How's THAT for a title, eh?
"Excessive Analysis, and the Devolution of a Synesthete Fangirl's Head, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love that Weird Attorney from the Last Bits of Battlestar Galactica"
Devolution, because you know I love DEVO. A quick nod to synesthesia, because you just know that sooner or later I'm going to start talking about what words taste like, or some tangent like that, so I might as well open with it.
Everybody who knows me well knows that this summer, I ran out of Mass Effect to play AND ran out of new Doctor Who to watch. It was a dark time. In desperation, as I really quite needed get that whole "spaceship fix" taken care of, I decided to try to use the reimagined Battlestar Galactica as a form of... Let's say "methadone."
It took some getting into, because stories about career military persons and well-dressed dream girls aren't as immediately relatable or intuitive as the predominantly 1970s psychedelic novels that I cut my teeth on.
Give me the Marines or the Navy and I'll worry about my mother's childhood. (Lots of military on that side of the family. Complicated, dark, emotionally unsettling stuff.)
But give me Sissy Hankshaw and I'll think of Dr. Jacoby, and then I'll think of Spider Jerusalem's peculiar glasses, and then I'll think of Raoul Duke's bitterest regrets, and then I'll relax and think of myself.
In case you're young, I'll give some clarification. Sissy Hankshaw was the protagonist from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which you MAY want to skip if you majored in feminist literary criticism. But if you're willing to forgive some imperfections, the novel is as great and lovely a fever dream as has ever been concocted about hitchhikers, cowgirls, hallucinogens, and the politics of pubic hair.
Dr. Jacoby was the therapist from Twin Peaks, who as far as I can tell, was a straight-up analog of the author-analog-therapist whom Sissy Hankshaw converted to Bohemianism IN that dear Cowgirls book. (Quite a dogpile of Pacific Northwest iconography, if I'm to be believed. Though both are allegedly drawn originally, not purely from the ghosts of our local pine trees and madness, but from Californian Terence McKenna. And that's okay.) Dr. Jacoby also wore sunglasses converted into roughly the old 3D-theater-style, in one-red-and-one-green fashion. Just like Spider Jerusalem of Transmetropolitan wore, more or less.
Spider Jerusalem is why girls like me have a crush on Warren Ellis. Any man that can produce so many poetic words, with such foul bounce, deserves to have copies of his whole back catalog ground into a fine dust, so that it can be snorfed up we fans' noses, and be allowed to grow out of our scalps, changing the color of our hair. (See, I told you I've stuffed my head a bit too much with Tom Robbins! What kind of a sentence is that, anyway!?! "Snorfed" is no word to use. Should I have said "wee fans," and changed the tone? What would happen if I had?)
Spider Jerusalem is also the sort of Hunter S. Thompson analog that people in my position need. A man who'd never dissolved into the 1980s like Alka Seltzer in water. A man who never shot cats for sport. (Even if he fictionally ate a fiction puppy in fiction, for fiction, by fiction.) A man who used gonzo-like journalism to cover more than just hangover emotions, who toppled despots and changed cities even more dramatically than a doomed run for sherif ever could.
And Raoul Duke, of course, is the sunshine and disappointment and terror and humanity right in the middle of it. The classic Gonzo Figure Himself. The protagonist in the painstakingly fictionalized, nearly autobiographical romp through mental illness known as the Rolling Stone article series-turned-novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The reason why aviator glasses, great red sharks, and foul, filthy, political poetry can make panic attacks, dissociative symptoms, and psychotic disorders alike look like the natural, fashionable evolution of themes first breached by Bogart and the Rat Pack. I can't have a belief system that I truly believe in, but this is as close as I get.
... Actually? You know what? Fuck it. I'll finish this thought later. This is plenty of writing for one blog post.
But to recap:
By golly, I was able to really pacify myself, aesthetically speaking, on the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, even though military themes do always remind me of (barely hinted at here) terrrrrrrrreribbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbble family secrets. Seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeecrets.
And EVEN THOUGH my soul is ACTUALLY stuffed to the bursting point with Tom Robbins and David Lynch and the best, tastiest bits of the poetry and politics of the gonzo movement. (I may not shuffle easily into the rank and file--my dear dad was a larger-than-life young Nicholson and Hopper before my time, who's since mellowed into a proper meta-Murray--but I have the good sense of home and country needed to believe in Bob Dylan, even though Dylan was always a notorious liar.)
And NOT JUST BECAUSE I'm a dedicated fan of the Mass Effect games...
Although, to get tangential, Tricia Helfer thoroughly won me over in both properties, and now I hope that she'll get some juicy, Oscar-courting Tarantino roles someday. I mean, TELL me you wouldn't want to see her and Zoë Bell and Rosario Dawson in another itch-scratching homage to the dusty boxes in the corner of fabled video stores--the video stores of my early adulthood, of which only a few of these unicorn-precious anachronisms remain--and I will slap you in the teeth.
And... Yeah. Okay. At least I called "tangential" early, on that one.
Third attempt at a recap:
Spaceships are good.
Military themes unsettle me.
Gonzo and the freak power movement comforts me.
We good? Okay, good.
Sooner or later I'll try again and actually write about whatever point I'd planned to make.
