardest thing this non-conformist ever did was buy a hat that vaguely resembles what everyone thinks I am supposed to wear. [For the record, it is a locally made Filson, whose rain-shedding sun-shading excellence makes the inevitable calls of "Hey, Indiana!" bearable.] Most Americans, and plenty of the rest of the world at this late date, know about as much about archaeology from the Indiana Jones movies as from anywhere else.

From the base of excavation to the top of the ivory tower, we archaeologists cringe at what the public thinks of us based on these blockbuster figments. Other than chrono-stupidity of biblical proportions ("Hey, you finding any dinosaurs?"), the perception that archaeologists hunt treasure ranks high among our existential banes. An interesting thing about the movie (oh yeah, I'm supposed to be writing a movie review) is that the protagonist is in fact presented as a procurer-for-hire, an expert in the occult, and to the extent he is a professor of archaeology at all, it is only so that he may cause coeds to swoon until he is called out on feats of daring-do. Neither 'raider' nor 'occulticist' has yet made it onto the list of sub-disciplines recognized by academe, and the fact that this flick shows him being recruited by spooks (who inexplicably demand to hold a top-secret conversation ins a large echo-ey hall) absolutely hammers home that Indy is to get the goods before the Germans, not stop and take notes, screen all the dirt, and all that other boring shit. Under no circumstances is he to waste time mapping a site, other than to find treasure. [Ahh, treasure, the worst of archaeotropes.]

There is, of course, a love interest, as is so often not the case for dedicated shovelbums, nomad-ing their way through their region of choice, living in cheap motels and on cheapskates' checks. No, it is not one of the college girls. Indiana Jones needs something more complex and mature than that: his professor's daughter. Who, I was surprised to learn upon consulting imdb, is not played by Deborah Winger. No, it is Karen Allen, who to my knowledge has never posed for a magazine spread french-kissing a dog, which helps distinguish her from Deb. Whoever it is, the character turns out to be a far more accurate take on an archaeologist man's mate: she can drink her weight in the alcohol of any nation, she looks good in a dress but prefers more practical wear, and she can hold her own in a fight. Come to think of it, those are also the qualifications for a pirate's girlfriend.

At this point in this post, I cannot see the sense in trying to summarize the action or the plot, or to aim for literary criticism. What's the value in pointing out that Natives are portrayed as bloodthirsty, Mestizos as duplicitous, African skippers as good-hearted slave-traders, and Arab shovelbums as cowardly buffoons? Or plodding my way through the large data set of un-archaeological actions, noting each and every professional and technical objection? [OK, maybe just one: after uttering the most hilarious line he gets--"Belloq's staff is too long"--Indy uses a staff that is even longer still, based on the units specified on the Staff of Ra, yet I am asked to suspend disbelief... Oh yeah, that's some prime geek-crit there.]

Belloq, the obligatory nemesis. Like all European stereotypes deployed for this film--the Frenchman is a conniving lightweight, the Nazi is enamored with sado-masochistic coat-hangers--his is entirely accurate. A bad guy not because he steals priceless cultural heritage, but because he steals it for the wrong people. At least he managed to convince those wrong people to make a pit stop on some island to engage in a fake Jewish ritual so that Indy and his androgynously-monikered Marion could have a conversation while tied up together, just before denouement. Unlike most US presidents, I have decided that the nemesis of my nemesis is not my friend.

Oh, Doc Jones, what am I to make of you? The franchise eventually had archaeologists doing all sorts of offensive things, from using femurs for torches to enrolling a spunky kid and an addled Sean Connery in his adventures. Oh, and most of all, making Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull...unforgivable. Snatching treasure you don't need, Harrison?

But on the other hand, there's Indiana Jones, making archaeology cool. Had Hollywood inexplicably portrayed archaeologists doing what they normally do: digging slowly, taking notes, spending untold hours weighing, illustrating, researching and writing,...if they'd showed all that, nobody would think our job is interesting. And Indiana Jones hates nazis, like most archaeologists; that's a good thing.

So yeah. Raiders of the Lost Ark kicked off one of those sprees that alters culture, that casts a type so solidly the populace cannot escape. Archaeologists are stuck with Indiana Jones like Nixon had Rich Little and comedians have Seinfeld. [Yes, there are more up-to-date analogs, but dammit, I am an archaeologist.]